Oh, it's beautiful. Midsummer morning. A lot of people on vacation. All of us should be on vacation, we should all be. We are. Oh, right. Thank you. As some of you know, I recently returned from a journey to Rome. to participate in a Buddhist-Catholic dialogue there on the subject of suffering, liberation, and fraternity. This was sponsored by the Vatican, and it was interesting and challenging and not always easy, but Rome was not that much of a hardship. Actually I'm going to give a more full report back tomorrow evening including slides from the event and that will also include pictures of wood fired pizzas and pastas and the things that one should do when one is in Italy.

[01:16]

This was a smallish gathering, about 25 Buddhists from the United States and about 25 Catholics from the United States. And we met at Castel Gandolfo, which has historically been the Pope's summer residence. now, and actually the new Pope is not going there this summer, and hasn't gone there for the last couple of summers, which is a disaster for the economy of this town. But it's beautiful, set on top of a hill overlooking a lake, and we were at a lay Catholic community retreat center. Anyhow, I want to talk about two things and I may or may not get to the second one.

[02:25]

I wanted to talk about the practice of dialogue and seeing that in the context of our practice, practice of zazen and our practice of community. And also then, to look at that, to begin to look at the quite eloquent and powerful teachings in Pope Francis's new encyclical on the environment. It's called Laudato Si, which means praise to be, and the title that he uses in English is On care for our common home, which seems to me tremendously appropriate for how we view our practice here, taking care of our common home in the Zen Dojo, but also taking care of a larger common home that we inhabit.

[03:32]

So, One thing I'll say, I've been thinking about, I wanted to talk to, Ron is here, talk to Ron about possibly doing a class in the fall on a Buddhist perspective in this encyclical because I think there's a lot in it that is very resonant with our practice, and there are places in it that are not, and I'd like to look at those, but not tonight, but I think a class would be really enjoyable. Okay, we got the okay. So I want to talk about dialogue. The word dialogue comes from the Greek, and dia, I always thought it was Dialogue, it was like monologue and dialogue, but actually it's a different route. It's not the route of two, it's the route of, it means across or through.

[04:37]

And the logos part is word or speech or reason. And this, the practice of dialogue clearly articulated in an early fashion in Plato's exposition of the Socratic method, and then up through Western culture through the Middle Ages and through Martin Buber in looking at dialogue as the method that he writes about in I and Thou. and then taken into a social liberation context by the Brazilian social writer and thinker Paulo Freire. And Freire writes about the disposal of dialogue in which a critical consciousness across different partial perspectives emerges through process of mutual learning.

[05:50]

In other words, as we talk, as we spend time together, we develop an understanding that evolves from the place in which we begin. And if you look at the Buddha's teachings, if we look at our own tradition, Almost all of the Pali suttas are dialogues. It's a dialogical method in which people ask the Buddha questions and he responds and they go back and forth. And we also, of course, have this in our Zen tradition, the Zen literature. that we hold so dear, the Koan tradition, is the record of dialogues, basically, between teachers and students, between teachers, between students, but

[06:56]

It's very much like Ferreri speaks of, a way where each person brings their perspective and out of that something enlightening occurs. And I think we have this here in our community, and we have it in our practice. We have various dialogical processes that we use frequently. We'll have question and answer at the end of this. We have shosan. We've been experimenting with counsel, which is a dialogue process. And all of this is to acknowledge that reality is not something that one person holds, but that is brought forth in relationship. One person may know more about one thing and another about another.

[08:01]

but we bring it forth together. This is the way we see when we have a shuso ceremony, a head student ceremony. In previous settings that used to be sometimes referred to as dharma combat. But I don't give it that way. It's the instruction that we give is to bring forth the dharma together. And then as I moved, as I pushed a little further with myself, I feel there's a way in which Zazen is also a form of inner dialogue. And I'm not talking about the mental chatter that I experience, I don't think any of you experience it.

[09:10]

I'm talking about you sit, we sit and we face the wall and we face ourselves. And all kinds of thoughts and feelings, sensations arise and we have to meet them. There has to be, there is some dialogical exchange by which at least we meet them and often the intention is we can meet them and set them aside and return to our relationship with our body. And sometimes if they are very insistent, we can't set them aside. Sometimes we have to engage in that dialogue. A thought arises, and if it's very insistent, we have to ask ourselves, what do you want?

