Good morning, everyone. And for new people, welcome. I'm Taigen Layton, the teacher here at Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. This morning, I want to talk about the 50th anniversary this week of the murder of Robert Kennedy. And I want to talk about this in the context of Bodhisattva practice and teaching. We just finished last week our two-month practice period talking about the Bodhisattva practice. So this Zazen practice we've just done and this Zen teaching we've just done is part of the Bodhisattva movement in North Asia and East Asia, which is recognizing that we don't practice alone. So when we do this upright sitting, of course, when we do it regularly,

[01:02]

It has some benefit for ourselves, but also we're doing it together with all beings in various ways. And the point of this is not personal liberation, but universal liberation. So there's a long history and tradition of various Bodhisattva figures which we were studying in Bodhisattva practices. So in the course of this last practice period, I also spoke about a couple of other 50th anniversaries from 1968, the beginning of the practice period, the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, and in April, the 50th anniversary of Columbia University protest against Vietnam and racism that I was part of. We occupied the buildings for A week in protest, and more than 700 of us were arrested at the end of it. So a part of bodhisattva teaching and practice, along with the aspect of it that has to do with our own personal work,

[02:13]

in our meditation and our awareness in our everyday activities and our practices of kindness and awareness in our involvements with the people we love. are involved with in our day-to-day activities, there's also an aspect of social response and even social activism. So that's the part that I'm referring to today. So I want to talk about Robert Kennedy. Partly just for the history about him, because I think some of you don't know or don't remember, don't know who he was, but also that I think he's relevant to current concerns. So I want to read some things that he said and talk about especially who he was during that last presidential campaign, which after winning the California primary, he very likely would have won and would have been elected president if he wasn't killed.

[03:30]

So in the last period of his life, during his last campaign especially, demonstrated deep care for marginalized, impoverished people, and he spoke out strongly against the Vietnam War happening at that time during his campaign for presidency. So, for those of you who were in the practice period, you will remember one of the bodhisattvas we talked about, Jizo Bodhisattva, who witnesses to the, to marginalized people, to people in hellish situations, And, you know, in that sense, Robert Kennedy was an exemplar of that. He spoke, he went and spoke to poor white people in Appalachia, to poor black people in the Deep South, to the Hispanic farm workers in California. He worked closely with Cesar Chavez, who was an organizer of the farm workers and was a champion of nonviolence and had studied Gandhi's teaching.

[04:42]

So if you look at documentary footage, which is now available, of Robert Kennedy in that last campaign, it's very clear his deep, sincere connection and concern and empathy with all people and his connection with children who were caught in poverty. Part of what he demonstrates is the possibility, part of what he demonstrated was the possibility of transformation, which is part of what we talk about in Buddhism when we talk about Buddha nature, that all beings have the quality of awakeness and the capacity to awaken. So Robert Kennedy started out his political career working with Senator Joseph McCarthy, who in the early 50s was part of the witch hunts, right wing witch hunts against supposed communists.

[05:52]

Robert Kennedy was famed as a tough guy, as Attorney General. But he there are many aspects of his transformation. So I want to read some things from some articles this week about his last campaign and some of what he said and some of what he did. So one article by A fellow who remembers him said he offered, during his campaign, he offered the opportunity to redeem the terrible slaying of his brother, President John Kennedy. As historian Evan Thomas has talked about, Robert Kennedy had his own ruthless side, as I mentioned. And Thomas described how Bobby Kennedy, as he was called, considered manufacturing an incident to justify an American invasion in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

[06:56]

So I'm going to come back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. But both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy really stopped a nuclear war that was very, very, probably the closest we've come since Hiroshima to a nuclear war. Some people think we may be close to that now, but the movie 13 Days, which includes Kevin Costner, I highly recommend. It shows what they did. And I'm going to talk more about that later. But Robert also supported his brother when John Kennedy changed his tactics and tried to reach rapprochement with Fidel Castro in the summer and autumn of 1963 and changed his approach to the Russians and to the Cold War after that. And I'll come back to that. during his campaign for the presidency in 1968 during the Vietnam War after President Lyndon Johnson said he would not run.

[08:06]

And you can see documentary footage of this. who and how Robert Kennedy was in that period, in that last period, the last few months was remarkable. One thing was that the Black Panthers were seen doing security at his big city rallies. Robert Kennedy traveled to the Mississippi Delta to learn more about poverty and to experience the extreme poverty of black people in the Mississippi Delta. He also went to, again, as I said, to the Central Valley Farms in California and worked with Cesar Chavez, who was a very inspirational figure. Working with class white people, though, also embraced Robert Kennedy as one of their own. He was Irish. His father was a bootlegger. So he had a close relationship with people in Appalachia.

