So, on this joyous, auspicious occasion, I want to talk about the Buddha work and how we are doing the Buddha work here now. So, in his instructions to the Tenzo, the head cook, in Dogen's Pure Standards for the Zen Community, his instructions on Sangha life. He starts by saying, from the beginning in Buddha's family, there have been six temple administrators. They are all Buddha's children, and together they carry out Buddha's work. Then he particularly talks about the Tenzo, or chief cook. But he makes it clear, as in his instructions and in his talks, that he's not just talking about particular positions in the temple, that actually just by being here, all of us are doing Buddha's work.

[01:20]

So this is a wonderful occasion to inaugurate this space into the life of Zazen. And many, many, many people, many of you here and others, made this possible. And I want to thank Lindsay particularly, our realtor who found us this space. Thank you, Lindsay. And I wanted to talk about the temple administrators and the other positions that we have, because this is something that we're all doing together here, all of us and everyone, by bringing your Zazen presence here tonight. But we do have these forms, even for this humble little storefront temple. So we have this traditional six temple administrators. So Nancy is our director. Kathy is our assistant director.

[02:22]

Yoshi is our Ino, in charge of the meditation hall. Hogetsu is our Tenzo. And the kitchen's not quite ready yet, but already we have had refreshments served, so thank you. David is our treasurer, and Dawn is our work leader. So thank you all. So particularly, Dogen talks about the six temple administrators. and how they're doing Buddha's work. But there are many, many more. And he talks about many different positions. And so we're developing, we're proliferating many positions as we open up this space to Zazen, because we realize that we need many people to make this possible. So Moro, who's over in the corner there, and Adam, who's our Don tonight, are also on the board along with Nancy and Kathy and David and Dawn. The six temple administrators I mentioned are on the practice council along with Kevin, who's our head dawan and website manager.

[03:31]

So many people come to us through Kevin's work on the website. And we also have a staff of dawans, I call it, the people who take care of hitting the bells and announcing the chants. And that's an expanding group. along with Kevin, Adam, and Nathan, and Deborah's going to be, and Mauro, and David, and Christy's going to be, and anyway, when we're leaving out Dawn, and Doug will be doing that. And then we also started having greeters who will welcome people into our space and try and take care of the situation of being right here, out in the storefront, right out on Irving Park. Let's see, John and Naomi and Deborah and Christy also are going to be doing Doan. So, you know, I want to try and, we sometimes have been going around saying everybody's name, and I thought tonight I would try and see if I could get a lot of you in.

[04:37]

But anyway, thank you to everyone. So this Buddha's work, I want to talk about what that means, and Dogen talks about that. Part of my being happy tonight is for 15 years I've been leading Zen groups and after every event we put away these laboratons. We're not going to do that tonight. So this is fun. Well, there'll be other work to do. So we're going to have much work to do here to make this work. But this is all of us together. So, specifically, how this works, this Buddha work, has to do with what Dogen calls three minds. And he talks about this particularly in terms of the Tenzo position, the chief cook who feeds the assembly.

[05:39]

And he's writing this about, a monastic community, but actually, I think all of this applies maybe even more to, you know, a storefront on Chicago. So how is it that we make this practice available? How is it that we all help each other to find our own way to do the Buddha work? So he talks about three minds. And they are, just to say all three of them, joyful mind, nurturing mind, and magnanimous mind. So he says that all who do Buddha's work should maintain joyful mind, nurturing mind, and magnanimous mind. And he says, what I call joyful mind is the happy heart. So when we say, may all beings be happy, that includes us as well.

[06:40]

and includes extending that to our engagement in the Buddha work. So he says, you must reflect that if you were born in some heaven, you would cling to ceaseless bliss and not give rise to a way-seeking mind. This would not be conducive to practice. What's more, how could you prepare food to offer to the Three Jewels? Talking about the Tenzo. Among the 10,000 dharmas, the most honored are the three jewels, this Buddha, this Buddha work, this dharma, this teaching of reality, and the Sangha, all of us coming together. So one of Dogen's sources from China, Zen En Chinggi, says, respected by society, though peacefully apart, the Sangha is most pure and unfabricated. Now I have the fortune to be born a human being and prepare food or help support The Three Jewels. Is this not a great karmic affinity?

[07:43]

You must be very happy about this. And he also says about the joyful heart, you should engage in and carry out this work with the vow to include 1,000 or 10,000 lives in one day or one time. This will allow you to unite with these virtuous karmic causes for 10 million lives. The mind that has fully contemplated such fortune is joyful mind. So what we're trying to do here on Irving Park is something that goes beyond this particular time and place. And yet, of course, here we are right out on the street in the storefront. And this is an opportunity for each of you, for all of us coming here tonight for the first time. But in our regular schedule that we'll be developing. See the website for the full schedule.

