Welcome, everyone. This morning, I'm going to talk about Independence Day, the Fox co-on, and systemic racism. So that's a lot to talk about. I hope there's time for discussion. Some of you may have to leave a little early, that's fine. Independence Day, I think of as also Interdependence Day. So independence is about interdependence. Interdependence is about true independence. we find our interconnectedness through independence. I think of July 4th, Independence Day, as an American Buddhist holiday. The American ideal of freedom is parallel or compatible or related to the Buddhist idea of liberation and Bodhisattva principles. liberation is acknowledging interconnectedness, interdependence.

[01:02]

Our Buddhist liberation is to realize that each of us is fully interconnected and interdependent with all beings. So this Independence Day, we celebrate July 4th, is an opportunity to realize Buddhist liberation as well as the principles of American freedom, Our Zazen practice can be called the Samadhi of all beings. Our Zazen is a social practice, not merely a self-help practice. Of course, we benefit from regular Zazen practice, but it also connects us and shows us our interdependence with all beings. Can you all hear me? Good, okay. So our Zazen gives us the opportunity to realize our deep communion with all beings in space and time.

[02:06]

The American ideals of freedom are perhaps more about social freedom, societal freedom, and Buddhist liberation traditionally is about personal liberation, but those are not separate. On 4th of July, I feel my responsibility as a clergy person, my responsibility to the precepts of liberation, to speak about how our country's doing from the perspective of bodhisattva values, from moral values, to speak difficult truths as I see them. So July 4th, we celebrate on July 4th because of the Declaration of Independence. which was written and signed this day, written by Thomas Jefferson. And Tom Jefferson is the personification of the great American koan. He was a slaveholder. He contributed to the theft of Native American land and the suppression of Native American cultures.

[03:11]

And at the same time, he had a brilliant mind. At least some of his writings are brilliant advocacies for democracy and liberty. and have continued as inspirations for many, including these ideals have been inspirations for Dr. King, for the current Black Lives Matter movement. The Declaration of Independence we celebrate on July 4th claims, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Of course, this applied back in 1766, only for men, and only for white men, and only for propertied white men. It's now only 100 years, exactly, since women were considered worthy of voting, since women were considered to be capable of voting. And still, women are unequal in pay, in healthcare,

[04:18]

being suppressed in many other ways. Some historians now think that the Revolutionary War was at least in part a war to protect slavery, because the basis of economy in the colonies then, both in the North and South, was slavery, and England was about to end slavery. Of course, there's more to the Revolutionary War, but there are many. So Tom Jefferson was a slaveholder, helped suppress Native Americans and oppressed Native Americans. But his writings are brilliant and inspirational. There's some wonderful Jefferson quotes besides the declaration. He quote, vowed eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the human mind. So this is very congruent with Buddhist principles. He said, the price of liberation is ongoing vigilance. wonderful, good, zazen slogan.

[05:21]

He said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I would say the price of liberation is ongoing vigilance. So we pay attention. And as Pushin pointed out in her talk, we could offer attention, you know. We're a capitalist country, so we say we pay attention. But anyway, the price of liberation is ongoing vigilance. As we sit, we give our attention to What is this liberation? Jefferson also said, quote, I hope we crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. So Jefferson back in 1800, 1805 was concerned about the the money corporations daring to challenge our government to a trial by strength and we might consider that now in terms of the corporations now being considered people and having great control over our government.

[06:41]

But again, Jefferson was a slaveholder, and he intentionally contributed to the theft of Native American land and destruction of Native American culture, even though he studied Native American culture and wrote dictionaries of Native American languages. So, you know, I consider him the personification of this great American koan, the challenges and inspirations and, you know, potentialities of America, and also the limitations of America and all the ways in which we have not lived up to the pledge of liberty and justice for all. We don't have liberty and justice for all. Now we have separate justice systems for blacks and whites and for billionaires. But these ideals still celebrated show possibility for change and realistic hopefulness. Just to have these ideals, allows us the means to produce change, to support change, to support well-being with these ideals.

[07:48]

Lincoln said, government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth. And now we have government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, for the billionaires. So, you know, Buddhist people in East Asia, Zen people, traditionally did not even have these ideals in their societies. There were occasionally challenges to systemic injustice, but mostly their best chance to make changes for the better was to appeal to the goodwill of feudal warlords. That was what was available. So, you know, we celebrate Independence Day and Interdependence Day today. And the realities are that we have these ideals that we need to live up to.

