Good morning. Can you hear me in the back? Yes? No? Could be a little louder, perhaps? Huh. Okay. All right. Good. Good morning. It's a really crisp, chilly winter morning. What happened to global warming? Just to note, I was upstairs in my place and after many years we have this really happening children's program that's going on now. I think a lot of it is initiative that came from Tamar and Lori and Jim and Nancy Zu and there were like 15 kids up there. It was really and the whole living room was just crowded and the energy was so good, you know, really.

[01:04]

It says something about staying with something even when it appears not to be happening and also constantly refining and examining what it is that you're doing to find the formulation that works and it was really working. They were singing and the boys were relatively peaceful and it was a very sweet circle. So I just thought I would say that. So for the last week I've been, I buy this bin on what I like to call the Dharma of Martin Luther King. I believe that his birthday is coming up on Monday.

[02:08]

He would have been 84 years old if he had been if we had the advantage of his being alive. And I've also been thinking about it because in about 10 days, Lori and I are going to make our first overseas trip together since our kids were born. This is one of the advantages, one of the few advantages as far as I'm concerned of having an empty nest. I'm not so comfortable with it, but we have some freedom, some ability to travel. And so we're going to India, where I've been going for the last four years or so. And mostly when I go with Laurie this time, we kind of learn from and live in and teach in this community of

[03:17]

young of Dalit Buddhists, Dalit being another name for ex-untouchable, so these are people of a very oppressed background who have taken on Buddhist practice and Buddhist identity as a path of liberation. I think related to how many of us have taken on a Buddhist path as a path to liberation. I find there's something in common there. And there is also a lot in common with the liberation movement of black people and other people who've experienced oppression, other people of color, and of people who see themselves and might be seen as outcasts in this society.

[04:28]

So Martin Luther King, I'm going to be teaching this year sort of a unit to the young people at this school on the civil rights movement. and sort of exploring with them what the relevance is to their practice and to their lives. So that should be interesting and I think Lori and I will talk about it when we get back. So I've been studying Martin Luther King for about 15 years and reading his sermons and his speeches and studying his activities and his strategies and mourning his loss. I feel in many ways as much as any person of the 20th century, his life has been a teaching for me.

[05:34]

I was fortunate to have seen Dr. King twice in the 60s The first was at the famous march in Washington in 1963. And I remember I was standing with my high school friends. We had been part of a busload of people from my well-to-do suburban hometown driving down to Washington. And I remember standing under a tree on the north side of the reflecting pool outside the Lincoln Monument, listening to Dr. King giving that iconic speech, which you've all heard or heard part of. And then the following year,

[06:39]

as the Civil Rights Movement was very active and engaged, there was a lot of fundraising that was happening. And so Dr. King and his associate Ralph Abernathy came to my hometown, Great Neck, New York, and spoke at the synagogue there, one of the synagogues, the reform synagogue. I think that was still a time when there was a very strong sense of commonality in the oppression that was experienced by African-Americans and Jews. And there was a very eager audience to hear. So as I said, I think Monday would have been Dr. King's 84th birthday. I feel that we need him now as much as or more than we've ever needed him or someone like him.

[07:50]

And I don't mean the king of postage stamps and sound bites and carefully edited dreams. It's really interesting to watch how society, and I don't think it's just American society, but society has a way of homogenizing and kind of making safe the teachings of radicals. I mean, I think it was done with the Buddha in India, and it was done with Christ. I don't think they had poster stamps then, but it's done with Dr. King. And amazingly, along with a King stamp in 1976,

[08:54]

There are a whole series of postage stamps of black revolutionaries, some of whom were actually communists, who were severely harassed during their own lives. And there's a W.E.B. Du Bois stamp. there's a Malcolm X stamp. I mean, Malcolm X stamp? I mean, you know, what would he have thought of that? But, I don't know, that's kind of an aside. So, as to the Dharma of Martin Luther King, I can just touch on it from the beginning. The essence of Buddhism as we practice it we talk about the three treasures Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And we can understand often in some of our ceremonies where we have a community of people who are educated in Buddhism and a community of people coming perhaps from outside or from other religious traditions we talk about

[10:21]

Buddha as our own enlightened nature. Each being carrying and embodying the essence and potential of Buddha. So we see Buddha as our enlightened nature. and you think you can think of dharma the second treasure as uh it's dharma has various meanings uh one of which is basically the teachings uh so it's the the uh designated words of the buddha But what are these teachings? These teachings are essentially a description of how things really are.

[11:33]

And the teachings, what he keeps pointing you to through a very sensible process of analysis is a way of looking at each of us looking at our own experience by sitting down and what we call Zazen to experience ourselves very intimately and thereby understanding that we are experiencing the wholeness of existence and so In that sense, the Dharma is just the way things are. It's the basic laws of existence akin to gravity.

