Good evening, everyone.
So tonight, I want to talk about our practice and its relationship to what's happening in
the world.
So in the Song of the Grass Hut, we've just chanted from one of our great ancestors in
China, Shito or Sekito says, although the hut is small, it includes the entire world.
And so, you know, the space of our Zabuton and the Sendo is small, but it includes the
entire world.
So wherever we sit, our practice includes everything in our life.
So I spent a few years training up in the mountains in Tassajara in California, it was
wonderful and it's kind of secluded and remote and, you know, one can really focus on the
stuff going on just on one's cushion and on one's own.
This self we imagine as separate, of course, everybody you've ever known is part of what's
happening on your cushion right now.
And even in such a place, it's like that.
But what we're doing here on Irving Park Road in Chicago is kind of radical and it's an
experiment.
And here we are out in a storefront in Chicago, non-residential lay practice.
We all have complicated lives out there in the world of Chicago.
And yet we come here and we face the wall and we have this time to, as we say, turn
the light within to see this complicated body and mind.
And yet, it includes the entire world.
And Chitra says at the end, don't separate from this skin bag here and now.
So in some ways, the heart of our practice is, well, he also says to just let go of hundreds
of years and relax completely.
And yet, to not separate from this skin bag, when we first started chanting this some years
ago, some people were offended to be called skin bags, it's an old Zen slang, you know.
But this, you know, applies to each of us and it applies to our world and to our society.
And so I want to talk about the skin bag of our country, our world tonight.
And we're not separate from that either.
And especially as we're out here practicing in the world, how do we see this relationship
and this non-separation is in some ways the heart of our practice.
To not push anything away, to be willing to sit upright and relax completely right in
the middle of our own stuff, to use the technical term, our own greed, hate, delusion, our own
craving and grasping and anger, frustration, fear, sadness, confusion.
And all of that, you know, we each have our own particular combination or versions of
that and it's not separate from what's going on in the world around us.
And so part of our practice is to face that too and how do we not separate from that.
So I want to talk about that in terms of the values of Zazen, the values of Bodhisattva
practice and practice of enlightening beings, which is the Mahayana tradition that Zen is
part of.
And I want to talk about it in terms of climate change and from this article that I've been
inspired by, by Bhikkhu Bodhi, who's actually a non-Mahayana Theravada monk, talking about
moving from a culture of death to a culture of life and mobilizing for the people's climate
march.
So Bhikkhu Bodhi is an American guy from New Jersey who became a Theravada monk and he's
now probably the primary translator of the Pali, the old Pali texts into English.
But he's also a passionate speaker for sanity in our society and our culture and he's talking
about the large climate march in New York City, September 21st.
So here at Ancient Dragon, we're going to be hosting a fine teacher from San Francisco
Zen Center that weekend.
So I'm not going to be there, but any of you who are moved to do so, it's an important
event because the Secretary General of the United Nations has called for the world's
leaders to come to actually talk seriously instead of just in little token matters about
responding to climate damage.
And so there's a call for people, many people to go and march to support such a call.
So I want to come back to what Bhikkhu Bodhi says about that, but I want to talk first
about something closer to us.
So today in Ferguson, Missouri, it was the funeral for Michael Brown and of course this,
the situation for African Americans, it's not just in Ferguson, Missouri, it's in Chicago
and the violence and the gun violence and the discrimination is part of what we live
in in Chicago too.
And so for maybe a few of you who are new here tonight, sometimes I talk about traditional
Buddhist teachings, but I don't think that's separate from this.
I want to try and talk about this in terms of the Bodhisattva values and Bodhisattva
precepts, not killing and supporting life, benefiting all beings, seeing ourselves as
connected with all beings, not taking what's not given, being generous, not lying, rather
than speaking truth to power, also not speaking of the faults of others.
So it's not a matter of blame, how we get to something better, it's not a matter of,
you know, this is a long, long karma we're talking about, letting go of, not just hundreds
of years, I should say, it's longer than that.
The karma and legacy of slavery and racism in our country affects all of us.
