Good evening. So at the start of our current practice commitment period, I talked about it being the 50th anniversary of the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., which was a year to the day after his speaking out strongly against the Vietnam War, not coincidentally. Today is the 50th anniversary of the 1968 Columbia University Uprising, one of the major events of that year, and one I was part of as a freshman in the college and a member of SDS, Students for Democratic Society. So I want to try and tell some of the complicated story about Colombia in 1968 in the context of our practice period, which is focusing on the major bodhisattva figures and their practices.

[01:10]

So I'll try and tie this together at the end with particularly Maitreya and Samantabhadra bodhisattvas. So 50 years ago today, We occupied and barricaded, starting 50 years ago today, five buildings on the university campus protesting the university's involvement in weapons research to support the Vietnam War, and also protesting the university's expansion into the Harlem neighborhood. The university was building a gym on public land with a separate lower downstairs entrance for the mostly African-American neighborhood, kind of back of the bus, smaller portion of the gym. So after a week, more than 700 of us were arrested in what has rightly been described as a police riot.

[02:16]

After that, the university was closed down by a strike for the rest of the semester. This event helped inspire many other protests at universities around the country and around the world. So I wanna give some context and I wanna talk about, try and talk about what happened in this complicated event. So it was less than three weeks after Martin Luther King was killed. again one year after his speech against the Vietnam War when he said that his government, our government, was the major source of violence in the world. Four days before his assassination, President Lyndon Johnson had announced that he would not run for president again because of all the Vietnam War protests.

[03:22]

And the previous January, the Tet Offensive happened in Vietnam, in which the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had managed to enter into Saigon, and it made it clear that contrary to what the generals had been saying, we were not winning the war. And some years later, Dan Ellsberg's release of the Pentagon Papers documented that all the presidents who had sent troops to Vietnam knew that this war was not winnable. And we knew that, those of us who were protesting the war. Six weeks after the beginning of this week-long Columbia protest and longer, the New York Senator Bobby Kennedy was killed after winning the California presidential primary. So that was some of what was going on around this event. So last week at her first Shuso Talk, Ayshan as is traditional, told how she came to practice, talked about that.

[04:30]

So I also want to tell this story as a personal story of at least one part of how I came to practice. So to give a little bit more of the context, it was only four and a half years before this that John Kennedy had been assassinated, President Kennedy. The civil rights movement had been very much part of national awareness with television showing black and white civil rights workers being attacked in the South and later on in the North too, including Chicago. The Vietnam War and including American atrocities there was on television every night. It's very different from, there are parallels and echoes of things that are happening now, but it's also very different.

[05:34]

There was also a draft, so young men were all subject to possibly being forced to go to a fight in Vietnam. Personally, I had been protesting and organizing against the Vietnam War while I was in high school. A few years before the Columbia event, I had been demonstrating in front of the Pittsburgh draft board when there were only a handful of people. And I'd been one of the organizers of the first large anti-war demonstration in Pittsburgh while I was in high school. During that period, Muhammad Ali and other people came out against, and then Dr. King came out against the war, and the anti-war movement had grown. While I'd been at Columbia, I had been involved in protests, so this was part of what I was concerned with as a teenager.

[06:44]

In March, the month before the demonstrations, what I call the uprising, Dow Chemical, there was a day when Dow Chemical Company, who produced napalm, was recruiting at Columbia. Napalm was, does everybody know what napalm was? Does anybody not know? It's a chemical that was dropped on civilians and burned them. Anyway, Dow Chemical produced that and was recruiting at Columbia, so a number of us went down to the... Midtown, New York, offices, corporate offices of Dow Chemical Company to try and recruit their employees for the anti-war movement. And we sat in in front of their office and locked the doors. And 17 students, I was one of the 17 students, and there were two professors who were arrested.

[07:47]

As it happened, when we showed up for our hearings later on, the judge threw out the arrest because it happened to be the morning after Bobby Kennedy was killed. And the judge just didn't want to hear about it. He just threw out the arrest. OK, April 23, 50 years ago today. There was a demonstration scheduled midday at the Sundial, which is in the middle of the Columbia campus. There was a demonstration called by SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, which was mostly white, and the Student African American Society, which was much smaller. Well, it's interesting. So, you know, this whole thing was a very complicated event, and I remember it.

