Good morning, everyone, and welcome. So this is Thanksgiving weekend, and I want to talk about Thanksgiving first as a, well, I think of it as a Buddhist holiday or a spiritual holiday, but I also then want to talk about it as part of American history. So from the point of view of Spiritual practice, well, this is a traditional time of harvest and of Thanksgiving going back in many cultures. And just the word Thanksgiving brings up the practices of gratitude and generosity. So generosity is one of the, actually the first of the traditional bodhisattva practices, the practices of awakening beings. Just generosity, giving, as a helpful practice.

[01:06]

So we have many specific practices that we intentionally work on as ways of bringing meditative awareness into our everyday activity. Generosity is the first. There are others, patience and skillful means, meditation itself, insider wisdom, effort, commitment. But generosity is very important and it comes out of gratitude actually. So this is a time of year when we often think about what it is that we have to be grateful for. And each of us, no matter what difficulties we have in our own life and in the world around us, has much to be grateful for and to think about this and to appreciate our life and the wonderful opportunities we have

[02:11]

to be alive and to express gratitude and respect for that which we benefit from. And then to pass that along, to share, to be generous, to try and give to others. from that which we benefit from. So I want to talk today, personally, first about what I'm grateful for. So in one week and a month, it will be 10 years since I moved to Chicago from the San Francisco Bay Area. So I'm really grateful to be living in Chicago. And I'm really grateful for this Sangha, for this community, and for this little storefront space to practice together in.

[03:19]

This is a wonderful Sangha, a wonderful community. For those of you who are relatively new to it, or brand new to it, for those who are here for the first time this morning, wonderful, wonderful people. talented, bright, caring people, many people in this Sangha. And you're all part of that, even if you're here for the first time. So I'm really, really grateful to be in this big city and to have all these wonderful people to practice with. So thank you all. This is a great joy to me. That's what I came to Chicago for and didn't, you know, and here it is. So this is, so having trained in this tradition for many, many, many years, it's really a great joy for me to be sharing this practice together with others.

[04:26]

So I could stop there, but there's a lot more I want to say. So in the last, just the last couple months or so, there's some other things I'm personally grateful for. So I'm going to be a little self-indulgent. So I'm very grateful that Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for Literature. He's been a hero of mine for as long as I can remember, and I loved it that the Nobel Committee talked about him, compared him to Homer, and, you know, I think Dylan has been a great storyteller and great bard, and when I gave a talk about it right after, it didn't get recorded, but You know, I read every grain of sand and ring them bells, and Masters of War, and anyway. So, just the way he tells stories is something that's been very inspiring to me, and I've often quoted him in Dharma talks.

[05:41]

And I had sort of thought about the Nobel Prize for Literature for years, along with friends of mine who are Dolan fans, like Stephen Hine, another Dogen scholar who comes and talks here. And we'd sort of given up that that would ever happen. I was in Albuquerque when they announced it at our affiliate sangha. Anyway, so that was kind of cool. And then, after 108 years, the Cubs won the World Series. Wow. Okay, I'll confess that I wasn't hoping for the Cubs to win the World Series for all 108 of those years. Actually, even further, I'll confess that that Cubs are, you know, and some of you don't care about baseball, but, you know, indulge me, that, you know, I mean, it was a wonderful postseason, and the Cubs went, won.

[06:46]

It was amazing. But the Cubs aren't even my first baseball team. It's my third team. Yeah, I'm confessing this. I grew up a Pirates fan, and then I was a Giants fan for a long time. Are you from Pittsburgh, too? Well, and Game 7 of this last World Series was the best, I mean, the most amazing game since my hero, Bill Mazeroski, hit a home run to win the Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. So, do you remember that? I was young. I was watching it on television in black and white. Yeah, so anyway, so this is my third team in my fourth city, Chicago. Fifth if you count the two years I spent in Kyoto. Anyway, but yeah, it was so cool that the Cubs won the World Series after 108 years, so I'm grateful for that.