[09:00]

And right now there are these aspirations and inspirations are being challenged in our world. And that's, I think, a good thing. I want to talk now about one of the most important stories in the Zen tradition. This is the Fox Kalon, and it's relevant to all of this. So I'll read you one version of this story. And there are numbers of versions. This is from the Mumon-Kon, one of the great collections of Zen koans. And this is about a great master named Baizhang, or Hyakujo in Japanese. Whenever Baizhang held a meeting, gave a teaching, there was an old man who used to listen to the teaching along with the assembly. He would say in the back, whenever the, when the people of the assembly left, he would also leave.

[10:02]

One day the old man stayed behind and Master Baizhang asked him who he was. The old man said, I'm not a human being. In the past, in the time of a prehistoric Buddha, I used to live on this mountain, which is to say he was the old Master Baizhang in a previous Buddha age. As it happened, a student asked me whether or not a greatly cultivated person was subject to cause and effect. I said, they are not subject to cause and effect. And I immediately fell into the state of a wild fox for 500 lifetimes. Now, Master, I ask you to turn a word in my behalf so that I may be freed from being a wild fox. And Baizhang said, And then the old man asked, are greatly cultivated people still subject to causality? And Bai Zhang said, they are not blind to causality. They do not ignore causality or cause and effect. The old man was greatly enlightened at these words, bowing, he said, I have shed the wild fox body, which remains on the other side of the mountain.

[11:09]

Please, I'm asking, would you perform a monk's funeral for me? So Bai Zhang, hit the signal for a monk's funeral, which perplexed all the monks because nobody had been sick. Then he led the monks around to the back of the mountain and with his staff dug out the body of a dead fox and cremated it and gave it a monk's funeral. This was really scandalous because Baizhang is known in the Zen history and Zen lineage as the originator of the monk's standards and guidances, procedures for monks. I think Brian will be speaking about that tomorrow evening, about the standards and procedures for monks. So this is an important story in all of Zen, and especially in our Soto lineage. Dogen, our 13th century founder, who I often talk about, founder of our Soto Zen lineage,

[12:16]

wrote two different Shobo Genzo essays about this box koan. And in many ways, this, his, his, his, he changed his view about this story. And it's maybe the main, maybe the main or the only change in Dogen's teachings. So Baizhang said that greatly cultivated people do not ignore or are not blind to cause and effect. And this is an issue because people who are, maybe particularly in monasteries, but people who practice a lot can become attached to emptiness teaching. They can become, we can become attached. One can become attached to the ultimate or universal awareness and feel that they are one that can may feel beyond cause and effect.

[13:19]

And actually in the Chan or Zen tradition in Dogen's time in China, the standard mainstream perspective on the story was that there was no difference between being not ignoring cause and effect and not falling into cause and effect. And Dogen initially went along with that. And then later on, came back to, it's important not to be blind to cause and effect. This is such an important story for us, especially now, I think. We cannot ignore karma. And, you know, we often think of karma and, you know, Well, in addition to ultimate awareness, we have to attend to the phenomenal world, to our everyday activity. A big part of our practice is bringing our Zazen awareness into the everyday world, into the phenomenal world.

[14:21]

We have to respond to the suffering of the world. We have to be aware of our ethical precepts are about responding to the suffering of the world. And we live in a time and place where that is extensive, there is extensive distress all around us now with the COVID virus, with the response to racism, with climate, with economic distress. How do we respond to that? We can't ignore cause and effect. And karma is not just personal. So often in traditionally in Buddha's teaching, Karma was talked about in terms of personal karma. It was often seen that way popularly in Asian Buddhism and maybe in American Buddhism, causing the factors about our own personal, you know, consequences of our own personal activities in our past, in our past lives even.

[15:23]

But we also have this teaching of non-self, that our ideas and attachments about a personal self is a delusion. So karma is very much also collective and communal, although it affects each of us in a particular way. We cannot ignore our societal karma. We have karmic consequences both from our individual consciousness and collective or shared consequences from the physical world we live in, from the phenomenal world we live in. We are all individually responsible for how we act and the consequences of that. So karma, the word for karma also means just conduct or action. And there are consequences to our actions. Everything we do has a consequence. But there are also consequences, collective, communal, shared consequences from our physical world.

