Good morning, everyone. Welcome. So our zazen is about being present, being aware of this body mind as it is here this morning. But of course, this body mind as it is here this morning, is a function of many bodies, many minds, many beings in ten directions. So, when we do this practice regularly, as I strongly encourage, we become more and more fully aware of our deep interconnectedness to all beings. And that this practice is not just about ourselves, but that it's about ourselves as expressions of all beings.

[01:04]

That this bodhisattva vow will sometimes say, may all beings be happy. May they be joyous and free from suffering. So our practice is connected with all beings. in space, but also in time. So often I talk about... more distant times, Shakyamuni Buddha 2,500 years ago, or the great Chan masters in China in the 700s and 800s, or our great founder of Soto Zen in Japan, Eihei Dogen in the 1200s. Today I'm going to talk about the last 75 years. So today is the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bomb by our United States government on Hiroshima, August 6, 1945, 72 years ago.

[02:17]

And there's going to be a commemoration that I helped organize. I'm one of, there are about 10 speakers this afternoon in Hyde Park. the University of Chicago between 5 and 6.30 at the sculpture Nuclear Energy by Henry Moore at the site of the very first nuclear fission reaction that Enrico Fermi and others created. So that was right here in Chicago. So I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about how that event and its implications affects us today and affects our zazen. And I'll come back to what this has to do with our zazen.

[03:21]

So well, I'll just say, you know, part of what's difficult about zazen. It's not just sitting still or getting our legs into some funny position, but actually seeing our own patterns of greed, hate, and delusion, of grasping, and anger, and confusion, and fear, and so forth. But our karma's not only about our personal karma, of course. that our personal karma is affected by our collective karma. And I've talked about how we're all affected by, for example, the reality of our country's economy being built on slavery and racism. Well, we're also affected by the karma of warfare and of nuclear warfare and nuclear energy. Three days after their bombing of Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, kind of overkill.

[04:29]

It was a huge devastation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And historians now question You know, at the time, it was said that this was done to end the war, World War II, more quickly, to save lives, to save American lives. Some historians now say that the Japanese were ready to surrender. It was very clear. President Truman and the military dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and killed so many people, and Nagasaki, too. Not really to end World War II, but as a warning to Russia, because the Cold War was already clearly going to be starting. So that's pretty ghastly.

[05:32]

So I want to talk about the effects of the possibility of nuclear weapons on us. We don't think about it much. There have been times since Hiroshima when people have thought about it a lot. But it seems more relevant to think about it now, this year, than it has been in a long time. But it's always been there, that reality. So I'm going to refer to some notes about all of this and say some more things afterwards. But I'm going to refer to some notes by Dr. Charles Strain, who's a professor at DePaul University and active in Buddhist Peace Fellowship Chicago and one of the speakers this afternoon. So he says, one of the key characteristics of empires and one of the cause of their collapse is endless warfare.

[06:40]

Since the end of World War II, the United States has been involved in over 100 military conflicts. An article in 2015 in Military Times Magazine estimated the cost of current conflicts in 2015 at $4.79 trillion. That included homeland security, care for wounded vets, as well as direct costs of operations at that time in Afghanistan and Iraq, $1.7 trillion. Another major characteristic of modern warfare is that civilians are its overwhelming victims. And that was kind of the definition of war crimes going back to the Nuremberg trials after World War II. There was an article in 2006 in The Lancet that argued that the war in Iraq up till 2006 had caused 650,000 civilian deaths. So a few things about nuclear war.

[07:45]

The U.S. currently deploys about 1,800 nuclear weapons with another 6,800 in reserve are waiting to be dismantled. Russia deploys about 1,910 weapons with 7,000 in reserve. So I'm just going to give some data about all of this, but then I want to talk about moral considerations and, again, come back to how this affects what this has to do with Arzazan and practice. Between 2010 and 2018, the U.S. will have spent $179 billion just to maintain nuclear readiness, not counting communication, intelligence, missile defense, costs of decommissioning weapons. The most powerful weapon now deployed by the United States has a blast equivalent of 1.2 million tons of TNT, equivalent to 80 Hiroshima bombs. current weapons are nearing the end of their shelf life, and it's estimated that it'll cost $400 billion between 2017 and 2026 to maintain and modernize the current stockpile of weapons, that must never be used.

