Good morning. So, can you all hear me out there in Radioland? And can you all hear me back out here in Zendoland? Good. And they're not feeding back off each other. Well, it's a beautiful day outside. Maybe the heat wave is broken. And we are on the second day of our three-day session. And we're involved in an experiment. The experiment is a kind of hybrid session where there's a small group of people of the residents who are sitting in the Zendo. And there's a larger group of you sitting outside around. And everything that we do,

[01:02]

we have to figure out, oh, what happens now? Does Mary Beth ring the bells? Does Lori ring the bells? It all has to be thought about with patience and composure. And I think everybody is really doing their best at that. We've been having a good session. My topic for today, I already spoke about the three treasures or the three jewels earlier in the practice period. These are also known as the three refuges. The refuges being Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And I'd like to come back, circle around again today,

[02:05]

and speak about the Sangha jewel. But first, what I want to acknowledge is that today is Juneteenth. This is the first recognition as a federal holiday of a celebration that has taken place largely in the African-American community since 1865. So that's what, 155, 156 years ago. Is that right? So it was amazing how quickly and with surprising widespread support in the

[03:06]

Congress, who I often don't expect that to be the case. But it all went through with rapidity this week through the House of Representatives and the Senate, and then got to Biden's desk, and then it was law. And that, I just felt very encouraged by that. So the holiday itself, if you're not familiar with it, where it comes from, it celebrates the emancipation of former enslaved African people in the United States. And particularly, it references a declaration that was made

[04:09]

by General Gordon Granger on June 19, 1865. He made this in Galveston, Texas. This is two months after the Civil War had ended, but the reach of the federal government was to a place as distant as Texas was not so strong. And so enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation, which had taken place two years before, was rather weak. And he proclaimed the end of slavery in Texas. And the celebrations began the following year at church communities throughout Texas, African American churches. And it sort of surfaced more widely in the 1970s in African American communities

[05:19]

throughout major cities in the US, celebrating arts, celebrating freedom, and for those of you, there's quite a few of you who have sat Jun Seshin in other years here, and often on this weekend, we'd be sitting and we'd hear the music, particularly the beat of the drums and the top of the bass, because there was usually a bandstand set up on Adeline and Alcatraz. And I miss that. Maybe that's going to happen later today. I'm not sure. But it might not be appropriate still in this tentative environment of

[06:25]

the pandemic. But anyway, I wanted to celebrate. We celebrated here at Berkley Zen Center, and we are part of this wide community, this sangha that joins in the celebration. So I wanted to read you something that I found that Sojin had written, and it's about community and actually the context for this sangha that I'm speaking of. You could also view it as what Martin Luther King referred to as beloved community. So Sojin wrote, if someone were to ask me what would make me happy, I would say

[07:29]

sitting together with a diverse group of people from all corners of the world, even though because the world is more or less round, there are no real corners. We all belong to this great circular form, whirling in space. He says, ever since I can remember, I have been either thrilled or brought to tears experiencing people from diverse cultures or orientations working together in loving harmony. When we opened the Zen Do in 1967, I thought of it as a grassroots endeavor where people from around here could find a zazen practice that they could devote themselves to. And for however long or short a time, work for them. Over time, this vision has developed,

[08:38]

and little by little, a diverse group of members from all over the world have found their way here. We have folks from the deep Midwest, from USA to Afghanistan and Japan. And this was a little while ago that he spoke these words. And in the context of the pandemic, our sangha has continued to broaden. It's broadened in age, it broadened in diversity, it's broadened geographically. So if I look on screen right now, I see someone from Sacramento. I see someone from Los Angeles. I see someone from Santa Cruz. I see

[09:43]

someone from Colorado. I see someone from India. Often, we have friends from Europe sitting with us. We've created or we've facilitated, we haven't created, we've opened our resources in such a way that people can participate widely in a geographic sense. And we also have opened our resources so that people can go more deeply, can go as deep as they wish. And we're trying to work our way back to the kind of depth of practice that we've had for many years. So the idea of sangha has expanded for us. But I want to go back and talk about