[08:43]

We'll be here Wednesday morning too. This is an opportunity to come and engage Joyful Heart, to see amidst all the difficulties of our own lives and of the world we're in, and I'm gonna talk about that too, but Joyful Heart is available. And then the next one, he says, is nurturing mind. Literally, it's grandmotherly heart or mind. As for what is called nurturing mind, it is the mind of mothers and fathers. For example, it's considering the three treasures as a mother and father. Think of their only child. Even impoverished, destitute people firmly love and raise an only child. What kind of determination is this? Parents earnestly consider their child's growth without concern for their own wealth or poverty. They do not care if they're cold or hot, but give their child covering or shade. In parents' thoughtfulness, there is this intensity. People who have aroused this mind comprehend it well.

[09:45]

Therefore, watch over water and over grain." So talking to Ben Cook, but each detail of how we take care of the cushions, how we take care of cleaning the Zanda, which we're going to have to learn, how we take care of the space of our Our temple, this temple belongs to all of you, all of us. This is nurturing mind, nourishing mind, to see the cushions and the chairs and the little pieces of dust as our children that we're taking care of. And of course, the new people who come in to welcome everyone, to make this practice available, this practice of really seeing ourselves. And then, as for what is called magnanimous mind, which is literally great mind, daishi, which Chohaku and I translated this as magnanimous mind. This mind is like the great mountains or like the great ocean.

[10:46]

It's not biased or contentious mind. Carrying half a pound, do not take it lightly. Lifting 40 pounds should not seem heavy. Although drawn by the voices of spring, do not wander over spring meadows. Viewing the fall colors do not allow your heart to fall. The four seasons cooperate in a single scene. Regard light and heavy with a single eye. On this single occasion, please write the word great. Please know the word great. You must know this word great, this magnanimous heart." So these three minds, I translated this text of Dogen's when I was living in Kyoto in the early 90s together with Shohaku Okamura, now in Bloomington, Indiana, and his community is called the Sanxing community, Three Minds community, or Three Hearts community, after these Three Hearts. So these are very important for us in seeing how to take care of the Buddha's work. And so I wanted to say something about those, these Three Minds on this joyous occasion, on this auspicious occasion.

[11:53]

So again, just to find our own enjoyment in taking on our practice as Sangha together here on Irving Park, but also in the way you extend zazen heart-mind into the rest of your life, and to find ways to be nurturing to yourself and those around you, and the physical cushions and so forth that support us. And then magnanimous mind, go beyond contention to find a way of working together. So all of this, in this opening of this center tonight, again, it's very auspicious timing. It just happened that this was when the space was ready, but of course, this is also Inauguration Eve, a very auspicious time indeed. And it's also, today's the day we celebrate Martin Luther King, so I wanted to talk about Dr. King some.

[12:58]

And just personally, tomorrow's my, I think it's 34th anniversary of my first Zazen instruction, of doing daily Zazen. So all of this, and then here we have this new Zen demo. So I watched a little bit of the pre-inaugural, inaugural or the festivities in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Wow, it's just amazing. So some of you are old enough like me to remember when African-Americans had separate facilities and were not allowed to come in and sit in the lunch counters in the South, and even in places in the North. And Martin Luther King, when he came to try and work in Chicago, said it was much more difficult than doing the work he was doing in the South. Just the fact that as of tomorrow, whenever it is, noon, one, whenever he takes that oath, we as Americans have an African-American president.

[14:11]

It's amazing. It changes the air we breathe. It really does. And especially it changes how the rest of the world sees us. So this is really an auspicious time, a hopeful time, and a challenging time. new time for new beginnings, new hopes. And of course, we know that there are huge, huge problems in the world. There's a lot of work that as good as I think President Obama will be, as smart as he is and as cool and calm as he is, it's going to be difficult for him. And it's going to be difficult for all of us. And this world is in a lot of trouble. And yet, here we are, and we're making available this practice on a storefront in northern Chicago. So, in challenging times, spiritual practice is more important. It's always important, actually. But this is a good time to be doing Buddha's work.

[15:12]

Very auspicious time. And I wanted to talk about Dr. King a little bit. And some of you are old enough to remember, and some of you not, who Martin Luther King was, not the sanitized version. So they talk about the I Have a Dream speech, and he did have a dream, and that dream still inspires us. But I was looking at some of the other things this week, some of the other things he said and what he did, He said, our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. So Dr. King was an adamant proponent of nonviolence, but he wasn't passive. The night before he was killed in Memphis, April 68, he said that humanity has the choice, nonviolence or nonexistence. So this is close to our heart as Buddhists.

