Zen Master Dogen, whose picture is up here on the wall and who we study a lot, he wrote, Gourd with its tendrils is entwined with gourd. This means that we're all intimately bound up, wound up with each other, truly inseparable. So this morning I would like to speak about the complexities of diversity, race, Zen practice in our community. This is something that people have been talking about here and at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship where I work at San Francisco Zen Center where where I'm involved and I hear it being discussed more and more in sanghas around the country as we begin to realize what the nature of our society is, what the questions are, how difficult they are.

[01:12]

I just want to say this is not about political correctness, which is usually, those words are used as a screen for, you know, it's used as an attack on something that we really need to be looking at. So this is not about political correctness. This is about my practice, our practice together, and our awareness, and what we can you know, what we can create by way of community. And how that affects the larger community. My own thoughts are, you know, very far from finished or clear about this. But at least I'll do my best to try not to mislead you. And I hope that if I say things that seem critical, You'll understand that it's the voice of self-criticism, and if they're challenging, I feel equally challenged.

[02:26]

I feel that my own efforts in this area are not consistent, but I'm trying to learn, and I hope we can work on this together. And I also hope that I'll leave some time for discussion at the end. So after six years of practice, homeless among the householders, way-seekers and teachers, the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree with a very firm intention on awakening. After seven days of zazen, he perceived the true nature of births and deaths, the chain of causation, and he awakened to realization with the morning star. At that moment, he spoke these words. Wondrous! I now see that all beings everywhere have the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of their misunderstandings and attachments, they do not realize it.

[03:32]

Allowing his understanding to ripen, allowing his bodhicitta, which is the mind of compassion, to ripen. He took up responsibilities of teaching, of sharing this experience that he had. It wasn't just an understanding, it was an experience of sharing it in a way that hopefully would unlock the mystery of our own experience. As the Buddha came to express it, he said, I only teach about the nature of suffering and the end of suffering. And I feel like this is about as succinct as you're going to get statement of what we're doing here. And there's nothing else that you really need to keep in mind to understand the nature of suffering and to practice towards the end of suffering.

[04:37]

So this is a radical teaching in the true to the meaning of the word radical. It gets to the root. There's no further down than you can go. And his understanding that all beings everywhere have wisdom and virtues of the enlightened one leaves us with a great responsibility. As the wheel of Mahayana Dharma turned, which is kind of our own Zen vehicle, that responsibility got clarified or stated in a slightly different way by the Bodhisattva vow. And those are the vows that we'll take at the end of this talk. And we take them often. We take them in sort of a fundamental practice. And that vow is to save all beings, which actually includes ourselves. were constantly avowing this.

[05:42]

And yet this vow, even though it wasn't made explicit necessarily in the Buddha's teachings, was there from the beginning. Otherwise, why did he rise from the comfort and joy of enlightenment and the freedom that he had to teach? And why else would he offer teaching like the Metta Sutta, which also many of you are familiar with. In the Metta Sutta it says, may all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety. all living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far, born or to be born. Let no one deceive another nor despise any being in any state. Let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another.

[06:45]

Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around, without limit, so that one cultivates an infinite goodwill towards the whole world." It's a very powerful teaching. And true to that teaching, the Buddha offered refuge to everyone he met on the path. He offered it to kings, he offered it to paupers, to naked ascetics, to householders, to people of all castes, to Brahmins, to outcasts, and to criminals. There's some really amazing stories in the Pali Sutta about criminals, all kinds of people who we might think of as marginal, being offered the teaching and awakened.

[07:51]

And actually, after some strenuous convincing, he even offered it to women. It's a long story, and it's not entirely unrelated to what we're talking about here today. It suggests that issues like patriarchy, issues of power, issues of privilege, run very deep. They run very deep in the human psyche, they run very deep in our societies, and maybe they're not so easily done with. With help, the Buddha actually saw through his own misgivings and his own issues around this. So, taking refuge, which is what was offered, and it's what we offer to each other, means committing your life to waking up, to taking on the problem of suffering and the end of suffering for all beings and ourselves.

