Good morning and welcome. Thank you for showing up on this very cold Chicago winter day. How many of you will not be going to work or school or whatever tomorrow because of Martin Luther King Day? Several. So every year on the official Martin Luther King Day, I speak about him not as the sanitized icon. Cornel West talks about the Santa classification of Martin Luther King. I want to talk about his real spiritual teachings. which remain relevant to us and to our bodhisattva practice now. So several of us are old enough to remember him, but most of you are too young to remember who he really was.

[01:14]

And this year, I think he's especially important, so I'm going to speak about him this morning and also tomorrow evening. In my book about the Bodhisattva figures and the introduction to the Bodhisattva idea, on page 107, for whatever it's worth, I speak about Martin Luther King as an exemplar of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva. There's an image of Samantabhadra on the altar today on the right side there, who is the main Bodhisattva of the Flower Ornament Sutra. We have a Tamsaka Sutra, which Dylan and Jason are going to start doing a reading group of in a month or so. There's flyers in the front. Samantabhadra is the inspiring visionary bodhisattva, the shining practice bodhisattva, we say in our meal chant, dedicated to benefiting beings.

[02:16]

And Dr. King. with his vision of a promised land and his inspiring, determined, long-term activism to benefit many beings, certainly exemplifies Samantabhadra, who is depicted riding an elephant and is a very, It's a bodhisattva who's devoted to beneficial action and also to a vision of, a devoted vision of interconnectedness. The image of Indra's net, which some of you know is the network of mutuality, is part of the flower ornament sutra Samantabhadra's work. This morning, I received from my friend Bipayaland in Berkeley a quote from Dr. King to add to what I'm already going to talk about that expresses this dimension as eloquent as anything in the flower ornament sutra, or as Dogen would say.

[03:33]

So this is a quote from Dr. King's 1967 Christmas sermon on peace. his last Christmas also. I'll quote it. Quote, it really boils down to this, that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied together into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Before you finish eating breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured. This is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on Earth until we recognize the basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality," unquote. So this is Dr. King, but it certainly could be a Buddhist sermon.

[04:38]

So Martin Luther King Jr. is best known for his speech, I Have a Dream, given in Washington DC in April 1963. I've been talking about dreams in Japanese Buddhism. And this can be seen as part of the dream of Western Buddhists. We chant, may all beings be happy, may they be joyous, and live in safety, from the Metta Sutra. So Dr. King said, I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, we can say all people, are created equal. And his refrain in that famous I have a dream speech is, let freedom ring, free at last, free at last. Our Zen practice focuses on attention within.

[05:42]

So in our meditation, our zazen that we've just done, we are aware of our own state of mind-heart. We see our own awareness. But also in our awareness expressed in our bodhisattva vows and precepts, we see that working on ourselves includes working on our world. Working on our world helps our work on ourselves. So the call for justice. that Dr. King is famous for is part of Buddhism too. Bodhisattva precepts benefit all beings. And that's one of our main precepts, to benefit all beings. Not just a few beings, but all beings. When we recognize that our karma is collective, as well as individual, we see this as part of our practice. So again, I want to talk about who Dr. King really was. not the sanitized version that is promoted today.

[06:50]

Dr. King not only had a dream, but he actively opposed militarism and war. He championed the poor. He spoke strongly for economic justice. He was killed organizing a labor union in Memphis as part of his Poor People's Campaign. He spoke out very strongly against the Vietnam War and the United States government's foreign policy and militarism. He stood for strong nonviolent resistance against oppression and modeled how we can do that. So sometimes he's depicted because of his nonviolence as passive, but he was anything but. All of these are issues for American Buddhists as well in various ways. The Voting Rights Bill of 1964, that was one of the great accomplishments of the civil rights movements, now is being destroyed under systematic attack by our government.

