Good evening. Welcome. So today is officially a national holiday for Martin Luther King Day. And I want to talk today about who Martin Luther King Jr. really was. A couple of you were here yesterday, and I spoke about this as well. And I think maybe two or three of you are old enough to remember who he really was. But most of you probably don't. So he's an American icon. Cornel West talks about the Santa classification of Martin Luther King. But his real spiritual teachings, what he really talked about, remain relevant today very much, and remain relevant to our bodhisattva practice now.

[01:10]

In my book on the Bodhisattva figures, the Bodhisattva archetypes, I talk about him on page 107 as an exemplar of Samantabhadra Bodhisattva, who's the main Bodhisattva of the Flower Ornament Sutra, Foyen Buddhism. And there's a picture of that bodhisattva on the altar on the left side. We say in our meal chant, the shining practice bodhisattva. So that's the bodhisattva of activity in the world, very dedicated to benefiting all beings, kind of devotional bodhisattva. He rides an elephant because he, or exemplars of this bodhisattva energy, he, she, they, are dedicated to long-term action, to inspiring visionary,

[02:24]

activity to benefit all beings. And certainly Dr. King was that in terms of his part of the Civil Rights Movement. And there were great, great, great many people who made the Civil Rights Movement what it was. The Flower Ornament Sutra and Samantabhadra also represents interconnectedness. the Buddhist teaching that Dr. King himself summed up very well and very eloquently in a talk in which he said, 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.

[03:27]

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. This is from Dr. King's Christmas Sermon on Peace in 1967, his last Christmas. And of course, this is a very Buddhist, perspective as well as coming for him from his Baptist context. So Dr. King is best known for his speech, I Have a Dream, in April 63 in Washington, DC.

[04:37]

And we might see the dream of Western Buddhists May all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety, as we have just chanted. 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 are created equal. So our Zen practice, this Zazen meditation we've just been doing, focuses on giving our attention within, taking the backward step and turning our attention within, awareness of our own state of mind, our own heart. But also in our awareness of our own ancient twisted karma, as expressed in our bodhisattva vows and precepts, we see that work on ourselves includes work on the world, work on our world.

[05:39]

Work on our world helps our work on ourselves. So the call for justice that Dr. King was dedicated to is part of Buddhism, too. It is embedded in our Bodhisattva precepts, the idea of benefiting the precept and the vow to benefit all beings, which is central to Samantabhadra. When we recognize that our karma is collective, as well as individual, that we are not, as Dr. King and the Bodhisattvas say, not separate, not self-separate from others, then we realize that connection. So, who Martin Luther King Jr. was, not only that he had a dream, but he very strongly opposed militarism and war. He championed the poor. He spoke and acted very strongly for economic justice.

[06:45]

He was killed organizing a poor people's campaign, organizing a labor union in Memphis as part of that poor people's campaign. He spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War and the United States government foreign policy and militarism. He stood for a strong nonviolent resistance against oppression and modeled how we could do that. So these are issues for American Buddhists as well. The Voting Rights Bill of 1964 was one of his greatest accomplishments, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Civil Rights Movement. Again, he didn't act alone. He helped inspire, as many did, a movement. And now, if we think about his relevance today, that the voting rights bill is being, well, is under systematic attack. So the Reverend William Barber from North Carolina, who's one of the successors today of Dr. King, says that the voting rights are less secure today than they were in 1965.

[07:55]

There's active voter suppression. in many states in this country and throughout the country. In terms of America today, racism and even slavery in some real sense continues in the mass incarceration of young African Americans and other minorities. Minority people's job opportunities and educational opportunities that Dr. King fought for are under attack in our current government. Ongoing murder of young black people by police continues. Despite courageous work and sacrifice by Dr. King and many, many others in the civil rights movement in the 60s, the karmic legacy of racism, going back to slavery, and Jim Crow remains deeply ingrained in our culture. This is just a fact. So today, you know, the sanitized version of who Dr. King was.

[08:59]

We need to go beyond that. In terms of economic justice, the current tax system is a massive giveaway of economic resources from the American middle class and the working poor to the extremely wealthy, to fossil fuel and war weapons industries. Dr. King championed the poor, spoke strongly for economic justice, Again, he was killed in Memphis leading the strike by sanitation workers. Economic injustice and disparity was a moral issue, not a political one for Dr. King. Today, we have, for example, the homeless crisis. Just as one example, a family was evicted from a house that they were occupying in Oakland last week that had been vacant for two years thanks to

[10:09]

landlords who were profiteering from vacant houses. There are four vacant properties for every unhoused person in that area. So Dr. King is known for the I Have a Dream speech, but a year to the day before he was killed, On April 4, 1967, his speech at Time to Break the Silence, he spoke about the Vietnam War. He spoke out strongly against the United States foreign policy there, a great cost to himself. He was attacked by all the mass media. and attacked by others in the civil rights movement for saying that. But he said, a time comes when silence is betrayal. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate in our limited vision, but we must speak.