[10:58]

kind of the history and then about what it means to me. And then maybe have some time for you to talk about what it means to you. The word sangha is a word that's found in many Indian languages from going far back, even pre-Buddhist. It literally means that which is well bound together. So you can view this as like a bundle of sticks that when bound together are incredibly strong and singly, they are easily broken. So the word existed in many spiritual communities

[12:04]

in early India, but it came to be the heart of the Buddhist way. The idea is that the Buddhist community is joined together. It's harmonious and it's unbreakable. It was put forth as kind of ideal community, again, resonating with Martin Luther King's concept of beloved community. In the Buddha's time, joining the sangha was really easy. People met the Buddha and if they wanted to become a bhikkhu or a bhikkhuni or a lay follower,

[13:05]

he would just say, come, come forward. And that was it. That's all the ritual that there was initially. But as it evolved and as other people were empowered to ordain people, there was more of a ritual to it, to join the formal sangha. So that's one of the definitions. One of the ways of looking at sangha is to look at it in that sort of historical, formal sense. And so you had technically a sangha of monks and a sangha of nuns. They were the part of the sangha that also included

[14:13]

what's called the Arya Sangha, which is the sangha of enlightened ones, of arhats, of actually of everyone who was on the path. And there were four stages. In the path seen as in the path to enlightenment. And if you were on the path, you were seen as part of the Arya Sangha. And they developed a complex ritual for ordination, which was witnessed by seniors, senior sangha members, and which took place within. Sangha existed within place. This is something that's very, I think, really relevant for us. That in order to ordain, you had to create,

[15:23]

you created what was called a sema, which was a boundary around the temple. And that sema was the location in which your ordination took place. Then you took it with you everywhere. But it took place somewhere. And to me, this is very important. This is what we were talking about when we recognize that we belong to a place. This is what we're talking about now. When we recognize that the place that we, that our temple is in, and the place that we live in, was formerly occupied by what we call the Ohlone peoples.

[16:29]

But the Ohlone peoples are only the latest historical historical name for indigenous peoples who've lived here from very, very early on. And when we look at a place, we look at the ancestors. We also look at the ancestral earth and the ancestral waters. In Berkeley, there are streams that run down from the mountains. Some of them have been covered over, but they persist. They're still there. These are part of our, these are our ancestors. And so, the role of the ancestors for us is, or should be very important.

[17:36]

Just as we value, as part of our ordination, part of our ordination process is actually taking our place in the lineage of ancestors. Some of whom we know, some of whom we don't know because their histories have been erased, particularly the women in the Zen tradition, but we would not be here without them. We owe a debt to the people who took care of this land for thousands of years. They did not willingly or freely give us this land. It was, it was taken from them,

[18:38]

usually against their will. In the same way that the laborers that built this country, which is also part of our extended sangha, were taken from peoples who were stolen from their own lands and who have never forgotten their lands. So this fits, I think, with a wider definition of sangha. The way I feel like I've come to learn it, and probably many of you have come to learn it, is that in a Mahayana sense, sangha was extended to the community of all practitioners. In more recent times, we talk about the sangha of all beings.

[19:45]

And I think in a lot of East Asian Buddhism, those beings include sentient and insentient. They include rocks, mountains, streams, oceans, and pastures, and forests. All of that is part of our mahasangha that we are responsible to. So, when I think broadly about sangha, I come back to a principle that sort of stands in contrast to some of the principles that we might see in religious traditions, including my own Jewish religion tradition, which refers to chosen people.

[20:53]

And I think that many cultural and religious traditions, sometimes their name for themselves are the people, as opposed to everyone else who are the non-people. But what I would say is that my vision of sangha is that all people are chosen. And concomitant with that, all lands are holy. There is no land that we can thoughtlessly ruin or pillage or steal from. So, to me, this is mahasangha in the widest view.

[21:58]

So, there are some principles to sangha that I would like to just lay out. They're not all-inclusive, but I think they're important. The first principle is friendship, supporting each other. And this is beyond conventional, what we might think of as conventional friendship, which involves like and dislike. It's friendship and connection, which is tantamount to maitri or metta, or in the Christian Greek rendering, agape. It's unconditional love, quite apart from like and dislike. It's the recognition of our connection.