[10:19]

What do you want of me? How can I respond? What's an appropriate response? And so, you know, I may be stretching this a little, but I think that this is, I'm trying to understand this process because my experience of it in a lot of different settings of dialogue is, in ways that remind me of Zazen, just as mysterious. What that process is, is very mysterious to me. You begin, as we began here in this one in Rome, mostly with a bunch of strangers. And as you sit next to each other, as you eat together, as you walk together, And as you explore your thoughts and feelings about things, what occurs, on the one hand, there's some tendrils of mutual understanding that arise, but the most important thing that arises for me is relationship.

[11:44]

And you know, it arises in peculiar ways. So, we had these two groups of people and, you know, every morning we would start off the day with chanting and meditation. And everybody showed up, you know. Nobody stayed in bed because they thought, well, you know, this isn't my practice. They all showed up and we had different Buddhist traditions and so each day we had like Sri Lankan chanting and Japanese chanting and Chinese chanting and Tibetan chanting and then a meditation, a silent meditation. And I had the privilege of, well, I felt it was really nice, I was invited by the Japanese Buddhists.

[12:55]

I think they thought my name was Japanese. No. I was invited by them to join in their chanting. They were mostly, these were Shin Buddhists, Shoto Shinshu, you know, who had temples in America. And so we chanted together and they, since they don't really meditate, they asked me to do the meditation instruction. So I had an opportunity to do that. And then we would close our meditation and walk down the hall to the chapel. And in the chapel, we would do mass. every day and it was a different officiant and one of the days there was a Greek Orthodox officiant, which I guess the Catholic Church recognizes now. I mean, I know they recognize because they wouldn't have done it otherwise.

[14:00]

And that was interesting. Not easy for me. You know, but we've got our own, there's kind of religious activity. It's like there's a part of me that wants to say something cute, but I won't do it. Because it's a serious human endeavor. But it's very powerful when they say, you know, they hold up This is my body. And they drink from the cup and say, this is my blood. And this is challenging for me. But you could see how deeply held it was. And then they would do communion. And I will say they did communion.

[15:00]

Communion was offered only for people who were Catholics. But if you wanted to participate, which I did, you could go up and cross your arms and bow and receive a blessing. I didn't think that could do me any harm. A nice Buddhist from a Jewish family, what's he going to do? What? Well, I didn't receive communion. Twice, yeah, right. But it was a very wonderful, warm feeling in both these activities. And those were my favorite parts of the day. So I also reflect on this process of dialogue in terms of, there's a wonderful section in Dogen's Bodhisattva Shishogo, where he talks about identity action, what he calls being the same.

[16:21]

So he says, identity action means not to be different. And then he says, neither different from self, nor different from other. different from self. So that's, to me, is speaking again to this internal dialogue that, you know, once I started thinking about it, I realized I'm always running this dialogue. It's always going on in my head, you know, very interesting. But the dialogue process means not just not being different, but recognizing recognizing what might be perceived as differences within myself and between ourselves, and also of commonality, a common connection, so as not to let these things divide us. And that makes the link, I think, to the Pope's encyclical, on care for our common home.

[17:30]

It's our common home. It's my body. It's our zendo. It's our town. It's the whole atmosphere. And all of these things are what Pope Francis in the encyclical is speaking of as integral ecology. That's really the pivot point of the encyclical, is looking at the almost unimaginable or unimaginable interdependence of all things in a way that makes us take a fresh angle at each aspect of our life and to take responsibility for it.

[18:38]

So I actually realized I had, there's a couple of photographs which There's one on this side, one on this side. So you can just get a picture of what our group looks like. And I will say that on the second day of the dialogue, we had an opportunity to have an audience with Pope Francis. For about, I don't know, 40 minutes or so, he greeted us. And then he went around and met each one of us, shook hands and made contact and received a lot of gifts. I don't know what he does with all, what does he do with all those gifts? I mean, he's like, I think, you know, he probably meets hundreds of people every day and everyone gives him something. You know, it's like, you know, I guess they must have, You know, caverns full of gifts.

