Good morning, everyone. And on this Fourth of July weekend, happy Interdependence Day and happy Independence Day and happy Liberation Day. This is one of my favorite American Buddhist holidays. So the American ideal of freedom, liberation and justice for all, accords very much with the ideal of, the Buddhist ideal, the Bodhisattva ideal of universal liberation and with Bodhisattva principles, the principles of enlightening, awakening beings and the liberation of all beings. The interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings, being, becoming free of personal estrangement and the ideal of universal freedom.

[01:03]

Liberation as acknowledging our interconnection, our interdependence and our practice. This zazen we've just been doing is the samadhi of all beings, that to be present and settled and open and awakens together with all beings. When we practice this upright sitting, we are practicing together with all beings. We are settling and opening together with all beings. This is, this samadhi actually supports the samadhi of all beings. This is a social practice to realize our communion with all beings in space and time. And our samadhi supports all beings. And our Bodhisattva precept is to benefit all beings, to help rather than harm, to support

[02:10]

helpfulness rather than harm. So, we celebrate the Fourth of July in this country in honor of the Declaration of Independence. And Thomas Jefferson, or some historians say Franklin, had more to do with it anyway. Thomas Jefferson was a great writer, anyway it says, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men, and at that time maybe it didn't include women, but we could say all people, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, endowed with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So, those are great Bodhisattva words. And this country has never lived up to that, but it's an ideal.

[03:16]

And it's important that we have that ideal and that we celebrate that ideal on this weekend. So, I want to talk about that, and I want to talk about our situation. Jefferson also said the price of liberation is ongoing vigilance. Well, that's the Buddhist way of saying it. The price of liberation is the ongoing vigilance of zazen, or of paying attention to the whole of our life and to all beings. May all beings be happy, we sometimes chant. So, our awakeness, our freedom is about this ongoing awakeness, this Buddha going beyond Buddha, this ongoing vigilance. Of course, I'm paraphrasing what Jefferson actually said, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. And he was talking about it in a social context.

[04:19]

And so, our practice, you know, is about our own personal struggles and problems, all the things going on on our own seat as we sit, and in our own lives, and in the world around us. But it's also in the world around us, and that's very pressing, this month, July 2016. So, we also have this ideal with liberty and justice for all. So, we still have these ideals, we still celebrate these ideals. These ideals in our country show the possibility for change, the possibility of realistic hopefulness. And realistic hopefulness means we need to face the problems and the sadness of all the difficulties and all the suffering in the world around us, in Chicago and our country

[05:23]

and the whole world. And yet, we still have the means to produce change and to support well-being through this samadhi of all beings and through other practices, social practices. So, later on, after Jefferson and Franklin, Abraham Lincoln said, government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Another great, cherished American saying. And we still talk about that, it's still part of our ideal, even though now it seems that we have government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires. And the reality is that the wealthiest 62 people on this planet own as much wealth as

[06:23]

the bottom half of the world's population, around 3.6 billion people. And the top 1% now own more wealth than the whole of the bottom 99%. So, on this 4th of July weekend, my responsibility as a clergy person, as a, my responsibility to the Bodhisattva precepts of liberation is to speak about how our country and our world is doing from the point of view of Bodhisattva values. So I want to try and speak about this from Bodhisattva values, not just from my opinions about political candidates or parties, but to talk about where we're at. And to talk about how we can respond. So our practice, our zazen, our, the samadhi of all beings is a kind of response to stop

[07:28]

our usual way of being in the world and stop and on a Sunday morning come and sit and be present and upright and pay attention to whatever comes up. This body, this mind, and all of us together in this room, how we are. And everything going on in the world around us. And this month we have nominating conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia for our election this year. So there's going to be a lot happening this month. And both of these conventions, it seems to me, show the degree to which we do not have real democracy, at least not in our political or economic or media institutions. Not all the people are represented. And our Bodhisattva precepts include, as we say it here, disciple of the Buddha does not

[08:35]

lie or we could say speaks the truth and Thich Nhat Hanh in his commentary says this includes speaking truth to power. So, I will say that in terms of the official version of what's happening, there's tremendous corruption and hypocrisy involved. And I think, you know, most people in this country or many people in this country understand this. The votes in the primaries in both parties reflect that many people understand. Many people rejected political business as usual. So just a few things about our usual politics in this country. Because of gerrymandering and the way congressional districts are rigged, most congressional seats are safe for incumbents of one party or the other. Only about 10 to 20% of races for the House of Representatives or for Congress are really

[09:44]

contested in any given year. For example, in 2014, one estimate described 408 of the 435 total House races as non-competitive. So this isn't really democracy. So, Thomas Jefferson, who at least in his writings was really brilliant and left us some powerful words. He said, I hope we crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already, he was writing in the 1780s or whatever, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country. Well, it's much later and now the elections and the political system and the media are largely controlled by money, by the big corporations.

