Good morning. As I was walking in, from this seat, you can take in the whole world, take in this whole room, take in the community, the world that surrounds it, but actually, Every one of us does that from our seat. We see things through our own eyes and we see the entirety of our interdependent world. As I was walking in, you come up the back stairs, you get a view into the next door neighbor's yard, which is a wilderness of blackberry vines and old tires and pieces of cars that used to be on the road. And then you look over in the fence and you see our righteously orderly space.

[01:06]

So that's one view. Those are the dimensions of our world in the context of nature and in the context of our human nature. And then I look around in the room and I see Laura sitting over there, Laura Burgess. Is Megan here? Megan is here, Megan's daughter. And Laura is gonna be doing a workshop, is it today? On Zen and 12-step. And this is another dimension to me, I'd like to encourage you to participate in that. It's another dimension of how each of us as individuals takes responsibility for our whole world, but does it together, doesn't do it alone. And so that's what I want to talk about today is Sangha. I want to begin with Suzuki Roshi, or thoughts about Suzuki Roshi, and then tell you where I'm coming from, because it's slightly complicated.

[02:20]

Looking in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, I found this quotation Suzuki Roshi said, we can develop... No, I'm sorry, this is from a lecture, from an uncollected lecture, I think. We can develop Dogen's practice in Zen Center in group practice like this. And this was sitting together, I think, in Sashin. Our practice is individual practice. At the same time, it is group practice. And our practice is hermit-like practice. And at the same time, our practice can be practiced in this modern world. That's the true meaning of to settle oneself on self, you know. Even though you're in this modern society, you should not lose your fresh experience moment after moment. We should not be caught, or we should know the fresh vitality within ourselves. So it's within ourselves as individuals And then I went and spoke to Sojin yesterday and asked him, what did he teach about Sangha?

[03:34]

And you can correct me if I'm misremembering or I took a few notes. And what Sojin Roshi said was that Sojin Roshi said that Sangha was the most important of the three treasures for us. And I think this relates to a place in time as well, that it relates to Zen Center in the time of the late 60s, early 70s, which was a very interesting, vital, tumultuous time. And what about Suzuki Roshan, that we're interested in Buddha and Dharma, but what we really need to develop was our awareness of Sangha. And so that was why Suzuki Roshi put such a strong emphasis on daily practice together, that this is something we do together.

[04:39]

We come to the zendo and we sit together as much as we can, given the constraints of our lives, but that doing this together develops the energy of Sangha, develops in subtle and steady ways as we do it over the years, this sense of interdependence, that we're co-creating a place that we call Berkeley Zen Center, we're co-creating Berkeley, we're co-creating America and the world. So, I think in the context of time, What's interesting is that, well, some of us remember the 60s, and we had all, there was so much ability to connect in community. We had so much energy and youth and vitality, but we tended to go off in kind of individualistic directions.

[05:40]

And now, as at least some of us are getting long in the tooth, What does that mean, actually? Does anyone know what that means? What does it mean? Okay, so one was rodents, two was horses, and three, which seems really accurate, gums are receding. Anyway you cut it, some of us are getting older and actually what we find is we are still interested in Buddha and Dharma, but we feel the compelling energy to have community, to extend our family from this kind of isolated place that we have. So that's... something that I understand has been handed down to us, these perspectives handed down to us from Suzuki Roshi through Sojin Roshi to each of us who tries to embody this Berkeley Zen Center practice.

[06:49]

So in my personal life, or my individual life, two things of significance, I think, have come up in the last month and a half. The first was I was invited to be the vice abbot of Berkley Zen Center. Not the co-abbot, the vice abbot, which is sort of like I don't know, the Dick Cheney metaphor is not really that comfortable to me in any respect. But what it really means to me is to take responsibility in a clear way and to identify responsibility for weaving together community, for helping us practice together, not for doing anything to people but for being with people so that we can practice together effectively and so that we can trust that our practice is going to continue into the future even though we really don't know.

[07:56]

It may all go away very very quickly, but it also may continue for 100 years. I hope so, because it's precious. So that comes also at a time, you'll hear more about this later from Carol, I think, we're celebrating 40 years of practice with Sojin Roshi here at Berkeley Zen Center. And so it seems an auspicious moment in that respect. So that's one significant thing. The other is that I've just returned and I'm still experiencing jet lag from about nine or 10 days in Taiwan. And I was there for a meeting of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists which I attended very steadily through the 90s and then I hadn't been to in eight years or so and in my heart and now kind of

[09:13]

brought back to life for me, I feel like that's my other, that's kind of the other key Sangha in my life. These are Buddhist activists from, in this case, we had people from 15 countries, mostly Buddhist countries, very few Westerners, practicing together, studying together, discussing both our individual social circumstances, oppression, violence, war, various kinds of deprivation, and from another side, from some of our countries, from America, from Taiwan, from Japan, from Australia and Korea, wealth and abundance. So it was a very rich kind of dialogue. So anyway, what I'm trying to do in the course of the next little while here is see how these fit together as seen through a lens of Sangha, and then hopefully we'll have some time for discussion.