[16:26]

but we're not in control of our karma because there's also this shared world. We're responsible, but we're not in control. So I want to speak more about, a lot more about the Foxkoan and about karma. There's a lot more to say, but I want to talk now today about not being blind to the karma of systemic racism. For 400 years, in our country and around the world. We've had slavery, racism, Jim Crow, and now mass incarceration in the prison industrial complex. We have seen police brutality, many police murders of unarmed black people. Now we're aware of those because of them being documented on cell phones. And I can say some of the names, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks in Atlanta, Tara Jamal Boone and Anders Guaidado in LA recently, and very recently, and also recently Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, Trayvon Martin, and on and on.

[17:46]

And now we have a mass movement responding to this karma. So in Buddhist, teachings about time and temporality, all time is present now. We're living in an extraordinary time here in 2020, but all time is present now. Time is not some fixed objective external container. You know, we have clock time. That's one aspect of time. Dogen talks about this in his teaching of being time. So being present or presencing, a good way to talk about it, means also re-inhabiting time. Being present doesn't mean getting rid of the past and all of our regrets about that, or getting rid of the future and all of our fears about that. Presencing means to see how all time, the past, the future, and the present,

[18:57]

are present right now. We have the opportunity to change the future and the past right now. We can change the past. That's what's happening right now, actually, in this time, through the movement of resistance to racism on the streets now. This amazing movement, this multiracial, maybe mostly young, but it's multigenerational, Last night in Seattle, a 24-year-old white woman, Summer Taylor, was killed. She was demonstrating for Black Lives Matter, and a car ran into a bunch of Black Lives Matter demonstrators, killing her, and another young white woman is in critical condition. So this is happening all around our country and the world. There's also this changing of the past with Confederate monuments coming down now in the South.

[20:10]

And also Princeton University taking down the name of Woodrow Wilson from one of their institutes, Woodrow Wilson. Amongst other things, there may be good things he did, but he was very much a racist. He supported the movie Birth of a Nation, which was about applauding the Ku Klux Klan. We're changing the past now by taking down these monuments. And I would say these monuments to the Confederate generals, it's kind of like if In Germany, still, there were monuments to Hitler and monuments to Nazi generals, monuments to the Nazi Holocaust in Germany now. They're not, but there's this 400-year-old Holocaust in this country for Black people. Instead now in Germany, in German cities, there are markers on streets

[21:14]

in front of houses where Jewish people lived before they were taken to concentration camps. One of Bob Dylan's greatest songs, Desolation Row, starts, they're selling postcards of the hanging. That's not just some absurdist symbolist lyric. On June 15th, 1920, residents of Duluth, Minnesota, lynched three African-Americans who were circus workers passing through Duluth, Minnesota. Their names were Isaac McGee, Elias Clayton, and Elmer Jackson. They were accused of raping a white woman. Later on, the rape story was reported to be false. Lynchings were not just in the South. Lynchings are happening now on recorded on cell phones, but they've been going on for a long time. And that lynching in Duluth, Minnesota in 1920,

[22:26]

At that time, there was an eight-year-old child named Abraham Zimmerman who lived in Duluth. He grew up to have a son named Robert, who would later become famous as Bob Dylan. There were actual postcards printed and circulated of that lynching. A copy of that postcard is available online. If you want to see it, let me know and I'll send you the link. So, you know, the United States might have markers at lynching sites. like the German street markers where Jews were taken to concentration camps. I had a couple of distant cousins who died in those camps. There's a good lynching museum now in Montgomery, Alabama. I haven't had the chance to go there, but I've read about it. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, documenting 4,400 lynchings of Black people in the United States between 1877 and 1950. Of course, there were more than that. The lynchings continue now, but from the museum, there are some examples.

[23:31]

Pretty difficult. So just a few examples. Parks, Banks. So I gave names of current people killed. Parks, Banks lynched in Mississippi in 1922 for carrying a photograph of a white woman. Caleb Gadley was hanged in Kentucky in 1894 for, quote, walking behind the wife of his white employer, unquote. Mary Turner, who after denouncing her husband's lynching by a rampaging white mob, was hung upside down, burned, and then sliced open so that her unborn child fell to the ground. So this is what's been happening for 400 years in this country. This is a Holocaust, much longer Holocaust than the Nazi Holocaust. So as we respond to this, it's very important from our bodhisattva perspective or respecting all beings to acknowledge the fear on all sides of this.