[23:04]

The second principle of practice, of sangha, is practice. For us, it is the practice of zazen and its extension into the moment-by-moment activity of our life. So, it's the realization and the enactment of genjo koan, really the inquiry and question that we raise in our moment-to-moment life. And zazen is our way of, we explore that, we ground ourselves in it, so that we can actually carry that forward in a continuous way. The third principle is discipline. Discipline is living by the precepts or living by some order.

[24:18]

It's allowing ourselves to train. And training means really shifting our habitual perspectives to be in accord with right relationship. Relationship to things, relationship to others, and relationship to ourselves. The fourth principle is democracy. We look at the, at the, this context of which the Buddha was raised. He was raised in, in this North Indian federation that was highly democratic.

[25:26]

There were, you know, there were certainly rulers or kings, but decisions were arrived at in council with each other. And that, of course, was the model that he, that he brought forward in creating sangha himself. So it's a, it was a community that was based on equality. And, you know, I'm probably idealizing this a bit, but there are many examples within, within the, the Pali texts and within the, the Vinaya texts, within the suttas and within Vinaya that talk about really principles of governance.

[26:32]

Last night, Lori and I have been, we've been watching some of the films in the, the Burma Spring Benefit Film Festival, and we've watched a wonderful film called Padauk about, it's basically a, a film about a, the unfolding of the Burma, of the present coup in Burma and the resistance to it. And the great yearning, it's being led by young people, and the great yearning is for democracy and not for sham democracy. And it's incredibly moving to see in this documentary how you see young people who at last were seeing through the propaganda that they had been

[27:45]

barraged by from the military for, for years about other ethnic groups, about the Muslims, about the Rohingyas and seeing how they bought this and saying, no more. If we're going to be a country, it has to be based on democracy. It has to be based on respect for all people. That is also, that applies right here. That applies in the Zendo, in the community. The final principle is work. And that was, if I think to the model of, in Sri Lanka, that was developed by Dr. A.T. Aryaratne,

[28:52]

is he formed a huge network of village organizations, each self-managing, called Sarvodaya Tramadana. And it's about shared work. It's about the power of working together, of working side by side. So those are, those are the elements that I would underscore. So I want to take a breath here and just speak personally, but referencing something else that I watched last week. I watched a video by Thich Nhat Hanh that he gave in Plum Village in 2013. And the title was Sangha and the Beloved Community. And what he says is that

[30:00]

even from the time of being a child, he said, my dream was to be in Sangha. And he had a model for that. In Vietnam, there was a Sangha. It was strong, it was visible, and you could join it. You could be ordained and join the Sangha. And he did from a relatively early age. What I feel myself is that from very, very early days, I wanted to be in Sangha, although I had no name for it. And frankly, no model that I could see. So I remember the very day that we had, we began the uprising at Columbia University in 1968.

[31:18]

That day, a group of us had been meeting over lunch in the cafeteria, which was called the Lion's Den. And we were sitting around a table. We had no idea. This was not planned. This was not going to happen. This wasn't something in anyone's mind. But we were sitting around the table thinking, how would we like to live in the future? How could we develop communities where we could grow and learn and flourish and support each other in the widest way? And then fate comes knocking on the door. And a day later, I found myself living in the presence of the university's office for a week with 100 people. And so this is not quite what we had in

[32:25]

mind, but it's what we were given. And it was not fun, but it was alive. And those friendships persist to today. Actually, we're having a little gathering of people from my building that we occupied two weeks from now. Some people were out here. And from there, we created a printing collective, a communal living situation in San Francisco, where we worked and lived together. I've been in bands that have lived together. So there's a community and feel in community with a sangha of like-minded musician friends around the world and various other iterations. And then I came here. And when I came here,

[33:33]

I think what immediately drew me was the sense of community and the sense, as I've said and other people have said, of immediately recognizing that I had come home. And then, of course, asking myself, how could I know that? Well, let's test it. So I've been testing it for 37 years. I think it's home, you know. But the reason that I felt that way was just to be around the people who were there then. The only one that I see. Um, well, actually, so Ron was one. And Peter Overton was one. And I'm not sure there's anyone else from back in the day that I knew. But I looked at those people. They were models for me.

