So, my talk. This is a, this is a study session that we're a study sitting that we're having, and there'll be a. this lecture, and then there'll be a talk in the afternoon. And the subject matter is really the dharma of Martin Luther King, Jr. And the context this morning, I want to talk about community, which we've already had some exemplification of, right? You could turn it up a hair if you could, if that's possible. Okay, never mind. All right. And in the afternoon, what I want to do is talk about kind of the enactment of community, how you do it. So let's just collect ourselves for a moment.

[01:05]

I need to do this. Just sit up. ground yourself, feel your feet on the ground or on the floor. Take some mindful breaths, feeling your breaths, fill your lungs down to your Hara. And then with your exhalation, just empty out completely. And the essence of community that we're experiencing right now is manifest in our breathing together.

[02:13]

In the fact that we hold this air and this atmosphere and this place in common, And that commonality is the heart of community. It's the same root. For Dr. King, the ideal that he put forward was what he called beloved community. Beloved community is the community that is practicing together. Please put your phones away. It's really distracting.

[03:19]

Okay. Okay. All my life, I've really sought community. Why that is, I'm not sure. But it goes back to high school and to college. And it's a peculiar intersection with those yearnings and also my experience, my historical experience. So I was with my community in the summer of 1963 at The March on Washington, my friends from high school, I remember where we were standing under a tree as we were listening to the speakers on the mall and listening to Dr. King.

[04:50]

And I was with my community some five or six years later when, in the aftermath of Dr. King's assassination, we occupied the university that I was attending, Columbia University in New York, and we took over uh, six buildings and lived in them for a week, which was, uh, on the one hand, exciting, on the other hand, not so much fun. We had a lot of meetings, and everything had to be decided by consensus. But what we formed, the building that I was in was Lowell Library, it was the president of the university's office, and we were the Lowell commune.

[06:01]

We formed these communes and we took care of ourselves. With the help of people from the outside, we cooked our food and we cleaned up our space. And we also were all arrested together. We were arrested in common with principles, according to principles on our part of nonviolence, which meant, but with some nonviolent resistance. We, when the police came in, we had linked arms. in a very tight series of concentric circles, there were about a hundred of us in this room, and we were singing.

[07:06]

We were singing, We Shall Not Be Moved, which was provisionally but not actually true. Because we were moved, we were beaten. and kicked and some of you may know I've got this bump on my head, which you can see, which is an artifact of that arrest. But we were a commune, we were holding a place in common. And I've been thinking about that in the context of our Sangha. Sangha is a common, it's a community. It's both we constitute the community, but we live in this place that is a commons.

[08:17]

It belongs to all of us. And the commons is something that evolved. It evolved in Europe in kind of the aftermath of the feudal era where land was not held in common. Land was owned. and people were owned effectively. And then as there got to be some little breeding room and that system began to break down, people owned land and pastured their animals and grew their crops in spaces that were commons. And so we have this word community that is

[09:20]

One of the things that's really important to me is to recognize that community exists in place. Now, for some of us in our context of modernity, there's community that exists in our mind or there's community that exists online. But this is one of the things that was really powerful that we learned. We learned it coming out of the Columbia occupation, but we didn't learn it until 40 years later. So the first building that was occupied at Columbia was taken over by the African American Students Association.

[10:34]

And they were about 40 or 50 of them, and most of the undergraduates who were African-American belonged to this body on both sides of the street, on the Columbia side and also on the Barnard side, which was women. And it was interesting because most of them at that point in time came from the South. And they were students who had grown up in in the segregated South, and think about it, this is 1967. So all of their high school and junior high and primary education was in an environment where segregation was legal. And their parents' generation were often, the fathers had fought in World War II.