[10:45]

Despite what all the major candidates have said, the major candidates in both parties, both parties' platforms, I believe, support the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP, which will basically give power to the corporations and overrule whatever local or legislation. For example, NAFTA, which is a small version of what the TPP will do. Based on that, the climate movement managed to stop the Keystone Pipeline, but now Canada is suing the American government, the American people for billions of dollars for stopping the Keystone Pipeline. So these trade agreements are the opposite of government of the people. So, the Republican platform pretends that climate damage is not even happening, even

[11:47]

though we've seen, I think it's 13 months in a row of record heat around the world, record breaking heat. Their candidate wants to build a wall to keep out Mexicans and Muslims and I'll say more about that. Well, I'll just say that, as I've said, that we sit facing the wall not to keep anybody out. So, you know, I think some people come to Zen and they want to keep, they want a way of hiding from the world and if you want that, this isn't the right place, obviously. We face the wall to face ourselves. We face the wall to face our connectedness with all beings. We face the wall as a window or as a mirror to see ourselves and as a window to see our connectedness with all beings. So we're connected with all beings, Mexicans, Muslims, whatever. On the other side, the Democratic platform supports global fracking that will increase

[12:53]

climate damage and poison land around the world. The Democratic candidate has a policy of imposing regime change in many countries, regardless of the consequences. And we saw the consequences of regime change in Iraq and other countries in the Mideast that have allowed Islamic fundamentalists to take power. And recently revealed emails show that the Democratic National Committee was planning and manipulating procedures early in 2015 before the primaries even started to ensure the present nominee. So our political systems are not really about democracy. I would say that real democracy will be outside the conventions this month. I had seriously considered attending the Democratic convention in Philadelphia.

[13:55]

There's a big march the day before about alleviating climate damage, and there's a big contingency of faith leaders. And I thought about going. I've got too many obligations here, so I'm not going to go. But next Saturday, if any of you are interested, I'm leading a meditation workshop for activists, including those who are interested in civil disobedience. Okay, so, you know, there are lots and lots of ways, and I'm going to talk about more of them, that our country and our world is in a mess. And yet, again, this Zazen we do is this Samadhi for all beings. We include all beings. Just to stop and sit and include all beings in our awareness is helpful. But there's also the helpful practice of marching in the streets. There are many helpful social practices.

[14:57]

And that's going to be happening outside both conventions. And we've seen the Black Lives Matter movement really make a difference in terms of how people in our country see the situation for black people, for African Americans. And we've seen the climate movement, as I've mentioned with the Keystone, really make a difference in terms of the awareness and the response to the dangers of climate damage. And we saw the Occupy movement and other movements make a difference in the awareness about what's happening in our economy. Many movements have made major helpful changes in awareness and policies. A hundred years ago, women were not allowed to vote in this country. Women's suffrage, as I've mentioned, did not happen because men decided, well, we like

[16:04]

women, we'll let them vote. Women's suffrage happened because there were women marching in the streets. Because there were women bothering their congresspeople saying, we want to vote too. So that happened less than a hundred years ago. And this year, after the massacre in Orlando, I feel we need to sit especially with all in the LGBTQ community. Gay marriage happened recently because of people in that community and their supporters speaking out because of pride marches in the street. And obviously, this needs to keep happening. So there's so many things that are happening that are destructive in our world. And maybe this has always been happening. And yet, I want to also speak for change and hope. Change happens. This is axiomatic in Buddhism. So Thomas Jefferson also said, if there be one principle, quote, if there be one principle

[17:08]

more deeply rooted than any other in the mind of every American, it is that we should have nothing to do with conquest. Thomas Jefferson said that. Since the war in Vietnam, which I protested 50 years ago, America has been involved in wars of conquest, or at least supporting wars to expropriate resources around the world most of the time. Since 1980, the United States has bombed or provided weapons for attacks against 14 different Muslim countries. Who's the terrorist and who's the freedom fighter? This is, you know, we should consider this. I'm not, you know, there are horrible acts committed in the names of all kinds of causes. After the massacre of African American people doing Bible study in Charleston, the corporate