[09:14]

Religious leaders welcomed him. He was a devout Catholic and fiercely ecumenical. He was so very religious. And he was determined to bring an end to the Vietnam War. In a divisive time, as we have now, a terrible time, he offered the possibility of healing. So he really talked about healing. And one thing that's memorable, he delivered an incredible oration in Indianapolis the night that Martin Luther King was killed. He announced it to the crowd where he was speaking and prevented riots in that city. And all through the country, there were riots when people were angry. Black people were angry when Martin Luther King was killed. Part of that, so I want to talk more about this. Part of that, Bobby quoted Aeschylus, who was a favorite of his. That night in the rally, he said, in quoting, he who learns must suffer.

[10:15]

And even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart. and in our own despair against our will comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God." So unquote. Even now it's hard to, this writer says, even now it is hard to grasp the loss of Martin Luther King or Medgar Evers or the four little girls who were killed in a bomb in Birmingham or Malcolm X or many other civil rights leaders. when there was a second Kennedy assassination. It seemed like the end of hope. So it was, 1968 was a really momentous time. I want to quote from

[11:18]

John Lewis, Congressman John Lewis from Georgia, who was one of the key supporters of Dr. Martin Luther King. He was on many of his nonviolent campaigns. He was brutally attacked in the march in Selma. And John Lewis spoke this week about Robert Kennedy talking about the speech in Indianapolis. He read from the speech that Kennedy gave, an unscripted plea for love, wisdom, justice, and compassion for black and white that he personally witnessed Kennedy give in Indianapolis on the night that Martin Luther King was shot.

[12:27]

It was very, very moving, John Lewis said. From time to time, you have what I call an executive session with yourself. I said to myself that evening, we still have Bobby. Two months later, he was gone. So Robert Kennedy was just 42 when he was shot and killed. After winning the Democratic primary in California in June of 68, 50 years ago this week, Lewis said, I remember I just started crying. The next day, I got up. traveled to Atlanta. I think I cried all the way from Los Angeles to Atlanta. It was a dark, dark period, but we would get better. And he decided after that to run for Congress. I kept thinking today, what could have been if Robert Kennedy hadn't been assassinated 50 years ago.

[13:40]

I think when he was assassinated, Something died in America. Something died in all of us who knew him, who worked with him. He was the embodiment of hopes and dreams of so many people. I think our country and the world community would have been much better if he had lived. We would have ended the war in Vietnam much earlier. We would have been a force in bringing together young people of the world. At that same event where John Lewis spoke, Congressman Joe Kennedy III of Massachusetts, who's the grandson of Robert Kennedy, said, in the shadows, in the background, in the quiet spaces that rarely sought or got attention.

[14:44]

Robert Kennedy found the arteries of our American heart. And he said to those forgotten, your country sees you. Your country values you. America would not be America without you. He held their hands. He knelt by their side. He shared their sorrows. And he lifted their spirits. He wasn't radical or revolutionary. He was human and willing to be vulnerable. It was his greatest gift. So I want to read from a speech that Robert Kennedy gave in South Africa. And it's kind of, I don't know, ironic, funny. This was a speech he gave two years to the day before he was killed. He went to South Africa. And it's like Martin Luther King, a year to the day before he was killed, gave the important speech about coming out against the war in Vietnam.

[15:56]

And his last year, Martin Luther King, spoke out against the war and against poverty and was killed on a poor people's campaign. But two years to the day before his assassination on June 6, 1966, then-Senator Robert Kennedy delivered a speech perhaps the greatest speech of his life, at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. How this came about is interesting. A young student leader there named Ian Robertson, who ran the National Union of South African Students, invited Kennedy to come for their day of affirmation, when members of all the multiracial group, which resisted the apartheid regime, which was very firmly in place then, where blacks and whites were not allowed to be together at all, were dedicated themselves to the ideals of freedom. This tradition started after the government banned non-white students from all universities in 1959.

[17:01]

South Africa, the government reluctantly allowed to grant Robert Kennedy a visa to the country. He was, after all, the brother of the slain President of the United States. And authorities only relented because they were worried about the optics of turning him away They had just expelled a New York Times reporter and did not allow any journalists to cover Kennedy's trip. Two weeks before Kennedy's arrival, the government banned Robertson, 21, the student who had invited him, from participating in public life at all for five years because it was activism. The student who had invited Kennedy to speak was forbidden to be in a room with more than one other person at a time. But Kennedy's speech, an empty chair, was left on stage as a symbol of his absence. It's too bad he can't be with us today, said Kennedy.