[08:52]

I was there, but I've been reading up about it. There's a thick book called A Time to Stir, Columbia 68, by a guy named Paul Cronin, who was not there, but he spent the last 10 years researching this. This book has essays by lots of the people who were involved, not just the demonstrators, but those opposed to the demonstration by police who were involved in the bust. Anyway, a lot of different people. But he also did a seven-hour film about the event. He interviewed me for it back in the kitchen. I have a couple little excerpts in that film, I'm told. Anyway, the leaders of SDS and the Student African American Society thought that there wasn't really any interest in campus on having a big demonstration. They didn't think much would happen. But as it turned out, when There were a few hundred students who gathered, a couple hundred, a few hundred students who gathered for this demonstration.

[09:54]

And the plan was to go to Lowe Library, the administration building, and give them, the university administrators, the university president, our demands, which included particularly ending affiliation with the Institute of Defense Analysis, which was this defense contractor that was connected with the university in lots of ways. The university was involved in weapons research, including for poison gas, and also to end the building of this gym on public land, Morningside Park in Harlem. Other demands included amnesty for demonstrators and eventually student faculty committee involved in judicial decisions. Part of what was going on was that the administration was very autocratic and really didn't care what the students or faculty thought about anything. So many students were very angry at the university and its complicity with the government and the war and for its involvement in racial oppression.

[11:05]

And one context is we'd grown up in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust. not want to be complicit in what we consider genocide in Vietnam. So the whole story, again, is very complicated, and I'm just trying to give some of the basic points. And one thing to say is that what happened was all very spontaneous. None of it was planned. But anyway, when we couldn't get up to the below library administration building because there were police and some of the pro-war, there were pro-war demonstrators too, mostly athletes, we called them jocks. Anyway, so instead we went down to the gym site and there wasn't much there except a construction site and some fences and some people broke the steel fence around the construction site.

[12:12]

One student was arrested. And there wasn't really anything to do there. We came back to the Sundial, and somebody said, let's go to Hamilton Hall, which was the main college classroom. Actually, it was two Barnard students, two women who said, who yelled onto Hamilton Hall. And we went there. They occupied the building and actually the college dean was there and he was kind of held as hostage for a little while in his office. And we agreed to barricade the building and stay overnight. There's a picture in the kitchen here of a meeting in the lobby of Hamilton Hall. I'm in the picture, I'm up towards the left. So there were lots of different people with lots of different political perspectives there. The African-American students were much more disciplined and there was a smaller group and they knew how serious this was, how much they had at stake, and how brutal the arrest might be.

[13:14]

They'd been involved with community organizing in Harlem. So they were meeting separately and early the next morning the SAS student, African American Society students asked the much more disorganized white students to leave the building, to leave Hamilton Hall and take over our own buildings. So most of us left early in the morning in a kind of daze. And I was one of the people who helped break into Lowe Library, the main administration building. I hope the statute of limitation has expired. So many of us occupied Grayson Kirk, the university president's office. But then later in the day, many of us left. Some remained. Within the next day, we occupied and barricaded Fairweather Hall, the social sciences building, Avery, the architecture building, and mathematics halls. That was in Fairweather.

[14:16]

So this occupation went on for seven days. There were endless meetings. All the decisions were by, well, it was more organized in Hamilton Hall, but in the other buildings. All the decisions were by participatory democracy. So there was a steering committee from the different buildings, but there was endless discussion. We knew an arrest would happen, and we didn't know when it was coming, and we didn't fully realize why it was delayed. But that was because Mayor Lindsay near John Lindsay at the time of New York, and the university administrators were very afraid of Harlem and of more riots. Because this was soon after Martin Luther King was murdered, and they thought that if they arrested the African American students, there might be more riots. Right after King was murdered, there were riots in Harlem, there were riots in Chicago, in many, many cities.

