This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good evening, everyone. Good evening. It's such a pleasure to be here on a summer's evening. And I want to start out by thanking you all. and honoring you all. Even though I don't know all of you, I want to honor your efforts to practice the way of Buddha. And for those of us who live in the temple and who get up early and who work hard, I know I've done that lifestyle. I want to thank you. It takes a lot of effort. As well as those of you who are living lay lives outside of the temple, Needless to say, we live in a very stressful society during stressful times, and I thank you for applying your practice to all that you're doing.

[01:05]

As a former board member of San Francisco Zen Center, I also want to wish you all happy 50th anniversary. Happy 50th anniversary. That's a great number. So the title of my talk this evening is Daylighting the hidden streams, why our stories matter. So that's daylighting the hidden streams, why our stories matter. And how many of you know what it means to daylight a stream? Okay, I see a few hands. I will explain that more later. It's actually a term that I learned a long time ago. when a stream near where I live, which is in the Rockridge section of Oakland, was being daylighted or opened up. It's kind of descriptive. So Shanaz John Muhammad, our People of Color Sangha Coordinator intern at East Bay Meditation Center in downtown Oakland, which is where I teach, and I always call myself the admin monk.

[02:15]

That's how I was trained, and I'm the person who processes the web mail and gets the calls if we run out of toilet paper or something. So Shanaz recently began an e-newsletter for the East Bay Meditation Center People of Color Meditation Group, which was our first group that began to meet even before we opened our doors, which was in January of 2007. followed closely thereafter by our alphabet sangha, which is our LGBTQIQSGL, same-gender-loving group. And those were our two foundation sanghas from which other weekly groups emerged, including one for people with disabilities, chronic illness, and chronic pain called Everybody, Every Mind Sangha. So in this launch, which I was so thrilled to see, of the e-newsletter for the People of Color Sangha, Shanaz included this quote from Bell Hooks.

[03:21]

Beloved community, and you'll recognize that term, of course, from the civil rights era, beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference. So when I think of that, I think of I grew up with the whole sort of melting pot ideal. And so, beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference, but by its affirmation. By each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world. So I thought that was pretty good, and it's so good I'll repeat it. Beloved community is formed not by the eradication of difference, but by its affirmation, by affirming our differences, and by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

[04:25]

And so there we have it immediately. One of the new faces of Dharma in the United States, part of the movement that I've been part of for quite a number of years now, bringing together forms of Buddhist meditation, and our traditional teachings, the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path. I'll be teaching a class series on the precepts this fall at East Bay Meditation Center, the Brahma Vaharas. So bringing together Buddhist meditation, traditional teachings on impermanence, non-self, and the extinctions of afflictions and notions, with the assertion, so we're bringing all of that together, with the assertion that if our spiritual communities, our sanghas, are to become truly beloved communities, it will be through each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.

[05:30]

And then through this process, So that's the end of the quote, and this is me. And through this process, I would say slowly beginning to reclaim the wholeness of our precious human lives, the restoration of lost histories in so much as we can restore them, and the potential for a world inhabited by whole that is to say profoundly awakened human beings. So I'm just back very recently from an annual diversity conference that I go to. It's in California. I've been going for, I don't know, maybe nine years now. And the conference is just beginning to go into its 20th year. The founders originally named it Diversity 2000. And then we went past 2000. So we've recast ourselves as Diversity 2020.

[06:34]

And it's an annual gathering, about three or four days, of people that we call diversity practitioners. So some of these folks are professional consultants, others are not, and we're all brought together through our common passion for helping to try to create communities in which we want to live and in which all human beings can flourish. So at this particular conference that just was over, there were some folks who came forward with their stories, including my colleague, Toni Battle, who is conducting interviews. She's now deeply involved in a project in which she's conducting interviews with African-Americans, including people in her own family who had witnessed lynchings of their family members. And this conference was only a day or so after the shootings in the Sikh temple, which are emblematic of the rising Islamophobia in our country.

[07:46]

And needless to say, the Buddha's first truth, the first noble truth of dukkha, which is pain, which is separation, which is unsatisfactoriness, which is suffering, is so close to us, always so close. And fortunately, for me, I certainly feel that first noble truth is only the first of the four. There's a second noble truth, the third noble truth, which is that there is a path to liberation. from this suffering, both collectively and societally, and that that fourth noble truth, of course, is our noble eightfold path. So I will be emboldened by our president and say, at the risk of audacity, based in the work I've been doing in Buddhist communities since 1982, I'm going to propose that

[09:01]

here and now in August of 2012, in our dharmic communities, we might want to add an additional tweak to the fourth noble truth, which is the Eightfold Path, in order to add something to the practice of right speech. And I want to suggest that that addition would include what we might call right storytelling. More specifically, the practice of noble silence and cultural humility. So this is a term that is used in the field sometimes of diversity and inclusion as an alternative to cultural competency or multicultural competency is cultural humility. So I'm suggesting that we... begin to practice noble silence and cultural humility as we seek skillful ways to hear each other's and to invite each other's sacred stories.