[07:46]

Then there was the election. And I'm not grateful for that. So now we have this opportunity to how do we practice in the midst of so many people are feeling afraid. And this is a challenge for us. an opportunity for practice. How do we pay attention to our world? So our practices, you know, for people who are here doing Zazen for the first time, our practice is both personal and communal. You know, we practice together with everyone. You know, no matter, regardless of how you voted or didn't vote in the election, there are people who, immigrants and minorities, who feel afraid of what will happen after the next government is in.

[09:08]

And that brings me to the next part of what I want to talk about. So, you know, Thanksgiving, gratitude and generosity. How do we practice? One of our precepts is to benefit all beings. One of our chants is, we say, may all beings be happy. So how do we include all beings in our practice, in our sitting? Actually, that's the reality. that we are in communion with all beings when we do this practice of sitting upright. We may try and build walls to keep certain people out. We may try and face the wall as a way of ignoring certain parts of our life. But that doesn't really work. We can manage to do it for a while. But when we commune with our breathing, when we are willing to enjoy our inhale and exhale, our whole life is there.

[10:16]

Everything is there. Our whole world, the whole universe is part of what is sitting on our seat here now. And part of the wonder and joy and part of what I'm grateful for of our practice of Zazen is that we can be here with all of reality. But you can face all of reality with care, with kindness. So that brings me to Thanksgiving. And there's much more to say about gratitude and generosity. And in whatever time we have for discussion afterwards, one of the things that I invite you all to do is to, each of you say, any of you who want, say what you are grateful for.

[11:17]

This is a traditional part of Thanksgiving, to express what we're grateful for, to come together, to gather with families. And actually, the American holiday of Thanksgiving officially was introduced by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. And it was introduced as exactly that, as a time for families to get together at that terrible time, difficult time, as this is a difficult time, for families to get together, to celebrate together, to mourn the dead, and to be grateful for the living. That was the beginning of the American holiday of Thanksgiving formally. But sometime after that, this became somehow it was interpreted as a holiday about the pilgrims and Plymouth Rock.

[12:18]

And I grew up with that story, so again, from a personal perspective, as a child I spent most of my summers, all of my summers on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, and we used to visit Plymouth and Plymouth Rock. And so I knew about this story about the pilgrims that was, when I was growing up, part of what was, and still I think part of what is told as the beginning of the American holiday of Thanksgiving. But to Native American people, the holiday of Thanksgiving and the United States of America is about a history of genocide. So Thanksgiving is a day of mourning. A terrible day for Native American people. Many of our presidents, some of our presidents anyway, were elected because they were successful at massacring Native peoples.

[13:40]

William Henry Harrison and Andrew Jackson are two examples, but there were others. So the story about the pilgrims at Plymouth Rock, the story that's told is that there was, and I've read new versions of what actually happened, but there was a Native American named Squanto was one of his names who helped the pilgrims. It turns out the pilgrims were, there had been Europeans who had come to that part of the colonies before 1620 and traded, but then were evicted by the Native peoples. The pilgrims at Plymouth were able to stay because some kind of smallpox or other viral infection had wiped out the Native peoples in that area, so there was open ground for them to stay.

[14:46]

But they stayed and eventually wiped out the Native peoples in that area. And there were terrible things that happened going all the way back. So the history of the United States is a history of broken treaties and of massacres and trails of tears. It's just there, so for Native Americans, this is, the United States is a genocidal regime. That's how they put it. And there are stories going back to colonial times. Jeffrey Amherst, who has a college named after him, sent blankets that had been the blankets of smallpox victims to a tribe in western Massachusetts or western New York intentionally to wipe them out, for example.

[15:54]

So at the same time that we can recognize the practices of gratitude and generosity, this history is something that we should know about. There's a book about this, it's called An Indigenous People's History of the United States by an historian named Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, if you're interested in looking this up. So this is, you know, and it's just a long, long, long history of Native peoples all over this country. On our altar, an incense holder that I got when I was visiting our affiliate sangha in New Mexico, Kezan Titus O'Brien, who's one of our priests, is now co-leading a sangha, a valley dragon sangha in Albuquerque, and the many native peoples in New Mexico.