[11:45]

And they came back and lived in the South and found themselves in circumstances where they were not given the rights, not allowed the rights that they actually were fighting for purportedly. But these students who were, you know, they were the brightest in their communities, in their schools, and they had been recruited to come to some of the elite schools in the North. And they came and they found that the circumstances were astonishingly as discriminatory in many ways as what they had left in the South. So they were leadership that took over the key classroom building at Columbia, and the issues were

[12:48]

For them, the issues were, one, that Columbia was buying up real estate in the neighborhood and basically evicting all of the low-income people, who were mostly people of color, and also that Columbia had worked out a sweetheart deal with the city of New York, which gave them a part of Morningside Park, which was a park that was used by the Harlem neighborhood to build a gym for Columbia students. And the gym was going to be accessible to the neighborhood literally through the back door. on, you know, with very limited access and limited hours. This is public land.

[13:52]

So that was their issue. And we, the white students from SDS came in. We were invited in. But after about 12 hours, the African-American students invited us out. They said, why don't you go and take over your own building? And so without fully comprehending what was going on, people said, okay, and we did. What we learned years later, 40 years later, actually at a Columbia strike reunion, was that this principle of beloved community was something that the African-American students understood deeply because they had grown up in such communities.

[15:10]

They had grown up in an environment in the South where the church was the center of community. and where for survival and in order to thrive, people had to help each other. They had to take care of each other. They had to lift up those who had the capacity and put them forward and to take care of those who were in need. And it was related to the church, it was related to the actual land and place that they lived. And it was something that was very real and concrete to them. So when they came to New York, just quite naturally, what those students did was they saw like the university is

[16:12]

right next to Harlem. And so they just went down and made contact with the churches, with the civic leadership, with the community of Harlem because they felt that was their community. They felt safe there. As opposed to the reality of being stopped by campus police whenever they tried to come through the gates and carded, you know, and had to prove that they were actually students at the university simply on the basis of their skin color. So they made contact. They had extensive contact with the Harlem community.

[17:21]

And what's interesting is that very few of the Euro-American students had any community to rely on. even the ones who came from a working class background. So in a way, this is just my thinking, that for some of us, particularly for a large number of the students of Jewish background, like myself, our community was in our minds. It wasn't related to, we were quite disconnected from land or place. The place that we had been encouraged to cultivate was a place in our minds.

[18:28]

And so we didn't know how to take care of a place. And I've come to realize, so when we heard about that, that was literally what was going on that night. When the African-American students took over that building, they were disciplined. They knew what was at stake. They knew that they were representing their communities and that the hopes of those communities had been really placed on them as the future. And so to take over, to do an illegal act or an act of civil disobedience was really a risky thing for them. And they took that seriously. So when they went into the building, they kept it clean. They organized the food.

[19:30]

They didn't allow any trashing of the space. And when we went into the buildings, we ransacked the files and we painted graffiti on the walls, you know, and we had piles of trash and we didn't give a shit, you know. And it was a very different mind. And in a way, you know, we didn't understand this until they actually told us 40 years later. And when they did tell us, there was a great weeping on both sides that this pain had been there for all those years and we didn't know.

[20:33]

It was really eye-opening, was really eye-opening for me. And it's particularly since at that point, let's see, that was that was 2008. I had already been sort of studying and teaching about Dr. King for 10 years at that point. I found my papers this morning and I see when I was started to really investigate this stuff. And I knew about Beloved Community, but it was somewhat abstract. But it wasn't abstract for them. It wasn't abstract for Dr. King. And the community that we have here, with its strengths and weaknesses is not an abstraction either. And the communities that the, what you see in Buddhist communities to me are beloved communities because they include

[21:52]

Everyone, the doors are open to everyone who wishes to come in. When you go to, I remember some of my early experiences in Southeast Asia, going to meetings in Thailand, we often met in rural temples in sort of not urban countryside temples in Thailand. And those temples, it's interesting, first of all, they welcomed all the dogs of the neighborhood. So it was like there were all these pretty mangy looking dogs, you know, dogs with skin disease, dogs, three legged dogs, you know, two and a half legged dogs, all the dogs

[23:02]

were there and they were just welcomed and fed and they felt comfortable there. And also, in the day, all the old people from the village would come and they would help around, they would sweep, they would clean. And that was their center. And it's also true that if you had children or people with various kinds of physical or mental limitations, they were welcome. Everyone was included. And this is actually This is our attitude. This is the attitude that Soshin Roshi and Suzuki Roshi teach in the context of Zazen.