[15:23]

So, Really, the African-American students were crucial to the whole thing. And they were meeting with many people from the community that they had been involved with, community organizers, people from Harlem who were coming up, bringing food, talking with them. All the well-known New York African-American politicians were there and came and met with them, went into Hamilton Hall. National, the gym had become a national civil rights issue and national black leaders like H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael came and met with the students and then spoke on their behalf outside the building. Outside the buildings was a whole scene. There were faculty members, kind of trying to protect the students in all the different buildings. The faculty were between the buildings and the group of pro-war athletes who were demonstrating and who wanted to come and get us out of there.

[16:32]

And then meanwhile, there were policemen in buses outside the campus just waiting to come in and arrest people. While all this was happening, the African-American students in Hamilton Hall were meeting and very disciplined and worked out their arrests with authority. So it took seven days before the arrests happened. But the African-American students, so lots happened through all that. There was a kind of community atmosphere in the buildings. But when the arrest came, the African-American students had arranged it with the police, so they went peacefully. They were disciplined and walked out. In the different buildings and different parts of the barricaded buildings, arrests were handled very differently.

[17:36]

I was in Fairweather and was part of a group that just agreed to walk out peacefully under arrest. Some of the buildings, the arrests were totally brutal. Police had been waiting in buses outside the campus for a week, just waiting for a chance to get at the demonstrators. So partly it was maybe a class thing. The police were angry at these Ivy League kids squandering their chance at education. And I was going to read an excerpt from this book from Hilton Hopenzinger about, it's a really, it's a description of the brutal arrest at Lowe Library. I don't know. I don't know if people want to hear violence in the middle of a Zen meditation hall. It ends with, I'll skip it, it's very vivid and talking about police coming in with big aluminum flashlights and clubbing students just brutally and them bleeding and it ends with

[18:56]

I'm beating his friend Alan, who is Alan Sanaki, who will be here in November, and he still has a big bump on his head from that. You'll see when he's here. While that was going on, the police also were brutally attacking the bystanders outside the buildings. Some on horseback, some on the police. This included professors, journalists, even pro-police counter-demonstrators were being attacked and brutally beaten. So this turned almost everyone, I guess everyone in the campus except the administrators, against the university administrators and everyone went on strike. So the campus was closed for the rest of the semester. So there's numbers of things to say about this. During the strike, the teachers held classes on the lawn.

[20:10]

There were classes in professors' apartments. It was a real workshop in alternative education. The Grateful Dead came and gave a free concert on campus to support the strike. That was pretty cool. And people from all over New York and all over the country were there. One thing I learned was a healthy distrust of the mass media. Throughout the week while we were in the buildings, the New York Times kept saying on their front page that there were maybe 60 or 70 troublemakers in the buildings, mostly outside agitators. And it's true that the night I spent in jail after the arrest, I was in the cell of maybe 20 guys, including Tom Hayden, Abby Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin, who all were later part of the Chicago Seven, who were arrested after the police riots later in 1968 at the Democratic Convention here in Chicago.

[21:17]

But it turns out there were 712 people arrested in the buildings, not 70. And over 80% of them were Columbia or Barnard students. And later we learned that the publisher of the New York Times was also on the board of trustees of Columbia University. And other trustees were connected to defense contractors. So I have this perspective about the mass media that continues. But even though I never lost that perspective and insights from that experience, I confess that six and seven years later and so I was working in television news for NBC and ABC in New York and San Francisco as a film editor. That's another story. Anyway. There was a second occupation of an apartment building that Columbia was trying to evict tenants from. So part of the whole thing is, and this happens I think with most big city, large universities that they try and evict.

[22:23]

people in the neighborhoods and expand. But there was another, a second, smaller violent police arrests in May. So there are lots of details in the story that I'm leaving out. Well, one was that Grayson Kirk, the president, before the arrests in March, had a and the chapel had a memorial for Martin Luther King, and Mark Rudd, who was the guy who was sort of chosen by the media as the spokesperson, walked up in the middle of it and said, �How dare you,� you know, to the president. So, there's a bunch of things more to say about this. One thing is that really, on one level, the strike was totally a success.

[23:27]

The gym was not built. Columbia ended its ties with the Institute of Defense Analysis. And they gave in, eventually, on the demand about students not being punished for participation in the demonstration. So, because of the strength of the strike, it was a success in some ways. But there were other things, too, in the aftermath. For me personally, in terms of my own coming to practice, as I said, one of the things that I learned about this was about anger.