[11:17]

And he said, amongst other things, and I want to quote from that speech, quite a bit, he said, I must speak clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my own government. The relationship of this ministry, his Baptist ministry, 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 was meant for all people? And again, Buddhist precepts talk about benefiting all beings. And as a Buddhist preceptor responsible to those precepts and Buddhist values, I must also speak about this. So Dr. King quoted many Vietnamese Buddhist leaders and talked about the details about the Vietnamese history.

[12:22]

And he said about America, 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 said, can well lead the way in this revolution of values, 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's nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood. So some of the other things he said in that speech, he talked about the United States' Vietnam policy as being built on lies.

[13:28]

The United States speaks of North Vietnamese aggression as it drops thousands of bombs with no concern about our own troops and cynicism about the process of death. He said, we fight on the side of the wealthy in Vietnam against the side of the poor. Each day the war goes on, hatred against the United States increases. There's no honorable intention in Vietnam. And then he said, we have to grant asylum to refugees from Vietnam to make reparations for for what we've done there. He also talked about, in the terms of what was going on then in this country, an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

[14:37]

We are now prone to adjust to injustice. We have become conditioned to injustice. And he talked a lot about love throughout his career, and I'll come back to that. But he said, love is not sentimental, weak response. It is a force that leads to ultimate reality. So he talked a lot about ultimate reality. a way in which a lot of what he says has some kind of Buddhist tinge to it. Or maybe it's just that spiritual truth is spiritual truth, whether it's Baptist or Buddhist or whatever. He said, the war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.

[15:46]

So again, this is back in 1967. 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. True compassion, he said, 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, as I said. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

[16:49]

So much of this is relevant today, and more so. He said, 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. So, okay, this is what Dr. King was talking about. in 1967 about Vietnam. And, you know, we know historically now the Pentagon Papers that Dan Ellsberg revealed about the Vietnam War showed that through various administrations back then, the president and the policymakers in the Pentagon knew that knew that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. And very recently, the New York Times revealed similar Afghan documents, documents about the Afghanistan war that for several administrations under George W. Bush and under President Obama and now under President Trump,

[18:07]

the administrations have known that the Afghanistan war was unwinnable. So a lot of what Dr. King said is relevant, has meaning for us today. I think that Dr. King would be 91 this week, and he would surely still say that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is American-based megacorporations, including weapons makers and fossil fuel industry. Still, we have massive and rampant violence in our society. We spend much more on military than programs of social uplift or even basic social care or even basic infrastructure repair. Our military spending is a sacred entitlement now. So I want to quote about our situation now about this. I want to quote a Republican military person, retired US Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson.

[19:17]

He served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's Chief of Staff From 2002 to 2005, Colin Powell was the, I think, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And Wilkerson says, the escalation of tensions between the United States and Iran today is a continuation of two decades of United States policy disasters in the Middle East, starting with the 2003 run up to war and the Iraq invasion under the Bush administration. So Lawrence Wilkerson has said in the last week, America exists today to make war. How else do we interpret 19 straight years of war and no end in sight? It is part of who we are. It's part of what the American empire is. We are going to lie, cheat, and steal, as Secretary of State Pompeo is doing right now, as Trump is doing right now, as Esper, Secretary of Defense, is doing right now, as Lindsey Graham is doing right now.

[20:25]

as Tom Cotton is doing right now, and a host of other members of my political party, the Republicans, are doing right now. 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 of it, the agony of it. So again, this is a military man, a Republican speaking. He also said, We have just, this is talking about the attack against Suleiman. We have just, as we did with torture from 2002 to 2007 or 2008, as we substantiated for the world that torture was okay. We have now okayed the killing of recognized members of other states' governments. That is what Solomon was. No matter how heinous we may paint him, he was a member of an established state's government.

[21:32]

And we assassinated him. That is a very dangerous precedent we have set. So this is what's happening now. And what Wilkerson is saying about this echoes what Dr. King said. And so I want to add something from another Republican general and former president, Dwight Eisenhower. So just to give a context on this, this was a little bit before Dr. King's speech. You know, I feel some responsibility to talk about this today on Martin Luther King Day. So American President Dwight Eisenhower, who was the general who led our troops in World War II, at least in the European theater,

[22:33]

In his farewell address in January 1961, concerning the then new concentration, conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry, the total influence, economic, political, even spiritual, Eisenhower said, is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the federal government. Eisenhower cautioned that our, quote, our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved, so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex, the potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced powers exists and will persist. The point of this warning is not merely that a weapons industry exists, but the current domination over the American economy and government by arms corporations and their overwhelming lobbying of legislators, as warned against by Eisenhower, has resulted in a situation where policy is made by the service of military might rather than vice versa.