[19:44]

Do they re-gift them? You think so? You think they do? I don't know. Some of the things are a little weird to re-gift. Like that hammer and sickle cross he received in Bolivia last week. Did you see that? That's going to be a tough one to re-gift. I gave him a copy of my book, The Bodhisattva's Embrace, which he looked at as a very striking picture on the cover of a young Thai girl, a Burmese girl in a camp. holding her baby brother. It's intense.

[20:47]

But I also gave him a letter and explained it to him. I'm on the board of an organization called the California People of Faith Working Against the Death Penalty, and so I drafted a letter in the name of the organization at their request, and enclosed it with a letter of support that we had gotten from the Papal Nuncio, who's the Pope's representative in the United States. And I said, this is from us, and this is from California People of Faith Working Against the Death Penalty, and he said, I know you have a strong opposition to the death penalty and I really encourage you to talk with our governor, Jerry Brown, who is in your church, and encourage him to do what he can to abolish the death penalty.

[21:53]

So, who knows? We don't know how things work, we don't know how things change, but I was grateful for the opportunity to do that. But mostly I went, I'm trying to figure out, the Buddhists were drawn from Sri Lankan, Thai, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Tibetan, Chinese, Korean communities, and then there were four outliers, of which I was one. And it was my friend Mushi Makeda, who some of you may know from the East Bay Meditation Center, and Fleet Mall, who works with Shambhala, who works with prisoners and youth. And I'm going to talk more about this tomorrow night, but it was very interesting because in terms of, we're trying to figure out what was the principle by which they invited people, and why was I invited?

[23:03]

and quickly as the principle became clear, the question of why became less clear. The principle was they were inviting people from these Asian and Asian-American Buddhist communities and then I think that some of us were invited because we had a visible social practice, and because we also had experience in dialogue. So that maybe accounted for the four of us, but I will say. So anyway, why I went, I'll get to that to the second place. The Pope wrote, He said this encounter is his, well the invitation said, not the book, the invitation said the encounter is historic and that it brings Buddhist and Catholic leaders from all across the United States together to dialogue.

[24:09]

They will dialogue about relational ills and social problems they cause, the social ills Relation will cause the problem, not the people. And look for ways to speak out together against the injustices that cause so much suffering, and how to work together to heal and reconcile our broken world as brothers and sisters. And then he, in the book, in a message to Buddhists earlier this year, the Pope said, to Buddhists, he said, you are also convinced that the root of all evil is the ignorance and delusion born of greed and hatred, which in turn destroy the bonds of fraternity. As Buddhists and Christians, we live in a world all too often torn apart by oppression, selfishness, tribalism, ethnic rivalry, violence, and religious fundamentalism. a world where the other is treated as an inferior, a non-person, or someone to be feared and eliminated if possible.

[25:18]

So the message continues that drawing on our different religious convictions, we are called to be, quote, outspoken in denouncing all those social ills which damage fraternity. to be healers who enable others to grow in selfless generosity and to be reconcilers who break down the walls of division and foster genuine brotherhood between individuals and groups in society. In other words, to be friends. In other words, as the Buddha said to Ananda, Ananda asked him, said, to the Buddha, this is half of the holy life. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie. And the Buddha responded, don't say that, Ananda. Don't say that.

[26:20]

Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole So this is the reason to participate both in our community, where the need for dialogue is constant, and also across our communities, across various cultural lines, religious lines, ethnic lines, racial lines. And one of the things that we discovered in the course of the dialogue was, this came to me on about the third day, as I realized, we really needed a dialogue among the Buddhists, that we do not talk to each other.

[27:24]

And there are some serious misunderstandings that we have about each other, particularly across lines of traditions, lines of Asian monastic and lay. And we don't yet have the language for talking about it. And there are divisions that go back more than 2,000 years. And I was I don't know why, but I was surprised to find how clearly drawn they could be. At one point, we actually had an argument in the last 15 minutes, last half hour of the dialogue, when we were working on the final statement.

[28:28]

and it listed all these ethnic groups. And my friend Fleet said, could we add and Western? And that was really complicated. That was a controversial issue. We argued about it for about half an hour. And what was interesting was that there were, you know, people of particular kinds of Buddhist background who didn't, they just were, there is no Western Buddhism. I mean, they actually said, aren't you Japanese? Aren't you Tibetan? In terms of our practice. And, you know, we said, well, we had Japanese teachers and Tibetan teachers, but we work in, a Western context. So, this is hot, you know, and it's an interesting question.