[12:39]

It's not just a good idea, it's the law. You can't replace it with another idea. To me, that's my understanding of the Dharma. And then Sangha has been variously described, even in the Buddhist teachings, that sometimes, well, the broadest understanding is, in Buddhist time, he talked about the community of practitioners, which included ordained people and lay people, women and men, As the teachings grew in the Mahayana, Sangha is often expressed as the entire community of being. And in some places even the community of inanimate beings that all of us make up.

[13:48]

the community of practice because all of us are the embodiment and expression of Buddha nature. But for the moment we'll just consider, we'll talk about the community of sentient beings. So using that as a framework I come to look at the vision of Martin Luther King. Now King was a Christian, a Baptist minister, but by way of education, by his character and his inclination, he was what you might call an inclusivist. And you see this again and again in his life where he welcomed and related to people of all kinds of different faiths and folded their ideas into his vision of humanity.

[15:12]

He saw he saw the workings of divinity, what he called divinity, what we might call, some of us might call it Buddha nature, some of us might call God, and some of us might actually use each term without necessarily experiencing a sense of contradiction or tension between them. So he saw these workings in every being and quite early on he wrote about this in a piece in a sermon in 1954. So 1954 was what? 68 years ago, 59 years ago now. So, boy, he was pretty young, 25, is that right?

[16:24]

Yeah. He wrote an essay called, a sermon called, What is Man? And he looked over the various social and religious traditions and he wrote, all that has been said concerning the spiritual element in man gives backing to the Christian contention that man is made in the image of God. Man is more than flesh and blood. There's something else in us that is connected to what is deep and true and broadly existing. So, in our Zen terms, We often hear, all beings are Buddha. And one could quibble that this is not exactly the same as what Dr. King was saying, but it's pretty close.

[17:36]

And his practice was to see what was good and true, to see the divine, to see the Buddha nature in each person, even in his enemies. And I think that was the rare quality that he had, to be able to remember to look for that, even in the most difficult situations. This is an inspiration for me, and I know like others here and maybe some really have this practice which I bow to anyone and sometimes we want to dismiss people but he really did his best not to dismiss anyone not to set anyone outside the realm of love

[18:46]

the realm of acceptance, at the same time as being clear about actions, evaluating them, and this here we get into the realm of the dharma, evaluating them in the sense that we would evaluate them in dharmic terms. A person my actions may be wholesome or unwholesome. So he did his best to meet each person with respect and in fact this was the heart of the training that he gave to that he he had offered to all of the particularly the early civil rights activists, people who went on freedom rides, the young people who sat down in lunch counters, the people who were walking through dangerous counties and states.

[20:03]

They were trained in nonviolence and it was a practice. It wasn't an idea or an ideal. It was something that actually had to be learned in their bodies, very much as what we call practice here is very broad, that the root of it is sitting, facing the wall, experiencing oneself, and then When the bell rings at the end of zazen, we get up, we leave the zendo, we pause for a moment at the threshold and give a small bow and take that zazen mind, that mind of acceptance, that mind of introspection, that mind of equality into

[21:16]

the larger world and we have to find a way to meet each other which well I won't say which is harder to meet yourself or meet each other at any given moment one may be an insurmountable difficulty but we take that into the world that's our training and we grow and steady and ground ourselves by training in very much the way that activists in the civil rights movement and activists in all movements have to train just as a soldier has to train. So it's our training in Zazen and in our community to meet ourself with acceptance and with recognition of the Buddha and to relate to each other that way.

[22:27]

Buddha to Buddha, true human to true human. So Dr. King's Dharma unfolds in so much of what he said and did in the early 50s during graduate studies in theology. He actually studied Buddhism and I found online among his papers a paper he wrote comparing, talking about Mahayana Buddhism and in his conclusion he writes approvingly, Buddhism became a religion for the layman as well as for the monk. The emphasis on fleeing the world was replaced by a desire to live in the world while yet not being quite of the world. So he was familiar with these ideas. And then in later days, from the middle 60s on, there's correspondence that one can find between him and Thich Nhat Hanh.

[23:42]

And I think that his meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, who he actually, he nominated Thich Nhat Hanh for a Nobel Peace Prize in a very eloquent letter. But what you find, particularly if you read that remarkable talk that he gave at Riverside Church in 1967, you just you really hear Thich Nhat Hanh's voice right in the middle of it, talking about interconnection, talking about interdependence. And that I think gets to the, we talked about Buddha, that gets to the Dharma, the Dharma jewel. Now this notion of interdependence was one of the Buddha's great discoveries right in the first days of his awakening.