[08:57]

This is what Zazen is about. Sitting upright in stillness, sitting upright in one's own suffering, and in the midst of community with those sitting next to us, sitting around us. Seeing oneself in complete interdependence with all beings, with the rocks and the trees and the ocean and the sky. And we sit, this sitting upright is, we talk about it as sitting in emptiness. I mean, most of you know, we talk about emptiness a fair amount. This is not some kind of negative space. It's the emptiness of total interdependence, of gourd, entwined with gourd, of a reality that everything, every being is empty of any one thing, but it's all constantly working together to create what we see, what we do, to create the things that we call reality, that have no permanent self.

[10:21]

So we co-create each other. This is really important, that in this gourd entwined with gourd, that even people at a distance, people near and people far, are co-creating the world for ourselves and for each other. So when we think we're doing it ourselves, then we're caught in kind of dualistic thinking. And seeing through this and beyond this dualistic thinking, that's the direct experience of Zazen. And it's important to emphasize this word experience because if you're caught by an idea or a wish for an idea of how your Zazen should be or an idea of how the world should be or

[11:27]

a wish, an idle wish, or how you would like to see it, then you risk falling back into this kind of dualistic thinking. All of us have these experiences of emptiness, these experiences of oneness. We have them a lot, from moment to moment and time to time. A moment of merging with someone or something we love, a moment of really doing something completely, a moment of losing oneself in sitting silently. This happens. It happens from time to time. It doesn't happen quite as much as one might want it to happen, but in Zazen, times we settle fully into this realm of non-duality and just feel that we are in our true mind, our true state of being.

[12:37]

And while this is something that we can experience in Zazen, it's not necessarily a state that is that just belongs to Buddhism. It's something that's found in all the great spiritual traditions. They all understand this kind of natural way of life. But the way we often live, by habit, we see a world that is thoroughly conditioned by duality. And as we're driven by our doubts and our fears, by a lack of trust in our own mind and way, we see things as self and objects, as me and mine, as us and them, as other.

[13:41]

And we have a very hard time recognizing or understanding, experiencing the truth that the Tibetan Buddhists speak of often. This truth that every being was at one time my own mother. This has kind of staggering implications for how you treat each other. If you really believe that at one time every being was your own mother, This really brings me up short. So the root of racism is a denial of this truth. It's about seeing people as other in a very systematic way. in a way that's such an entrenched habit that we're usually not even aware of it.

[14:51]

Some of us aren't aware of it. Other people who experience the brunt of it are very aware of it. But I would underscore the word systematic because the ideas have a kind of run like a virus through our society, various societies, and they take on a power that goes beyond kind of my individual likes and dislikes, who I might like, who I might dislike. I'm kind of, these ideas have a kind of motor force that kind of drive me, if I don't bring them to awareness, to like or dislike whole types of people, people that I don't even know, people that I've never even met, people who might look a certain way or act a certain way.

[16:02]

So when we talk about racism or other kinds of oppression, here we're talking about a system of domination that's economic and political as well as personal. It runs deep in the person who's oppressed and deep in the oppressor alike, although the damage caused is not the same. Not quite the same. I'm not going to... I can't say which is more damaging, but the character is a bit different. So even though I have the privilege of good education, middle class male upbringing, white skin, I find myself deeply ingrained in my own systematic survival responses as somebody who was born Jewish.

[17:12]

It's weird. And it took me more than 40 years to even really tune into it. I was at a meeting of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists in Thailand, I think it was in 1991 or 1992, and there were a bunch of Westerners. And I realized that within the first six hours, I had figured out everybody who was Jewish there. I figured, I sort of had an intuition about who all they were. And beyond that, which was very interesting, was that the others were doing that too. And somehow within that time, we all had signified to each other that we knew who each other was. It was very

[18:17]

I realized I've been doing this all my life, and I never was aware of it. I'm sure this is a pattern. Once we knew each other, we were also a lot more comfortable. I think this is a pattern, obviously, that goes back through centuries of being ghettoized, of being the other. It's not a genetic thing. It's just something that comes with my upbringing and education. I can remember my mother telling me to watch out for myself, that some people might threaten or exclude me for being Jewish, and I learned that lesson. It's really deep. I find myself, sometimes I find myself looking around the zendo and trying to figure out who's Jewish.