[07:56]

The Reverend William Barber, who's from North Carolina, who is certainly one of the successors of Dr. King today, has talked about voting rights as less secure today than they were in 1965. In terms of America today, racism and even slavery continues in the mass incarceration of young African-Americans and other minorities. Minority people's job opportunities and educational opportunities that Dr. King fought very strongly for are under attack by our current government, by state governments. And then there's, of course, the ongoing murder of young black people by police, which continues. Despite the courageous work and sacrifice by Dr. King and many, many, many others in the civil rights movement in the 60s, the karmic legacy of racism in our country remains deeply ingrained in our culture. In terms of economic justice,

[09:05]

which Dr. King spoke of as a form of violence, economic injustice. Our current tax system is a massive giveaway of economic resources from the American middle class and working people to the extreme wealthy and to the fossil fuel and war weapons industries. Dr. King championed the poor. He spoke strongly for economic justice. and against economic injustice and disparity. This was a moral issue. It wasn't a political issue. It was a moral issue for Dr. King, coming from his Baptist spiritual tradition. But he spoke of it as a basic moral issue from all spiritual traditions. Today, there's so many examples of this. The homeless issue, for example. Last week, there were families evicted from a home, a house that had been vacant for two years in Oakland, California, where I used to live.

[10:11]

And there are now, in the Bay Area, four vacant properties for every unhoused person. And these are vacant because of housing speculation by housing profiteers. So anyway, this continues. And this was very much part of what Dr. King worked for, along with racial issues. In April 4, 1967, a year to the day before he was killed, which I don't think was a coincidence, Dr. King at Riverside Church in New York City near where I used to live, gave a speech called A Time to Break the Silence about the Vietnam War. He spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War, against the United States foreign policy. He did at great cost to himself as a civil rights leader.

[11:18]

Many people in the civil rights movement urged him not to talk about this. And again, a year after the speech, he was murdered. Dr. King said, a time comes when silence is betrayal. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. So he was very eloquent. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And again, Dogen and many Zen people talk about our limited vision as human beings. So there's so many ways in which Dr. King echoes Buddhist and Zen teachings. In that speech, she said, Dr. King said, I must speak clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government.

[12:25]

Quote, the relationship of this ministry of his to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news of his gospel, of his tradition, was meant for all people? Again, in Buddhism, we talk about benefiting all beings. as the Buddhist preceptor responsible to precepts and Buddhist values. I must also speak about this. In his speech, Dr. King quoted Vietnamese Buddhist leaders. He said, a nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, he continued, can well lead the way in this revolution of values.

[13:38]

There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities. so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood." Unquote. So Dr. King spoke in detail about the history of Vietnam and the sufferings of its people and Western complicity in their poverty. Quote, he said, the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. 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."

[14:39]

So he saw the problems of race that he was addressing as a civil rights leader as totally connected to the issues of militarism, the issues of peace. He continued, quote, a true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. And the contrast of inequality today is even more than it was then. He continued, quote, our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.

[15:52]

So he said we need a revolution of values from material to spiritual and moral concerns. So that's Dr. King's 1967 speech. Today, Dr. King would be 91 this week, and he would surely still say that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is the American-based megacorporations, including its weapon makers and the fossil fuel industry, who in many ways still control our government and have massive and rampant violence, and we still have rampant and massive violence in our society now. We are spending much more on military than programs of social uplift or even basic social care, infrastructure repair. Military spending in our society is a sacred entitlement. Today, still, our government creates violence and endless wars all around the world.

[16:59]

So to comment on the situation today, in response to what Dr. King said in 1967, I thought I'd quote a Republican military person today on our nation's current military situation. So this is from retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson who was the Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from 2000 to 2005, including when Colin Powell, who had been Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and then became Secretary of State, gave the talk to the United Nations justifying President Bush's invasion of Iraq.

[18:01]

And well, I'll just read some of what Lawrence Wilkerson says. He talks about the escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran today as a continuation of two decades of United States policy disasters in the Middle East, starting with the 2003 run-up to war with Iraq. So Lawrence Wilkerson says, quote, America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It's part of who we are. It's part of what the American empire is. We are going to lie, cheat, and steal as Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper is doing right now, as Lindsey Graham is doing right now, as Tom Cotton is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now.