[23:58]

with all congressional districts impacted by potential base closures, all are dependent on military spending and the missile economy. So I have to say, this is not about the soldiers who serve. I respect very much the dignity of soldiers. And this is even at right livelihood. the policymakers who direct what our military does. This is what Dr. King was talking about, and it's very much applicable today. And so just an example, back in January 2011, the Boston Globe reported that despite an apparent clear conflict of interest from 2004 to 2008, 80% of retiring three- or four-star generals quickly took jobs as consultants or executives in weapons corporations.

[25:01]

So this is just updating what Dr. King said. about the dangers of our military policy. I'm going to go back to add some of the other things he talked about. Well, just to say a little more about that and how that applies today. The United States currently has many hundreds of military bases all around the world, many more outside its borders than all the other countries put together. Our military budget is massive with bipartisan support for 60% of the United States budget going to the military industrial complex. And we're now entering a new nuclear arms race, more expensive and much more dangerous than the Cold War.

[26:10]

The attack on Iran was very inflammatory. It threatens a nuclear arms race. And I could add our military support of Saudi Arabia, who's sponsoring genocide through famine and cholera in Yemen. OK. So that's one part of what Dr. King spoke about, along with civil rights, along with economic rights. So bringing all of this to our current situation, if Dr. King were alive today, I'm quite certain he would be talking about climate breakdown. Many of the refugees that, global refugees, as well as the refugees coming into this country from Central America, are fleeing in part from the effects of climate damage.

[27:21]

And I think the Pentagon is now in their recognition of all of this, you know, trying to plan about how to deal with climate wars. So I think Dr. King would be supporting something like the Green New Deal or some conversion of our economy to sustainable energy systems. So I spoke about To speak about King's successors today, I mentioned Reverend William Barber from North Carolina, who's trying to lead a poor people's campaign today. I think of Greta Thunberg, who's sponsoring civil disobedience in response to the climate situation. I think groups like Extinction Rebellion. So the idea of Dr. King as this nonviolent,

[28:25]

And that's often taken to mean passive, nice guy. He's contrasted with Malcolm X and other black power leaders. But they were actually friends. They were on the same side. I mean, they disagreed about tactics. But Dr. King and Malcolm, you know, recognized each other. Their daughters, after they were killed, their daughters were very, very close friends. So, you know, the media's view of Dr. King is something that I wanted to address today. Groups like Extinction Rebellion, who started in England and actually now are starting to be active in Chicago. There are flyers out front. There's a talk by a member of the Chicago Buddhist Temple.

[29:27]

on Cornelia Street that's going to happen next month that I'm actually going to introduce it. And I'm hoping he'll speak here sometime in March. They are doing what seems like radical stuff now, but it's just straight out of Dr. King's playbook of blocking banks who support fossil fuels, doing nonviolent actions directly out of the kind of things that the civil rights movement did in the South that Dr. King helped to lead. So a few more things. Again, Dr. King said that it's not just the bad actions of bad people that cause the problems, but quote, the appalling indifference of the good people.

[30:28]

So we must respond. And nobody knows what will change, make the changes, but we must respond. The other thing is that Dr. King talked about this in this brilliant way in terms of love and in terms of loving your enemy. And Dr. King studied love in his own Christian tradition. He talked about the different kinds of love, agape, brotherly love, sisterly love, loving your enemies. So just a little bit of what he said about that. Some people resign themselves to the fate of oppression. They sometimes somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn't the way, because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. So I'm going to say some more about this talk about loving your enemies.

[31:42]

This was from an early talk in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. And he studied the practices and the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. But Dr. King said, in order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. So again, this relates to our own practice of working in the world has to do with working with ourselves. Some people will not like you, King said, not because of something you have done to hurt them, But they just won't like you. I'm quite aware of that. In order to love your enemies, you must begin by analyzing self. Democracy is the greatest form of government, to my mind, that man has ever conceived. But the weakness is that we have never practiced it. Isn't it true that we have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes?

[32:45]

Isn't it true that we have often in our democracy trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression? Isn't it true that through our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism? Seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in the enemy. So just a little more. Another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personalities of the hater. Hate at any point is a cancer that gnaws away at the very vital center of your life and your existence. It is like eroding acids that eats away the best and the objective center of your life.

[33:45]

If you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. But if you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption. So just in closing, You know, so much of this is relevant to our bodhisattva precepts, which offer coherent, reliable criterion for ethical standards, non-harming, supporting life, benefiting all beings. And we can look at our situation and the world situation in that context. So, you know, Just to put this a little in context, 50, 60 years ago in our country, African Americans in the South and elsewhere were not allowed to vote, de facto, if not by law.