[19:21]

And I don't think, I'm sure that some of you make a similar census. And I know from talking to people of color in different places, I know that they do. This is not, I don't think it's an unusual human instinct. But I also try to remember where our Buddhism, our school, our teaching comes from. Our ancestors come from India and China and Japan. In June, I was in Japan for a meeting and I visited Rinzowin, Suzuki Roshi's temple where I've been before. found myself walking in the graveyard where the old priests of the temple were buried. It's just completely amazing to me that Zen, our Zen, has kind of leaped oceans and leaped cultures and was just offered to us.

[20:31]

And we should accept it humbly and remember the price that was paid for the price of suffering that was paid to plant the Dharma here. Much was given up, much was sacrificed, and that sacrifice continues. So we owe it to our teachers and ourselves to share this practice with the same kind of generosity and open-mindedness that it was offered to us. And we need to keep in mind as well that most Buddhists in America don't look like me. Most of them, in terms of numbers, are Chinese or Japanese or Thai or Vietnamese and so on. And they are sustaining the practice. I come to Buddhism, many of us here come to Buddhism out of a sense of suffering, wanting to know how to engage it.

[21:44]

People from some of the Asian countries have an awareness that comes with their birth. They have another gift that's very precious. And they have the same way-seeking mind. They have the same suffering. And so we find a way to work together. So the question I might raise is, how does it feel to come to Zen practice as a person of color? People of color do come. They will come. And I was talking with my friend, Sala Steinbeck, who's an African-American woman who practices at San Francisco Zen Center. And her message is, if it's about liberation, people of color will be interested.

[22:50]

They'll want to know about it. So this is happening all around the world. The Dalai Lama draws stadiums full of people in Mexico. In South America there are a growing number of Zen teachers and Tibetan teachers who are actually settling in and building communities, communities of practice. We don't know a lot about this. I don't know a lot about this and I get a lot of information, but it's beginning to come in. So I ask Asian and Latino and African-American friends about how it feels to come here or to come to San Francisco Zen Center or Spirit Rock. And I ask myself what feelings come up for me. Seeing different people walk in the zendo or not seeing them come in the zendo.

[24:00]

And this is also part of the practice. Dogen suggests we take a step back to turn one's light inward and illuminate oneself. Whatever I see when I shine that light, I need to look at really carefully and then reflect back into the world. So the answer to how it feels, I think, largely depends on two further interrelated questions. The first one is, does it feel safe? Does one feel safe and seen in the community? Are you acknowledged? Are the conditions of your life acknowledged and welcomed and explored in the Sangha. I suspect this is sometimes yes and sometimes no. Thoughtless words can turn people from the practice and from the temple.

[25:09]

I've seen this happen here. I've seen it happen elsewhere. An offhand comment is made about maybe say about the white middle-class makeup of this community and the people who are not white or not middle-class are sitting right there when these things are said. Are they seen? How does it feel to to listen to such things being said. So through a kind of unintended eye of white supremacy, which is a hard word, I know, people are made to feel invisible and uncounted. Maybe I should say something about white supremacy.

[26:14]

I think this is a building block of racism. It's built on kind of my own blindness to privilege that I may have. And so it has a personal aspect and it also has a systematic aspect. Systematic aspect of privilege that I have in common with other people. So if one wants to see it, the practice of individual mindfulness, of turning our light inward, needs to be blended in dialogue with our friends and with Sangha members who may not carry this particular privilege. So we kind of need to find out about it. We need to find how it looks from various sides, not just how it how I might experience myself. So these same kinds of painful things happen if you're a homosexual or if because of injury or fact of birth you can't get up the steps of the temple.

[27:28]

Blindness to these conditions, blindness to the need for to be safe and seen turn people away, they hurt. So that's what it might feel like from one side. On the other side, the Buddha's understanding is that all beings have the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of misunderstandings and attachments they do not realize it. So this understanding is so precious that we're obligated to share it. I don't mean proselytizing, even though the Buddha never stopped preaching Dharma. But now we have centers and institutions, and to make zazen and the Dharma available, we need to tell people they're welcome and invite them to practice with us. We practice, we've been taking the practice to jails and to hospitals.