[24:29]

So many of us were carried away with anger at the Vietnam War and what our country was doing. And some of the people after this event Um... Their anger increased and they felt they wanted to stop the war by any means necessary. This led to a group called the Weathermen that some of the SDS leaders got involved with in the weather underground. And they did things like bombing property and they ended up going underground for years. A couple people were accidentally killed through those bombs. Through the 1970s, I could go into any post office and see pictures of people I knew. So I'm talking about this social engagement action. Of course, in terms of bodhisattva practice, our practice is also personal and seeing ourselves.

[25:32]

And I realized Seeing the aftermath of this and what these people were doing, and I sympathized with their feelings, but I saw how corrosive anger was, how harmful it was. And I saw it in myself, too, just that holding that anger is debilitating. So for me personally, that first led to my just moving away from social engagement. and eventually to Buddhist practice, working at transforming anger into more composed, constructive resolve and response. So I talk about anger a lot in terms of that. How do you transform the energy of anger to something that is actually constructive? And that's part of the difficult work of meditation practice. So, as I said, this was part of what led me to practice.

[26:38]

As it happened, two and a half years after the Columbia strike, I had dropped out of school and I had the opportunity to go around to to go to Japan, and I ended up spending a few months going around to temples in Kyoto and Nara, looking at Buddhist statues and Zen gardens, and was totally blown away by that, and that's where I had my introduction to these Bodhisattva figures we're talking about. But I can say that the impulses that led to the Columbia strike relate to, at least in part, parts of Maitreya and Samantabhadra Bodhisattva. Maitreya, who I spoke about yesterday morning, looks to harmonious and beneficial future. Maitreya is the Bodhisattva who we chanted the Metta Sutra, may all beings be happy. Maitreya is the Bodhisattva of loving kindness and wishing for all beings, may all beings be happy.

[27:41]

And Maitreya is predicted to be the next future Buddha, so he looks to a beneficial future. And I think this was part of the impulse that led so many of us to want to stop the Vietnam War and to try and stop oppression. So in that generation, that was part of it. And Samantabhadra, maybe even more, is about practice in the world. So Samantabhadra has many aspects. Samantabhadra's also very devotional and aesthetic and involved in interconnectionist, but also is about the long, dedicated, persistent work of responding to systemic suffering and protecting and benefiting all beings. So I think there are lessons from this event that happened 50 years ago. I think there are lessons that are relevant today for young people who are organizing for a sustainable climate, or against gun violence, or for equal housing, equality in housing, or health care, or for better education.

[28:55]

So one of the lessons is just the value of long-term dedicated organizing because this event that happened 50 years ago today was a product of students at Columbia but also throughout the country working for a long time to educate ourselves and each other about what was happening in Vietnam and about what our country was doing. And it was also about coalitions. So the STS and African-Americans students working together, both working for both sets of demands and really being committed to each other was key to this being a successful strike and occupation. Other lessons have to do with flexibility. not being stuck to some particular...

[29:59]

tactic or strategy. One of the problems of the left back then was being self-righteous about tactics or different approaches, and that was not helpful. That's what kind of ended it in some ways. But what worked at this event in Columbia was that people were flexible. They were willing to try different things. They were not rigid about their tactics. There's lots of other pieces of this that I could talk about. And as I say, it was a really complicated event with lots of different perspectives. But maybe I can bring up some of the other stuff in discussion, if people have comments, questions, responses. And again, just to say that I'm talking here about an event that has to do with maybe Bodhisattvic aspect of response to suffering in the world.

[31:06]

And of course, the Bodhisattvas are also involved in our own working internally, and they're related. seeing our own suffering too, and finding our own calmness helps in being able to respond to things in the world. So, comments, questions, responses, please feel free. Yeah, that's another whole part of the story.

[32:24]

So I think a lot of us did not realize what that was about fully at the time. I think we wanted to support them and we went and we did take over those other buildings. And there was a mutuality. For the most part, maybe there were some white students who were upset about it, but ten years ago, on the 40th anniversary. There was a large event at Columbia that I went to and there was a, there were, and there's a web, I can, if anyone's interested, I can send you, email me and I can send you the links to it. There were many panels talking about many aspects of it, lots of good discussions about it. There's a whole gender aspect, which I didn't mention, which I can talk about too. But there was, the last evening, there was just a long discussion about everything that happened with a select group of people.