[16:14]

How do we find a way to First of all, just to see what is nonviolence, how do we approach our lives and the world and our working together and doing this Buddha's work with joyful and nurturing and magnanimous mind with this spirit of nonviolence. So Dr. King was much more than just a civil rights leader. And maybe you all know this, but it's hard to find out if you just watch the mainstream media. He was very much against the war in Vietnam. The year before he was killed, a year to the day, on April 4, 1967, he spoke at the Riverside Church in New York City, just up the street from where I moved to several months later. He supposed the Vietnam War when it was not yet popular to oppose the Vietnam War. There were lots of people who had. Muhammad Ali was ahead of Dr. King in this. Dr. King said a lot of important things, and they're relevant today.

[17:21]

Still, he said, now in Vietnam, the war in Vietnam is a symptom of a malady in the American spirit. And I would say the war in Iraq is a symptom and a cause of such a malady in our spirit today, too. Still, he also said that the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, speaking in 1967, is my own government. So that has been the case today, I would say, in terms of sales of weapons of mass destructions, invasions, occupations, massive attacks on civilians in Iraq and elsewhere, and massive torture program, which is now generally acknowledged. So there's a lot of work to do. President Obama will need a lot of help, and there's a lot to do. It's going to be more than just a matter of closing Guantanamo, which he's pledged to do. How do we restore human rights? So in April 67 at the Riverside Church, Dr. King said, we need a revolution of values.

[18:23]

He said we must shift from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented society. And as of tomorrow, President Obama has said we must change our mindset. We must change the mindset that led to the Iraq invasion, and changing our mindset is exactly what this work of practice and this Buddha work is about. So how do we find our way to express this nurturing and joyful and magnanimous mind with this spirit of truth and nonviolence? How do we help ourselves and each other change our mindset? How do we face the wall and see our own habits of greed and anger and confusion and breathe into that and acknowledge that with joyful mind and nurturing mind for ourselves as well as all beings. And this magnanimous mind, this forgiving mind.

[19:32]

We need to forgive ourselves for being human beings. We need to see the malady in our national spirit, which we're part of, and the tendency towards violence instead of nonviolence. So there's a lot of work to do changing our mindset. And Dr. King also spoke not only about African-Americans' rights, but he spoke about all workers' rights and against economic violence. This was an important part of what he did. He died working for sanitation workers in Memphis. So I wanted to read some excerpts from his Nobel Peace Prize Award lecture in 1964. And some of it is very relevant to our enterprise of doing Buddha's work. He said, there's nothing new about poverty. What is new, however, is that we have the resources to get rid of it. Why should there be hunger and privation in any land, in any city, at any table, when man has the resources and the scientific know-how to provide all mankind with basic necessities of life?

[20:42]

And I think this is so even in our time of climate emergency. He said, there's no deficit in human resources. The deficit is in human will. The well-off and the secure have too often become indifferent and oblivious to the poverty and deprivation in their midst. So here we are trying to express human will as we do the Buddha work right out here on Irving Park, right on, you know, having a storefront is the perfect opportunity for Buddha practice now and for Buddha work. So Dr. King also said, ultimately, a great nation is a compassionate nation, No individual or nation can be great if it does not have a concern for the least of these. So this is magnanimous heart that Dogen talked about. And the next part sounds especially Buddhist. He said, in the final analysis, the rich does not ignore the poor because both rich and poor are tied in a single garment of destiny.

[21:52]

All life is interrelated. All people are interdependent. The agony of the poor diminishes the rich. the salvation of the poor enlarges the rich. We are inevitably our brother's keeper because of the interrelated structure of reality. This is a very deep, basic Bodhisattva teaching, that we are interrelated, that we are all connected. So, to me, one of the most important teachings for our time is part of the Eightfold Path, which includes things like Right Effort and Right Action and Right View, but one of them is Right Livelihood. So Dr. King said in August 1967, we must develop a program that will drive the nation to a guaranteed annual income. And I would say Right Livelihood, finding a way to Contribute, joyful mind, and magnanimous mind, and great mind, in this time, in this economy, is a great challenge.

[23:02]

I would say that there's a basic right to health care, and people have talked about a right to a living wage. There should also be a right to do creative, productive, fulfilling work. This is a great challenge in any time. But here, 45 years after Dr. King, We've had an economy in collapse due to greed and deregulation and so forth and unemployment that's affecting many people in our Sangha. And so it's a great challenge for all of us, for President Obama, but for all of us. How do we find a way to, for our Sangha and for our temple and for each of us, engage in right livelihood, to do the Buddha's work in a way that is helpful, that's supportive to our own livelihood and supportive to positive values, to values of caring and nurturing mind. So, how do we change our mindset?

[24:10]

How do we find this way to do the ongoing work of moving towards sanity, decency, and caring. So this has a lot to do with what we're doing, setting up this temple here tonight. And it has a lot to do with the ideal of Sangha that goes all the way back 2,400, whatever scholars are debating, but anyway, 2,400 or so years to northern India, Buddha, when he established his order of monks and nuns, was establishing a kind of counterculture, an alternative to the mundane world, the thing-based world. He was trying to set up a people-oriented world, or society, or group. So this Buddhist order, which evolved through different countries and cultures, now we think of Sangha not just as monks and nuns, but all of us.