[19:11]

We are going to cheat and steal to do whatever it is we have to do to continue this war complex. That's the truth, and that's the agony of it. So this is a Republican military person speaking. Again, he says, quote, we have just, as we did with torture from 2002 to 2007 and 2008, as we substantiated for the world that torture was OK. We have now okayed the killing of recognized members of other states' government. That's what Soleimani was. No matter how heinous we may paint him, he was a member of an established state's government, and we assassinated him. That is a very dangerous precedent we have set." So again, this is retired Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, who is still a member of the Republican Party. And as Martin Luther King talked about the military in 1967, today the weapons manufacturers are a major influence on the United States government and media.

[20:38]

The United States has hundreds of military bases all around the world, many more outside its borders than all other countries put together. The military budget is massive, with bipartisan support for 60% of the United States budget going to the military-industrial complex. Moreover, we are now entering into a new nuclear arms race, more expensive and much more dangerous than in the Cold War. And our military support of Saudi Arabia is sponsoring genocide through famine and cholera epidemics in Yemen. So Dr. King, back in 1967, spoke of this military budget as a sickness in the American heart. And now we see it clearly. So there are many aspects to this.

[21:41]

This is connected to many things in our society. And again, as Dr. King said back then, that silence is complicity, and it's a time when we must not be silent. And from the point of view of Buddhist precepts, I am on this day honoring Dr. King, I have to agree. For the United States not to accept refugees and asylum seekers and to attack immigrants now just encourages more terrorist attacks. Many of the global refugees trying to come into this country and other countries are fleeing climate damage, including the refugees trying to come into our country on the southern border. If Dr. King were alive today, I have no doubt that he would be acting strongly to oppose the climate breakdown, would be opposing fossil fuels, as Gerda Thunberg is, would be acting to support conversion to Green New Deal and to sustainable fuels.

[23:07]

sustainable energy systems. So I think of the successors to Dr. King as, well, I mentioned Dr. William Barber, the civil rights leader from North Carolina who's leading a Poor People's Campaign now, directly related to what Dr. King was doing. and speaking about racism and civil rights, but also speaking about the economy and poverty as a civil rights issue. And I would also say that one of the main successors to Dr. King are groups like Extinction Rebellion, who are acting strongly in England, and there's a Chicago group, so there are flyers out front. There's going to be a talk. I was asked to introduce it at the Chicago Buddhist Temple on Cornelius Street. A member of their sangha who's part of Extinction Rebellion.

[24:11]

They do civil disobedience actions in front of banks that are supporting fossil fuels and in front of pipelines and so forth. Now civil disobedience, actions like that are seen as very radical. This is exactly what Dr. King was doing. In terms of Dr. King as a media icon now, the sound of classification, he's depicted as this kind of passive, nonviolent dreamer. I have a dream. And he's contrasted with Malcolm X. So I think on Martin Luther King Day, we should also be honoring Malcolm. The mainstream media sees them as contrasting, but actually they were kind of friends. They respected each other. They were connected. And actually, after they were both assassinated, their daughters became very, very close friends.

[25:24]

So what Malcolm was saying was very much connected with what Dr. King was saying. They had different tactics, of course. But Dr. King was not passive. He was speaking out strongly. And so to honor Martin Luther King with a holiday and depict him as this passive guy to dishonor him. So Dr. King said, it's not just the bad actions of bad people that are the problem, but the appalling indifference of the good people. So with all these issues, we must respond. And we don't know how to respond. It seems like there's no way that we can have an effect. Buddhism teaches that in terms of cause and effect, everything we do has an effect.

[26:26]

Every act of kindness, every act of opposing the status quo, as Dr. King spoke about, has an effect. Dr. King also spoke about love. We don't talk about that so much in Buddhism. We do in our Metta Sutta. Dr. King actually studied love. He talked about different aspects of love, including agape, brotherly and sisterly love. And he talked about loving your enemies. He gave a talk. back in 1957, 10 years before his speech against the Vietnam War, about loving your enemies. He said, some people resign themselves to the fate of oppression. They somehow acquiesce to the thing. But that isn't the way, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with the good.

[27:35]

So these times are challenging. I was on a Zoom video call yesterday with a dozen other Soto Zen teachers who were trying to think about what to do about how to act, how to respond to the climate catastrophe. You know, it's not easy. But Dr. King gave us this example of not cooperating with oppression and fear. So how do we support people in our sangha and in our city and our society who are being abused and oppressed? How do we support justice? How do we speak out against injustice? How do we see the meaning of the real meaning of Martin Luther King Day and who he really was?