[28:32]

and to people who may not be able to come to us, but we haven't quite figured out always how to take the practice or how to offer it, how to welcome people in the very neighborhoods in which we exist. That's really a challenge. One way that some churches in San Francisco are doing is to kind of declare themselves, they're using the term open congregation and they have kind of covenant among themselves. This means that in their literature and at their services and classes and events they make it known that they welcome people of color, gays and lesbians and so on. So they're being proactive rather than passive on questions of diversity and inclusion. I think this is necessary to be kind of active in that way because in this country, passivity or saying, well, this practice is for everyone, just, it carries with it this kind of white supremacy.

[29:48]

it doesn't acknowledge that it may not feel so safe to come here, that you risk being hurt. And so the invitation and the opening is really important. This passivity is very subtle and pervasive. It's conditioned by our magazines and our movies, our clothing, all the things we buy, and it's conditioned by my upbringing, You know, the privilege that came to me through education and family. And it's a very subtle thing that we need to be tuned into. But the wonderful thing that the Buddha taught, what we can experience in Zazen is that each of us can go beyond duality. It can't be done just by reason and talk. We have to get the reality of the world deepen our bones, and then bring it back out again into the world.

[30:54]

We must make a lot of mistakes. A lot of mistakes, maybe like this talk, which is for Suzuki Roshi. Suzuki Roshi said, giving a talk is making a mistake on purpose. So, we make our mistakes, and we learn the lessons, and we go back at it. I was reading in a relatively new book called Buddhist Women on the Edge, which is really good. A lot of wonderful pieces in there. And there's a piece by Bell Hooks, who's an African-American woman who's a scholar and a Buddhist practitioner. And she kind of writes about this process. She writes, in a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimhood and identity is inevitable.

[31:56]

I once believed that progressive people could analyze the dualities and dissolve them through a process of dialectical critical exchange. Yet globally, the resurgence of notions of ethnic purity, white supremacy, have led marginalized groups to cling to dualisms as a means of resistance. This willingness to surrender to attachment to duality is present in such thinking. It merely inverts the dualistic thinking that supports and maintains domination. Dualities serve their own interests. She writes, what's alarming to me is to see so many Americans returning to those simplistic choices. People of all persuasions are feeling if they don't have dualism, they don't have anything to hold on to. If we are concerned with dissolving these apparent dualities, we have to identify anchors to hold on to in the midst of fragmentation, in the midst of loss of grounding.

[33:04]

She writes, my anchor is love. I like to think that I am working towards love and compassion as anchors of my own practice. And I think that that's true for many of you. I know a lot of you really well and I see that's what we're trying to do together. But these anchors depend on our mindfulness too. Zazen is rooted in mindfulness, breath after breath, thought after thought. And this kind of training carries over into our life outside the zendo. So this mindfulness, I try to uncover thought patterns. This is sometimes painful and it's embarrassing. Sometimes.

[34:06]

Depends on who you are. You may not be so easily embarrassed. But it's the essence of saving oneself and all sentient beings. So with mindfulness, one thing you can do is when you turn your mindfulness on your own thoughts, you may find yourself amazed at the stories that you make up about other people, about how these stories are conditioned by race, by age, or class, or privilege. I invite you to Check it out. Think about, as you meet people, think about, before you even know them, what story do you carry about them? What story do you carry about someone? What do you think you know about someone who you think is different from yourself?

[35:08]

Often we'll have that kind of story. If we meet somebody who we think is like us, then actually the story is even more deeply buried. Because we don't even have, it doesn't even come to mind because we think they're like us. And in both cases we think we know something about this person. And it's a kind of, I think this is a fundamental practice that we can do in our daily life outside the zendo, to uncover the stories that we carry about people watching thoughts about race, or any kind of difference. And this is something we do for our sake. We don't necessarily do it for the other person's sake, but in fact, because we're gored, entwined with gored, we're doing it for each other. And it's liberating. I think this is a kind of personal practice that we can do.

