Good morning. Nice to see you all here on this holiday weekend. There are some old friends sitting in the back also. Hi. Good to see you, sort of relevant to the talk that I'm going to give. This is Independence Day weekend, or Interdependence Day weekend. You actually, you can't have one without the other. That if you have, they're impossible to separate. You can't have independence, independent from what? without necessarily having interdependence, and you can't have interdependence without necessarily seeing that there's independence. At any rate, I won't belabor that too much. I'm gonna do some,

[01:06]

personal storytelling. Can you hear back there? Some personal storytelling this morning, and the focus of it is going to be, the Dharmic focus, I think, is going to be on race. Something that we're all aware of, something that we talk about from time to time, something that affects our community life. something that we are grappling with, I think, as individuals, as community, and nationally, internationally, in fact. So, to me, this perception unfolds from an understanding of right view. which is the first step on the Eightfold Path. Right view in Pali, I think, is samasati, and sometimes it's translated as right recollection.

[02:20]

So what does that mean, recollection, whole things in our mind, how we recollect the various threads of memory, the stories that we tell ourselves to form something that is whole. But the tricky word in that formulation, whether it's this right view or right recollection, is the word right. when we hear right in English necessarily we hear wrong, we hear them coming up together. So it's not what right view means in Buddhism is not strictly speaking the way reality or event that in the sense that there's a correct way to view it or an incorrect way to view it.

[03:29]

But what right means is sort of getting to the point, is getting to the view of things as impermanent, is looking into the interdependent nature of reality where everything is composed of limitless causes and conditions that some of which we can see and some of which are beyond our understanding and some of which take a long time to come together in a way that we can see the pattern or the shape of it in its impermanence in its So, in that way, the storytelling is like right recollection, but it's really a question of what is the story we're telling now?

[04:39]

What is our understanding? How do we view things? I'm reminded to tell a story of the past. I'm going to talk about two months ago, some of us in this room attended the gathering at the 40th anniversary of the Columbia University strike. When we occupied buildings at the university, some of us lived in the president of the university's office for a week. There was a kind of revolutionary spirit in the air and it was actually, it was an incredible event that was very much also in keeping in its own uniqueness. It was incredible and it was also in keeping with what was going on at the time and in the country.

[05:45]

And what we found, or what I found when going back 40 years, was I was looking at Barack Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia last March, and he began it by saying, understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, the past isn't dead and buried. in fact it isn't even past and that was the experience to have this remarkable opportunity to be back in the same place that you were in your youth 40 years ago and to reflecting on our activities of those times, what sense we made of what we were doing then, what sense we make of it now.

[07:02]

This is a very unusual opportunity to see old friends and realize, oh, now they're 60, not 20. you know, and, oh, but me too. You know, and some of them, expecting to see everybody and recognize them and realize that, you know, some people say, well, who are you? You know, you'd have to like, feel like you wanted to peel away layers of age. And then you saw that person, something continuous and contiguous with who they were. 40 years ago, still alive, still coming from that voice and face even though really we're getting old. But that's better than the alternative, right? So it was a very powerful experience.

[08:08]

It was a powerful experience to see old friends and to reconnect. It was a powerful experience to be walking. I don't think I've walked across the campus for, it might have been since then. I don't think I've been up there and just find all of these images flooding back. And to tell the stories, which is what mostly we did. There was a lot of storytelling. So I should say something before I get into this core piece. So there was a strike at Columbia in the spring of 1968. It flowed fairly directly in a matter of days and a week or two from the assassination of Martin Luther King.

[09:10]

which took place in Memphis early in April of 1968. And I won't go into a lot of detail, but there were two large issues confronting the radical community at Columbia. And that community consisted of radical students connected with SDS, African-American students who had their own organization, faculty, graduate students, etc. And there were two main issues where one was the university's involvement in research for the war effort in Vietnam through something called the Institute for Defense Analysis, and that had been sort of badly kept secret.

[10:12]

There was some secretive aspect to the university's involvement in this, but with the proper research it was all easy to uncover. And they were involved in counterinsurgency and various kinds of nefarious dealings with the military as this war was raging in Vietnam. And the war raging in Vietnam was something that occupied everyone's minds, irrespective of what side they were. It was a really pervasive reality. It was very hard to turn your back on it. So that was University's involvement in that was one key issue. The second key issue was that I think seven or eight years earlier, the university had somehow cut a deal with the city of New York.