[10:13]

And in order to hear these stories and in order to be able to hold them, to learn from them, and to treasure them. I believe that we need to learn increasingly to convene sacred circles in which these stories are protected, protected by ritual and by the building up of... containers of deep listening and in which we're encouraged to develop the qualities of the ability to tolerate if need be actually pretty high levels of maybe discomfort of not understanding and that being okay not understanding right away of being in it

[11:18]

for the long haul, and of a commitment to this process over time. So I was very privileged to be part of one of these sacred circles just this past Sunday. Wow, it was just this past Sunday at East Bay Meditation Center where we had a very wonderful Saturday and Sunday two-day retreat taught by my very dear friend, Michelle Benzeman-Mickey. And it was called, I think, Coming into Wholeness as Multiracial. So this was a retreat for people who self-identify as multiracial. And she did it at East Bay Meditation Center in February. It was very successful. People came out of it just... kind of glowing, and I heard all these wonderful reports.

[12:18]

I don't self-identify that way. So I said to Michelle, I respect your space, and I sure wish I could be a fly on your wall. I'd love to be able to hear. I'd love to be able to learn. So to my delight, she repeated it again this past weekend. And on the second day on Sunday, she opened it up. to what she called empowered allies, to allies to the folks who self-identify as multiracial. And the way that she constructed it, I feel holds so much potential for our sanghas. And I was delighted actually to see such wonderful support in that actually Tova and Blanche from San Francisco Zen Center came also as allies and was just delighted to see them. So the way that it was done is that the focus, of course, was on the multiracial folks, and they were invited to form a circle in the middle of the room, and then the folks who would come as allies formed a circle around them, and this is a form that

[13:35]

many of you may know, called a fishbowl, in which the outer circle remains silent, listens deeply, does not add, does not question, does not interject, simply listens, simply witnesses. And it's surprising, even though there is, of course, awareness that the outer circle is there, in many of the fishbowls I have observed, the deep sharing that comes out of it as people begin to establish eye contact, if they're sighted folks, and to build up that rapport and that trust and that confidence that comes from feeling that, okay, let's start from a place where we don't need to explain everything because we have this... this one way we identify in common, we're going to be able to immediately start to go more deeply and to discover, to discover even perhaps stories that we had forgotten, that we had never known how to tell, and to find new language, to find new language in which to express the deep truths

[14:59]

of our lives when we look at it through these lens, this particular lens. So when I talk about right storytelling as a function of right speech, by this I mean being honored to gain access to what really matters to the human beings with whom we share the public spaces in our lives. I think there might be some expectation over time that, of course, in our intimate communities of people that we live with, that we do our spiritual practice with, perhaps that we work with depending on our work spaces, maybe that we go to school with or our children go to school with. that in those circles we might have some expectation that over time, perhaps over years, we'll hear some of these stories.

[16:05]

Or not, but that we might. And I'm really interested in trying to extend that to include the human beings with whom we share the public spaces in our lives. So shopping at Safeway, riding on BART, in their own voices, in their own words, in languages we may or may not understand, and in whole or in fragments. So I remember that I was with my original teachers and Master Samu Sinem in January 1985, and we came through on pilgrimage through San Francisco and just visited as many Buddhist meditation centers and groups as we could. That was before the internet, so we would go and find a phone book, open it up to the yellow pages, turn to churches, under churches look for B, Buddhist, and then start calling and say, we'd like to visit.

[17:18]

Or if we saw a temple, we would simply stop and knock on the door. So on one of these, one of the temples that we saw was in San Francisco's Chinatown. And I remember that we entered and inside we went up several flights of stairs in a little windowless room. We met a very lovely a Chinese monk who did speak a little bit of English. And I'll never forget what he said. Because he said, I became a monk in order to understand the world. I became a monk in order to understand the world. And as soon as he said that, something in me thought, well, I would like to do so as well. And I commit to doing so as well. as much as I can.

[18:20]

So we can ask ourselves in a really open way, how much do we really know about why, when human life is often so difficult, any given person in our society gets up and out of bed in the morning? My friend Art McGee, who is a manager of a DVD rental store that I go to and that I went to over many years, and I found out that he always gave the best recommendations for movies. And so we became friends, and this is what he recently wrote me as we were dialoguing in person and also via email about some of these matters. And he wrote, I know that I personally, as a black person, do not get up in the morning because of some empirical data analysis in a report that I read.