[09:06]

So this is a key point about all of these weapons, that We can't use them. That to use one of them would lead in a chain reaction to what used to be called mutual assured destruction. So I'll come back to that. Charles has a note here that one such bomb, for example, detonated over the loop would immediately kill 770,000 people. with another 1,100,000 casualties, not counting the effects of radioactive fallout. Ninety percent fatalities from the South Shore to Edgewater in the north and west to Oak Park in Cicero. Meanwhile, there are reports of both the United States and Russia considering withdrawing from current treaties limiting numbers and types of nuclear weapons.

[10:08]

And one of the important things that's happening now that we can all have an impact on is that there is a movement for a nuclear weapons ban treaty. President Obama was trying to move towards that. It's in the United Nations. This is something that we can lobby for. Okay. The Cold War standoff between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union was based on this idea of mutual assured destruction, the acronym being MAD, and its madness. The leaders had to convincingly commit themselves to massive retaliation in the event of a nuclear strike. One nuclear weapon, then the other side would have to respond. In other words, They had to present themselves, in Charles's words, as moral monsters willing to incinerate billions of people.

[11:14]

In democracies, this entailed cultivating the backup of the nation's citizens as victims. We were asked to endorse this madness. And so what is the moral fallout of such a posture? So this is where I want to get back to, what does this have to do with our practice? And we can apply this to various of our Bodhisattva precepts. One of them is, a disciple of Buddha does not intoxicate mind or body of self or others. So there's a kind of intoxication involved in this practice. Robert J. Lifton, a psychologist, argued some time ago that we are not psychologically equipped to handle such madness, and in order to maintain sanity in our daily lives, we psychologically and morally must numb ourselves.

[12:17]

Quote, psychic numbing has to do with exclusion, most specifically exclusion of feeling. In its extreme varieties, numbing itself becomes a symbolic death. One freezes in the manner of certain animals facing danger, becomes as if dead in order to prevent actual physical or psychic death. There is a real question about how much ultimate atrocity the human mind is capable of taking in and absorbing. The truth is that we have found no language to express the destructiveness, evil, and absurdity of the nuclear devices. So currently this also applies to climate damage, which threatens human survival. My friend and mentor Joanna Macy, who came here to Ancient Dragon several years ago, talks about nuclear despair and talks about all of this.

[13:18]

This is hard to talk about. If we spend all of our time thinking about this, we couldn't go through with all of the things we have to do during our day. I think part of our awareness is to open to our numbness, at least a little bit. I mean, we're in the midst of the sixth mass extinction of species on our planet. This is already happening. This affects us as individuals. this kind of required numbness. Dzogchen is about awareness. we open ourselves by doing this practice, doing it regularly, to awareness. And this opening has its own rhythm.

[14:23]

We have to open ourselves, sometimes gradually. If we open too much, Maybe it's just we couldn't function. So how do we keep a balance of being aware of what's going on and yet being able to function just in our everyday activities, but also Joanna talked about nuclear despair and feeling like it's hopeless. And if it was really hopeless, if I thought it was really hopeless, I wouldn't talk about any of this. That would be cruel. So it's not hopeless. We don't know the outcome of any of this. So, as Dr. Strain points out, we kind of live in the world of endless wars.

[15:29]

You know, 50 years ago this year, April 67, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said the United States government is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. And I kind of think that's still true. And maybe this year, it's more important than ever to pay attention to it. Donald Trump's current president, his foreign policy seems to be based on going around and selling as many weapons as he can. So his first foreign trip was to Saudi Arabia to sell, he said, $110 billion worth of weaponry. Back in World War II, there was a concern about war profiteers. In some ways, our economy now is based on war. what we have to sell.