[29:39]

It's something that engages my mind anyway. It's not everyone's, for sure. So, meanwhile, the Catholics were like, whoa! What's going on here? They don't have the same doctrine. There are people that I've worked with in the dog that I know very well and they are very attuned to both differences and similarities and there are places where I will say that conservative social doctrine that you also hear in the church is not so different than conservative social doctrine that you might hear in certain kinds of Buddhist settings. You won't hear it here often, I don't know, I don't want to characterize everybody, but in certain places you will.

[30:50]

So, I just want to take a few minutes and get to the second point, which is just that this all happened, it's interesting, it all happened in the aftermath, just a week after the Pope's encyclical came out. And it's a very beautiful document. There's a really interesting piece by Naomi Klein in the New New Yorker about her. She was there a couple days after we were there. But I want to read you what his point of inspiration was from beginning for the source of the encyclical and then leave some time for conversation. The source is from a canticle of the sun by St.

[31:54]

Francis. It's very beautiful. Praise be my Lord through all your creatures, through brother sun who brings the day, through sister moon and the stars, through brothers wind and air and clouds and storms, through sister water, through brother fire, Be praised, my Lord, through our Mother Earth, who feeds us and rules us." In the words of this beautiful canticle, St. Francis of Assisi reminds us that our common home is like a sister with whom we share our life and a beautiful mother who opens her arms to embrace us. This reminded me of this just wonderful passage on giving from Dogen where he says, give flowers blooming on the distant mountains to the Tathagata.

[33:03]

Offer treasures accumulated in our past lives to living beings. We offer ourselves to ourselves and we offer others to others. And a little later in this section he says, entrusting flowers to the wind and entrusting birds to the season may also be the meritorious action of Dhanaparamita. So I think that I'm inspired by, I realized this morning, I'm inspired by Pope Francis. There are things that I, don't understand and don't agree with and I'm not about to have a conversion experience. But his openness to other faiths and traditions out of concern for the planet and out of concern for the poor resonates with me very deeply and I think with many of us.

[34:16]

And his understanding, his way of looking at the world is very passionate and critical. And he wants to do something. He doesn't want to just hang out behind the walls of this, it's incredible, St. Peter's and the Vatican, but it's not the real world. But to be with, to alleviate suffering, this is the Bodhisattva's task, irrespective of religious tradition. So I think I'm gonna stop there. I apologize for the incompleteness, but I wanted to give you some sense of some small amount of what happened on this journey.

[35:19]

And, you know, we can unpack our thinking together in, well, that's the life of community, actually. We're constantly doing that. And we're constantly finding where, where do we agree, where are we in harmony, where are we in difference? And accepting that. And that was, every time you enter dialogue, you have that opportunity. So, I want to leave a few minutes for dialogue. Yes? Thank you, Hosann, for a very moving, beautiful talk. I'm hearing now something, and I don't know if it's new, interconnectedness between environment and poverty, that they're not separate anymore.

[36:25]

Is this new? Is it new? I don't think so. No. No. Do you want to say something, Ben? No, I don't need to say anything. A lot of people have made this connection for a long time. Yeah, right. But he's got a big pulpit for doing this and it's making a lot of people very uncomfortable, which is okay. It's good, in fact. It makes me very happy. Me too. But this again and again, when he reads this in Typical, he says, basically he says, the shit is coming down hardest on those who are the poorest. And if we're looking to global warming, if we're looking to rising sea levels, we're looking to drought, all of these things, come down most hardest on those who've been least afforded. I will say, oh, I meant to say, so I was asked about three months ago before I even knew about it, four months ago before I knew about this encyclical, said, could you please give us a paper on Buddhist perspectives on nature and the climate crisis?

[37:40]

And I thought about it and said, And then I realized, as we get closer, that it was really going to dovetail with this encyclical. So I've done my best and I'm happy to share. I have to figure out, maybe I'll put it on my website. Yes? I wanted to see if there was some conflict between the Catholics and the Buddhists over parts of the encyclical. You wanted to see if there was? Conflicts. Were there any conflicts? Well, let me be honest with you. Most of the Buddhists there, I would say about half of them, really had no idea what, say, the social gospel was. you know, and their papers reflected it.