[11:13]

They needed to build, they wanted to build a new gym. And they thought the ideal place for building this gym was in a public park called Morningside Park, which was right next to Columbia. And it was a park overlooking the Morningside Heights or West Harlem neighborhood overlooking Harlem. And it was a park that belonged to the people of Harlem. university had cut this deal with the city to actually have land that was going to be allotted to them to build this massive gym. And not surprisingly, they didn't want to allow free access to the community. So they were going to allow access on the ground floor on limited hours to the black community whose park it was.

[12:18]

So this became known as Jim Crow, J-Y-M, G-Y-M. And yeah, black people were allowed to come in the back door through the bottom and have limited access to the gym. So this was the center, was a lot of organizing in Harlem, and quite a number of the African American students were involved with that community that was organizing there. It was not the community they had been born into, which I will get to, but those are the people that they connected when they came to Columbia, they connected with. the local community and were quite involved. And this is also an issue for, it was a continuing or just another dimension of what other students and faculty saw as the obtuseness and, you know, just

[13:24]

the kind of blind privilege that the university thought it could impose on the community around it, as well as others. So that's the backstory. There were, how many buildings? Six or five. Five buildings were taken over. The first building that was taken over was the main classroom building at Columbia College, Hamilton Hall. And it was taken over jointly by SDS and SAS, the Student African American Society. And that was the first day. Subsequently, there were four other buildings that were taken over. And after a week, they were cleared quite brutally by the police. So if any of you have ever wondered about this kind of bump that I have in my head, this is an artifact of the arrest when I was beaten pretty seriously.

[14:37]

I didn't go to the hospital. The person in front of me did go to the hospital, which is why I was beaten, because while they were beating her, I made some charged remonstration to the police, and they said, oh, okay, and they picked me up and put me on a desk and beat me with clubs and fists for It's hard to know how long. Time kind of is not a relevant factor in those moments, and then pushed me off the desk and dragged me out. But in the clearing of the campus, there was about 700 people were arrested. 150 of them went to the hospital. So it was not done with kid gloves. But here's where this story begins, I think. And I'll quote, this is something from Dogen, from Genjo Koan.

[15:44]

We talk about Dogen, one of the, that's him. the Japanese monk who really brought our practice from, went to China, brought it back, brought it to Japan, and then our Zen ancestors, Suzuki Roshi brought it from Japan here, passed it to Sojin Roshi, and Dogen was a wonderful thinker and poet. So in this key work of his, he says, Though there are many features in the dusty world and the world beyond conditions, you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. You see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. In order to learn the nature of myriad things, you must know that although they look round or square, The other features of oceans and mountains are infinite in variety.

[16:48]

Whole worlds are there. It is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet or in a drop of water. You see and understand only what your eye of practice can teach. So, After the first day of occupation, in the night, the African-American students asked, the SDS students who had co-occupied this first building, asked us to leave. And I think they suggested, why don't you go take some buildings of your own? And so that was good advice, so we did.

[17:54]

But why did they ask us to leave? Now I wasn't in on those discussions immediately, but it was a question that to some extent was unanswered for 40 years. Someone that I was speaking with a couple of weeks ago said that their partner had gone to law school, I think, with one of the leaders of the African-American students, and that they had been very friendly and collegial, but even in the course of those studies, in the course of a friendship, that had not been revisited. It was very painful. It was painful on both sides. The pain of leaving, the pain that was involved in what the perception was that asked us to leave, 40 years.

[19:04]

And then the astonishing fact at this gathering was we finally got to talk about it. So it wasn't too late. You know, it's never too late for these dialogues to happen. We were lucky, though, that we were able to come together. And there was some arm twisting to get various parties there. But once we were there, we were able to talk. So I want to say something about that experience, which I didn't understand. And that non-understanding is precisely, to me, the meaning of you see and understand only what your eye of practice can reach. What we heard from

[20:07]

some of the leaders of the black students at Columbia was something about their reality that I had not perceived. And this is interesting because I think most of the left students at Columbia were had an awareness of racism, and it wasn't just a surface one. It was deep. It was committed. And still, there was stuff that we didn't see. When I had been in high school, I had done a lot of civil rights work. I'm remembering before I went to Columbia, before we occupied Columbia one year, I also went to Milwaukee and walked with this radical priest, Father Gropi, through neighborhoods in Milwaukee and had stuff, you know, bricks hurled at us off of rooftops.