[24:47]

He had insights into the workings of what we now call dependent co-arising, the understanding that all things are infinitely dependent upon each other. and that nothing exists separately with an inherent identity or permanent nature. Things are constantly arising and passing away. Dr. King expressed that understanding this way. We are all tied together in a single garment of destiny. an inescapable network of mutuality. It's a beautiful phrase. I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be.

[25:51]

That's taking it a step further into the human realm. I can never be what I ought to be until you are allowed to be what you ought to be. This is very much the thought that I think Lori and I can carry with us to India as we meet with these young people. Their limitation is our limitation. This is true in our society. It's true of the poor. It's true of the oppressed. The extent that we allow that to happen is the extent that we actually are bearing some of that oppression by virtue of this notion of our deep interdependence. In a later essay, Dr. King says, we are inevitably our brother's keeper because we are our brother's brother and our sister's sister.

[27:02]

Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. So this leads to the third jewel, the Sangha, which I think is the core of Dr. King's vision and is deeply important to us here at BCC. We are blessed with having a really close and mutually supportive community and a large one. And I feel very grateful to have fallen into it and gotten mired in it all these years, sort of like falling into the tar pit. I'm sorry, it's just the way my mind goes.

[28:08]

We're all in the tour together. So what Dr. King expressed this, he used an expression that he borrowed from an earlier theologian, I think his name was Josiah Royce, the beloved community. So in Dr. King's day and ours, our world is marked by violence, war, various kinds of difficulty. And, you know, if you look back at the Buddha's teaching, you see that the world that the Buddha came in was not different in, certainly not different in quality. the same kinds of things were happening, the same human shortcomings were being expressed and that's why in Buddhist terms the world that we live in, the Buddha realm that we live in is called the Saha world which translates as the realm of

[29:29]

also the world within which one can wake up and become a Buddha. If you read other Mahayana texts, there are other Buddha realms and some of them are a lot more pleasant. Some of them have wonderful food and drink just can just reach up and it's very easy and everybody loves each other and it's always it's never cold and you know there's no nobody has athlete's foot or anything but you can't become a buddha there you could have a good time but you can't become a buddha So, how do we do this? This beloved community that Dr. King talks about is not a land that's devoid of conflict.

[30:51]

it's you know it's not like what happens when you put on your rose colored glasses but it's what he talks about it the way he talks about is it's the society which deals with conflict without falling into violence and retribution so it's based on a practice of non-violence And that nonviolence is rooted in a fundamental kind of love and acceptance that we have for each other. It's radical. Radical means going to the root. So in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1957, just at the end of the successful Montgomery bus boycott, Dr. King said, in the final analysis, he was speaking to his community, and he was speaking to his community that had to endure a lot.

[32:03]

They knew about the Saha world. And they had a lot to resent in understandable ways. And he said, in the final analysis, love is not this sentimental something that we talk about. It's not merely an emotional something. Love is creative, understanding goodwill for all men. It is the refusal to defeat any individual. When you rise to the level of love, of its great beauty and power, you seek only to defeat evil systems. individuals who happen to be caught up in that system you love. In that same talk he says, talking about the habit of hating, the habit of dismissing, the habit of setting aside, he says hate for hate only intensifies the existence of evil in the universe.

[33:17]

I love this passage. If I hit you, and you hit me, and I hit you back, and you hit me back, and we go on, you see, that just continues ad infinitum. It just never ends. Somewhere, somebody must have a little sense, and that's the strong person. The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. somebody must have religion enough and morality enough to cut it off and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love. I really like that expression, inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love. I think We make the world.

[34:22]

We make this entire existence. This is the bodhisattva vow. Beings are numberless. I vow to save them. I vow to inject my compassion, my wisdom, however small it may be, into the structure of the universe in order to be of help to all beings. So on this day and every day what I hope to happen is that I'll be reborn as a card-carrying member of the beloved community. My dream is certainly not as dramatic as Dr. King's.

[35:30]

It's really simply that we can walk quietly side by side. This is what This is the way Kobinchino Roshi, one of our teachers, described bodhisattvas. They walk side by side at the same pace with sentient beings. So can we walk side by side and enjoy each other's company in peace? That's really my wish and actually my belief that we are capable of this and that in fact in some very small but really important way. That's exactly what we're doing here, day by day. So I'm going to stop there and if you have any questions or any thoughts, we have a few minutes to talk about it.