[18:03]

So he had an all-white audience. And this is what Kennedy said. And it's worth quoting some parts of this. And it's relevant to some things today. So Robert Kennedy said, the enlargement of liberty for individual human beings must be the supreme goal and the abiding practice of any Western society. The essential humanity of men can be protected and preserved only where government must answer not just to the wealthy, not just to those of a particular religion or a particular race, but to all its people. Then, you know, Kennedy opened with what this. misdirection. Kennedy said, I came here because of my deep interest and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-17th century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent, a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day, a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier, a land which has

[19:24]

tamed rich natural resources through the energetic applications of modern technology, a land which at once imported slaves and now must struggle to wipe away the last traces of that former bondage," he said in South Africa. Then he said, I refer, of course, to the United States of America. Then he said, we have passed laws prohibiting discrimination in education, in employment, in housing. But these laws alone cannot overcome the heritage of centuries of broken families, stunted children, and poverty, and degradation, and pain. So he talked about his own. background as a devout Catholic. For two centuries, my own country has struggled to overcome the self-imposed handicap of prejudice and discrimination based on nationality, social class, or race, discrimination profoundly repugnant to the theory and command of our Constitution.

[20:32]

Even as my father grew up in Boston, signs told him no Irish need apply. Two generations later, President Kennedy became the first Catholic to head the nation. But how many men of ability had, before 1961, been denied the opportunity to contribute to the nation's progress because they were Catholic or of Irish extraction? How many sons of Italian or Jewish or Polish parents slumbered in slums, untaught and unlearned, their potential lost forever to the nation and human race? Even today, what price we pay before we have assured full opportunity to millions of Negro Americans? Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must march towards increasing freedom, toward justice for all.

[21:39]

toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people in a world of immense and dizzying change. So the writer says the remarks were intended to give hope to political prisoners in South Africa and young people who dreamed of a brighter future. Kennedy met with Robertson, the student who had invited him, and who was not allowed to speak. So he met one-on-one in Robertson's apartment, the only arrangement allowed. Kennedy noted that his apartment was probably bugged and told him to stomp on the floor and turn on the faucet to interfere with listening devices placed by the government. When Robertson asked how he knew that, Kennedy replied, I used to be attorney general. So just a little bit more from the speech he gave in South Africa.

[22:50]

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us, and this seems very relevant now, each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of this generation. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a person stands up for an ideal or acts to approve the lot of others or strikes out against injustice, they send forth a tiny ripple of hope. and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance." So, obviously he was an impressive guy.

[23:53]

I want to go back to the Cuban Missile Crisis. At that time, and again, I highly recommend the movie 13 Days, at that time the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the military very much wanted to have war with Cuba and actually with Russia. Some of them wanted nuclear war. And they thought that the Kennedys were traitors for not allowing nuclear war. So there's a book about this called JFK and the Unspeakable by James Douglas, D-O-U-G-L-A-S-S. It's in our library, which has incredible detail on this. It's extremely well documented. So I just want to say there are significant questions about the murders of both John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy.

[25:03]

And I recommend that book. For information about that, I don't want to go into a lot of detail. If any of you are interested, I email me and I can send you more information, but about Robert Kennedy's murder the night when he won the California primary. Just a little bit, the coroner who examined Robert Kennedy's body made a critical finding that the powder residue pattern on the right ear of Senator Kennedy was caused at a muzzle distance of approximately one inch from behind him. No one saw Sirhan Sirhan, who was convicted of the murder, get closer than two feet, and no one ever saw him get behind Bobby's head. Also, the acoustic evidence showed clearly that there were 13 shots. There were no more than eight bullet holes in Sirhan's revolver.

[26:05]

So Sirhan was involved in some way, and there's questions about that. In the last couple of weeks, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for a new investigation of his father's death. He now is convinced that there was a second gunman, and his sister Kathleen Kennedy, who is the Lieutenant Governor of Maryland, has joined him, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend. That's just to say that. So if Robert Kennedy had not been killed, it's pretty clear that he would have been elected president instead of Richard Nixon.