So in our sangha, we have several African-Americans who participate sometimes, but mostly we're
not so diverse in that way, we're diverse in other ways, but as white people, as a white
person myself, I think it's important to, especially on this occasion, what's happening
in Ferguson, to say something.
So, probably, I don't know, maybe some of you have, some of you don't follow the news
so much, and sometimes that's a good practice, you know, sometimes what's reported, at least
in the mainstream media, is not so reliable.
But anyway, there's this young man, Michael Brown, young black man was walking in the street
and was unarmed and was basically shot down by a white policeman in Ferguson.
And Ferguson is one of these black suburbs, mostly African-American suburbs, but almost
all of the police force and almost all of the city council and the school board, a very,
very high percentage is white people.
And anyway, his body was left in the street for, I don't know, 10 hours, 11 hours, some
long period of time.
And he was shot, and there are conflicting stories, but according to eyewitnesses, he
had his hands up when he was shot, he was unarmed.
And there have been these ongoing demonstrations, and most of you know this, but there have been
these ongoing demonstrations, basically really admirable non-violent demonstrations in the
tradition of Dr. King.
And late at night, there may have been some looters or some people, some angry people
throwing water bottles at the cops or something, maybe something more.
But the response of the police, who are armed with weapons from, left over from our adventures
in the Mideast, tanks and other large weapons, have been rather aggressive.
So this is the society we live in, and we have, you know, so I don't say this out of
disrespect for the, we have a number of lawyers in our Sangha, including one present, and
I don't say this out of disrespect, but the system of law and the system of justice in
this country is fairly obviously, it seems to me, flawed, and we have two systems of
justice, maybe based on class and certainly based on race.
So just one statistic, this is from the NAACP, only 12 percent of the people who regularly
use drugs in the United States are black, but 32 percent of those arrested on drug charges
are black.
And, you know, the percentages of, in terms of incarceration and so forth are similar.
The situation, and there have been many, many other incidents like this of Michael Brown,
of young black men harassed and arrested and even shot unarmed.
So, I just say this because I think it's important to say it, and as a clergy person
responsible to precepts, I want to say this truth, and to acknowledge it as a white person.
And, you know, we don't know what to do about any of this, but I think just admitting
it, acknowledging it, feeling the sadness about it, is part of what needs to be done.
And I appreciate how difficult it must be for African-American mothers every time they
see their young sons going out, just leaving the house, and the danger they know they might
face.
So I just wanted to say that.
And it has to do with the sense of separation.
And in our country, the separation that we feel between races, the separation that's
happening increasingly in terms of class, the inequity between the very wealthy and
the rest of us, and separation for young people who increasingly have difficulty finding
jobs and getting through college without large debt, and the separation between men and women
and the way that laws increasingly are being written to impede women's health rights.
So, you know, this is just the society we live in.
And how we respond, you know, Buddhism, you know, our practice offers some, I believe
offers some space for possible healthy response.
And there's not one right response.
We don't know what will change this, except that change happens, you know, after lots
of effort over a long period of time, and then suddenly something happens, and, you
know, the examples in my lifetime, the Berlin Wall falls, or apartheid ends, or, you know,
things happen suddenly after a lot of effort.
And there is change.
So it's not pointless, and it's not hopeless to make efforts to try and respond.
And there's not one right way to respond.
And maybe just by talking about it is, you know, my way to respond.
But just maybe to, I don't know.
Today, a black person, an African American person on the street asked me for some change,
and I gave it to him.
And made eye contact and said hello.
I don't know if that helps anything.
You know, I don't know what he was going to do with that money.
And it's not out of white guilt or anything.
It just, you know, he was a human being.
Anyway, I want to also talk about climate, because that's something that all of us, you
know, it's, there's a very strong tendency in our society now to kind of pretend it's
not happening.
And I don't think it's just from the fossil fuel company, corporations who are investing
a lot of money in advertisements to pretend it's not happening.
I think we don't want to face what's happening.
But the so-called extreme weather is obvious.
And this article by Bhikhu Bodhi points to some of what has to happen.