[18:09]

media did not call the shooter a terrorist because he was white, not Muslim. Horrible, horrible thing. So you know, the American liberty and justice for all, the American, you know, Thomas Jefferson's quote, we hold these truths to be self-evident, did not include Native Americans, did not include African Americans, did not include women, and did not even include all men. Men had to have a certain amount of property before they could vote initially in the United States. Part of how change happens in terms of all these things is that we need to talk about them. We need to talk about race, the epidemic of unarmed African American men and women shot

[19:12]

by police, the high percentage of African American men in prison, prejudice in our legal system, and the Black Lives Matter movement has made a difference in terms of our awareness. So we have to face white privilege. So we're celebrating the Declaration of Independence and the American Revolution, but if we look at history, it's complicated. From some perspectives, the American Revolution can be seen as a pro-slavery rebellion against British abolitionism. Jefferson himself and many other founding fathers were slave owners. And in colonial America and up until the Civil War, the economy of the North as well

[20:15]

as the South depended on slavery. So a historian named Gerald Horne wrote about this, quote, what helped to prompt July 4th, 1776 was the perception amongst European settlers on the North American mainland that London was moving rapidly towards abolition of slavery. This perception was prompted by a particular case decided in London in June, 1772, which seemed to suggest that abolition, which not only was going to be ratified in London itself, was going to cross the Atlantic and basically sweep through the mainland, thereby jeopardizing numerous fortunes, not only based upon slavery, but the slave trade. And abolition became total in the British Empire in 1807. So you know, what happens is complicated. I still appreciate Thomas Jefferson's words, but you know, he was a slaveholder.

[21:21]

And as president, he helped to, you know, maybe it was inevitable that the United States would move West. And Thomas Jefferson is this huge koan. There's a lot about him I really appreciate. And he actually studied Native American cultures. He wrote dictionaries of Native American languages. And yet he insisted that they had to become agrarian. They had to give up their culture and their nomadic culture and become like the colonists. It's complicated. Maybe that was inevitable. I don't know. So there's many other problems for democracy. You know, and you know, I'll just add that it's important that we have these ideals of participatory democracy. In Asia, in Asian Buddhism, they didn't have even the idea of this.

[22:23]

So I celebrate today because for American Buddhism, for the Bodhisattva ideal in America, to have these ideals is really important. These are Bodhisattva ideals. And in Asia, they lived in feudal societies where there wasn't even the concept, the possibility of thinking of participatory democracy. Most of engaged Buddhism, Bodhisattva work in Asian Buddhism up until modern times had to do with working with the warlords to try and get them to be kinder to, you know, the serfs or the equivalent, to the peasants. Anyway, we've got, you know, I mentioned climate and how our habitat is being destroyed for short term profits. And it's happening. It's not something that's happening in the future. It's happening now. The big floods in West Virginia and fires in California.

[23:25]

And, you know, since the early 70s, ExxonMobil and other fossil fuel companies did the research and knew the effect of their business and chose to cover it up and keep making their profits. And we've seen mass extinction of many species. But now we have campaigns for fossil fuel divestment, for keeping fossil fuels in the grounds. And 350.org Chicago is working on divestment campaigns and there may be ways in which we can join with them. So there's many other problems, of course. The high debts for college graduates in this country. All of these issues, economic injustice, you know, belie the promise of liberty and justice for all and government of the people, by the people, for the people, that we celebrate

[24:31]

this weekend. And yet, I feel like these ideals are really important for us and worth speaking about in the bodhisattva context. All of these economic and class injustices against minorities, against young people, mistreatment of women and LGBTQ communities, the failure of the official American values of decency or transgressions against bodhisattva principles in our society, however, these principles of freedom and the notion of justice is still alive and we celebrate them on this Interdependence Day. These ideals are important. And actually, these ideals are what the rest of the world appreciates about our country

[25:37]

and about America. And what I want to end with is that change is possible and actually inevitable. As Dr. Martin Luther King said, the arc of freedom is long and moves towards justice. In our practice and the bodhisattva view of time and history is wide and long. We have this lineage of ancestors going back 2,500 years to Shakyamuni Buddha, going back to the great Chan masters in the 800s in China, going back to Dogen in 1200 Japan. We have this institution of sangha, of practice communities, which from some perspective the Buddha set up as a kind of counterculture, as a movement to show another possibility

[26:40]

to the usual way of being in the world, which has always been here. So injustice is not something new. The effects of it are extreme in our time, it may be, but I'm talking about this Samadhi of all beings not to talk about ill will to the people causing harm. So one of our precepts is not to harbor ill will. So all of the harm that's being done, the fossil fuel company executives like the tobacco company executives before them, it's not about them personally. And the policemen brutalizing African American and other minorities, it's not about them personally. From our bodhisattva perspective, this is part of our disease.