[34:54]

Of course, we now have voter suppression, but at least theoretically, everyone's allowed to vote. Until 100 years ago this year, in our country, women were not allowed to vote. So it's only 100 years ago this year that women were allowed to vote. 160 years ago, I guess, in large parts of our country, slavery was deemed as totally acceptable and worthy of being spread. So change does happen. And change works in, you know, it doesn't work in a straight line. It works in complicated ways. But anyway, today is Martin Luther King Day, and I wanted to share some of what he was really about. And I've taken all the time, but we'll make some extra time if anyone wants to add something. He was a challenging guy. And to think of him as some safe, you know, iconic,

[35:58]

I figured to celebrate is just wrong. So, comments if anyone has one. Because the mainstream media, they called him a demagogue for talking about it. The New York Times and the Washington Post and Time Magazine, because he was supposed to be just talking about civil rights, how dare he talk about foreign policy. The war in Vietnam was, the anti-war movement was just starting to become massive at that time. Other people, you know, it had been going for several years. Many of us were already involved in it. But he and Muhammad Ali had spoken out against it a few years before.

[37:02]

But the people in the civil rights movement thought that he was risking his reputation as a civil rights leader by talking about the war. So it was very, it was still and remained, for many people, still a popular war. So that was very controversial. And he was killed a year to the day after that speech. I don't know that that's a coincidence. So this is why I'm talking about this, because a lot of you don't know this. It's part of our history that's been sanitized. Yes, Alex. Yeah. I think that's less than the approval rating for President Trump now. So yeah, he was very unpopular.

[38:28]

He was very dangerous. And we have a national holiday now. And some of you were off work today. But he was very outspoken. In many areas. The way he talked about economic injustice, too. Organizing unions, organizing poor people. He was killed organizing this union in Memphis, but he was organizing towards a poor people's campaign march on Washington that he was planning. And of course, when he was killed, that led to massive riots all over the country. People were just, people in the black community were very upset. It was a very difficult time. And we're in a difficult time, so. Yes, Jen. When the voting came to South Africa, Yes.

[40:08]

And once we got over that hurdle of thinking that women should not be allowed to vote, we got over that hurdle. Then when votes came to South Africa, nobody even thought of it. I think that's just something that we should take note of, that once the outlook changes, I guess one of the reasons I wrote this book is this young man thinks that white and brown were the exact opposite of each other. It was a completely different time. And before women got the vote, it was a completely different time than when the people in South Africa got the vote, and they always went out and voted, and nobody said, when you're a woman, you shouldn't be voting. How change happens is really interesting.

[41:12]

And there's all this talk now about the founders and the Constitution in terms of this impeachment business. The Constitution talks about the unalienable rights, but back after the when the beginning of this country, it wasn't that all people could vote or all people had rights. It wasn't just even all men. It was property men. You had to have a certain amount of property. And of course, it was only white men. So the principles of equal rights and life, liberty, and all of that have changed. It's all right. If you need to go get some water, I don't have any more. Things changed. So at some point, it was just unthinkable that women could vote.

[42:16]

Women voting? At some point, it was unthinkable that gay people could marry. And that's a pretty recent change, relatively. Yeah, yeah. So anyway, Dr. King was talking about these basic principles and social justice in this powerful way. It's interesting how close a lot of what he says is to our Buddhist ideas, given that he was coming from a Southern Baptist, African-American Southern Baptist context. Something about basic values goes deeper. Anyway, any other last comments?

[43:21]

Yes, Dylan. of an aptitude or something of being able to face all of the challenges that we have right now. And I guess I'll say this to suit myself as many as anybody else about this, but I believe that the things that we are each meant to do

[44:27]

I think it's okay to rest, to be ready for those moments. It's necessary. There's a little voice inside each of us that kind of knows when it's time to do the thing. I feel like every one of us has the moments in life when a voice kind of asserts itself and says, this is the time, this is the thing I'm supposed to do, this is it, let's go for it, let's do it now. So I guess I'm telling myself, I'm telling everybody not to get too caught up in comparing my life to someone like Amen.

[46:15]

And he didn't do anything by himself. What he did was to be part of a movement that he helped to inspire and other people inspired him. So it's not all on you or me or any one person. Things come together together. So there are people who end up speaking for a lot of other people. Nelson Mandela is another good example. The women who got the vote, we can name some of the leaders, but there were decades of many, many women marching. Anyway, just to say that. There were many, many, many people who were sacrificed of themselves and totally worked together to make the civil rights movement what it was, to make Dr. King who he was.

[47:21]

So anyway, we've gone beyond time. But I just wanted to talk about him today in terms of who he really was and how this is so relevant for all of us now and just to remember that. So thank you all. Thank you all for being here. We'll chant the four bodhisattva vows. Oh, before that, oh no, let's do that first.

[47:49]

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