And part of what he's saying, he's talking about economic realities, but he's also, I
think, pointing at something that we have to offer from our practice, which is a sense
of values of connectedness.
So I talked earlier this year about Dogen's Mountains and Water Sutra, Landscape Sutra,
and how we, the environment is not something out there, but that actually we are an expression
of the natural landscape of mountains and waters, prairies and lakes, of the landscape
of our life.
We are connected very deeply.
We are expressions of the landscape.
The landscape is not something that we, that it belongs to us to exploit, to cut off the
mountaintops, to take the coal for our electricity.
How to, practically speaking, change from the systems of energy that we have now that
are contributing to carbon dioxide rise and so forth.
The practical, political realities, it seems very difficult how we're going to make this
change.
I don't know.
Nobody knows.
And yet, we have to pay attention to this.
Anyway, I'm going to read some parts of what Bhikhu Bodhi says.
He says that a mere change in technologies will not suffice to avert global disaster.
So, we do need to find sustainable alternative technologies to fossil fuel and systemically
change them.
How, you know, and it's complicated.
I've been involved in a lot of discussions about this.
So, wind energy is happening around the country, but that also has its problems.
So, birds get killed by windmills.
There are unintended consequences in every technology.
And yet, we have to find some alternative to the increase in carbon dioxide.
But what Bhikhu Bodhi says is what is equally essential is to facilitate the transition
from the current social paradigm rooted in profit maximization to a new paradigm that
gives priority to preserving the integrity of human beings and the natural world.
Well, this is what our practice is about.
How do we see, how do we learn?
You know, this is something that we can talk about as a teaching and we can sort of see
just the first time we said zazen.
But actually doing this practice regularly, we see it more and more deeply and we express
it more and more deeply that the value in the world is not about material accumulation.
It's not about, you know, profit margins.
It's about actually recognizing the integrity of each other and of human beings and of the
natural world and of the landscape and that sense of value long term and changing the
hearts and minds, our own and each other's and everybody in the world.
How do we do that?
Well, it's going to take, you know, this isn't something that happens, can happen overnight
or maybe after a long time, suddenly it happens overnight.
I don't know.
Anyway, he talks about this in a lot of practical terms.
So I'm just going to read some little excerpts.
The climate instability we are facing today is symptomatic of a deeper malady of cancer
spreading through the inner organs of global civilization.
The extreme weather events we have experienced come as a wake-up call demanding that we
treat the underlying causes.
The dominant political and economic elites claim that this system of organization is
beyond doubt or questioning, immutable as the law of physics, yet when carefully scrutinized
this system that we have, this industrial commercial financial economy he's referring
to, reveals itself to be sustained by a matrix of ideas and values shaped and imposed by
powerful vested interests.
These ideas and values are the hidden forces beyond the climate crisis.
They are driven behind, drivers behind more frequent and severe floods, droughts and heat
waves, behind more acidic oceans, collapsing ice sheets and vanishing glaciers.
Day by day this model is dragging human civilization down a treacherous slope, threatening planetary
suicide.
And he says this is the paradigm of corporate capitalism, locating all value in monetary
wealth, human value, labor value, the value of work, of decent work.
Natural value all translates into financial value and the latter is the only value to
which this paradigm ascribes ultimacy.
So he talks about this in terms of objectification and this is where the sense of non-separation
comes in.
It treats everything, people, animals, trees, rivers, lands and mountains as objects to
be utilized to generate financial gain for corporations, their executives and their shareholders.
This logic of objectification and its accompanying scheme of values entails policies aimed at
unrestrained domination and subjugation of nature, the extraction of natural resources
to generate energy and produce commodities for sale in the market.
It therefore turns nature's bounties and the plurality of goods often inessential and frivolous
goods.
This corporate paradigm treats people just as callously as it treats stones, trees and
soil and pushes indigenous people off their lands and treats labor as an abstract variable
producing real human beings to figures in a database.
He goes on like this.
I want to bring it back to our practice.
Well, rather than talking about it in economic terms, well, a little bit more.
This change in worldview must lead to reverence and respect for the natural world recognized
as our irreplaceable home and nurturing mother.