[24:43]

The fear that can become hatred on all sides. This fear is real and stoked by politicians and those who profit from dividing common people, working people. I very much recommend Paula Lazar's very eloquent talk last Sunday about this fear and the fear for white people in Chicago as they were displaced by black immigrants fleeing the South. We are all oppressed by racism. Of course, Blacks may be more viciously than whites, but all of us are impacted by this. So, we now have the opportunity to face this ancient twisted karma.

[25:48]

And it's so deep. 400 years of lynching, 400 years of slavery and our whole economy, South and North. The example from Duluth, Minnesota, of this lynching shows this is not a Southern thing. The colonists who rebelled against England, you know, many of the Ivy League universities, the president's own slaves in the North. We're all implicated in this. And of course, many of us, you know, don't have ancestors who were, many of us came to America or our ancestors came to America much later than all of this, much later than the Civil War. But those of us who are so-called white benefit from this. I don't have to be afraid of police.

[26:53]

Black men walking down the street if they see a police, a policeman, police person, are reasonably afraid. But we have the chance to face this, the interdependent web of fear and suffering from the cause and effects of slavery. of Jim Crow, of lynchings, and now of mass incarceration, which is another form of slavery. And now people in prisons, that's one of the centers of COVID and spread of COVID, along with nursing homes and detention camps on the borders. And yet we're more aware of this than ever, thanks to Black Lives Matter, thanks to cell phones showing us how George Floyd was murdered, brutally, and others, many others.

[28:02]

So we're living in this interesting, terrible, painful, distressing time. And also, real systemic change is possible. after this pandemic, during this pandemic, this is such a difficult and also a time of opportunity. How can we be aware, face the fear involved in all of this? I mean, the practice of fearlessness is not to deny our fear, but to face the fear. with bodhisattva values of radical respect for all people and beings. It's not the police that are the enemy. It's the way that all of us have been propagandized or whatever by this system of racism.

[29:07]

So we all have to, we all have to change inside and out. to respect the suffering of all of us victimized by this ancient bitter karma. Encourage our new post-pandemic society with values of compassion, cooperation, and respect. So I've talked about a lot of stuff this morning. And I wrote it all out so I can get it all out. And again, Interdependence Day, Independence Day, which we celebrate this weekend is, you know, a blessing and a mixed blessing. This country was founded on slavery, but also founded on ideals that are noble and inspiring. and that we have yet to live up to, but that we still celebrate.

[30:09]

And that's wonderful. And then there's this great story in our Zen tradition about not ignoring these causes and conditions and the consequences of our actions. And again, this karma means conduct. So everything we do, everything we say, has a consequence. And everything that happens has a cause. Everything that happens has a cause. It may be some cause that has to do with us personally. It may be some cause that is communal, that is about everything that our country is. How do we respond? How do we recognize all of this? And then we have this problem of these divisions in our country now.

[31:18]

So, That's a lot and we do have time. I wasn't sure we would, but we do have time for discussion and a part of what we can do to help in this is just to talk about it and to hear each other and to listen and to share. So I invite your comments. So you can just raise your hand or if you don't have your face up on the On the view here, you can go to the participants window and just, there's a button on the bottom to raise hands so we can look at that too. So please feel free if you have comments, responses, questions about any of this, I welcome your response. Thank you all very much for listening. Who'd like to start?

[32:26]

I will. Sure, sure. Thank you. Thank you, Tygan. I've been considering fear. And I'm not sure that facing fear is maybe quite intimate enough. I maybe admit fear and embrace it, maybe. It just seems like facing fear it's kind of like we are the face of fear. And then perhaps we can offer also compassion in that admission.

[33:38]

Because if we face fear, it's kind of like, you know, I'm over here and the fear is over there. And for me, fear is not like that at all. is very intimate. And then I ask, or something in me asks, can there be a response to this fear that can speak to it and release it and relieve it somehow? So thank you if you could respond. So being intimate with fear maybe means being kind to our fear, forgiving ourselves and others for being afraid. I'm not sure what your suggestion is for the alternate mode of, or for how to face fear intimately. What would you say? Well, fear is like kind of gripping.