[24:08]

That everything is included. Every thought that we have is included. Every person the door is open to them to participate. But we begin by, we begin by creating beloved community in ourselves. So every wonderful joyous thought that comes up, okay, come on in. every rank or self-centered thought that comes up, okay, come in. But none of you should expect, you know, that we're going to feed you forever, the good thoughts or the bad thoughts.

[25:16]

We welcome you. We recognize you. We have respect for you. And so you can freely come and go. And this is when Dr. King spoke about beloved community. It wasn't the idealization of a way of living that was devoid of conflict. Conflicts would exist. Conflicts do exist. And they're not actually, it's not bad. Conflicts are creative. This is how we grow. I like thinking about, I teach with Roshi Joan Halifax. She has a wonderful book called Standing at the Edge. And it's like we grow from the edge.

[26:22]

So it's by having the edge, you think about the frontier, or you think about our emotional edges to confront that territory, which is often It's this liminal threshold space, you know, beyond which we feel a little unsafe. But that's where we grow. We're constantly moving into the space that is not entirely safe. We're moving into it with curiosity. We're moving into it with a sense of wonder, with a sense of appreciation for the unknown. Because that's how we grow. Everything grows from the edges.

[27:26]

The community grows from the edges. So I've been talking around this idea of a beloved community. And I think that that's the community that the Buddha was also creating.

[28:39]

When he finally sat down to study, rather to preach. He did it in the context of creating a community. And in that community, what evolved was not a community of elites, but a community that was open to It became, it was open to women. It was open to people of all castes, including so-called untouchables. And that it was based on the principle of inclusion was not based on your position in society. It was based on your actions. And it was based on your words.

[29:45]

And there were conflicts. If you read the sutras, if you read the commentaries, you'll read about some of the conflicts. Everything was not wonderful. But they had a principle that we'll come to more this afternoon of recognizing that everyone was the embodiment of Buddha nature. And it's interesting Dr. King speaks of this. I found when I was doing research a paper that he had written in April of 1950 called the Chief Characteristics and Doctrines of Mahayana Buddhism. He wrote when he was at Crozier at theology school.

[30:53]

And, you know, it's like we write a paper for college. You know, you'd read some key books, and then you would sort of compress the ideas. And it's interesting. If you want to read it, let me know, and I can send you the paper. But you can see that even then, he was thinking at the age of, he was 21, which was basically around the age that we were when we formed our communes at Columbia. We were thinking about the same things, like how do we create an environment in which people can grow and thrive.

[31:56]

And we are still thinking about that here at this center. I've just come back from a couple days, every year we have a meeting of a small group, about 50, actually, yeah, it was less than 50 priests, Soto Zen priests who are recognized by Soto headquarters in Japan. And these are my old friends at this point, and all of us are thinking about the same things, like how do we open our communities? How do we make our communities not kind of idealistically or theoretically open, but actually open? Which to me means, what is it?

[32:58]

And how will we learn, not how will we teach, but how will we learn from the communities that we're surrounded with? to some extent there in this room and to other extents certainly not in the diversity of community that we live among is much wider than the diversity that we may see always in this room. But it's here. It's not that there's no Everyone is represented here, but there's more that we can learn. And it's really important. I think one of the great things, I think that to me, the essence of Beloved Community is very much aligned with

[34:08]

with three principles or three tenets that we speak of in, comes from work that Bernie Glassman did. Comes from first not knowing, bearing witness, and then responding, and then that cycle begins again. Not knowing, it's like, realize, I don't know all of the conditions in our community. I don't know how everyone lives. And so the bearing witness part is actually the curiosity, the asking, the learning, and then how do we respond? How do we change? not how are we locked into a certain kind of ritual path or a certain formal path here.