[34:41]

And they are still models for me. This was beloved community. Beloved community is not without conflict. Sangha is not without conflict. But it has principles for how to resolve and work in those conflicts without violence, without verbal violence, without physical violence. And now we're expanding. We're also looking, how do we, how do we conduct? How do we have Sangha without doing violence to history? Without doing violence to the memories of what took place in this land?

[35:44]

And I often feel that, and I think I've spoken of this, that I also carry the sense, a sense of community forward from the threads of my birth and my heritage. Uh, and they, they converge in me just as all the traditions of your lives converge in you. And this is what, this is, I think what Sojan was talking about. I just moved him greatly to, to recognize that people of so many different backgrounds had arrived at this practice. And they didn't shuck that background. They didn't dump it in the, you know, kind of the refuse bin of culture and history, but they actually, we, every person who comes

[36:50]

brings their history with us, with them. And it helps to expand this beloved community. Helps to enrich this Sangha. So I've longed for this all my life. And there are probably some psychological reasons why that's the case, but I feel so happy to have arrived at this and so grateful to be doing this with you. So many of us know each other so well, and we will know each other better. And we will know each other through our joys and our victories and our losses and our departures.

[37:59]

And we will see each other because we were in, we are in Sangha, we will see each other through, completely through. This is what Sojourn asks Suzuki Roshi, what is nirvana? And Suzuki Roshi said, seeing one thing through to the end. We see our life through to the end. We see our life in Sangha through to the end for ourselves, but also for every member here. And so we constantly weaving that fabric. And there's always an edge to it. It's an edge which we expand the fabric. So I'm going to stop here and allow for questions. If there are questions from inside the Zendo,

[39:07]

people here can raise your hands too. And I will repeat your question in case it can't be heard. So we're open for the moment. Okay, so Hozon will ask people in Zendo, anyone who online wants to please raise your digital hand, and I'll call on you. Or you can also put in the chat box. Looks like Judy has her hand up. Judy, do you want to ask your question? Thanks, Mary Beth. Hi, Hozon. Hi, everybody. Hozon, I'm grateful for your talk and the themes and also the invitation to explore. First of all, can you hear me okay? To explore the edge. And the edge that I want to explore is what happens when we see things a little differently.

[40:19]

And say you as the speaker have a certain intention. And I as the listener, feel a certain impact, which happened for me this morning, that I felt a real sting in my heart when I heard you reference the chosen people, you know, referring to the Jewish, the phrase in Hebrew. And that all people are chosen. And your experience of that, as I heard you, is not inclusive, contrasting with when you were speaking a few minutes later and talking about the Christian principle of agape as aligned with Buddhist principle or practice of metta. So I'm, you know, I'm working hard as I'm listening to you to stay in the room, to stay present.

[41:28]

And what came up for me was really the edge of I and we. So I as an individual, and also we, some of us might feel that we belong to different groups or multiple religious traditions, like myself, Jewish and Buddhist, or peoples, you know, ancestry, all this kind of stuff. And all of it shows up in the embodiment. So I'm wondering, you know, in this sense of respect for all peoples and really practicing together, how do you see that way of how do we and really having a difference that actually, you know, it lands in the body, but to stay present and to be able to speak, you know, as I'm trying to do right now, and trusting that you're hearing

[42:32]

in the sound of bodies is participating in this, to be able to really connect from these deep places which have an edge of not knowing, not assuming, either way. How do we do that? Because it seems to me when I think about home and the whole sense of belonging, there's a certain pain to that. You know, what's the edge of belonging? If it's going to be all people, then how do I leave room for I don't know? You know, I'm not actually sure. What I understand is that I said something that that was painful to you. And that I can understand. Although I'm not entirely clear about it, but I can sort of guess about it. I'd rather go to the specific

[43:34]

what happened because I got kind of lost in the larger, this larger question. I felt my mind get fuzzy. It was something very clear happening at the beginning. Yeah, I think what it is, is it's the pain of decontextualizing, you know, belonging to a group. So like, you know, I could bring in now my understanding of different, very contemporary voices on that whole thing, how the Hebrew is spun, how different congregations have actually changed it sometimes to say, chosen with all people, and have a whole, you know, trope on that, as well as struggling with the actual text, as we sometimes struggle with Buddhist texts, you know, how do we have, you know, or, or any of these texts. So I just want to stay with, how do I say to you, I have this big context that I hear being narrowed to a certain statement