[34:41]

It can be gripping, right? It can feel gripping. And what I'm suggesting is that there may be something in us, and I know we talked about the we and the problematic, but in all of us together that can address fear so that it can be released, so the fear can be released. I'm just objecting to the idea of facing fear. I mean, we don't turn away from it, certainly. but I don't think facing fear maybe is enough. Okay. I'm not sure how, well, okay. We need to look at fear and how to be with fear is a good question. How to relieve fear, how to You know, I think there is real fear.

[35:44]

We have to acknowledge it, but how to go beyond fear is a good question. I noticed in the chat that, so thank you for that question. I noticed in the chat that Eve mentioned about the Confederate monuments that they were put up in the, during Reconstruction. They were put up, a lot of them weren't put up until the early 1900s, long after the Civil War, during a time when they wanted to reinforce segregation. So it's interesting. the Confederate monuments were not immediately in the aftermath of the Civil War. So yeah, I mean, maybe if there's a neo-Nazi movement in Germany, they would put up monuments to Confederate generals. But yeah, history, so they were, you said they were changing the past then. And it's been pointed out now that

[36:46]

Robert E. Lee and the other Confederate generals were traitors to the Union, and they were trying to uphold slavery. And I didn't know this because I was brought up in the 50s and early 60s, and Robert E. Lee was considered a hero, a noble person, but I've heard now that he was actually a very vicious slave owner to his slaves. So changing how we understand history does change the past. It changes the meaning of the past. It doesn't change maybe the data of the past, but we have a looking at what's happening now with all these monuments. And it's complicated, you know. Taking down statues of Columbus is one thing. Maybe we should put up other statues of Italians so that Italian-Americans don't feel offended. But I feel some question about taking down statues of Washington and Jefferson, because they are our founding fathers.

[37:47]

But we have to acknowledge these problematic. This is all complicated. It's all complicated. Eve, did you want to say something else? Um, yeah. I mean, I think saying that it's complicated and maybe, you know, linking that to non duality, it's important that there are these contradictions and, um, we can't effectively deal with the situation by ignoring them. Um, and, and, you know, by pretending that everything, you know, is either, so to speak, all black or all white. Um, but, um, And one of the story, you know, talking about changing the past. So one of the things like I've noticed lately in, you know, reading about pandemics is that now people are writing about the, you know, the depopulation of the Americas as a major pandemic.

[38:51]

Yes. And, you know, we talk about, you know, the way we interpret history, you know, the American history is that, you know, Europeans were advancing into this unpopulated continent, right? And that, you know, and even if you acknowledge the warfare with, you know, Cortez, it was like, well, okay, so, you know, the Spanish were stronger, but they were stronger because the indigenous population had already been weakened by disease because when Europeans first came, the viruses spread way ahead of them. And so there was this tremendous depopulation. And, you know, for a long time that wasn't acknowledged. I think, you know, with the experience of the pandemic, I think people are experiencing that history in a different way. And then, you know, you talk about Holocaust, of course, you know,

[39:53]

that the challenges isn't, you know, sort of like, you know, the my Holocaust is bigger than yours kind of thing. And, you know, we have to get past that and to just as, you know, every individual. And I'm not saying, you know, I'm not saying either. And that's maybe another example of both thinking. I mean, I think you can say, you know, black lives matter and all lives matter, but it's not. And but not accept the sort of erasure that some of the people who are saying all lives matter You know being by it And and it can feel very heavy and and oppressive to to realize the burden of all these you know multiple transgressions, but and I think the other piece of that that we all that you alluded to is that we are You know, we all have the blood of both the oppressed and the oppressors.

[40:56]

You know, we inherit both. And then I'm a practitioner of theater of the oppressed, which started by Augusto Boal. And a lot of the exercises in theater of the oppressed depend on sort of making this distinction between the oppressed and the oppressor and playing it out. But Augusto's son, Julian, says, yeah, that, you know, also we need to realize it's more complicated, you know, that we're all both, and we all have the inheritance of both. Thank you. Just a footnote about the pandemic to Native Americans. Yes, Europeans carried viruses and so forth that wiped out many Native Americans. Some of it was intentional. Jeffrey Amherst, who has a very fine college named after him, he intentionally shipped blankets from smallpox victims to peoples in Western New York to wipe them out.