[35:14]

That's valuable, but this is the way, to me, beloved community is the process of how we dynamically live with traditions. Because if you stick to the tradition, It kills you. It shuts you down. If you stick to a tradition, it's the opposite of what Suzuki Roshi was saying. It's like, in the beginner's mind, there are many opportunities. And in the expert's mind, there are few. But when you stick to the tradition, you think, then you're being the expert. And you're really shutting down possibilities. But what if the tradition is many possibilities?

[36:18]

Is lifelong learning? Is adapting? our ways, adapting perhaps even our practices to create space for other ways of doing things, for the folding in of different traditions. Traditions are living things. We also see that traditions can bind us together, but they also can shut us down. They very easily can become us, the people of this tradition, as opposed to them, the people not of this tradition. So we depend upon our friends.

[37:28]

We depend upon, I mean, you've probably heard many times the dialogue from the Upadana Sutta between the Buddha's attendant Ananda and the Buddha himself. I'll repeat it for you. Ananda says to the Buddha, this is half of the holy life Lord, admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie. The Buddha responds, don't say that Ananda. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a practitioner has admirable people as friends, companions, and comrades, he or she can be expected to develop and pursue the path to enlightenment.

[38:43]

And one more quote before I open things up. This is from John Winthrop, who was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And I think he has a somewhat ambiguous historical biography. But here, I think he really gets to this. I quote, this is a quotation I got from a wonderful book by Sarah Vowell. People know of her. She was one of the writers and producers on This American Life. She wrote a book called The Wordy Shipmates. So this is John Winthrop.

[39:50]

We must delight in each other, make others' conditions our own, rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, our community as members of the same body. So this is, I'd like to open up to thoughts, comments, and we're going to get a little more into the how in our study this afternoon. It'll be more free-ranging discussion, I think. But I apologize if this sort of rambled. I'm not quite sure where this talk came from. I had all these notes and actually I haven't hardly looked at them.

[40:56]

So hopefully it came from my belly and you can partially digest it as I have. So let's not follow that metaphor out too much further. So James, yes. Well, you mean what happened to them in that moment? Well, one thing that happened to them is that they were not beaten and arrested. They were arrested in a very orderly way, whereas the police just beat the shit out of the white students. But the university was scared of them. you know, because they knew that they were really tied into the larger Harlem community and they were scared of them, you know, and so they treated them sort of with kid gloves in the arrest.

[42:14]

And what happened to them, you know, these are really, really bright young people, and most of them went on and had really good lives of service to community and the world, as did many of my friends. I mean, I'm still really – we just had – I just had an afternoon with four friends from that era, including one with whom I was handcuffed when we were arrested. You know, so we've been friends for 55 years. And, you know, all those, it was a transformative experience. So almost everybody who went through that pretty much There was a shift in our lives from that moment.

[43:16]

Yeah. What was the connection in the mind of the student as this mission of being and occupying the university? What happened was, so the year before, Actually, literally exactly a year before, in April of 1967, Dr. King gave a very famous speech at Riverside Church, which is about four or five blocks from Columbia. And in that speech, he laid out in beautiful detail the connection that he saw between the civil rights movement and racism here at home and the war in Vietnam. And he was excoriated publicly for that statement.

[44:24]

There were editorials in all the major newspapers against him for like, you know, talking about something that he didn't know about. When we get to this afternoon, the text that I'm going to work from, from 1957, shows that in 1957 he had all the pieces together in his international analysis. You know, he was focusing on what was happening in the country, but that, you know, the war in Vietnam and poverty and racism, all of those fit together then and they fit together now. So what happened was after the assassination, the university had a memorial service for him, in which the president of the university, who was an unbelievable, arrogant, stuffed shirt, gave a very pious speech.