[44:42]

that I now feel like I don't belong. And how do I say that to you, so that we can connect and have a larger sense of belonging to include our difference of view? Well, I feel like you've said it. And I hear it. And the next thing to do is to talk about the particularities. I really can't talk about it in the abstract. You know, and just to know, just so you know, and I'll say it publicly. I have an ongoing struggle with the Hebrew scriptures. I'm pretty educated in them. And I have an ongoing struggle, and I'm not shy

[45:47]

about saying that. And I don't exclude the fact that they're, they're very, they're complex, and they are, they're very rich. What I would assert, and I thought that I'd contextualize this by saying that you find this in many religious traditions. I was citing a particular one that grew out of my own experience. But the fact of the matter is that much of the trouble that we have in the world is because people identify themselves as the chosen people. So I see it differently, and I feel a pain in my heart, but I look forward to continuing. I'm really open to talking about this. Shalema, would you like to ask your question?

[47:00]

Greetings. Hi. Hi. I don't have a question. I just want to offer thanks. I was on for the mention of Juneteenth, being that I am a descendant of former slaves that actually knew my life. So that was important to hear that from you. And then I have an add-on to, you said that we owe a debt to the ancestors of this land, in my opinion, which doesn't really mean a whole lot sometimes. I think we owe many debts to the ancestors of this land. And then lastly, growing up in the South in the 50s, I didn't hear the word sangha, but community was definitely one thing that was alive and well in a very poor, poor place.

[48:11]

And I think we see that today where Georgia has, politically, a lot of the counties has moved from a red state, and Georgia is conservatively Republican, to a more blue state. And then lastly, I just want to, and I think this might tie into Dana, or is it Donna? Dana. So I had the pleasure of actually working with an elder who grew up in Natchez, Mississippi. And I asked her about 15 years ago, I said, how did we make it? How did African Americans make it? And she shared with me that we made it because we gave our first harvest away. And that first harvest could be collard greens, it could be peaches, it could be,

[49:15]

you know, potatoes or peanuts. And so I just want to, for me, if I could bring in the talk and let it land in my lap, and then give it back to you, as I just have, I just want to thank you for the offering. And thank you. And thank you, Sandra. Thank you. And one of the things that I remember, you know, I left for college in 1965. And I think it was really the first year that there was a relatively significant cohort of African American students. And almost all of them at that time were from the South. So almost all of them had had grown up with segregation. And almost all of them had grown up with a very tight sense of community.

[50:19]

And they had strengths to rely on that were remarkable. And when they came North, it was really, really hard. They were much more atomized. That community wasn't as available to them. But what struck me, what I learned from them, but I didn't learn it for 40 years. When we took over the buildings at Columbia, first building was taken over by African American students. And then SDS, mostly white, poured in. And they had a respectful relationship with the African American students. But after about 18 hours, the African American students asked the

[51:29]

white SDS people to leave. And they said, please go take your own building. And part of that was coming from the discipline, which is one of the elements that I mentioned of sangha, from coming from the discipline and the necessary discipline for survival in the South, the African American students were highly organized and they took care of their space. They didn't go writing graffiti all over the walls or trashing the building or anything like that. They were respectful of the space that they were in. And in many ways, we were not. And that did not come out until 2008, 40 years later, when we had a

[52:32]

reunion, a regathering of people who had participated in that event. And finally, the African American students had the honesty to tell us what they saw in us and how they had to take care of their own space. So this was an enormous lesson to me. And I've been thinking about ever since then, I've been thinking about place. How do we take care of the place that we're in? So thank you. Heiko. Thank you, Rozan. My question is about the beginning, middle and end of understanding. And in the beginning, we had religions that came from the ground and the earth and became Judaism and all different religions. In our practice, we had the, what we discussed at length yesterday,