[33:36]

And it really wasn't until then that we understood, the white students understood, how difficult it was for the black students there. Some of them, there were black students who grew up in the South who said that the worst racist experience they ever had was at Columbia. And we didn't understand that. For example, coming into the campus, the security guards would ask for identification of the black students, not of the white students. There were black students who had athletic scholarships, but the coach put them all in the same position, so only one of them could play at a time. Things like that.

[34:38]

So we just weren't aware of that. So they were very insulated. It was a very small number. a very small percentage of the students. So they were very tight. They knew each other very well. That was part of why they could come together when they got into Hamilton Hall and really be disciplined. And to them, we were just all over the place. We didn't know what we were doing. So it just totally made sense for them to take that building and take care of it. Yeah, I saw that, yeah. Yeah, Juan Gonzalez was one of the leaders of the strike. He's a moderator for Democracy Now.

[35:41]

Yeah. Yeah, so I recommend Democracy Now this morning for anyone more interested. There's a lot of material in the media now about this event, because it was really a major event in that year. The black students were ignored by the media then, pretty much, and since, but Mao Zedong sent them a telegram of congratulations. I just had a friend that worked at home here on a Saturday, and I'm just wondering if you think there's a threat, or if you think that we're going to have to go back to where it was seven or eight years ago now, and it feels very discouraging here.

[36:47]

And again, I'm going to say I'm not one of the things that's so militaristic in the United States now. Yeah, yeah, so there's, yes, one of the... issue, one of the things to say is, so I've talked about all this stuff from 1968, and what are the echoes of that now? And yes, we have racial problems now, and oppression, and many black, young black people being killed by policemen, and we have, as you say, many wars, and in some ways, you know, to compare Vietnam and the wars in the Mideast is interesting, there are differences, One was in the jungle, now the other is in the desert. But there are lots of similarities, too, in terms of the United States invading and in what is arguably civil wars or exacerbating what might be called civil wars.

[37:51]

And there not being an anti-war movement now the way there was during Vietnam, There are some obvious reasons why that might be, like the mass media then was showing what was going on in Vietnam much more than we are not aware of what's going on in the Mideast in the same way at all from our media now. Also the draft, they eliminated the draft, so it doesn't touch people in the same way that we were aware that this was something that was in our face. So there's lots of differences. And yet, I think the wars in the Mideast and the way that our government now is focused on spreading weapons of mass destruction around the world, I think is not popular amongst a large percentage of the American people.

[38:56]

So I don't think it's impossible that we could have, I don't know what it will take to catalyze it, but to have an anti-war movement again. kids understood how they could help use the disability that they got as victims of the Parkland shooting, the Columbine shooting that happened 19 years ago last summer, to help draw visibility to the forms of gun violence that their black and brown schoolmates are also suffering from. I've been really impressed from the start.

[39:57]

Right, right. And I think the young people doing that, that is, there's a lot of kind of analogy. And I think that the piece that needs to be connected, in my opinion, and again, I'm just giving my opinions, so it's okay if you have different opinions about any of this. The gun violence here and all the different shootings, there was just another shooting in Tennessee yesterday, a white man shooting, killing four black people in a Waffle House. But anyway, was that here? He was from Illinois, but I think the shooting happened in Tennessee. The shooter was from Illinois. Yeah, but anyway, all of these mass shootings, the piece that hasn't been really connected is, I think, in terms of our culture and our psyche, is that the gun violence is just ubiquitous.

[41:15]

And the weapons of war that are going to Saudi Arabia to be used in Yemen and elsewhere, and they're going all around the world. Those endless wars that Jan was talking about and the gun violence, I feel like there's a connection. That's how we think of dealing with conflict is with weapons, with guns and missiles. Yeah. Well, we just, yeah. The questions had to do, the differences had to do with strategies and what to do with the, how strong to be about the different demands.