[28:49]

How do we see this in terms of the meaning of our bodhisattva vow and may all beings be happy? And there are various ways to see this. And I often repeat the threefold response that that Joanna Macy talks about. You've heard me talk about this, many of you, that one aspect is holding actions to all the political work to try and mitigate the damage. We've already hit tipping points in terms of climate breakdown. But we have 10 years, the scientists say. And I don't think we should feel, if that makes you feel like it's hopeless, We have to keep trying to do actions, and I think Extinction Rebellion is one example. But there are many actions many young people are doing to respond, to mitigate, to make things less bad.

[29:56]

That's one thing. Then there's alternate social systems. Farmer's markets is a good example. eating more sensibly, not eating hamburgers and cows and vegan diets and things like that, and developing alternate communities like this where we can talk about these things and support each other. That's the second of Joanna's ways of responding. And then there's just changing ways of thinking, changing how we think about the world. And that's zazen, that's our practice. How do we think in terms of, how do we encourage others to think in terms of seeing our connection to others, seeing our interconnectedness?

[31:01]

seeing cooperation as a way of thinking, seeing this network of mutuality that Dr. King spoke of, that the Flower Ornament Sutra speaks of. Cooperation rather than competition and aggression. So that's what our practice is about. So, Martin Luther King Day is not just a day to have a day off work. It's a day to think about who he really was and what he was talking about. And there's a whole lot more. He left a huge legacy of sermons and teachings and talking about love and justice and talking about the dangers of militarism. and talking about justice and what that really means. But I'll stop now and invite your comments or responses or questions, please.

[32:11]

Kathy. She was a singer, right, but also an author of the Civil Rights personal development book. That's quite a history of her own, is talking about the shift in the country since slavery and ways in which we're still stuck. But she did it by talking about needing compassion, you know, and that it's a huge both camps, you know, both right and left, both Republicans and Democrats, there's more anger, hate, in general. And so she was kind of thinking about compassion.

[33:21]

And that makes me think about what she was talking about, engaging with people about climate change. Yes. He's been in Chicago for years and has done an incredible amount of research and describes the violence and the war zone that young Latinx men and women get stuck in.

[34:27]

And so those are kinds of things I think we should be aware of, because that's not quite here. And so now, what we can do with how to support a blue-to-the-photon reference and how to stay focused on the efforts that make sense of blue-to-the-photon. Yes, thank you. And I encourage, you know, as Sangha for any of you, all of you, to put forth information about that and make announcements about things that are happening. In this discussion yesterday, there was some people who had the idea that the climate situation is so dangerous that we need to, and I somewhat agree with this, that it's so urgent that we have to get out of our comfort zones and really act strongly.

[35:53]

But also, I always try and say that we There's so many different ways to respond. So I know there are people here in our sangha and in this room who are doing things. And maybe one way that this sangha, the people in the sangha, can act is to have smaller ad hoc groups that are acting together, but let people know what you're doing. and invite people to join in those things. So thank you for that. But please, if you have an idea of something that people here can do, please let us know. Let people know, all of you. Yes. Please. candidates that I'm going to, which I will support in the event that we get the nomination, I'm going to say that, and myself.

[37:12]

But one thing that I'm doing right now is that I truly believe, I mean, I'm working very hard to, for Mabel King, because I find him to be a more unified kind of person, and it's a person who, to run out of this situation. So, though I will support it later, I'm working for him right now. So, my friend Al and I put together a little program where we have collected a lot of clusters to make him more visible here in Chicago. So, what we are doing, and if you would like And you can also donate posters, because the posters, we pay for the posters.