[42:03]

So that's from a very fine little book called Lies My Teacher Told Me by an author named Lowen. I forget his first name, but his last name is Lowen, L-O-E-W-E-N, which has other wonderful stories about history that you never heard about in school. So yeah, when we become aware of things in the past, it changes the past. Right, yeah. Other comments or questions or responses, please feel free. Yes, David Ray. Thank you, Ta-Yin. I have questions about the box koan, which is still very new to me. So two questions. One is, does the tradition say something about the cause or agency behind the... metamorphosis into a fox, which is, of course, a common folktale motif all over the world.

[43:06]

Somebody might say, wow, that's a really hardcore story. Here's a teacher who messes up his Zen doctrine, and then he gets turned into a fox. But somebody might say, well, no, it's actually more like if a human being doesn't acknowledge the law of karma, then somehow they're you know, that they're not living up to their humanness, that it's falling short of humanness. And I guess I could bring that home to the present situation and think about the way that, whether as a slave owner or as a privileged white person, that somehow, you know, that one lives less than a human life if if it's a life that actively participates in oppressing. So I'm sitting with those questions about the Fox Koan and how to understand it. Yeah, there's a whole lot more to the Fox Koan, and I will be talking more about that Koan later this month.

[44:06]

And there are different versions of it, some shorter than what I said, some much longer. And there is a whole, there are, libraries full of commentary on it too. And it's very important in Zen generally, and especially in our Soto tradition. And there's lots of problems, lots of problematic aspects of the case. I'll say one thing I'll say is that in In Native American tradition, for example, the fox motif is, you know, the foxes are mischievous, can be troublemakers, but they also can be tricksters in a positive way. In Asia, they are almost exclusively malignant, you know, very malicious figures. So, and there's more I can say about that, but Fox is a bad thing.

[45:16]

And yes, there's the standard interpretations in Song Chan, Dogen went along with in his first. essay commenting more or less went along with it. Dogen's responses to this koan are complicated, but most of the koan commentary in Song Dynasty Chan circles was that, well, this teacher became a fox for 500 lifetimes, and he probably did bodhisattva work as a fox or something like that. And then there's also a question of how, well, how did he become freed from a fox, from being a fox? And can just hearing a good saying do that? And there's a whole separate episode of Bai Zhang, the interaction between Bai Zhang and his

[46:17]

disciple Huang Po, or Obako in Japanese. It's a later part of the story. Huang Po was the teacher of Rinzai or Linji. So there's much more to the story, and I will be talking more about it. It's a really interesting story. But it's all about the intricacies of karma and cause and effect and how that works. And that's the teaching of cause and effect and karma and consequences. is, you know, goes back to India and it's a complicated issue in Buddhism. And it gets into the whole thing about, you know, past lives and so forth. So it's a major issue in Buddhism. But the Fox Koan is kind of the crystallization of it in Zen. So I'll try and talk more about it in the month ahead. Other comments or questions about the Fox or about Independence Day or about America or about racism or about anything else?

[47:28]

Yes, Asian. You know, it kind of strikes me that our relationship to karma is maybe similar to our relationship to fear, that we, in some ways, maybe think that we can get past both of them, or, you know, like the example in the fox koan, we maybe think that we somehow have moved past them, and yet, Maybe the real answer is that we really need to stay very, very close to both of them and maybe other things. We need to stay fully in touch with our actions and our actions. And yeah, we just need to stay very close to those things. Yes. The price of liberation is constant attention, constant vigilance.

[48:38]

So this is the basics and practice. Keep giving attention, yes. And both, and karma and, yes, all of it. We need to do that. And fear and, the effects of all of the history of our country and the pandemic, everything. How do we pay attention? So there's also, how do we respond? So the question of skillful means, what is such an issue of skillful means is also very challenging and cause and effect in making mistakes, but yeah. Aisha? Oh, so our response maybe has to be fully informed. by potential ramifications of our actions or fully informed by fear? Ah, allow fear to inform us.

[49:41]

That's, yeah. Yes. So maybe we respond from our fear, but also we need to respond from fearlessness, which is to say embracing our fear. I don't know. That's the word I was going to use. Ah. And also, part of skillful means, which is the principle of response for bodhisattvas, is making mistakes, trial and error, trying things. It's not that we know. Sometimes we know. Sometimes we know how to respond. Sometimes we see something and, oh yeah, this will help. That happens, that can happen. But sometimes we try something because it looks like it might be helpful. And we have to be willing to make mistakes. Of course, you know, my favorite poet says, there are no mistakes in life. Some people say, and it's true that sometimes you can see it that way, but sometimes there are mistakes.