We must acknowledge the finitude of nature and treat it accordingly bearing in mind our
responsibility to future generations.
It should endorse an ethic, further endorse an ethic of simplicity, contentment and restraint
to replace the voracious appetite of consumerism.
This is exactly, you know, where our practice comes in.
And the insight into the fundamental ignorance, which is the source of suffering, where we
see ourselves as separate from others or we see the world as something separate out there
to manipulate.
So this is part of why Zazen, this practice we've just been doing, is so radical.
We sit and we just sit and we just sit and we take another breath and we pay attention
and thoughts come up and feelings come up and we don't try and stop them or crush them
or manipulate them.
Most of what we do in our life, so this goes, I think this goes deeper even than just our
consumerist culture, although it's certainly enforced in that.
But there's some aspect of our consciousness itself that is, some part of human consciousness
is about, you know, manipulating stuff out there to get what we want.
That if we only get the things we want, we'll be happy or get rid of the things we don't
want, then we'll be happy.
And to actually have a practice where we just stop and whatever happens is okay.
And we have the space and we take time regularly during the week to take the space in which
whatever happens is okay and we can see and watch our own patterns of grasping and our
own patterns of aversion and our own patterns of sadness and fear and be with that and
be upright in the middle of that.
That creates this tremendous space of non-separation where we're willing to be in the world
and with the world.
And then from that place, we can respond in the way Bhikkhu Bodhi is advocating, where
we can exercise restraint, but also respond helpfully, where we can appreciate simplicity
and appreciate content and not need to, not be hungry ghosts, not need to be consumerists
who get all the things in all the television commercials and so forth.
That kind of awareness is what he's talking about as the paradigm shift that needs to
happen, that will help somehow stop this climate damage.
And from trying, I'm not a scientist, but from trying to look at what's, study what's
going, what I can of what's going on, it's not hopeless.
That's the other thing that people seem to feel when I try and talk about this, that
it's already too late.
And certainly on some, to some extent, we've reached some tipping points.
Things are going to get bad.
It's going to be a difficult, our habitat over the next century, the next 20 years,
the next 200 years, it's going to get more and more difficult.
But it's not, you know, it's not that the zombies are all going to come and devour us.
You know, that's not the story.
Humans can survive.
And what we do and how we respond still has the capacity to make a difference.
That's all I need to say.
And what we do individually on our cushions, you know, in terms of opening ourselves to
facing the difficulty of just being the person, you know, all the people that are sitting
on your cushion right now and of being willing to sit there and be present with all of it
and face all of it.
The entire world is there.
And not separate from the skin-dead here and now.
And then also see that as what's going on in the world.
And we're not separate from the South Side.
We're not separate from the gangs and the gun violence.
And, you know, each of us has our own potentialities for responding.
And there may not be anything to do, but this practice of patience that I keep talking about,
this act of patience, where we're paying attention.
And when we see some way to respond, to do that.
We're ready to respond when there's something we can do.
And if we're all doing that, it's going to make a difference.
So, there's a little bit of time left.
I would love to hear your comments, responses, questions.
Please feel free, anyway.
Hey, Ben.
Thanks for your talk today.
This morning was a long article in the New York Times about a police officer who shot and killed my friend.
I can't remember his name.
Darren Wilson.
Darren Wilson.
But it struck me how normal and mundane he was.
He was caught up in this larger structure.
Yeah.
He was doing exactly what Jacob Brody was saying.
He was treating people as profit.
He was looking at arrests as statistics.
He had previously won an award for stopping a young man.
And they discovered a bunch of marijuana in his car.
And you can see how he was operating within a system that was rewarding him for the number of arrests that he was making.
Rewarding him for the number of drugs that he was apprehending.
And within a larger system that was making all this military-style weaponry available to the police department.
And many can.
Lots and lots of police departments all around the country.
Yeah.
And it just strikes me that you're not using that.
It's just a system of cause and effect.
A large structure that was making greed and hatred invisible.
Just part of how David Rudd happened.
Yeah.
Yes, thank you.
Other comments?
Caitlin?
Well, thank you for your talk.