[38:27]

We cost practically $4 a sheet, which is what we give them for free. And we'll give it to any of you who would want one for free. But we're also looking for people who would like to donate them, so we have more people, so we have more to give out. Saying that, that's one part that I'm doing, and I didn't Thank you, Arhannes. And one of the things that I want to say is that one thing that as a group, officially, we are not supposed to do in terms of tax laws is to advocate for particular candidates. But it's OK for any of you to. So it's fine for you to say that, I think. And people can respond. I know that in this room, there are people who support various of the different

[39:29]

candidates, and that's fine. That's good. And so I don't know if others want to make pitches for other candidates, but I don't know how much we want to get into that. But I actually think Pete Buttigieg is obviously a really sharp, smart guy, and so I respect him. getting into the, well, you know, it's one of the things that informally maybe, you know, over tea, we can talk about the issues. And maybe it's important to do that because this is an election year. And there's local elections. There's state elections. So just to say that, to acknowledge that, there are you know, congressional elections that are really important, you know, in our area as well. There's underlying issues, which we could also talk about.

[40:37]

So this is going to be a really difficult, interesting year. I was a little nervous with what you said, Kathy, about hate speech being equal on all sides. Because there seems to be, I mean, we had, there was a, I think that tomorrow there was going, the state of, the governor of Virginia who had to stop a rally of gun rights and potential KKK militia in Richmond. I don't know. Anyway, it's a really difficult time we're in. This is a really difficult year. And, you know, Martin Luther King Day is a time when this comes up. And partly I'm bringing up who he really was.

[41:38]

He wasn't just this passive guy who had nice dreams. And he was talking about real issues. And so, anyway. Other comments? I didn't want to monopolize. Yeah, and I agree with that. I can respect, even though I don't approve of a lot of what the current president has done or said, I can respect people who voted for him because of of objections to all of what our government is.

[42:40]

And not to dismiss anybody. And that's part of what Dr. King was talking about, to respect so-called enemies, to not see people as evil. to try and talk with people who disagree with it. But anyway, again, other comments? Brian. Yeah. I mean, along these lines, one of the things that I've always been interested in working with the King is his background, both as a deeply Christian person, but also his study of nonviolence and communism. Yes. various ways of resisting evil, is the internal work. And the teaching on nonviolence that you received was both Gandhi's active, not only actions, but also the interior quality of what's going on in my heart.

[43:56]

You're in deep trouble, but I see you. Buddha's teaching of hatred of our heart is necessary work to look at that as we

[45:22]

Well, it's what you've said. So the inner work and the working in society are totally connected. That's part of what I was trying to get to, that our zazen includes seeing our own patterns of greed, anger, confusion, and getting familiar with them, becoming intimate with them, so that we don't react based on them, so that we know so that we don't act out, so that the example of working with anger to not harbor ill will. So, you know, we have positive, negative and neutral responses. This is kind of elemental. But then, how do we work with anger? So I remember Aitken Roshi talking about how Gandhi was a really angry guy. But the point is to do the inner meditative work of transforming our anger.

[46:26]

So transforming negative emotions is an important part of Buddhist meditative work. So anger can be transformed into resolution, resolve, clear seeing of what are out to own one's own anger and to see how that arises and then to turn that into seeing what the situation is to determination to respond constructively. And so, yeah, so again, the inner work, the, focusing our attention in tension and attention within, is related to what's going on in the world and how we respond. And they support each other. It also seems that that work, for us, as it breaks down the subject-object, the other is not.

[47:36]

Yes, exactly. Right, which is exactly what Dr. King was saying in terms of not seeing things, but seeing in this network of mutuality, this non-separation, that we're not separate from, you know, how do we see even the fossil fuel corporation executives as not separate from us? maybe oppose their actions but without demonization. It's really difficult. This is a really difficult time. Yes, Bo? or whatever, or times of liberation, that you're liberating both people, both sets of people.

[49:07]

Because the oppressors who live in delusion, greed, hatred, that's a difficult state to just remind me of. the work of someone like Stokely Carmichael and the Apollo movement. So he was doing not only like, it's not that the oppressor is an object, it's not that the ally in our movement is an object either, but you know, there's a togetherness to that, that is, you know, I think you have to work constantly to do both of those things, you know. Right, so. Yeah, so that's what I was referring to in terms of, you know, the way the oppressors and the media tries to separate Malcolm and Dr. King, but they were really in some ways working together.

[50:22]

Yeah. So there's so much to say. We'll continue to talk. I'll continue this tomorrow evening. And this is an ongoing go on in our society. So thank you for listening and for your comments. And thank you to Dr. Martin Luther King for bringing us forward on all of this. So before we...

[51:07]

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