[21:18]

It wasn't that I didn't understand that there was violence. Still, there was some disconnect about where what things were like actually where I was, right? This is what, you know, what Dogen says, it is so not only around you, but also directly beneath your feet. So the reality, and because I had done civil rights work at Columbia, I always assumed I was initially given A roommate who was an African-American man from North Carolina, very bright, he's now a doctor in California. But we were supposed to have had some affinity because he was black and I was doing civil rights work. No, we didn't connect. I take responsibility for that.

[22:19]

He probably bears some responsibility for that. But we lived, the fact was we lived in different worlds. And this is what you didn't see. There weren't very many African American students. I think there were 16 or 18 in our class, something like that. Is that right? Almost all of them were from the South. Class was 700, 750, something like that. Is that right? I think, yeah. So here's what we heard when we sat down and listened to the stories of people. We heard that for months and months, there was what we now call racial profiling, that whenever they crossed the campus, African American students were stopped and carded, asked to see their ID. by security, until finally they actually got to know each other.

[23:22]

And so that sort of ebbed after a number of years, but every year there was a new crop, right? There were new students. So this racial profiling went on. we found that, for the most part, there was effectively segregation in housing, that African American students were housed with African American students. There were This was really hard to imagine, but there were wonderful athletes who were recruited to come to the university and then essentially not allowed to play, or only one black person on the field at one time, and so they were stacked up in positions. and not allowed to play. And this is, you know, this is in New York, in the heart of a liberal institution.

[24:27]

So, these are things I did not know, and I think many of us didn't know. I was reminded about an ugly an ugly incident of racial stereotyping where the college humor magazine ridiculed members of a black fraternity with the kinds of stereotypical images you can imagine. Again, this was in 1968. These are very, very painful things. And the most painful thing And the people who came, these students were incredibly accomplished and who had made wonderful lives for themselves, but many of them said that their time at Columbia was the most painful and difficult time of their life. And I just didn't know. I keep wanting to say we, but I really have to say I.

[25:32]

I just need to take the responsibility right here. I didn't know, I didn't know that. And there was more that I didn't know. I didn't really understand, most of the black students at Columbia actually had grown up in the South. And I didn't, so that means, think about it, in 1968, when they were in elementary school, there was legal segregation. de facto segregation remained very much in place. And in fact, talking with somebody yesterday, he said, well, it's still there. I know it's still there in parts of Virginia I visited, Louisiana I visited. These are facts that are not easily broken down. So, these students carried carried the scars of those experiences, they also carried the burden of the responsibility for representing their race.

[26:43]

Now, this is something I don't think about. Sometimes I think I'm representing the Jews, but not much. It's a different thing. But to go from the South to an elite Northern university, means you carried the hope of your parents, the hope of your entire community, into a new realm. their parents had been reckoning with and fighting racism in very direct forms for their whole lives. Somebody said at this thing that their father, who had been in the army, spent more time fighting his battles with his fellow white soldiers were fiercer than the ones that he had with the enemy. Those are the things they had to contend with. These are the realities. Martin Luther King said in 1967, discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

[27:58]

And these are also stories that we've heard. One student came into an advanced Russian class. He had had Russian in the school that he attended in the South and told, well, he must be in the wrong place. It was inconceivable for the teacher to accept that he was in precisely the right place. This is what he was capable of learning, this is what he needed to learn. So, for these black students, the stakes had been higher, and they still are, than they were for many of us, the white protesters. When we got into these protests, it was quite possible we were gonna get kicked out of the university. I can't, it's interesting, I don't think I took that very seriously, but they had to, because a lot was riding on them, and they persisted.

[29:10]

So even though this was New York City, they had to be aware of the stakes. They had to be aware. The African-American students were aware that only two months earlier, there were shootings at a campus in Orangeburg, South Carolina. at South Carolina State, there were protests. I think it was about the integration of a bowling alley. Is that correct? And black students were killed. I did not know that then. That doesn't make the news. It didn't make the news in New York. Three students were killed and 27 were wounded. by the police. And one of the stories we heard was that in the demonstrations around the Columbia gym where the African American students went and white students had gone, were there also, at one point the police were reaching for their guns.