[27:49]

This is part of human ignorance. We don't need to get into personal blame or name calling or hatred even. We don't have to harbor ill will. Our Buddha work is to relieve suffering, to transform anger to commitment, to help all beings towards awakening. So this is this counterculture of Sangha that the Buddha established 2,500 years ago to help transform our ways of seeing, to see that we're all connected. And it's sad that the fossil fuel company executives can't even see how they are harming their own grandchildren. How do we wake them all up? It doesn't mean that we don't speak out against particular harm and injustices and try to change harmful actions.

[28:51]

The good news is that there's lots of good things to do, that there's so much work to do. And we don't have to all do it, each of us by ourselves. Sangha is that we each can take up one piece of it. We need to listen and respond. There are ways to respond. So I want to close with some words from Rebecca Solnit who visited here not long ago. This is from her book, Hope in the Dark, Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. This is from her, the introduction to the new, the new introduction to that book. It's talking about change and how, and the transformation that's happening.

[29:59]

She wrote this book initially right after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but this current introduction, this is an extraordinary time full of vital transformative movements that could not be foreseen. It's also a nightmarish time. Full engagement requires the ability to perceive both. The 21st century has seen the rise of hideous economic inequality, perhaps due to amnesia, both of the working people who countered its decline in wages, working conditions and social services and the elite who forgot that they conceded to some of these things in the hope of avoiding revolution. Hope doesn't mean denying these realities, it means facing them and addressing them by remembering what else the 21st century has brought, including the movements, heroes and shifts in consciousness that address these things now. Among them, Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, Idle No More, the Dreamers addressing

[31:03]

the DREAM Act and immigration rights, Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and the movement for corporate and government transparency, the push for marriage equality, a resurgent feminist movement, economic justice movements addressing and in many cases raising minimum wage and fighting debt peonage and the student loan racket, and a dynamic climate and climate justice movement, and the intersections between them all. This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement building, social change and deep, profound shifts in ideas, perspectives and frameworks for broad parts of the population and of course, backlashes against all those things. It's important to say what hope is not. It is not the belief that everything was, is or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction. The hope I'm interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones

[32:05]

that invite or demand that we act. It's also not a sunny, everything is getting better narrative, though it may be a counter to the everything is getting worse narrative. One of the founders of Black Lives Matter early on described the movement's mission as to provide hope and inspiration for collective action, to build collective power, to achieve collective transformation rooted in grief and rage, but pointed towards visions and dreams. Hope locates itself in the premises that we don't know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. So we don't know what will happen. Change happens, we know that. There are many possibilities and good things happen. And so she calls her book Hope in the Dark. So I recommend all of her books I've talked about, quoted many of her other books.

[33:05]

So this is an extraordinary time and this month, I think, will be extraordinary too. And I'm interested to see what happens in the conventions in Cleveland and Philadelphia this month. And we all have the possibility of doing this samadhi of all beings, for all beings, together with all beings. And when there are, when occasion arises of also marching in the streets or doing other actions to help raise awareness of what is possible and help support change. So thank you all. I welcome comments, responses, questions. Please feel free. Okay, I'm going to tell the story that Dan, I think I've mentioned this here before. The story I heard from Dan Ellsberg. This is a true story and this is a story about the power of demonstrations.

[34:06]

I was, the year before I moved to Chicago, I led a weekly torture teaching and vigil outside the UC Berkeley Law School where John Yoo, who wrote the torture memo for George W. Bush, taught and is still teaching, to the shame of the University of California. But Dan Ellsberg spoke a few times, a couple times there. But I heard, he told a story about a time when Richard Nixon was president and he was sitting in the white, in the Oval Office, talking with Henry Kissinger. And I'm not sure if this was before or after he started bombing Cambodia, but he decided to drop atom bombs on Hanoi. They made the decision. And then he looked out his window and there were like, I don't know, 300,000 people protesting the Vietnam War outside, you know, the White House.

[35:11]

And he said, well, maybe I shouldn't do that today. Those people, you know, and there were all these marches against the Vietnam War, you know, to Washington, to New York, I remember some of them. Those people went home and on television they heard that Richard Nixon didn't even know that, he said that he didn't know that there was a demonstration, he'd been watching the football game. That's what the media said, but they stopped an atomic bomb attack, those people. It's a true story. So Dan Ellsberg said he has verified this. So we don't know what we can do.

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