[25:12]

It has worked through history as an alternative to move humanity in a positive direction toward awareness and caring, even though our karmic legacy moves quite slowly. So the fellowship of practitioners or Sangha established by the Buddha has often functioned since as a radical contrast to existing social conventions and conditioning. The Buddhist order, despite its varying relationships and accommodations to the ruling powers throughout Asian history, has offered an alternative or counterculture to the status quo of societies based on exploitation or disregard for individual human potential. So we come together and support each other to do this practice of finding our individual potential, facing the wall, seeing ourselves, accepting ourselves, seeing how to find a way to do the Buddha work, each of us and together.

[26:25]

So this spiritual institution, in fact, has had a civilizing effect in Asia. moderating the brutal tendencies of various rulers. The common designation of Buddhist monks as home leavers ideally implies the act of renouncing worldly ambition and joining the community, but also the inner work of abandoning ensnarement from the bonds of social and personal psychological conditioning. The Essential Insight of Buddhist Awakening affirms the fundamental rightness and interconnectedness in the relationship of all of creation, just as it is. But the Sangha, this third jewel of the Sangha, are coming together to do the Buddha work. It's kind of an historical instrument to perform the long-term work of civilizing and developing the awareness of humanity, so eventually we can actualize and fulfill, for all beings,

[27:33]

this vision of may all beings be happy, informed by wisdom and compassion. So in 1967, Dr. King also said, in spite of all of the obstacles that he faced, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. So I feel like, again, our new little storefront, Zento, is the perfect expression of the Buddha way now here in Chicago. It's not that we're better than anyone else walking down Irving Park Road, but we're all here because we have the intention in some way to live with awareness and attention. We practice to learn to work on ourselves and face the confusion and habits of this body-mind, just as it is.

[28:44]

We have the intention to express uprightness in our lives and, of course, it can be very painful when we see how we're caught in these patterns of greed or anger or contentiousness. And yet we keep doing this together. This is the Buddha work and to make a place where we can do this together. And again, it's not that we're better than anybody else walking down Irving Park Road, but we have this intention and we invite anyone to come in and join us. And then how do we, as we see this, how do we share this with all the different interlocking, interdependent sanghas of each one of us, each one of us on a cushion and chair as whole worlds of communities. So I think this is tricky. How do we transform the idea of the Buddhist community as an example of something different and an alternative to the usual ways of greed, hate, and delusion? The money-oriented society or materialist-oriented society towards people-oriented society.

[29:54]

This is not easy. And so we must be patient with ourselves and each other. We practice to learn to work together and find our ways to do this Buddha work in spite of, or maybe even in the light of our human shortcomings. So taking care of this temple together is, and the way that everybody has come together and made the space possible, and worked very hard in the last couple of weeks to make this space beautiful. So we will continue with this, working together, and seeing the difficulties of that, and breathing into it, and trying to make this Buddha work available to anyone who's interested, in whatever way they're interested. So part of you know, this arc of the moral universe that Dr. King talks about.

[30:58]

And part of the idea of Sangha is to recognize that change in the human world takes a long time. And yet, you know, 45 years after the, is it 45 years after the I Have a Dream speech? Something like that. No more than that. Anyway, I'm bad at numbers. In all the time since Dr. King, here we are and we have tomorrow this inauguration of this Chicago fellow. He's from the South Side, but some of our song members are from the South Side, so it's okay. It's a really amazing time. And it's going to take a lot of time to make all of this work. And here we are doing our little piece of that by making this practice available. and sharing it, and right out here on Irving Park Road. It's great. So, this sense of time in Buddhism, you know, we have this legacy going back, whatever, 2,500 years to Buddha, and of the Sangha working, and, you know, how has the arc of the moral universe moved?

[32:15]

Well, you know, maybe it's two steps forward, one step back, maybe it's, sometimes it seems three steps back. One of our great Americans and patriarchs, Gary Snyder, said this, maybe it's 20 years ago, long before the climate of urgency was obvious. Anyway, he said, our situation is urgent. We must act as if our hair is on fire. And at the same time, he said, we need to act as if we have all the time in the world. So here we are. doing this together, opening this center together, just getting started. And thank you all for being here. Please come again, join in Sangha in trying to find how to express this joyful heart and nurturing heart and magnanimous, generous heart. Okay, any comments or responses or anybody have anything to say about the Buddha work or President-elect Obama or anything else?

[33:27]

Yes, Kevin. Yes, it's wonderful. We can't hear, but I think there's a big avenue out there, isn't there? Irving Park's a fairly major artery, so the sound system works.

[34:03]

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