[36:33]

Thank you. How would you and Laurie convey to people on the other side of the world that their awakening, your all's awakening is dependent on theirs? I don't exactly know. One of the things that I think is really important, there's a message conveyed by just showing up there, by just expressing that you care. I'm not sure I can express something as complete as what you said, but what you can express is,

[37:41]

your lives are valuable and that means we make the trip and try to support these young people in school and my sense is they really feel that and then we can say continue we actually have little chats on Google chat or on Skype from time to time so there is a feeling of a continuing connection. And I think that that's really important in a lot of places. I have a kind of hesitation, you know, it's like, okay, I've come from this privileged background from the United States, you know. But I think for these young people, it's like, Oh, we are seen. You know, we may not be seen in our village, but there are people in other parts of the world who are practicing or who have some understanding and they are seeing us and they find that valid.

[38:56]

Yeah, thank you. Yeah, Sesha. I was just thinking about My experience of what really brings up this urgency for liberation is my life, our life is on the line. Whether that's quality of life or a way of living or life and death and so I'm just thinking of you walking into a situation that is potentially quite dangerous for the people that you're working with, and thinking of civil rights movement and so forth in this job, what's your sense of, what is safety?

[40:02]

What is liberation? Aware of that? Well, I think this is what you train. I don't feel that situations I'm going into are particularly dangerous for me. Sometimes, but I may not be, I know I'm not fully aware, but if you are going into a situation like that, and I think this is what I said, it applies for peace activists, and it applies for soldiers, and it applies for, say, brave doctors who are going, who are like in Medecins Sans Frontieres, who are going to places like Pakistan. It's like you need to train so that when you face force, you have a way to respond. So you're not, as we would say, you're not pushed out of your seat.

[41:06]

What you have is composure. What we're learning here is composure. To be able to be upright even to the point of our death. So that's what training has to be particular to the sets of circumstances you're going to encounter, but I think that there's something common in that mode of training and it can't be overlooked. Thank you Ghazan, that's very moving. It seems to me that when you acknowledge the privilege you come from and contrasted with the situation you're going to, that it's identifying the thing that appears to separate you in the way that we think of class or privilege in that way, and that the practice that you were talking about is about looking deeper than that, and that, from what little I know of your background, you're not unfamiliar with the feeling of being outcast,

[42:22]

of having pain in your experience that is not different maybe from the pain in their experience and that there is a way of being together in that dimension that seems to me the impulse. I think there's some truth in that. It's really hard to quantify pain. or to equate. I mean, I certainly have experienced some in the realm of kind, but not necessarily quantity in the same way. But privilege divides. And also, the thing about privilege is it's really hard to see from within the system, within the system, privilege that you're living. I don't know if this makes sense if you know what I'm talking about.

[43:28]

So you need good friends, you need to experience widely, and one needs to be open to the experience, but also the teachings of people who are coming from different sets of circumstances. You need that outside, you need a Buddha view, you know, you need that large view that is looking at everything with an awareness of equality simultaneous with an awareness of differentiation, that they're one reality, to see it that way. Thank you.

[44:30]

Linda? You know those old texts that show Buddha speaking to a big assembly and then at the end they all go, you know, great, well done, well done. So I really felt like that today, so I'll start with that. And the question I wanted to pose was that bringing that element of love into the universe and the whole beautiful presentation that King gave of the beloved community, does it take into account or would you like to say something about how to actually deal with our very complex feelings in the face of, you know, people who do atrocities and people who have hurt us personally or people who have, you know, you can't just say, okay, I'm going to love them. So is that important for us to get trained and skilled in dealing with the multiple feelings that arise?

[45:36]

Well, I think yes, of course. I can't speak to atrocities. I can't speak to that feeling of it having been done close in to me. But I can speak to what it feels like, all of us can speak to what it feels like to be hurt. To have experienced perhaps something like betrayal or just really strong hurt. And how do we practice with that? How do I practice with that? What I find is I have to... One, I have to step back with an understanding that there will be a time to step forward. And... Two, I really take the long view.

[46:39]

I've experienced relationships that felt like they were stuck for decades, and then there's movement. I have to be, keep part of my mind on both the intention, the wish for myself to move, but also to observe the situation. And if there's movement, then some other relationship, some other transaction can happen? Is that too abstract? Well, as you were speaking, I was thinking of keywords like outrage and anger. Is there something creative there? It's a big question and we're already out of time, but I'm just raising it as a question. Well, there's a wonderful, let me just say, and I hope we can get to, I'd like to be studying this in the next year, The wonderful book by His Holiness the Dalai Lama is called Healing Anger.

[47:49]

There's a sense of ambiguity about that expression, that one heals anger, but also that anger as energy can also catalyze healing, and that's based on Shantideva guided the Bodhisattva's way of life. This is his commentary on the section on patience. So perhaps that's another subject. Maybe that's a good place to end and I think we're going to have Q&A so if you want to come back and talk some more we'll have a chance after a cup of tea. Thank you and stay warm.

[48:37]

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