[16:45]

And Saudi Arabia, who we had been giving lots of weapons to, is now committing, arguably, genocide in Yemen, spreading. There's a cholera epidemic and famine there due to Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen with United States weaponry and United States approval. So going back a little history, maybe a few of you remember, but most of you don't, the Cold War. In the 50s, I would say that, again, that right now, this year, is the most dangerous time in terms of nuclear weaponry since the Cold War, maybe more so, I don't know. During the Cold War, in the 50s, People were aware of it, though.

[17:46]

People are not aware of it now. This is why I'm talking about it. This is why I think it's important to think about this and talk about it. Because we can respond and do something. We can lobby our government to go along with weapons ban treaties. So I'll say more about that. When I was in grade school in the 50s, to date myself, back then we had fire drills. I think that probably still happens in schools around the country. We also had air raid drills, I think they were called. Now, this didn't happen in my school, but in some schools, the practice was duck and cover. Did anybody experience that? Yeah, where you were supposed to, when the air raid drill came, you were supposed to go under your desk, as if that would protect you from a nuclear attack. In my school, what we did, this is very strange, we would go down to the basement.

[18:52]

So for fire drills, we would go outside because the building would be on fire. So we had to be prepared to evacuate the building if there was a fire drill. But for air raid drills, we would go down to the basement. and stand around the perimeter of the basement facing the wall. I seem to recall, I don't know if that was actually what we did, but I recall that years later when I was living and practicing at San Francisco Zen Center, and we would go down every morning to the Zendo in the basement and face the wall. I used to think of Zazen as penance or punishment from Japan. We took this Japanese practice as a penance for having bombed, dropped the bomb in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, now I'm so grateful to Japan, and I don't think of it as penance. But it's funny, our karma with Japan.

[19:54]

Anyway, during that Cold War in the 50s, there was a great awareness of the danger of nuclear war. So Joanna Macy talked about nuclear despair and how people would numb themselves to that. And you couldn't think about it because you had to go through, you know, There was a strong middle class and material well-being in the 50s too, and so people were buying refrigerators and modern appliances. You couldn't think about nuclear weapons, but still there was this awareness of that. And there was the Cuban Missile Crisis, which is maybe the closest we've come to nuclear war. The Cuban Missile Crisis, I think, was in 62, and it came very, very close to nuclear war. Fortunately, the Kennedys restrained the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the United States who really wanted to use their nuclear weapons.

[21:07]

We didn't have nuclear war then. And a bit of history that most people don't know is that after the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Kennedy and Premier Khrushchev of the Soviet Union were both totally frightened by what had happened and started working together to end the Cold War. They were working secretly from their own military. So before Kennedy was president, President Eisenhower, a good Republican president, had warned against the military-industrial-congressional complex and the military industry that would take over power, and it has done so now. The military companies run our foreign policy and our Congress and our media. So this is why I'm talking about it, because now, and it's been going on since then, but it's even more obvious under President Trump.

[22:24]

But President Kennedy started in 63 campaigning for peace. He had been working secretly with Khrushchev to end the Cold War. He started giving speeches about peace, and there started to be a popular support for that and for banning nuclear weapons. And he was planning, after he came back from Dallas, to bring the troops back from Vietnam. Of course, that didn't happen. So there's a book about that called JFK and the Unspeakable, written by a man named James Douglas, with two S's at the end. It's in our library. He was a Catholic worker, and it will change how you think about the last 50 years. Anyway, JFK and the Unspeakable. And it's an interesting book, because he's kind of upbeat about it, because he says, well, at least we had a president who was willing to confront the military. And at times, it seems like we've almost had that again.

[23:31]

But anyway, right now, well, I want to come back to psychic numbing and zazen. Again, our practice is about awareness, awareness of our own body, mind, awareness of what's going on in the world around us. They're not separate. Maybe we have to start with our own body-mind, our own fears, our own anger, our own confusion. We do have to do the work of looking at our own karmic patterns. But again, it's not separate from what happens in the world around us. Part of what happens, part of people's individual depression is that things going on in the world affect us. I've talked to numbers of psychologists who say that their clients are depressed about what's happening in the world since President Trump was elected, directly due to that.