[10:34]

for each of us who was there, just as for each of us who practices here. All of what we experience in the world comes to this one. As Suzuki Roshi said, our practice is individual practice and at the same time it is group practice. And our effort individually and our effort as a community is to how to keep this fresh vitality within ourselves. And I saw a lot of freshness. And I also saw things that troubled me. So what we, let me just tell you very sketchily, I actually thought about showing slides, but I decided no, that's like a travelogue and I'm not going to do that. But hopefully we'll have some opportunity to do that because I'd just like you to see, I'd like you to see mainly the faces.

[11:45]

of the people in INEP, International Network of Engaged Buddhists, mostly young, beautiful, full of life, really dedicated to practice in somewhat variety of traditions, but I think in terms that we can all understand. And each of them trying to build Sangha and community in their context, because that's what they need. So we had a conference for three days at a Buddhist college in Taiwan, kind of in the countryside, run by nuns, by very wonderful, very energetic nuns. named Venerable Chau Hue, who was maybe in her late 40s, early 50s. And I should say that the nuns kind of run the show in Taiwan, which is maybe different than almost any place else in the world.

[12:49]

And in most cases, they're not figureheads. You know, they're not kind of the implementers for these big guys who are kind of behind the scenes or taking the credit. They're actually largely running things. And because of the structure of that society, the Buddhist monastics are somewhere between 80 to 90 percent women and a very small percentage men. And I think that has something to do with the fact that the pressures on men in that society the pressure to succeed, the pressure to go into business, all of these things, the pressure to sustain your family, your multi-generational family is so intense that they don't have a lot of opportunity to opt out. Whereas this is a place where I think, in a sense, the social

[13:54]

configuration which could be seen as certainly not fully validating women works in their favor. They have a little more freedom and a little more mobility actually to drop out and to drop into monastic life, into that life of community which they really enjoy. with each other, the communication and flow among the women in Sangha is very impressive. It's very joyous, it's energetic, a little, you know, it's a little raucous and a little rough, but it's wonderful to see. It's not this kind of, you know, energy that you would get from the men in monastic circumstances where You know, it's like stiff upper lip, stiff lower lip.

[14:57]

And there's a freedom in the women working together that's really encouraging. And we can learn a lot from that, I think. So we had a conference for about three days discussing issues and also learning about the circumstances in various countries, particularly focusing on countries like Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Burma, Tibet, and India, where the circumstances of Buddhists are one where either they're experiencing great oppression and or they're caught in various kinds of civil strife and war. So just to create a space where people can speak what their situation is and for us to hear it connects us.

[16:04]

And then each morning to meditate together, to eat together, to do work together, cleaning the grounds, that forges a new kind of Sangha. So that was really wonderful. One of the sponsors of this conference was a very prestigious academic. And as is the wont of people with prestige, he set up an exposure tour. And the exposure tour that we went on was four days on a bus. And that was the best part. Actually, I'm going to talk about that. You know, it's like there's a metaphor there. To be on the bus, you know, it's like we're all on the bus together in a very horizontal way, and it was fun. And by the second day, well, what Dr. Yeo, this guy, set up was a tour of all the big mountains, all the big Buddhist institutions in Taiwan, four of the five biggest ones, and when I say big,

[17:19]

You know, probably most of you, maybe a couple of you have some idea, but you can hardly imagine. Has anyone been to Shilai outside of LA? The Shilai Temple, you know of that? That was, you've been there? Shilai was the place where the nuns gave Al Gore $50,000, you remember that? So, Shilai is the American branch of one of these organizations, Foguangshan, or Buddhist Light Improvement Association, I think it's called. And it's enormous. Shilai is enormous. The institutions that we went to were physically enormous. You know, there are millions of people running around, monastics and lay people doing a lot of the work. It was very tedious. You know, this is a Buddhist culture, Taiwan.