[53:37]

the Indian Buddhist tradition. Since then, we have encountered Bodhidharma and Dogon and Khezan who have changed a lot of the doctrine in its presentation. And in fact, I think in some of its actuation. So today, you mentioned how you're troubled by the ancient Hebrew attitude, which was in the beginning. And in the middle, they began to adjust. And by now, we have Khezan following Dogon, I think, and the idea that some of the things that we attend to are no longer as valuable and in fact, need to be shed. So what is it about the ancient things that we are troubled by that we just don't let them go? That's my question. I hope everybody could hear. Could you hear that? Or do I need to repeat it? Yes. Okay. So the doctrine,

[54:48]

we're talking about living religion and living practice, which means it grows and breathes and changes. And that's true of every religious tradition. In Buddhism, just looking at the eastward journey of Buddhism, every culture it moves through, it changed. It absorbed parts of it and perhaps left some other parts behind or de-emphasized it. You know, that's true of us. It's not like it's just begun here. But we have already a hybrid of religious consciousness

[55:53]

that we carry with us from other religions that people have brought here. And I think it behooves us to learn those traditions. And we find creative ways to bring those in. So it's really important not to be fundamentalist and not to be originalists, not to think that the original is the right way. You know, like these so-called strict constructionists of the constitution. Strict construction is not actually the spirit of the constitution. But we find is people have that tendency to lock down. So how do we open and listen?

[57:00]

How do we learn? How do we learn from each other? How do we learn from each other's traditions and find the ways that they resonate with core principles that we have inherited in Buddhism, but that those principles are breathing as well? Would you say that's forgiveness, facing truth and forgiveness, letting go and dropping or something else? I don't exactly know how to apply those words. I'm not sure who we would be forgiving. And I'm not sure what you're referring to as forgiving. Well, if I could say so, I would say forgiving that we are attached to the ideas that are no longer presently active or worthy. That's the forgiveness. And we get those from ancestors, but we don't always get them from older. No, you can get them now. Yeah. More to me accepting than forgiving. Forgiving this opens a big door for me.

[58:12]

There's a lot of questions about that, which I don't want to get into. Maybe one more. Ajayan, do you want to unmute yourself and ask your question, please? Yes, you're audible. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. Hossan, you have a talk about the democracy. I'm sorry, your connection is your connection is not good. Could you could you write your question? Is it audible now? Better. Yeah. You have a given talk, the five principles of

[59:20]

the Sangha. So the fourth principle you are talking about the democracy in the early Indian. And there had been practiced the democracy, especially the Sangha, the principles of governance. So my question is that when we look at the early Indian histories, especially Vinaya, we can find the eight Gurudhammas, the eight additional rules. So democracy is some way emphasizes the equality, equality for all. But the eight Gurudhammas, it is anti-democratic. It denies the equality. So is it constructed, it came up the time of the Buddha, after the Buddha, it has been appeared in the Sangha. So it is my doubt.

[60:21]

So what I understand the question to be, when the Buddha admitted women into the Sangha, there were eight Gurudhammas that were placed on top of the precepts. And they basically mandated, they were the mandates of male supremacy, basically. Correct? And how does that square with democracy? It doesn't. It just doesn't. And whether it was the sutras and parts of Vinaya, which were fundamentally oral teachings initially, were not

[61:28]

written down until probably three or 400 years after the Buddha. And in those years, it was enough time for the men to get back in charge of things. And so whether that is an original teaching of Buddhism, I have serious doubts. The problem there is that the Vinaya became concretized, the sutras became concretized. And we don't have, there are no, scholars do not have very good ways of discerning the layers,

[62:32]

the layers of composition, when something was written. And I think that, you know, in all cases in India, in the United States, we have principles of democracy. Some of them are quite beautiful, but we don't live them. And so we have to keep working at that. But I'm glad that I'm not, I am, we're not in a tradition. I'm not in a tradition in this, in this Zen tradition that, that recognizes the Gurudanmas. I don't think I would be willing to be part of that. And there are some radical Theravada monks who are really challenging that,

[63:40]

but it's really hard because there's, there's a whole institutional superstructure that is defending it. So we have to do our best. So I think that's where I'm going to end for today. And we'll see you tomorrow and look forward to continuing this day of sitting.

[64:06]

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