[45:41]

And he was confronted by the students in fairly raucous and impolite confrontation. And that was kind of the first step of the escalation. Yeah. Yes, it was community. Yes. No. We have to decide what kind of community we want. I said community has a shadow. Community, if you look at tradition, if you look at community, it's often exclusive. Beloved community is not

[46:44]

is something else. So we're talking about a particular kind of community, and we're talking about with for Dr. King. The particular modality of community that he was talking about was one that was rooted in nonviolence, which is not the root of community that you see in Germany in the 30s and 40s. It's not the root of community that you see in parts of the South where, I mean, you could also say that the Klan is community. It's Klan. You know, so community is not an absolute value. It's the quality. It's actually the conditions of that community that we really need to look at. And that's what I'm advocating. I'm not, I would not advocate community in the abstract. Community, and Linda probably knows more about this than I, but community is, it's like I can't use that word in India.

[47:52]

They don't, you know, because what it means are different discriminated against groups that are seen as community. Is that right? Right. Okay. Anyway, yeah, just, anyway, that's, I don't want to idealize community. I want to examine, actually, what is beloved community? What does that mean? Even if we don't like that term, I'm not crazy about the term beloved, but we're talking about communities that's on a different basis. I was going to say that community presence in Africa refers to tribalism.

[49:01]

Yeah. Right. Right. Tribalism. Yeah, I think that that's another aspect of it. Yes. Yeah. So Linda? Just this week I read, I think it was from Lion's Roar, who is associated with the East Bay Meditation Center, and she was saying, you know, it's hard work. And then she said, here are some of the things we've learned in working on that. We're still working hard. It's not enough to say we're open and then expect everybody to be open. I have a dream. I have a very different understanding now as you do about racial issues in this country.

[50:04]

I really work with people of color. Angel Kyoto Williams, and a very diverse group of people got together to deal with this question. I would like to see, if this question is discussed here in this place, I would like to see two people of color's voices, every white person's voice, helping to lead the discussion, even if they're not official Buddhist teachers. Okay, I hear that. We have to see how, you know, we're just going a step at a time.

[51:07]

But part of what I wanted to do was open up some discussion about this. It's okay. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Rihanna? This scenario happened this morning when we had two visitors from the general public enter during our organic breakfast. And listening to you talk, I keep wondering, what would have happened if we had let go of our forms and perhaps found some guests in the hallways and just invited them to take seats? That could be. You know, I, what I decided from sitting up here was I was going to see what happened and let other people take care of it.

[52:15]

And I was okay with however that was going to come down. Um, I only saw one person. I didn't see two people, but, um, I'm not in the back. Yeah, that could happen. Yesterday, when I got home, lying across the stairs at the bottom of our staircase in front of the house, there was a guy just lying out there. You know, when I got out of the car, he sort of perked up a little and said, oh, I'm sorry, is this your house? I said, yeah, are you okay? And he said, yeah, I've just, I've been feeling, I was feeling a little dizzy. And it's like, it was clear to me, I was curious who he was.

[53:17]

I didn't have an entirely comfortable feeling. But I also thought, okay, there's no real problem here. And, you know, I said, you know, just take care of yourself. If he had, you know, if I had to walk around him, that would have been okay. It was no harm. We need to really understand, not be attached to our forms, not be attached to our tradition or community, But we also have to make some evaluations about what makes sense at any given moment. So that might have happened, and I'm not sure that what did happen was the wrong thing either. Don't have fixed ideas. Really see what serves the moment.

[54:18]

That doesn't shut people out. That's hard. Sometimes we actually, sometimes that may be the right thing to do. Here you go. You were speaking of the principles of a loving community and one thing that you, concrete thing that you mentioned was the place. What in a Buddhist community is a principle of community that doesn't become exclusive and established? Like we talk about Buddha and other people Oh, I don't give a shit. I don't give a shit. I don't care about Buddha. Yeah. I care about kindness and respect, which to me is Buddha. But to somebody else, it might be Allah. It might be God.