[50:43]

And Dogen says, well, make good mistakes, or learn from your mistakes. Tushin. So with mistakes, why we don't like to make mistakes is there are consequences of making mistakes. It involves people in further suffering, so, or at least evidence suffering. So anyway, it's, it's important to like, you know, do your best not to make mistakes, but you're going to make them because you're learning. So, uh, yeah. There are helpful mistakes. They give each other permission. And then, you know, we may be afraid of the consequences of our mistakes, so we have to know. So about fear, you know, I've mentioned the five fears, right? And maybe I should mention those again. Do you all know the five fears? So everybody knows the five fears. I don't need to say it. No, no, please mention them again. Please mention them again. Fear of loss of life.

[51:43]

Oh, yeah. Yeah, you know? I mean, that's a big one. And especially during the pandemic. Fear of loss of livelihood. That's also a big one now with our economic collapse. Fear of loss of reputation. That's a big one. Fear of, is that three? Loss of life, loss of livelihood, loss of reputation. Oh, fear of weird mental states, fear of going crazy. Some of us have experienced that. And then the other one is fear of public speaking, which some of you may be feeling now. But I've recently heard, felt, learned that as fear of speaking truth to power. So, you know, I've said some things now that some people might not like.

[52:44]

I don't think the president pays attention to the Ancient Dragon website, Ancient Dragon podcast, but he might not like some of the things I've said. I don't care what he thinks, but excuse me for saying that. I wish he would think good thoughts. Anyway, and maybe I shouldn't have said that, but anyway. Oh dear, now I'm afraid, okay. Does anybody else have something to say? I don't think Nancy Pelosi would have torn your State of the Union in half. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe. But I also, I just thought that, and thank you for your presentation. You know, in many ways, ideals, national ideals, like some that you had mentioned, are landmarks of fearlessness. Yes. And they give us guideposts to what the nature of citizenship actually involves and the relationship of causality to the phenomenal world that we tend to isolate ourselves from.

[53:52]

Maybe part of that responsibility is an investigation into causality because, of course, causality doesn't declare itself in advance. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Part of the practice of cause and effect is to study it. to look at how what is happening is a result of previous causes, personally or communally. Yes, good, thank you. We're at 11.05 now, Ty, and so however you wanna handle it. Well, I think if anybody else has some comment, I'm okay with going a little bit further. So Jason, do you have something to say? Yeah, thank you for your talk. That was really poignant. So thank you very much. Two things, one comment and another question.

[54:56]

So in East Berlin, there was a beautiful old church that got bombed out during World War II. And rather than create a monument or do something to commemorate this loss, the East Berlin government decided to leave that as an open wound basically in the middle of the city that lasted for decades. And people talked about that as an open sore, as a wound. The East Berlin government tried to say it was a monument, basically, to the failure of capitalism, which it certainly was. But they tried to spin it off as almost a way of remembering, and this is why we are the way that we are. And this conversation about our monuments, Confederate monuments in the United States, has me thinking a lot about monuments that we construct and how those become wounds because of our actions or how we construct wounds, which feels like we're constructing or that we have constructed the wounds that are littering the country with

[56:16]

Columbus or Robert E. Lee. And there's a subtle difference. And I think that it touches a little bit on this conversation about fear and karma. So it's something I've been spinning, and I think it's kind of important. Thank you. The second thing, so the question that I have is, I can't remember where it comes from, but I think it comes from a Chan text. But basically, There's a comment about giving support to the government. It's in the context of like that one needs to give like filial concerns, like respect your mother and father, respect the government or the king or the emperor. Could you talk a little bit about that? Because I find. In the United States, that's a very difficult notion to do for some folks. And I'm wondering about the importance of that for our practice, especially in light when our government is advocating for malicious, atrocious ideas.

[57:27]

Yeah, that's a really interesting question. In You know, East Asian ethics are based on Confucianism. And Confucius really advocated social ethics based on the good ruler. And so I'm going to make some generalizations here, for which there are probably lots of exceptions. But, you know, the Jewel Mary Samadhi talks about being filial at the end of it. ministers served their lords and things like that. There was the idea of being loyal to the emperor. That's part of, it's in Japan and China and all of East Asia. And you knew when the emperor or this nation was not acting ethically because there would be floods and earthquakes and natural calamities, and then the dynasty would change.