[17:15]

the Pueblo, but near there, there are the Dine Navajo, the Apache are in southern New Mexico. One of the different Pueblo peoples, the Jemez Pueblo, where I visited with Titus a couple years ago, the incense holder we have is from that Pueblo. They managed to drive out the Spanish in, I think, 1670 for about 50 years. So that's on an altar. And then there's the Great Plains people, the Sioux or Lakota people, and the Cheyenne, and all the herds of buffalo that were wiped out in the 1870s. And Ishin Artenzo brought back, there's a rock in front of Bodhidharma, who's the figure to my left of the altar.

[18:21]

Buddha sits in the center, and we all sit like Buddha in our own way. Sitting like Buddha to find Buddha in our own body. But the standing figure to my left is Bodhidharma, who was the Indian master who came to China and is considered the founder of Chan or Zen. But there's a little rock, those of you back there maybe can't see it, but do you know what kind of rock it is? Is it quartz? Do you know? Granite, maybe it's granite, yeah. Anyway, that was brought back from the Badlands and is part of the rock that's been blasted away near Mount Rushmore. So Mount Rushmore is, who is it, Teddy Roosevelt? who was a great conservationist amongst other things. And Washington and Jefferson and, who's the fourth?

[19:23]

Lincoln, Lincoln of course. But nearby there's this strange Romanian sculptor who started building, I guess it's his son now who's working on it? Many sons. Building this large, large statue of Crazy Horse. who was a great Lakota Sioux warrior who was one of the people who won the Battle of the Little Bighorn against George Custer. Anyway, so that piece of granite on our altar is part of what was blasted away, this rock blasted away to build, so in honor of Crazy Horse. And this land, Chicago. Chicago's a Native American name. What does it mean? Who knows? Yeah, both. Smells like onions. And we have at least one person in our sangha who's descended at least in part from Potawatomi people.

[20:30]

So anyway. So, you know, and Buddhism is an earth religion. We sit on the ground. And the Buddha, when he awakened, when he had his great awakening, he continued to awaken every day thereafter and continued sitting and practicing. But when he was challenged by the spirit of temptation by Mara, how can you be a Buddha? He touched the ground. And the earth, and some versions say the earth goddess arose and said, yes, this is a Buddha. And there's a great tradition of planting trees in Buddhism, too. So we sit on the ground. We honor the ground. We honor the earth. And not just Native Americans, but indigenous people all over the world honor the earth and protect the earth and have deep relationships with the earth and care for the earth.

[21:40]

And not to over romanticize, you know, wars between indigenous people and between Native American people. But anyway, this is, in the history of Buddhism. So when it moved from India to Tibet, to China, to Korea, to Japan, to South Asia, in various Buddhist countries, Buddhism interfaced and integrated with the native indigenous, sometimes shamanic traditions. And this is part of what Buddhism needs to do and is doing in this land. How do we feel this land? So this temple is called Ancient Dragon Zen Gate. And the Dragon Gate goes back to a place in China in one of the rivers...

[22:51]

Douglas, do you remember which river it is? The Yalu River that is a very deep river, and somewhere in that river there's this dragon gate, and when fish swim through it, they become dragons. And there's a little image to my right of the altar of that, that is found in Chicago, Chinatown. I don't know. I don't know for sure, but I'd like to think maybe there's a Dragon Gate in Lake Michigan. So here we are. Yes, Aisha? Have you seen Dragon Gates elsewhere or heard of them? Well, no. I've seen the Dragon Gate down the Chicago River. It's the one that the fish swim through. They become something else. Well, that's a different kind of game. Anyway. So I also want to say that this attempted genocide, because it wasn't successful.

[23:59]

There are still Native peoples in this land. And there's still Native culture in this land. And there's still Native spiritual traditions, Native people doing spiritual traditions in this land. But the attempted genocide is still happening. now this month. So I've talked about what's going on in Standing Rock, North Dakota. But for those who don't know, the Standing Rock Sioux Dakota and Lakota people have had an encampment since last summer trying to block the Dakota Access Pipeline, it's called. It's a pipeline of fracking oil, which is very dirty oil. It's a pipeline that a lot of it is built. It's going from fracking oil on North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa, into Illinois.