[30:32]

So, given the circumstances of their upbringing and all they had learned from their parents, the African American students came to the occupation of a university building with a great sense of discipline. And frankly, it was a bit different from the freewheeling participatory democracy that we had among the white SDS students. Ray Brown, who was one of the leaders, told a radio interviewer, inherent in discipline, especially in a long-term stay, would be the need to be clean and to be neat from everything from food to waste and clothing. And I think there were some deep cultural divisions between at least some of the African American students and the white students.

[31:35]

And it's clear we maintained our building in a different way than the other students. I'm not totally convinced of that. It's clear they kept their buildings well. Some of us didn't do a terrible job. And we did that with some pride. But there was that level of discipline that went from making sure that we controlled who was in the building, and what was in the building, and what was done in the building. Everything about your person and your space is critical in a situation that calls for discipline. one of the reasons that they asked us to leave was because they didn't trust us. Big surprise. But what they didn't, I mean, part of what was involved was, I think, an understanding that they had, that I certainly did have, that the kinds of things that we might do, were they to do them, could get them killed.

[32:44]

These are realities. We see these in our neighborhoods, in our communities, the kinds of things that are kind of schoolboy pranks and playfulness that go on in some communities, in other communities of color, have really the possibility of dire consequences. These are realities that persist today. So, The other thing I was very struck by was that when these students came from the South to Columbia, they came with this abiding sense of place and community. And what they did when they got there was they connected. I can't say I connected. I connected, I had good friends, but

[33:47]

I'm not sure that I had set foot in Morningside Park in three years there before the demonstrations around the gym. I wasn't connected to the place. I was connected to the mind of being a Columbia student and my friends, and I can say we were fantastically disciplined. We probably smoked too much dope to be very disciplined. But they made connections with the local community organizers, community organizations, actually with political figures in New York City, particularly African-American political figures who were connected to their communities. So they were very rooted in ways that certainly I didn't feel. what mattered to their wider community mattered to them and how they conducted themselves was a matter of pride and integrity.

[34:59]

I'm aware of the time. My friend, Paul Spike, who's a writer, wrote a moving piece for a literary night, the Saturday night of the gathering. His father had been a civil rights worker. Also, his father had been a priest, and was murdered in 1966. A murder that still remains unsolved. And when his, His father had been working with political figures and also working actively with most of the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement. And so when his father, Robert Spike, was murdered, there were letters and telegrams from Martin Luther King, from various leaders in the African-American community.

[36:05]

And still, there were things that Paul, as a student, and he was a classmate of mine, even though his father had perhaps paid with his life for his political stance, Paul still didn't understand. So this is from something that he wrote. I want to ask Ray Brown, these are leaders, Thulani and Leon, and all of your brothers and sisters to try to forgive me. and those like me. I want to ask all of the black students at Columbia in 1968 to try to forgive the adolescent self-absorption and intellectual mindlessness, even the privileged racism, which failed to grasp the reality of their suffering, which failed to reach out to them. I realize this is a lot to ask. It is like asking me to forgive the people responsible for my father's murder.

[37:11]

I understand that asking for forgiveness is in many ways outrageous. But I believe that if you could forgive me and forgive us, then perhaps one day our children might begin to fulfill the ideals, freedom, justice, equality, which we all want to share. The past is not the past. The past is here now. In his speech in Philadelphia, Obama really eloquently lays out how the past is with us now.

[38:13]

I look around the Zendo. There's a certain amount of, there's certain kinds of diversity here. And there's certain ways in which we are also not as connected to the very neighborhoods that we're in as we could be. And I do not have any solutions for this. I just ask, how could we be? when I talked, when I went back and talked to some of my African-American friends in the Buddhist community after this experience in New York in April, there were both smiles and tears on their part. It was as if, I'm thinking about a person, one person in particular, it was as if this person had been trying to tell me this

[39:22]

for a very long time. And I understood something for the first time. I still don't know quite what to do about it, which is partly why I'm talking to you today. But I needed to surface that. I needed to surface what it is that I can't see, that where was that the eye, my eye of practice was not open, where my right, my view was narrow. Bernie Glassman has three tenets that he created for his Peacemaker Order. bearing witness and loving action for the world.