[18:25]

Even more a Buddhist culture than we're a Christian culture, so it's not surprising they have institutions. But these institutions, if we're using the metaphor of a bus, which is very intimate and, you know, you go down the road and think of Ken Kesey's bus further, you know. These are like the Queen Mary or something, you know. And where the monastics are the crew. And then you had, and the lay people are the passengers. And they're just vast and impersonal seeming, and the operative word I think is seeming. To us they were impersonal because what we were being shown was the institutional face of Buddhism. It's not that they were truly impersonal, that I can't say, because what we were shown, it's like we didn't sit down with the monastics and have tea and chat or work together.

[19:29]

Uh, we were- we actually in a couple of places said, okay, line up two by two, you know, and it's like, oh, elementary school. And we were, you know, it's like, we were very bad, you know. It's like we would line up and then we immediately kind of scatter around. And they would try to march us through, here's the Buddha Hall, and here's the Dharma Hall, and here's our television station, and here's our dining hall. I have pictures of the dining hall. We had a breakfast at Fo Guang Shan. It was like 3,000 people in the hall. It was incredible. But it was very nice, actually. It was impersonal and personal at the same time. a quite nutritious plate of vegetables, rice, pickles, and soup. Sort of like, you know, a slightly revised oreoki served to us directly by somebody, picked up, and we were all eating together in silence.

[20:35]

It was vast, but actually I really enjoyed that. But after four days of these things, so we went to Fokhongshan Tzu Chi, which is the largest of these organizations. In Tzu Chi, where we went was to the, what is it, the Buddhist Tzu Chi General Hospital. in Taipei. It's enormous and beautiful and really good hospital. And Tzu Chi, this Buddhist organization, runs the largest private health care system, delivery system in the world. That's what I was told anyway. It's really big. They have like 10 hospitals in Taipei. And they're so big that this is slightly embarrassing. They sent volunteers to New Orleans after Katrina, which actually is great.

[21:37]

I don't know what our government sent, but that's the kind of capability that they have. After about two days of the four days of this, I realized they'd march us around these institutions, and I just was looking forward to being back on the bus with my friends, where we could really, where we could talk about what we had experienced, where we could compare the experience of what we were seeing and what our respective understanding of Dharma was and what our experience is in our own countries with this. It was a very rich dialogue and very different. I should say I've been on a lot of exposure trips for AINAB all through the 90s.

[22:40]

I used to go almost every year. Went to the Burma border and to Northeast Thailand, to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, and the kinds of experiences that we had there was, you know, kind of tramping through the jungle in the monsoon, having leeches land on your leg, and a couple of people got malaria. Somebody fell into the trench toilet latrine once. It was not good. sleeping on slab floors without even a blanket, which is how the monks and practitioners slept. Ah, not easy. We stayed in a five-star hotel. I've never stayed in such a fancy hotel. And there was a different kind of, I don't want to frame it as suffering because it wasn't so hard, but a different kind of dislocation and different kind of notion of practice than what we have.

[23:44]

One place that we went in the city of Taichung, beautiful, interesting place called the International Bodhisattva Sangha. It was very modernistic with a very high kind of aesthetic that was very appealing, very kind of Zen taken to the nth degree. And they chanted, we chanted, we ate together. And the monk who was a Chinese-American, very interesting guy, I think he went to UC San Diego, very educated, very articulate. And they'd shown us everything but the meditation hall. And I said, oh, could I see the meditation hall? And he said, well, we don't have a meditation hall. Because they don't meditate. And this is not so unusual. The main kind of practice that's manifest in Taiwan is essentially pure land practice.

[24:57]

It's a devotional practice related to the Jodo, Jodo Shinshu schools in Japan and here, in the various pure land schools in China, but it's very highly developed. So, think about that dynamic. It has a lot of resemblances to Christianity. And the way that these practices manifest in the world, the institutions that we saw were very involved in social welfare, which was like charity. And what you know to overstate the case and I'm glad Eric's not here because he would for sure contradict me but to overstate the case in these devotional schools there's a certain calling for the Buddhas to help oneself.

[25:58]

Now it is there's a Mahayana of course there's a Mahayana aspect to it we do by sitting down together in this room every day. There is something different that we did among the various participants at AINAB by sitting down together every morning and meditating. And this is how we forge Sangha. And I think that in a That's what the Buddha meant by Sangha. While meditation was just one of the practices, the whole practice was framed, the whole shape of Buddhasasana, Buddha practice meaning becoming Buddha, was to

[27:01]

meditate, to work together, to do things together, and to forge a transformative energy among ourselves by effort, by concentration. as well as by practicing generosity and sila. All of these elements, and we're going to be talking about them, these bodhisattva practices during aspects of practice that come up, they create the heat and binding energy for Sangha. And that's what I kept feeling as I was traveling about and as I was looking at these young friends from INEB and their yearning and not hearing very much as we went about Taiwan.