[25:06]

A lot of it is built. There was resistance in Iowa, too, by farmers whose land was taken by eminent domain, even though it's for a private pipeline. Anyway, there's a huge encampment at Standing Rock, North Dakota, of Native peoples. All seven of the Sioux people, for the first time since the Battle of the Little Bighorn, are together, but also Native peoples from, there are thousands of Native people from all over the United States and Canada and some from South America even, and from Alaska, encamped there trying to block this pipeline. And originally their concern, they call themselves water protectors, and their concern is that this pipeline, they're trying to build it underneath the Missouri River.

[26:08]

And these pipelines often have spills. So a couple of us, a few of us in the room, were at a demonstration about this a couple weeks ago downtown. And it's very likely that this fracking oil, which is highly toxic, would enter into the Missouri River and be poisonous to people downstream. Originally it was supposed to go through just upriver from Bismarck, North Dakota, which is one of the larger cities there. But the people of Bismarck said no way, and so they moved it to go right through the Standing Rock Reservation. And the Standing Rock people said no, and they pointed out some of their sacred spaces. Burial grounds, and then the next day, this happened September 3rd, the Dakota Access Pipeline security people bulldozed that sacred ground and that burial ground and brutally attacked the Standing Rock people who were trying to block them with dogs and with pepper spray.

[27:23]

So this is going on. And so there are a National Guard and police from six states there now, very heavily militarized. helicopters, with dogs, with armored military personnel carriers spraying. So last Sunday there was an attack on the Native peoples there, and Native peoples and other allies, and there was a and a group of 500 clergy including, I don't know, a dozen or so Zen priests and clergy a week or so, a couple weeks ago, standing to protect them. There have been various non-native allies going there. Jane Fonda was there Thanksgiving Day.

[28:25]

Robert Redford has been there. Mark Ruffalo. But anyway, last Sunday there was a very brutal attack. One woman from New York had her arm mangled. Various people were brutally attacked with significant wounds. Wendy Johnson, who's a teacher at Green Gulch Farm, which is part of San Francisco's Zen Center, and in many ways my home temple, was there a couple weeks ago. And she was there Thanksgiving Day. I saw yesterday a video from Shailene Woodley, who's an actress from the Diversion film. I haven't seen it, but anyway, some of you may have. And Wendy Johnson was on the video, long video.

[29:30]

They have the Army Corps of Engineers under the direction of President Obama had ordered that the pipeline not go through a couple weeks ago, but the pipeline company went and started, kept building the pipeline anyway. Now they've announced that next Sunday there will be another assault and they will try to invade the whole camp. And there's thousands of people there. So part of what, so these Native people, so this is again part of this history that is celebrated on Thanksgiving, as far as the Native American people are concerned, of attempted genocide. and often genocide. Right at the, about a hundred years ago, right at the site where the Standing Rock encampment is now, there was a massacre of women and children.

[30:37]

So next Sunday there will be another attack. But one of the things that Shailene Woodley and Wendy Johnson talked about in this video I saw was about anger. And this is relevant to so much now and the fears that many people have about what will happen in the next administration. And I'll note that this is happening now under President Obama. You know, in the early 60s, during the civil rights movement, when the Freedom Riders and the lunch, you know, and the school integration was happening, there were attacks against civil rights workers. And President Kennedy sent troops in to protect the civil rights workers who were being attacked.

[31:48]

Instead, now, these militarized police have announced they're going to attack. However, as I started to say, Shailene Woodley and Wendy also mentioned that, you know, the point isn't to be angry, or the point is to use the anger, to transmute the anger, as they said, that it's not about the particular police that we all need water. And the point of this encampment and of protecting this water is that we all need water to live. And the police need water, and they've been talking to the police about them needing water too. And at least a couple of policemen have stopped working with the police and have come and joined the encampment. So if we feel anger about anything that is happening in the world, we need to turn that to love, to kindness, to resolve, to commitment.