[24:46]

And there is the tension now around North Korea getting missiles and potentially bombs. and the whole situation with Iran and Israel and Palestine. Well, the reality is that North Korea has demonstrated willingness to negotiate. North Korea is very dangerous, so is the United States. Iran has demonstrated their willingness to negotiate. Our government, our current government seems to want to talk about military responses. And President Trump has many generals all around him. Diplomacy is possible. So, you know, I'm talking about this because our awareness and our attention can make a difference, but also this affects us all.

[25:48]

part of our own sadness and anxiety and fear, you know, it has to do with our own stuff. I like to think of that as a technical psychological term. I don't know if that's accurate. But, you know, we have our own personal things. we're not separate from the world around us, and it affects us. Maybe even more so in a non-residential storefront temple in the middle of a big city, but even when you go off to a monastery up in a mountaintop like Tassajara, the world is still there. How do we face the situation of the world? How do we pay attention? How do we, just to be, I think right now, just to be aware of the danger of nuclear weapons makes a difference.

[27:01]

To think about a nuclear weapons ban treaty which is being discussed by some and to try and advocate for it can make a difference. So we're doing this thing, this event this afternoon at the site of the first nuclear fission reaction as a way of helping to support awareness. And I'm talking about it this morning to support awareness of this. I think maybe part of why we didn't have, we have not had a nuclear attack since Hiroshima is that people were aware and people were concerned. And so that exerted pressure on policymakers, on government officials and presidents and so forth to not do that. You know, how we each respond and think about these things, it's an individual matter.

[28:16]

There's not one right way to respond. You know, people can write letters, call Congress people, can go to demonstrations, or just to talk about it, just to be aware of it makes a difference. But I have sometimes encouraged people who have that inclination to to go to demonstrations, and some of you have heard me tell the story from Dan Ellsberg. Maybe you've all heard me. Have you heard the story about Dan Ellsberg and Richard Nixon that I've talked about? This is directly, this is an example of stopping a nuclear attack. So do you all know who Dan Ellsberg is? Some of you don't. He was, during the later 60s, he worked for the Pentagon. He worked for the Defense Department. He was a civilian, but he had a very high position, advising the Secretary of Defense, McNamara, and I think before him.

[29:22]

And he had gone to Vietnam to look at what was going on in the war there. and had been part of an investigation into what was going on in Vietnam and had been part of a report that was drafted that showed, and this was an official Pentagon report that was kept secret, that showed that every president from Eisenhower on, maybe it went back to Truman, who had been involved in sending troops to Vietnam was aware that there was no way to win the Vietnam War, just as there's no way to so-called win the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. What that even might mean is nonsense. President Trump talks about winning, but there's no way to We create, we have, we created ISIS by attacking Iraq. That's just, that's known and all of, and ISIS used, it talks about Trump's, President Trump's

[30:34]

Muslim ban as the blessed ban because it's their greatest recruiting tool. But going back to Dan Ellsberg, he knew about this official secret doc report that showed that all the U.S. presidents knew that they could not win, the U.S. could not win the Vietnam War. but it was kept secret and the war was continuing. And at some point he released that to the newspapers and this was called the Pentagon Papers. He released it knowing that it meant he would likely go to prison, probably for the rest of his life. And he didn't only because Richard Nixon, who was president then, was so freaked out by it that he organized the people who ended up going into the Watergate, but they also had gone and raided Dan Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office trying to get evidence against him.