It was a good voice.
And I like how you are constantly reminding us that we're all connected to each other.
I think that's really important.
Because I think that if we all really thought and believed in things,
things would probably be a lot better than they are.
It would certainly be a different world.
And kind of on another subject, in a way.
But I think that you're absolutely right.
I mean, I just sit down, face the wall.
The first couple of times I tried that, I didn't even know how it was coming.
It was certainly before BPFS freaked me out.
And probably for the very thing you were telling me about,
you kind of got a, I think you call it facing yourself,
or facing the world, which is kind of the same thing as where you are.
And I get the impression that the more things I read,
there are a lot of different practices that are going on in this world.
Like there's a lot of different types of yoga.
And a lot of them also for instance,
and there's all different kinds of Buddhism too.
Because students kind of say.
And it seems like that is, I mean it does take patience.
But it seems like that might be a really great hope for the world.
That people, more and more people are getting involved in things like this.
And I think it's actually, if I'm not mistaken,
you talk about devolving the frontal lobe.
I seriously, I mean anatomically,
that part of our brain has to do,
if I'm not mistaken, with our will and power.
The way we exercise our power.
Because power is not necessarily, power is not a bad thing.
It's how you use it that's the, that can be the difference.
Well there have been studies that show that
doing meditation actually changes the physiology of the brain.
I mean that's been shown.
I don't know, you may know something about that Gary from studies.
But anyway it's, yeah.
It's practice does have an effect.
But it does require patience.
And you know in terms of changing things on the level of
systems of energy in the world.
We don't know how that's going to happen.
The other thing I was going to say in response to what you said is that
and this is a point that my friend Joanna Macy makes is that
that I've talked about a lot is that all over the world there are lots and lots and lots
of people who are working in all kinds of different ways to try and make it
to try and help, to try and be helpful.
And those efforts must have some effect.
So anyway, I think
feeling
overwhelmed and hopeless is not realistic.
Feeling just kind of, feeling hopeful in the sense of well they'll take care of it
is also not realistic. We each have a responsibility to do what
we can in the way that works for
for our own interests and our own aptitude and our own
situation.
So time for maybe one more comment or
response or question from some of the newer people
here. You're welcome to ask them too.
I really appreciate the comment about
part of the problem being that we all live in and want to live
in a world of clear-cut categories and exteriorities
and dichotomies that give
us the illusion of control. And it seems that you can see that
operating on a bunch of different levels and different examples.
Mike Broward from Yad was trying
to figure out his religious beliefs and what he was going to do as a young man.
The police officer that was facing him
I'm sure he had been laid off from a previous job and was also
trying to structure some kind of control.
I know for me one of the frightening things about climate change
is the sense that we're entering into a new world of new
patterns and new systems and unpredictable
forces. And it's easier to
fall back on the structures
that are there than if they're there for a purpose.
But I think
there's something about sitting on a cushion and seeing how little control
I have over my own brain.
And that it's okay. And I think that that
at some level helps.
It helps make us adaptable and flexible
and sturdy in a way. And to see that we can't
just even control our own thoughts.
And that it's okay that we can't. And to be able to sit
upright in the middle of change and
uncertainty and still we can respond and try and
be kind to ourselves
as well as to others. So this isn't about
going out and helping others separate from ourselves.
This is about how we are connected and we have to take care
of ourselves as well. So on that note
we'll do our closing chants. So it's in the
Four Bodhisattva Vows and our translation is next to the last page of the chant book.
And we'll chant them three times.
Beings are numberless.
I vow to free them.
Illusions are inexhaustible.
I vow to end them.
Environment is boundless.
I vow to enter them.
In Buddha's ways
unsurpassable.
I vow to realize it.
Beings are numberless.
I vow to free them.
Illusions are inexhaustible.
I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless.
I vow to enter them.
In Buddha's ways
unsurpassable.
I vow to realize it.
Beings are numberless.
I vow to free them.
Illusions are inexhaustible.
I vow to end them.
Dharma gates are boundless.
I vow to enter them.
In Buddha's ways
unsurpassable.
I vow to realize it.