[28:07]

When I talked a couple days ago, I talked to my friend Hung Shih from the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery. Some of you know him. He's a Chan monk and was a disciple of Master Wa from City of 10,000 Buddhas. And he said, oh yeah, what they do, Pure Land practice is a lot, it's karma yoga. It's activism. It's practice as activism. or a social welfare activism, which is very important, very good. And it's on a scale that's really helping society, helping those who are downtrodden in society. But it doesn't exactly transform the base of society. And you can see that. I've never, the first two days I spent in Taiwan, I was by myself because I wanted to have some unfiltered experience of the country and the level of consumerism that I saw in the cities was in some sense beyond what we see here, particularly among the youth.

[29:21]

So what's interesting is that Buddhism as I saw it was not, it was promulgating wholesome values and yet it was leaving certain things unchallenged, certain tendencies in the countryside unchallenged. I didn't see anybody who, any of these places where they had an environmental movement or awareness, and yet the cities are choked with pollution, really polluted. So it's a real conundrum. And my hope for the future doesn't lie in places like Taiwan, even though I worry about kind of the unfolding nature of consumerism in Taiwan, in China, as it's emerging in places like India.

[30:28]

It may be a somewhat unstoppable force. But my hope is in communities like the one that we have here, the ones that I saw my friends in AINEB trying to create. And I don't quite know how to reckon with this because I'm not exactly as small as beautiful kind of guy. We have a mass society. So the real question to my mind is, how do we work dynamically to build small, intimate practice, intimate community, sangha, that is really interconnected, where we're involved in each other's lives, not entangled in each other's lives, but involved in each other's lives, and yet connected to our larger societies?

[31:32]

This is a real, it's a real conundrum. It's a real difficult question. And it intrigues me. And I think it's the, I've been working for many years at Buddhist Peace Fellowship in the area of called engaged Buddhism or socially engaged Buddhism. And I think it's the fundamental question. It's like, how do we really seed the idea of enlightened society within something that often seems out of control and in certain respects is out of our control. And yet as humans we have the potentiality for control. This is what the Buddha taught. This is what Suzuki Roshi taught when he said you be the boss of you. You know which also means each of us as individuals and together, has to take complete responsibility for our world.

[32:41]

I think of, I don't quite have the quotation, but the drift of it from Kobinchino Roshi, who came to practice with Suzuki Roshi, that this task is so overwhelming that naturally we sit down. we sit down together. We don't sit down, if we sit down in our own corner of our own house, sometimes that's what we can do, but we can get isolated, we can fall into despair. If we sit down together, we can understand what it is to savor and enjoy the silence to reflect, to reflect on every state of mind, everything that comes up in our body and mind, to understand to the bottom its impermanence, and to let go into each moment.

[33:57]

what Suzuki Roshi means. Even though you're in this modern society, you should not lose, you know, your fresh experience moment after moment. This is really possible for us. Finally, I just want to say very briefly what inspired me most. and then leave time for discussion. What inspired me most at INEB, and this has been a growing contact for the last few years, was encountering a community of people, ex-Untouchable, or Dalit people from India, who were brought Buddhism, which had faded out very largely in India, not entirely, but largely.

[35:04]

They were brought by this kind of social revolutionary and visionary Dr. Ambedkar, who was the author of the Indian Constitution, who was both a collaborator and then perhaps an opponent of Gandhi. Think that's safe to say? Originally the former and then, well anyway. And he, he had a, he took refuge along with several million people, I think in 1956. And then he died about three weeks later. But his movement continues and in one hand it continues as a pretty hard-edged political movement and yet within that there are people who are really taking up the practice, particularly younger people, really taking up Buddhist practice and trying to create

[36:16]

Sanghas, trying to create communities out of a potentiality of, really there's several, I think something like a fifth to a third of the population of India is in the scheduled castes, is that something like that? A fifth maybe, they said two to 300 million. A lot of people, potential. So what I felt contacting these people was this is maybe where the real future of Buddhism lay. People who understand the nature of oppression and who are trying to transform their karmic situation, not seeing karma as fate, which is really the drift of the caste system, but to see karma through a Buddhist eye as the opportunity for transformation and to see that the way to do this is by practicing as Sangha, by practicing together.

[37:26]

So I was really inspired by this and my intention over the next few years is to try to develop some dialogue and some exchange back and forth between India and here, where we can learn from them. We have a lot to learn from these particular practitioners about how to reckon with oppression, how to, we, some of us are responsible for unconscious kinds of oppression in our own way, some of us are simultaneously or alternately the objects of that oppression. How do we understand that in dharmic terms and how do we form community even within the complexity of our cultures?