[31:44]

Anyway, that led directly to Richard Nixon's resignation. I worked with Dan Ellsberg a little bit the year before I moved here at a teach-in and vigil, weekly teach-in and vigil at the UC Berkeley Law School because one of the professors there, John Yu, had written the torture memo by which President George W. Bush was conducting a torture program in the Mideast in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyway, so I got to know Dan Ellsberg a little bit and I heard from him Oh, I've talked about this here before, but just in case, some of you may not have heard it, and it directly relates to why we haven't had nuclear war. But Dan Ellsberg was influenced to change his viewpoint about war, and again, he was a top

[32:46]

defense department official on his way to go to Vietnam. He stopped in Kyoto because he wanted to see the gardens and all. He stopped in a bar and sat down next to a Westerner who happened to be Gary Snyder, who was studying Zen at the time in Kyoto. And they had a long discussion and that affected Zen in a lot of ways anyway. So there's this Zen connection there too. Anyway, Dan tells the story that during the 70s, when Richard Nixon was president, he was sitting in the Oval Office with Henry Kissinger, and President Nixon decided to drop an atomic bomb on Hanoi in North Vietnam. He decided, and Dan says he's verified this. I don't know how, but anyway. But then he looked out the window and there were, I don't know, 100,000 or 300,000 people outside demonstrating against the Vietnam War.

[33:49]

So he decided maybe I shouldn't do that now. And those people went home and saw on the TV news that President Nixon said, oh, he didn't know about the demonstration, he was watching a football game. So maybe they got discouraged, but actually they stopped a nuclear attack. So we don't know what the effects of our actions will be. So I like to tell that story. So OK, here we are. It's dangerous times in the world with climate and Korea having nuclear weapons now and testing missiles and our government threatening all kinds of military actions. And we should pay attention to this. And I don't know exactly what we do, but, you know, you might call your congresspeople and say, you know, support a nuclear weapons treaty, ban treaty.

[34:58]

Support diplomacy rather than militarism. And I want to add as a qualifier, when I talk about militarism, because people have asked me about this, I'm not talking about soldiers. So some of you may have in your families people who are in the services, and that's a whole different matter. Many people go into the military service for very honorable reasons. Many people go into the military services because they don't have many other options. So this isn't about the people who serve in the armed forces. This is about the weapons companies who determine our policies and encourage these kind of weapons. Okay, so it's the anniversary of Hiroshima Day and I wanted to talk about all that.

[36:01]

Comments, questions, responses, feel free to disagree with anything I said, please. Comments, responses, please, questions. a lot recently, but your comment earlier about how it affects us and how we pay attention to that, I heard, I didn't hear all of it, but this morning on Kristen Tippett, I don't know if you'll listen to that, 7 a.m. on Monday, Sundays, she was interviewing Mary Catherine Bateson, who is a linguist whose mother was Margaret Mead and father was Gregory Bateson, And she was talking about learning from a young age, because both her parents were anthropologists, learning at a young age what being a participant observer is.

[37:10]

And her mother included her in it once in asking her to react to an interchange she had with a very difficult little boy her own age. She was eight. So she was talking about the usefulness of this in your life in general, and I was thinking it is useful now to notice our own reactions. And not that everyone else is going to be having the same reaction, but that we're part of something. And so our reactions also tell us something about the circumstances. You know, and the fact that the circumstances do tend to make us in shock, you know, kind of like freeze. And maybe being aware of that helps us figure out what to do next. Yes, thank you.

[38:18]

Yeah, I guess, thank you very much. Yes, I think the main thing I want to say is kind of pay attention to the way in which you are numbed by all of this. And it doesn't mean that you have to be to wallow in it or something, but how do we work with actually responding and finding a way to acknowledge that we are affected by all the things going on. And yet, we still also need to find our balance and take care of ourselves and the everyday things that we have to take care of. But yet, just to be aware of what's going on, I think makes a difference. And the implications for the other as well. Yeah. And each other, right. How do we take care of each other in the middle of this? Thank you.

[39:19]

Other reflections? Yes, Brian. Yes. So what do you do with that? I think one option is to be activist and try to prevent it. And that's fine.

[40:21]

That's good. Or sort of a cynic and nihilistic. You can just say, well, it's inevitable. I can't do anything. So I'll just be dispirited or whatever. But there's this other place that I don't know, somehow seems to help me, but I don't know how. And that is the tension of accepting that possibility and at the same time doing what I can to prevent it. It reminds me a lot of living with my wife who has a serious health condition that could result in her death sometime in the next few years. And I've had to, at times, say, to picture it, I can say, okay, that could happen. It's not, well, I'd be okay. It'd be fine. It might not be fine. And the nuclear holocaust certainly wouldn't be fine.