[27:16]

Many things would be different. And I've thought of Robert Kennedy often and how things would be different, would have been different. And I also think of others who were killed from the 60s. We've talked about Martin Luther King, who was a great leader of nonviolent resistance to economic oppression and racial oppression. And I think of Malcolm. And I wonder, you know, towards the end of his life, he had gone to Mecca and was connecting with Muslims, Islamic people around the world. And I wonder if he had been able to live, been allowed to live, what he might have done to produce

[28:19]

changes in the way Islam is now. Perhaps a multi-ethnic, more peaceful, global Islam. He was a powerful person. And I'll add, even though he was killed 12 years later, John Lennon, who in 1969, a year later, sang Give Peace a Chance, What songs would he be writing now? Just imagine. So, there is loss that we remember on this day. And possibility, but remembering this and remembering

[29:22]

Robert Kennedy, also is to remember possibility. Or else I wouldn't talk about this. So I confess to being a dinosaur from the 60s. And the way things are now in the world and in our country is different. But I want to, in the context of remembering Robert Kennedy and those others, I want to express my own opinion, my own concerns about some of what's happening now and try to do that in the spirit of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy and Bodhisattva ethics to

[30:39]

care for all beings, to express kindness. So what we have now is endless wars. And President Eisenhower warned just before John Kennedy became president about the military industrial, and he was going to say congressional, complex. And we now have, it seems, control of our government by military power and weapons manufacturers and profiteers and this is basically bipartisan. Apart from whether or not there's been collusion by the current government with Russia, certainly we have bipartisan collusion with Saudi Arabia and its genocide against civilians in Yemen. Certainly we have bipartisan collusion with the state of Israel and its genocide against civilians in Gaza protesting non-violently. President Trump now claims the right to pardon himself to make himself above the law.

[31:48]

By the way, the only legal opinion about presidents pardoning themselves said that that was not legal constitution. That was given only a few days before President Nixon resigned. So, you know, we are in significant danger of a dictatorship and You know, we may feel helpless, but in the past, people going out on the streets have made a difference. There's also the, well, there's the, all these wars and the nuclear, nuclear weapons. There's also climate destruction, which has been created for profit knowingly by, fossil fuel companies like Exxon Mobil and our recent Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, so I'm naming names. And then the current Environmental Protection Agency or Environmental Poisoning Agency, which has turned over natural resources to polluters, for example, for just one example, the Grand Canyon, now there's a bill to turn that over to uranium miners.

[33:03]

And then there's the poverty in this country. Maybe the overall economy is looking good, but for there are people who are in poverty. This was what Robert Kennedy was intimately concerned with. This is what Martin Luther King's Poor People Campaign began, now being replicated. So just one quote about this. People in the West today now realize what they have in common in a culture based on possessions. Most Americans own relatively little. The last 30 years have seen the biggest transfer of wealth from one social class to another in human history. Currently, 1% of the population controls about 40% of the resources.

[34:07]

Then there's the What we saw this week of immigrant children being separated from their parents at the border. 20 to 40 people at a time in shackles are being sentenced to detention without being charged. That's happening on the border. Oregon Senator Merkley went to investigate how children are being treated there and was not allowed to enter or see that. That happened this last week. We have a new head of the CIA, Gina Haskell, who was personally in charge of torture at a black ops site and personally destroyed video evidence that had been subpoenaed. So I'm just calling out some of what's happening now. But in the spirit of what Robert Kennedy said in South Africa, all of us can take on some piece of a response

[35:20]

and sends out ripples that make a difference, and it feels like there's nothing we can do. And again, I'm expressing my own opinion about things that are happening, my own opinion about things happening now, and this isn't the position of Buddhism or whatever, but in the spirit of Bodhisattva ethics, I feel like I need to say this. and also in tribute to Robert Kennedy and what he might have done if he was allowed to be nominated and be elected. So we have the world that we have, but there are other possibilities, and change is always possible. So I've talked long enough. I would like to now welcome your responses, questions, other opinions, comments.

[36:23]

Please feel free. Yes, hi. I was in New York. I was a student at Columbia. I had been arrested in the uprising there. The school was on strike. Actually, the next day, I had been arrested a month before the occupation at Columbia at Dow Chemical Company. So Dow Chemical was recruiting at our university. And some of us went down to Dow Chemical Company to recruit their employees for the anti-war movement. So we sat in front of their offices in midtown Manhattan, and I think about 20 of us were arrested, including a couple of professors. One of my college English professors, who I'm still in touch with, was there.