[38:44]

They just gave like, wrote presentations of suffering and the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, you know, it was like really dry. And of those who were there who did, and there were a number from the Vietnamese tradition, from the Korean tradition, and others who do work with their with their communities, nobody talked about climate. We did not really talk about the encyclical. I really thought we would, and we didn't. I had individual conversations with Catholics and with some Buddhists. No, and I would have to say my difference is there's one paragraph where he talks about population.

[39:48]

He dismisses the question of population, just sweeps it off the page that it's a red herring. that's the social doctrine around gender, around reproduction, around women, that's gonna be tough nut to change. Anyway, but no, this is one of the disappointing things was we didn't really dialogue on these social issues much. Some of us have these conversations very deeply, but not as a group, and we're trying to figure out how to do that in a continual way. Yes, Stan. So I understand part of the dialogue was to do these liturgy together in the morning and to be with each other, but then also it sounds like you met and actually talked about topics.

[40:49]

We did. And you didn't talk about climate change, so what did you talk about? I'll talk about that more tomorrow night, but what I will say is we had six to seven hours of presentation every day. dead. But then we would have a small group of our local, we had a small group of like regional, we had Northern California, like San Francisco area, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Chicago, and our Bay Area group was fantastic and that was, I mean just, they're very hip, and we had very deep discussions. So it's on that level. But the dialogue itself, I would say, was structured according to the Four Noble Truths, which was a great way to structure it. I don't know.

[41:57]

We're having local follow-up. And we'll have to see. Just to say, it's promising. They want to see this going on. But they want to see us working together and showing them that we're doing something together and we're not depending upon money from Moscow to get this going. And the other question is, were women Buddhists represented women Buddhists were very strongly represented. And frankly, the differences that emerged were with the men. Women Buddhists were represented, you know, here, Mushim, a Shambhala woman, of color from Chicago. The nuns in the Chinese tradition are very strong.

[42:58]

They run in everything. And also in the Shin Buddhist tradition, there are lots of women ministers. So yeah, very strong women presence. That was great. Much stronger than the Catholic, that's for sure. And the women were, the Catholic women, there were only a few. They were very strong, but it's, Patriarchy is well-entrenched. Walter. Back to dialogue. Yes. Really, there's obviously different kinds of dialogue, but I just wanted to ask a question about that. Dialogue where you're dialoguing on resolving differences or moving towards some quote-unquote teaching, which is quite different. Right, and there's dialogue, which is just open discourse to bring forth.

[44:04]

It wasn't so much... I mean, I guess this was teaching, and I wish there were more dialogue. I wish it had been structured so that there was more exchange structured, there were no small groups, there was The only small group we had was the local one. It's like there are ways in which it could have been much more interactive. And yeah, I think there's all kinds of different modalities. One more question, then we have to end. If there is another question. Or... He was doing his usual popish stuff, you know. He wasn't there. We went to, he wasn't in Tesco Gandalfa. We went to Rome for our audience, so we met him there. But I can't imagine how he lives his life, you know.

[45:06]

It's like, he's pretty fully booked. Ron, that's the last one. Aside from him being Pope, just being with him in that room, what was your feeling about him just as a person, aside from his position? I was talking with Sojin about this. For me, what I value is a sense of ordinary mind. Ordinary mind being not so mundane, but ordinary mind means mind in order, feet are on the ground. He was very present. When he was in front of you, he was really listening, and he completed that action and then moved to the next person. It's interesting, perceptions are so subjective, like the Catholics were flipped out, you know, because it's like fireworks were going on, the lights were, bells were ringing, you know, it's like, for me, I just saw a deeply, deeply ordinary person, which for me is the most inspiring thing.

[46:30]

This is what I love about Sojin. This is what I love about people in our Zen tradition. We value just being there. And he was really there. And you could see he spoke to us briefly, to the whole group. And when he spoke, it was really interesting because you could see him, he was speaking very slowly and clearly, but I could see the wheels turning in his head as he was shaping just what he wanted to say. You could really feel he was thinking, you know, what's the teaching of an entire lifetime? An appropriate response. What was an appropriate response? So, thank you very much.

[47:34]

And come tomorrow night, seven o'clock in the Zindo, I think a couple people might be there who are also in the dialogue, and we'll talk more broadly about some of these things.

[47:46]