[19:29]

I get up because Martin Luther King and Malcolm X risked their lives and faced death so that we could have a better life. I get up because Fannie Lou Hamer, despite being sick and tired of being sick and tired, kept on going. I get up because Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of an independent Ghana, taught me that personal liberation is bound up with collective liberation. I get up because Paul Robeson, a Renaissance man and one of the greatest Americans ever, showed me what it means to be pro-black, without being anti anyone else. I get up because my father, a man who raised me essentially alone since my mother died when I was very young, deserved a better life after working so hard for so many years. I get up because of all the people, black or otherwise, recognized heroes or not, who have struggled...

[20:37]

against the intransigence of our own idiocy to expand the definitions of human rights and human dignity. And when I heard this story and saw this story, it reinforced to me that I'm working toward a world in which all of these sacred stories do not remain secret stories. And in order for that not to happen, I think that we need to learn how to create the conditions, sometimes which take many years, through which these stories can be transmitted and can be received. So here's a koan or an open question. What is your sacred story or stories?

[21:42]

The story of your people that you want to be passed down to your children or your people's children? What support and what context do you need to tell it? So many of us here tonight, myself included, have come through a practice and a tradition which we call Zen Buddhism and of course I recognize the diversity in that term as well since my original lineage was Korean Zen which is called Son and there's Chan in China and also the form of Zen in Vietnam and Zen being of course a Japanese word And so many of us here tonight have come through these beautiful set of traditions in which we may hear teachings such as this one, which is a quote from John Dido Lurie Roshi's essay online, Master Dogen's Enlightenment.

[22:59]

So this is just a quote from that. Body and mind fallen away is a realm in which there are no doctrines, or marvels, no certainties or mysteries. And coming from where I'm coming from, so body and mind falling away, I need to ask, but before it falls away, do I really know your body, your mind, your culture, as you know it and as you feel it? So there's a journey, there's a process there, and it's a very deep one. We might think of it as daylighting or opening up the hidden streams that flow through and around our everyday lives that have been covered over, ignored, unheard, and unseen.

[24:04]

So I'm going to read just a little passage from a book that Tova mentioned in the introduction, which is from Curzon Press, an academic press in London, called Innovative Buddhist Women Swimming Against a Stream. It was edited by the venerable Karma Lakshay Somo. And... The chapter that I contributed was called Daylighting the Feminine in American Buddhism. So I'll just read a little bit of the beginning because it shows you the metaphor. And actually, it's a real thing, daylighting. And I started it with a quote from my friend Egyoku Natal Roshi, the abbess and... guiding teacher now at Zen Center of Los Angeles. And she wrote, from ancient times, living female Buddhas have accomplished the way.

[25:13]

The spiritual attainment and practice of females have flowed in a continuous yet hidden stream to the present time. That's the end of that quote. and the start of my essay, in which I say I recently heard the term daylighting used by a kindergarten teacher at the Oakland Public School my son attends. This was published in 2000. Urban environmentalists use this term, she explained, for the uncovering of small streams that run through Oakland beneath streets and sidewalks. Often the presence of these creeks and streams is unknown to the people who live near them. At a meeting where the volatile issue of institutionalized racism in the public school system was being discussed, the teacher suggested we think of our work as a process of daylighting the complex, deeply buried forces that make it difficult for many children of color and poor children to be successful.

[26:27]

Daylighting, I thought, would involve jackhammering asphalt and cement, building bridges, landscaping, creek maintenance. Initially, it would involve planning, noise, expense, and disruption of parts of neighborhoods. Often people are not interested in the work of uncovering something that has been successfully hidden since before their birth. revealing knowledge they are accustomed to living without. I have been thinking about this work of uncovering, discovering, recovering, reclaiming, and maintaining the wellsprings of our ecological and human communities and our individual lives. So I and many others have been doing this work of daylighting hidden streams in our United States Buddhist communities. And that work certainly started before the year 2000 and continues right up to now, August 15, 2012.

[27:39]

And it will continue because of the necessity and the beauty of this work. So I ask you to join me in seeking the sacred storytelling and making it a cultural value in our Sangha life. Making the sacred storytelling a cultural value in our Sangha life. You've got to think about values, not abuses. The 96-year-old legendary activist Grace Lee Boggs says in her two-part video message to Occupy Wall Street. You can find that online, and I really recommend it. Grace Lee Boggs. She says that you've got to think about values, not abuses.