[37:29]

The morning The day after Bobby Kennedy was killed, it turns out we had to appear in court. So our lawyer said to the judge, I forget exactly, but something like, these people are trying to, these young people, they're trying to make a difference. and the judges throughout the case. So Robert Kennedy had been the senator from New York and was very involved while he was senator with going into poor communities in New York, going to communities upstate, trying to work for change. So he was killed late at night in California. So I don't remember where I was exactly when I heard about it.

[38:32]

Maybe it was the next morning. I remember where I was when I heard about John Kennedy being killed. I was in a, I don't know, seventh or eighth grade classroom and they announced it over the class. over the loudspeaker and they stopped school and I went home and spent the next few days in front of the television. So do you remember 9-11? Where were you when you heard it? Yeah.

[39:42]

Well, that was the way that may have been for you, was the way John Kennedy and Peter Rock and Dr. King. Other comments or responses? Thank you for that. What's your name? Sarah. Sarah, hi. I'm Tiger. Thank you, yes, and maybe we don't have leaders

[42:02]

of their stature now, although maybe we do, but we certainly do have a lot of movements that are out there and that are, you know, maybe not getting the attention of the mass media, of course, but are working for change and that are actually, in spite of you know, what the government is actually sending out ripples, as Robert Kennedy said, that can make a difference. And our practice and the Bodhisattva precepts and this upright sitting are guidelines for how we can act skillfully and helpfully rather than harmfully, how we can try and increase harmony rather than harm, how we can find our own inner dignity to respond more helpfully to the world and also in our own lives.

[43:54]

This is not about some special fancy experience that we might have, but actually how to be in the world in a more helpful way. Any other comments or questions or responses? Yeah, we still have Barack Obama. There's many, many people of goodwill and yeah, there are possibilities. Yes, tell me your name again. Valerie? Valerie, yes. I just want to say something because I'm kind of intuitive. So since last year, like 2017, actually even in 2016 when British decided to exit out of European Union and then I saw the changes. And I'm originally from China, so China kind of close up to the other world, like between last year.

[45:05]

And you see Saudi Arabia is also making changes, opening up. I just feel like there might be like a 30-year cycle that every 30 years, things just change. Because I was born in 1989. So China opened up to their own country in 1992, but Soviet Union collapsed. And 30 years before that, I was like in 1960, that was what we were referring to. I just feel like they kind of work together. I don't know what is driving all the forces and I don't think, I don't know how things are shaping up, but it's just, I feel like everybody is being kind of minimal, like sad, just like they just don't know what's going to happen. And I don't know if it's a little bit of news, like I think two celebrities suicided this week. Yes. I just feel like everybody is in the mindset of, okay, Yeah, and thank you, along with 1968, 1989 was a tremendously important year.

[46:12]

And I want to just say something about that. Yes, so the Soviet Union collapsed. The Berlin Wall came down. Apartheid ended in South Africa, finally. So all of those things happened. The Soviet Union collapsing and the Berlin Wall coming down, for example, happened seemingly very, very suddenly. People who were experts on those issues wouldn't have expected it even a couple months before. And so change happens very suddenly after lots and lots and lots of work. So change is possible. Positive change, too. So, you know, again, as Robert Kennedy said about taking on some particular issue, some particular task, there are lots of organizations working on positive ways and to just connect and help.

[47:15]

We don't know how positive change can come about, but it's happened. I feel like this is a time that actually wake up a lot of people spiritually. Because even a year ago, I was just telling when I was walking, I was never able to meditate at all. Today I did it for the first time, I did 35 minutes of meditation, so I don't think I was into spiritual development. on their own, but now people just wake up. Okay, what's happening? Like, we didn't expect the world to shift in this way. Maybe we shouldn't change ourselves. Or it's complicated. So, yeah, Bodhisattva ideas, we change ourselves, and also Sangha is important, community. So, we change ourselves, and that relates to how we change the world.

[48:17]

So I hope you'll come back. Check out the schedule in front. Thank you to the people who are here for the first time. Thank you, Douglas, for giving meditation instruction. Please do this at home in your spare time. Do it regularly. And come back. You're now welcome to come to any of our events. So it's hard to do this. It seems hard to do this on your own. When we come together, we support each other. And that's how change happens. And it's personal, and it's also societal, and it's also communal. Yeah. I mean, one of the things, if you watch the documentaries about Robert Kennedy, he would actually, you know, talk to, you know, poor children in Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta and just, you know, get down and talk to them personally and touch them.

[49:21]

And, you know, he was really concerned about people. So we can find our own inner spirit this way. and we need to take care of ourselves and we need to take care of the world.

[49:33]

@Transcribed_v004
@Text_v005
@Score_89.75