[38:28]

So we have something to learn from they keep asking, they want to know how we practice. The people that I met with, they all had Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, the book, not just the attitude. And they said, oh, it would be really wonderful if we could learn your practice. So this is a way in which we can forge links of sangha across thousands of miles, across cultures and ages, learn from where the practice came, which is India, and repay or return that gift in some transfigured way through our own bodies and practice. I think I'm going to stop there. It's kind of a lot, but I'll leave. We have a few minutes for questions or comments, and the floor is open. Paul. Yes, that was one of the places we went to, Dharmadrum.

[39:37]

That was actually the place they made us line up two by two. They do have a meditation hall. No, they do. Out of all the places, that's the most Chan. Yeah, that's the most meditative. Evidently, he's very ill. Yeah, he's on like dialysis three or four times a week, so it's very unfortunate. So we're not able to see him, but I have great appreciation for him and his teachings. I was there. Sojourner was there, Lori was there, maybe some of you, the others were there. Yeah, he's a wonderful teacher. Thank you for bringing together this complex aspects of the consumerism of the outside world and Sangha and practicing together in our individual practices. And it feels that while you were wrestling with those in Taiwan, it feels like a very lively subject here in our collective consciousness in the Sangha.

[40:41]

In the teaching session we managed to wrestle with this whole subject of renunciation. It's also a subject that's been very much on people's minds around the 40th anniversary. How do we honor each of our contributions in this hanga without feeling like there's a right way? I think that's right, and I think it's also a question here in the West of how do we sustain a practice place like this in, you know, maybe one of the most expensive places to live. That means money. So this is the tension. I forgot one thing, which you just read. You were studying the Tenzo Kyokun.

[41:43]

I can't tell you how amazing the food was there. And it was all vegetarian food. They have this whole thing about kind of mock meat, you know, imitation. Everything is like, you know, you have chicken that tastes like, you know, vegetarian chicken tastes like chicken. The last night we had a banquet, we had a lot of banquets, with some dish that had like imitation shrimp and squid that tasted like shrimp. I was like, how do they do this? But I kept thinking, this is how we got through these kind of grueling 16-hour days, because they served us good food. But I kept thinking, I don't think this is what Dogen was talking about. But I was very grateful. We received it gratefully. There's no, with no disparagement of the careful food that we have here, which is not over the top. But we live within an economically driven reality.

[42:50]

And how do we keep that in a human, in a human scale, keep our relationships clean in the midst of that? So thank you for raising that. Oh yeah, so that was interesting. That's one of the movements. So I don't know, when the Buddha finally caved to Ananda and allowed women to join the order and created a nun's order. What he said was yes, and the women have to observe these eight special rules, Guru Dhamma, I think they're called. And basically what they mean is that a nun or a woman, monk, and I won't say nun even, of any seniority is junior, has to bow to a monk of even one day seniority.

[43:55]

And it goes on like that. And these were formulated, and we can discuss this a lot out, within the midst of a fairly strong patriarchal culture. And also they were formulated, I think, to some extent for the protection of the nuns and for protection of the monks, but still, in the modern day, they don't seem appropriate. And yet, most monastic orders have got hung up on this, even where they're giving full ordination to women. And Venerable Chao Wei just said, nope, this is not gonna be in our ordination anymore. And that, that feels right to me. You know, it's like, When the Buddha died, he told Ananda, Ananda said, which of the precepts should we keep? And the Buddha said, just keep the major ones. And Ananda said, oh, okay, and then went away.

[44:58]

But he forgot to ask which ones they were. So they decided afterwards, we're going to keep them all. This is not appropriate for our age. We need to keep the precepts and keep a mind of precepts. We hold the precepts differently than they do in a full monastic situation, but we have to reckon with what the conditions of our modern life are. And so, to me, Venerable Chow Wei doing this, and I saw no, everything, just relations between monks and nuns, very respectful, very clear and clean. And this seems like the right call. Maybe one or two more. You said you were in this devotional environment, not less of a meditation environment, and yet you sat every day. We sat. The locals didn't? Well, actually at At the Buddhist Tang Shi college, it's interesting, we sat and the nuns, I don't know, the women monastics there, I don't know if they meditated as a college for the most part.

[46:09]

They did Tai Chi and things like that, but we actually sat. We had a room and we sat up and we sat together. This was unusual because every other place that I've been, at INEB over the years, we actually sat together with people, with the local people. So it was a bit different. One more. So they had to sit down to collect themselves.

[47:28]

Right. But having done so, then they then they can. Yeah. That's a really good place to end. Thank you very much. Namo Buddhaya.

[47:49]

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