[40:32]

The problems in our practice, the problems in our communities, the problems in our nation and world mostly come from thinking we know. So it all boils down to this, I'm afraid, this bumper sticker that I have on my car, don't believe everything you think. I thought I knew in 1968. There are many things that I think I know now. And they keep, the impact, I think, the process, the training of Zazen is to keep unpacking this, to keep being able to look at what I think I know. to let go of it and realize there's more, which is why not knowing is not, we're not talking about being willfully stupid.

[41:35]

I've heard it taken that way. The second point here is bearing witness. It means I know I don't know what this reality is like. I know I don't know how this person lives or how that person lives. So the responsibility of not knowing is bearing witness, is to be able to see and hear from people themselves what their experience is. Not necessarily that their experience is in any absolute way the truth either. but it's just what they're calling their experience. And we need to honor that and hear it. And then, if we're in relationship, we're involved in this very interesting little dance to be in contact with each other, to see each other, to be involved with each other.

[42:43]

That's what community does when it's functioning at its best. And that's the third tenet. Once you have been able to bear witness, then there comes the responsibility of understanding how to act. How to act to heal those breaches, how to act to create a sense of equity and equality where the boiled down value of one life is every bit as important as any other life. And that the reality that we create is intimately interwoven, intimately interdependent. And to recognize that in its fullness, this is right view.

[43:46]

And this is right recollection, recollection like collecting every strand and thread and weaving it together into some wonderful fabric. What is, there's a coin, something about the brocade fabric. What? No, it's gotta be the brocade. Do you remember? Could you say that again? Something like that. That's pretty good. Couldn't you hear that? Gee, well, that's the last word. I think we'll stop there. But that's this infinite and intimate fabric that we need to create of our lives.

[44:52]

We do it here, but it constantly needs to be expanded, which means to bring other threads and colors and textures in. It's not like we go out and give people the Zen flavor, because we have found it's good. But it's like, what can we incorporate, fold into the reality of our practice and lives that harmonizes or even contrasts in that vast fabric? I'm going to go a bit over, but I'm going to stop here and leave time for a few questions and comments, and we can continue outside after the tea. Yeah. Just talking to the complications of this, I'm struck by segregated student housing, segregated C building.

[45:57]

Right. It's a matter of choice. It's a matter of who actually gets to make the choice about what people do. That's the way I see it. If people choose to live with each other, that's fine. We've reckoned with this in various ways even here when we started having women Seshins. There were people who felt, well, women only Seshins. Well, that excludes the men. But these are choices that I feel it's appropriate for people to make according to what they need to do to feel safe. But it's not appropriate for people to make about other people so that, in other words, if I'm making, I want to live in an apartment, if I've decided I want to live with you, that's our choice. If some powers that be for reasons

[47:00]

that are beyond my understanding say, I can or can't live with you, then whose choice is that? So that's the way I see that. So were you in jail? You were arrested. Oh, good for you. But it's also the people that hurt us in the situation.

[48:09]

I mean, it comes from my body. It's not going to change at the same time. Yeah.

[49:15]

Well, this is a long discussion about the prison system, but the prison system is a system of social control. And it's a system where the worst of these tendencies come down. And there are a number of us who work in the prisons, teaching meditation in the prisons. And it's wonderful to actually create a safe space that does happen, where people meditate together, practice together, and this has also, I see it, you see it, it has actually harmonizing effects that do ripple out, but it's within a system that is pretty intransigent. So these are good things, but how you actually change the system is our responsibility. So that's a whole other large question. And the undergraduates became aware of these extra study spaces, and so they would form groups to study on their own together.

[50:41]

And we all noticed in our lab that these study groups that had formed spontaneously among friends in the class or something, were deeming racial. from India in one library, black people in the conference room, American Asians in the kitchen. And I actually asked them, I said, you know, you guys are all bio students and taking similar classes, why are you dividing Right. It's just one. That could be true.

[52:14]

I have no contradiction to that. I'm talking about this because the responsibility is the same, not just what you see. Right. I was using C in a broad sense.

[53:15]

And what I really mean is your eye of practice is not your eye. Your eye of practice is all of your senses and mind together, which means it means, do you know? who you're with. Do you know what their experience is? And that's in the broadest sense the responsibility. And it will always be incomplete. So that's kind of why I raise this discussion. I'm aware of the time. I think we can continue outdoors. I appreciate being able to talk about this with you. Thank you very much. He's gone.

[54:07]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