[36:16]

Then we can take this further into our communities. I mean, one way that you find out what you can do once you realize you have a story is you can find out who is this person. You can find out what their story really is, or you can find out what they say their story is, because we also have stories about ourselves that are not necessarily the final truth. But together we can explore this. And you can do it in, you know, if we're talking about diversity, we're talking about race, you know, you can take this kind of risky step of asking your friends of color or your friends who you perceive as different, asking them about themselves, asking them how they experience the community.

[37:20]

This is risky and it's kind of taking a step into this realm of not knowing, but I think it's necessary. In the wider Buddhist community, it might mean making some excursions and visits to Asian Buddhist or other Buddhist temples, which are mostly friendly places. The same dharma resides there, the same taste, although it may take different forms. We really, we think nothing about going to all kinds of Asian restaurants, but And we do it all the time, but there's a kind of reluctance, and I see it some in myself, to go down the block to the Thai temple and find out what's the practice there? What are the monks doing? So this is also a kind of risk. Maybe when we've begun to examine ourselves and look around and share our thoughts with others, then we've started to create conditions for change.

[38:22]

If our American society could take these steps, it could be the start of something wonderful and hopeful, really different in the history of America. And I think this is not a pipe dream. This is the Bodhisattva vow, the working of our way-seeking mind. So if each of us and the sanghas we cherish could nurture this process of mindfulness, there could be a change. I think that compassion and peace could blossom in very surprising ways. And with that peace, our Zazen could be like a golden wind blowing across a meadow of wildflowers. So how can we take up this work together? I think we have a few minutes to welcome. I didn't say proselytize.

[39:39]

I'm not talking about proselytizing. I'm just talking about your practice with your friends who you think are open to it. It isn't? When you're here, you're silent. You know, when you meet somebody who you feel might be interested in what you're doing, please tell them what you're doing. This is not proselytizing, not sending, nobody's going out on a mission. That would be terribly frightening to me. But if somebody's interested, You know, you can say something to them.

[40:41]

I mean, you really don't have to. Proselytizing, I'm not saying proselytize, but talk about the Dharma. It's important to talk about the Dharma. It's important to talk about it among ourselves and with anybody who's open. Yes, it's sometimes risky. I think it goes to do with world singularity. Well, these are all words which fall into dualism.

[41:57]

Just sit there and accept any state of mind that comes. Accept any state of mind that comes as what is given and let it And then let it go. Don't stop at it. Just let state of mind after state of mind go. That's non-dualism. It's kind of the same boat, in a way, in that it's not familiar in terms of the forms, the rituals, the readings, the sutras.

[43:39]

I think what's familiar to people who become bishops is the basic teaching itself to which we respond. But a practice that's neither in its attributes Christian or Jewish or some other more familiar thing to us puts us all in a kind of, you know, there's something not, we can't quite get our, it seems to me, our stereotypes have some difficulty in But I think that's true. And it's also true that people have affinities that are beyond any sense of what their culture is. I mean, you're sitting here, right?

[44:40]

you're sitting here in this Japanese style temple, and for many of us, we have a deep affinity with it, and we can't say why. My grandparents and great-grandparents came from the Ukraine, from a Jewish family, what am I doing here? I can't say why. So it's not like, this is not for everybody, this practice is not for everybody, it's not going to be comfortable or suitable to everybody, but the idea is if you have an affinity, you should feel safe and welcome to practice. Maybe time for one more. I would like to expand a little on this question of dualism in regards to racism, which I think was your essential theme today. I think there's something that's other and different and perhaps even more radical than the problem that you addressed And I can only use myself as an experience.

[45:43]

When I first went into business, I would go to meetings, and I wasn't even there, I was invisible. I knew, after a while, this invisible quality that I possessed meant that I was going to be fired soon. And then later... And then later, I became quite successful. And all of a sudden I had star quality. And everybody knew exactly where I was, and if I would leave a situation, other people would say, that is a tough act to follow. And I'm retired now, and I have Jewish friends who had almost identical experiences. In essence, their experiences were identical to what I'm trying to describe. And I would say that they even had an easier time of it than I did. possibly because of the very discriminatory fact of being Jewish and centuries of being Jewish. I'm also reminded that the Italian Renaissance, possibly the greatest flowering of talent.

[46:49]

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