[58:33]

So that's kind of the, and Confucian ethics sort of came into Chan. In some ways we could think of Chan or Zen as Confucian Buddhism because it emphasized veneration of ancestors, and so we have lineages. It's a complicated a topic. I've talked about it in the past at times, but it's a whole different ethical system than Judeo-Christian ethics. It's more situational. Anyway, it's a complicated topic. But there was a sense of loyalty to the nation in terms of loyalty to the head of state, the emperor who was, you know, like the old feudal European idea of the kings being anointed by God or something like that, the emperors were, the word for the Chinese character for emperor is the same as the character for heaven. So they were the vehicles of heaven.

[59:40]

So that was kind of the basic ethical system. Of course, there were times when that didn't work in Asia. For us, the idea of patriotism and all that, our country was founded based on a revolution and overthrowing the monarchy. So, you know, I was talking about the Declaration of Independence and Revolutionary War, and there were problems with that. And yet there's this idea of independence and democracy. And Jefferson, for all his faults, talked about participatory democracy. So it's complicated. I could have, you know, we might be critical of all of the presidents in our history. There are things to criticize, but, you know, we could talk about loyalty or to our nation in terms of the people of our nation, you know, that is a value that we might,

[60:59]

uphold from bodhisattva ideals, you know. I, you know, thinking of Woody Guthrie's, this land is your land. I mean, I'm talking, I'm just expressing my opinions. I'm not speaking for Buddhism or Mahayana, but it's complicated. We have to each think about that ourselves. There's certainly, you know, there are different, you know, right now we have two political parties. I don't belong to either of them, but some of you belong to one or the other or some third party. I don't know. But, you know, how we see governance, there is in our political tradition, which is I think what you're asking about maybe, you know, the right to protest, the right to object, the First Amendment, that's enshrined in our constitution. And that's worthy of appreciation.

[62:05]

So I may be getting away from your question. Could you ask it again? Well, you did a little bit, but I think you highlighted the specific. So I think my question was more directly relating to the relationship between at least in the formulation that I heard, like the emperor and the subjects, where right now in this country or in this nation, this history that we share, we don't have an emperor. We don't even have a president that's very powerful. We have multiple branches that are supposed to balance out one another. So what we are beholden to, I think, as you put it, is not necessarily the government or the party in power, but the bonds that tie us together as a nation, which is freedom, democracy, a more conceptual notion of heaven not being held by an emperor.

[63:14]

That's how I walked away from your comments. So I feel like you answered it pretty well for me. Thank you. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it's a complicated question. Xinyu has her hand up and then we'll stop. So Xinyu, do you have a comment? Yeah, related to what Jason just said, because it was something about East Asian philosophy and political theory, so that I can't help but just jump in. It would be just, I'll talk in very intellectual terms, it might not be helpful, but I'll just say like, even within Confucianism, Of course, it really emphasizes the hierarchy system, the subject being loyal to the emperor, but also, especially there is a Confucian master called Mencius. He is particularly democratic. He is very, very democratic.

[64:16]

And there's something that says, He says, maybe one of the disciples or someone asked him, when is throwing away a dynasty or emperor legitimate? And he says something, I have to say, I'm not super sure whether it's him or Confucius that said this, but if the people will be happy when the emperor is thrown, then you should do it. If the people will not be, then you should not, Oh, sorry. It's about defeating another country. If people will be happy if you defeat the other country, then you should do it. If not, then you should not do it. So it's really about the people. It emphasizes a lot about people. And it is definitely not like, I just stupidly following the emperor. It's nothing like that, right? Right, right. Yes. Confucianism includes a whole lot of different, what we call Confucianism as a whole thing is, includes a whole lot of different thinkers and a whole lot of very complicated.

[65:26]

And Eve asked in the chat about Buddhism being more influenced by Taoism, but that's a whole complicated history, both, you know, were part of the context and different parts of Buddhism were more or less influenced. So thank you all. We will close now with a chant, closing chant from Fushin and the long well-being list. Any of you who would like to stay after that, well, after that, we'll have announcements. And then afterwards, if anyone wants to hang out afterwards, you're welcome to.

[66:07]

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