[55:23]

These are fundamental human values. If everybody's freezing and there's a wooden Buddha on the altar, then throw him into the stove. Better than people freezing. I think we have to figure out what is the basis for how we act. And that's an idealization, but that's what I believe in. So you would exclude people who are not kind and or polite? No. I know. So how do we deal with that in terms of establishing purity? experimentally. That is what we'll talk about this afternoon, actually, is actually the how.

[56:35]

And that's what Dr. King wrestled with, you know, his whole life. So we'll talk about that more. Well, community is also built on action.

[57:57]

It's built on, I would say it's built on action in place. I'm thinking out loud here. The action of occupying those buildings created a larger sense of community for us. Large enough so that almost all of the leadership and all the key people who participated in that action in 1968 were willing to come together in 2008 and reflect on it because they all felt part of something that was in common. So, you know, it's not just being someplace, it's actually doing something. It's the action, kind of, what can I say, it's the motive force, but action happens in a place.

[59:06]

So, time for a couple more, Judy. You said a lot, and it's been quite a rich and amazing time. And I realize that the thing that really touches me the most It includes a deep, I don't know what to call it, a principle or a deep connection, which I think is the phrase that you introduced some months ago instead of the word love.

[60:13]

So I've just written that phrase over the months since, and that moment of all of those streams coming together and the leaping seems to me a really important theme for this time. And I was just wondering, I think it's coming up because of also maintaining a Jewish practice, Jewish roots. And I hope it's coming up. How do you see falling into this, what we sometimes call formless repentance, and also, say in the language of AA, making amends? Well, I'm thinking...

[61:39]

One of the things we talked about at this Soto meeting this week was Duncan Williams, who was there, who some of you may have seen him when he was here speaking about his book American Sutra, which is about how Buddhism was sustained through the Japanese internment during World War II. And Duncan and some people organized an action at Fort Sill in Oklahoma about two months ago. Fort Sill is a family separation site in the present immigration crisis. It was in a Japanese internment camp in World War II. It was a major staging area for the Indian Wars in the 1880s.

[62:57]

So it's like, wow, there's so much karma embedded in this place. And what happened, hearing from people who were there, it was fantastic blending bridging because you had Lakota elders there. You had the families and actually some of the people who had been interned there. You had some European-American or non-Japanese, let's put it, Buddhist priests who were there. Uh, and they were, they were all, they were grieving a distinct and also shared history and also shared involvement.

[64:05]

Uh, and it's like that, that's going on. It wasn't a one time thing. It is opening the door. So that's a start. Helen, and then I think we have to end. I just want to correct Japanese-American. Japanese-American, yes. Thank you. Yes. I have a question. It's supposed to be Tsushima. But if you sneak in, I don't think anybody is going to be taking tickets. Yep, Penelope. Penelope. I hope I can frame this right, but what you spoke of in terms of the students, the African-American students asking the white students to go and create their own space or take over.

[65:13]

in the South where the African-American students, also SDS students, eventually asked white students to go back home to their own home communities. Those SNCC, SNCC, right, yeah. And do their, and do. Yes. Actually went one way, and I'm staying in the framework here a little bit, is they were really opening an invitation to create Yeah, I mean, at that point in time, in 68, the kind of a black power ideology was already very well articulated. So it wasn't so surprising, you know. But it also was not something that, what we got 40 years later was that it's not like, oh, we have to do our thing and you have to do your thing.

[66:40]

It's like, you guys don't know what the hell you're doing. And what you're doing is endangering us. And we're already doing something dangerous, you know, so it was the explanation behind it that just caused us a tremendous amount of remorse. Okay, James, you're the last. I hate encouraging words. I mean, I'm looking around at our country. I'm looking around at our world. I would say if you need an encouraging word, open your eyes and open your heart because it's all there.

[67:49]

It's there in you and it's there in so many people. And if you truly believe in that this very body is the Buddha, then you have something to rely on. And I can't do any better than that, you know? So, thank you.

[68:17]

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