[41:22]

Yeah, I know, this balancing is really important. How we take care of ourselves and at the same time, well, there's this basic not knowing. And now we have both the possibility of nuclear war, which has been here since Hiroshima. And climate damage, which is causing mass extinctions of species and might cause the extinction of the human species, it may not, but it certainly is going to be very damaging to the way we

[42:49]

you know, if not in our lifetime, within the next century to the way that the world, that civilization so-called functions. So how do we, so knowing that, How do we think, one way, so this isn't exactly responding to your question, but it's another aspect of it. How do we think of our responsibility to the future? I'm thinking of Joanna Macy's despair work, and working with future generations, and I think about the people walking by on Irving Park Road in 50 years, or 20 years, or 100 years. and our connection to them. And then also just our responsibility to, you know, how do we take care of ourselves in the best way? We can't, it doesn't help anybody if we just, if we freeze or if we just, you know,

[43:56]

freeze in numbness, or on the other side, just feel hopeless and nihilistic, as you said, and angry, and that doesn't help either. How do we find our balance of living wholesomely, wholly? You know, Zazen is this tremendous gift. So I started by talking about Zazen. Zazen gives us the possibility of finding balance where we can feel the possibility of living, of living. of being present, of doing our best, of being helpful, and that we don't know the outcome, we don't know what's going to happen, so we can give our best energy. And also, to appreciate the beauty of the world now, here today, and the beauty that there will be in the world and the kindness that will be in the world in the future and that has been in the world.

[44:59]

That's also true. So how do we find a balance where we can respond but also appreciate all the things that there are to appreciate? This is a tricky place. But it's possible. And we're also always kind of losing our balance, and that's okay. So it's not about being perfect or about being right, or even necessarily about being good. It's just, how do we find our seat? How do we find our place in this difficult situation? And we don't have any choice, really. Other comments? You know, you mentioned your situation with your wife, and I think in some ways it's not so different from working with personal difficulties, working with

[46:13]

you know, people who are dying or people who are having serious illnesses or working with our own personal losses, you know, we've all suffered from loss. We've all, you know, been damaged in some ways. We've all felt sadness, you know. How do we sit in the middle of that? And there's just a range of all of this and it's in the world and each of us has our own aspect of it. Yeah, meeting whatever comes up.

[47:25]

Yes, Sid, did you have something? My words were driven to care not because it matters, but because it's the only thing we can do. after why it's already public.

[48:45]

I think awareness is tremendously important, but this motivation, this desire, I think it's doing something to do. I think that's the unique, really powerful constitution. Thank you. Yeah, I agree. We are each here because, in some really fundamental way, we care. Kathy? Both of those comments made me think about the whole issue of adaptation, you know, and that when you see, you know, I think about species when they are slowly losing numbers, you know, that you see these incredible adaptations. it seems to me that we as people are faced with some of that too, and so we have to stay aware of our own, but also of others, the implications around things.

[49:48]

But, you know, what you were saying, that accepting kind of a personal death, you know, I think of it as accepting the death of the life as you know it, and being ready and observant, to take on an adapted life or something that is going to be different. Because we just freeze like deer in the headlights. We annihilate. But if you stay ready to adapt, and in your situation too, which is very sad that you almost have to imagine what would it be like in order to have the capacity to keep going or to be ready to. So, I mean, it seems tied to the ability to adapt to, even though it might be a compromise from where we are now, who knows what's going to be in 20 years, 30 years. Yes, sir?

[50:49]

to attain enlightenment. We accept and behold every which way we find the light. Yeah, and the other thing is that things change. We know that. And so whatever the situation is now, it will change. And our effort, our attention, our awareness does make a difference. We don't know the outcome, but so we continue. So thank you all very much for being willing to listen to this. You're still here.

[52:08]

Thank you.

[52:11]

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