[33:05]

do we protect people who were threatened, whether it's immigrants threatened with deportation, whether it's people threatened by our climate, by the climate damage that's happening, whether it's water protectors. So one of the things that the Standing Rock encampment people have asked is that people around the country today, this Sunday, pray for the benefit of the Standing Rock encampment. One of the ways we do that in our tradition is through chanting. And one of the chants that we do is called the Enmei Juku Ken'ongyo. So if you would get out your chant books, please.

[34:17]

This is the short, it's called the Short Sutra for Protecting Life. What page is this on? Page 26, thank you. So we don't hear any bells, David. We'll just chant, I'll hit the mokugyo. It's called the Kanzayon, so just follow along. And we'll do it 33 times, which is traditional. Kanzeon or kanon is the bodhisattva of compassion who listens to the sounds of the world. So this is for protecting life and for protecting the Standing Rock encampment. So please just follow along with the chant. It's in Sino-Japanese. No bells. I'll just announce it and then we'll just chant together. and magic who can on your hands a on puts it on puts it on puts it on

[35:27]

I am. yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah FAN ZE YON AH PUH PUH TUY OH PUH TUY OH PUH TUY NEN PUH POH SOH NEN CHO RAKU GA CHO CHO NEN FAN ZE YON POH NEN FAN ZE YON

[36:46]

I'm saying, I'm saying, Namo buddhaya buddhaya. I say, I say, I say, I'm going to say,

[38:01]

NEN NEN TU SHIN GYI NEN NEN FU RI SHIN KHAN ZE YON NA BU BU TSU YO BU TSU U YIN YO BU TSU NEN BU PO SO NEN GYO RAKU GA GYO CHO NEN KHAN ZE YON PO NEN KHAN ZE YON NEN NEN TU SHIN GYI NEN NEN FU RI SHIN KHAN ZE YON NA BU BU TSU YO BU TSU U YIN YO BU TSU So, I'm going to do a little bit of meditation. so so so and and and

[39:47]

So, so, so. then furishin kanze onamu butsuyo butsuwin yo butsuwen kupo sojo rakupa jojo then kanze onamu butsuyo butsuwin yo butsuwen kupo sojo rakupa jojo then kanze onamu butsuyo butsuwin yo butsuwin Cho-rak-ga-cho-cho-den-kan-ze-yon-bo-den-kan-ze-yon.

[41:24]

Den-den-ju-shin-ki-den-den-fu-ri-shin-kan-ze-yon. Na-bu-bu-tsu-yo-bu-tsu-bu-yo-bu-tsu-bu-en-bu-bo-so. Cho-rak-ga-cho-cho-den-kan-ze-yon-bo-den-kan-ze-yon. I'm going to say, So I'm the the the

[42:30]

so and [...] so ah [...] So, so, so, so. I'm going to do it.

[44:17]

Shakyamuni Buddha Shakyamuni I'm going to do it again. I'm going to do the same thing on the other side. May all the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas protect

[45:38]

our brothers and sisters at Standing Rock, and all the water through this world, and water as life and beings as life. So thank you all. We've run a little over time, but still, if anyone has anything you want to say, things that you are grateful for on this Thanksgiving, or any comments about anything else that we've said, that I've said, please feel free. Good.

[47:11]

Yeah. We struggle with our families. Well, many of us. Thank you. I'm grateful for having been hooded by this scholarship. Hmm. Yeah. Yes, the world gives us wake-up calls. Chris. Go ahead. I'm grateful for every life, especially in this case.

[48:31]

I'm grateful that what's being done is going to be supported this time, and it's going to allow us, like I said, it's going to bring them. Thank you. This kind of chanting is powerful. It changes the quality of the air. Aisha?

[49:33]

I'm grateful for Uber. Otherwise, my husband, who's been out of work for a year, would have no way to feel productive. Yeah. We all need to find some way to feel productive. Sometimes it's difficult. And yet there are so many things to do. And this world is challenging, and I think will become more so. Any last comments, anyone? Okay, thank you all very much.

[50:37]

I'm grateful that you're here.

[50:38]

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