[42:39]

And those issues came up more in the strike after we were in the buildings. But what to do when the police came, how to, whether to, there were some people in some of the buildings who resisted the police, physically. And they were really, really, they were really attacked brutally. There were others who just, like I did in Fairweather, just decided to just be arrested and go. But there were logistical things, getting food in, just taking care of the space. So there were lots of practical logistical things. But there were also discussions about how how to understand what we were doing, and so it just kept going on. There'd be breaks between, but in terms of the gender thing, just one context, and this has to do with the university's autocratic style, and it was not co-ed. Columbia was all male, Barnard was all female,

[43:44]

The major story that year at Columbia and Barnard, before the strike, the major story in the school newspapers had to do with Peter Bear and Linda LeClaire, who were a couple who shared an apartment off campus, which was absolutely forbidden. She was expelled as a Barnard student because she was living with a Columbia student in the same apartment off campus. That seems unimaginable now, but that's what it was like in 1968. He was not expelled. He was maybe put on probation. So that was one context. And that was like the biggest story on the school papers for most of the school year before that. So one of the things that happened, there were many women that, well, I think there were like maybe there were

[44:49]

I forget, maybe of the 700 arrested, there were 200 women who were arrested, mainly Barnard students. But a lot of them were very bright and very involved, but a lot of the leaders of the strike were mostly men. That's the way it was back then. I'm sorry. That wasn't me. I was just a freshman. I wasn't involved. You know, I was not a leader. But a lot of the women were, you know, relegated to making coffee and making copies, and they didn't like it. And a lot of those women, so a lot of the people who are in the strike, who are in the buildings now are lawyers or judges or professors or, you know, doing all kinds of things. A couple of us are Zen priests, anyway. But a number of the women became leaders in the feminist movements that were developed right after that, in response to that.

[46:01]

So that's part of that story. Other questions? Yes, Bill. Not then, no. I think he came, I think he visited, I think later. He had not been, I don't think he'd been in America at that point. Yeah, I think so, but I think that's later. I'm pretty sure that's later. But mentioning Thich Nhat Hanh, my first awareness of such a thing as a Buddhist monk was the Buddhist monk, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk who immolated himself. That was a couple of years before. That's the first time I ever heard of such a thing as a Buddhist monk, was to see that guy sitting upright and still as the flames engulfed him. Yeah, I know. You're just a kid. I know. You were hardly even born then.

[47:01]

Yeah. Bo? I don't know if you care to share the story of it, but you mentioned that a couple of years afterwards, you sort of left social action or that kind of activity. I didn't leave the awareness of it. I just wasn't involved. I just didn't see a way to be involved in it. I just, I didn't, yeah, I felt for myself, there was all this anger that I felt about what was about the, you know. what happened. And then there was all the Watergate stuff that happened. So I was just observing that. So I never, my sense, my awareness of the way things were was very informed by all of this and remains.

[48:02]

But the question of what to do about it, like what to do about The Middle East wars now is an open question and there are times when I feel some possibility of responding and then I try and do something. back. Yeah, and it wasn't even that I was, you know, I was just, I was working, I was doing, you know, my life. But I think that the thing about the anger was a part of that, part of what I learned from all of that, and seeing these other people who I'd been associated with just go off the deep end because of their rage, and I saw that was not helpful. And that directed me towards working on myself. And then after I came back from Japan, some years later, I met a Japanese Soto Zen priest in the Upper West Side, actually, and started doing this.

[49:12]

So this is only part of my story of coming to practice. There's other things, other aspects, too. Yes. Mexico City and Paris, there were big student revolts. Yeah, I knew some of those guys.

[51:07]

Yeah. Well from the, so just to close this, because we're going over time, but from the bodhisattva context, you know, there's the side of just working studying the self and looking at ourselves and seeing our own difficulties. And that's definitely, you know, part, needs to be done.

[52:08]

Looking at that anger, looking at our, the way our ego gets in the way of all kinds of things. But there's also not shutting out the suffering around us in the world and looking for how we can respond. in a constructive way. And that's a big challenge. Anyway, this happened 50 years ago today, this event began, and I was part of it, so I wanted to share that. And I think both the work on our cushions and looking at how to respond to what's going on in the world are important, and they're not separate, really. I learned a lot from that event. I don't even know if I understand all of what I learned, but it's part of why I'm here.

[53:00]

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