[28:42]

We need people to be reinventing the institutions of our society, reinventing work, reinventing education. We're at one of those turning points in society where we need revolution. And revolution means reinventing culture. So thank you, Grace Lee Boggs. At 96 years old, you're still bringing it. And on that note, I'll ask you if there are a few minutes for question and answer, insights and comments. Who gives me the nod, yes or no? Okay, thank you. We have about 10 minutes, and I would welcome your insights, your comments. If you have questions, I'll certainly try to answer them.

[29:44]

Yeah. So I know you've been in the area of Buddhist practitioners. environment for a long time. And given where you have belt and sit, what, in a sense, can you, maybe this is kind of a big question, but can you say a thing or two about what you think has been daylighted? And this is very specific to the Bay Area, so you can answer whichever. And then maybe where you see the concrete starting in another area of daylighting is maybe developing or would help to be exposed. Thank you. That's quite a substantial question. I acknowledge it.

[30:44]

It's a great question. And so what I heard you say is asking me to comment on what has been daylighted. and where the surface is beginning to be taken off and what's being exposed. What I see from where I sit and where I sit is that I've been really honored and happy to have been invited to teach a People of Color seven-day silent meditation retreat at Vallecitos Mountain Refuge outside of Taos, New Mexico. It's got to be one of the most beautiful places on the face of the earth. Really urge you all to go and check it out. And as well as I've co-taught the People of Color retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center one year, some weekend retreats for women.

[31:51]

also for social justice activists, as well as the teaching that I've done more locally at East Bay Meditation Center. What I've discovered, and I believe others would agree, is that we need to form a new language, I believe. And I discovered that actually first when I was giving a talk here in this Buddha Hall many years ago there was a people of color group that met here. And I had always heard and I'd always been taught and I'd always used a vocabulary of spiritual acceptance, accepting the way things are. And that's the way the teachings were transmitted to me. So this would just be one example. So I was talking about spiritual acceptance, which means... of course, recognizing the way things are so we can begin to operate from a base of reality.

[32:52]

And the group that was there that day, just all the hands shot up and they just said, hell no, we're not going to practice any acceptance. You can forget about that. We are not going to accept injustice and we are not going to accept prejudice and we will not accept it. And I said, I hear you. That's the end of my use of the term spiritual acceptance. So that would just be one example of ways in which as we become more in tune and more culturally sensitive, as we're given hopefully compassionate feedback, and yet any feedback is going to give us more data, more information, to allow us to be able to transmit the Dharma as best we can in ways that will be alive in people's lives. and in their cultures as they experience their cultures and as they experience their own needs.

[33:54]

And this is what I see that's being daylighted that is so exciting to me, that is so bright in promise and which I think really fulfills the promise of a Dharma in which 10,000 flowers bloom and show us the infinite variety and the depth and the commonality of what we're calling the Buddha Dharma as it continues to be transmitted into the United States. Does that answer some part? Yes. I am increasingly more focused on how important cultural humility is as a way of developing competency, understanding people who come from backgrounds, situations that are different around the world.

[34:59]

And I was wondering if we could talk some more about ways in which, about the concept of cultural humility and how it might be carried forth in our lives. on a day-to-day basis and our day-to-day interactions, you know, outside of ceremonial situations, like the circles, which usually the Jack never experienced. They sound wonderful. But when the road meets the road is about their own mystery itself. Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. So the question is about cultural humility. And so I'll just give you my experience and my understanding. So my, I say kid, but he's a young man now, whom some of you know, my son Joshua, went through the Oakland Public Schools K-12. For those of you who are familiar with the public school system in the Bay Area, they're not even falling apart.

[36:01]

They have fallen apart many years ago. As some of you may have known, the Oakland Unified School District actually did. It tanked. It bottomed. We went into receivership with the state. Our superintendent was immediately removed, and we were assigned an administrator from the state, who almost immediately after he began his job to try to bring the Oakland Unified back... into financial solvency and get it back in order almost immediately. Not only his life was threatened, but his child's life was threatened. And then we had to pay for a personal bodyguard who accompanied him whenever he made a public appearance. So that's something about the Oakland Unified School District. And within... This school district, which is one of the most, I would say, diverse urban public school districts in the country.

[37:04]

And it's not alone. There are many others. But Oakland, it is very diverse. I was a very involved parent. And so I would show up. I would show up to try to help make these public schools work for our family and for my kid. And I served on all of these parent committees. So I would show up and we would discuss whatever the topic was at hand. And what I learned in terms of, I would call it cultural humility, is that I had to develop and I chose to develop the ability to listen to people whose culture was very different from my own, whose background was very different from my own, whose language might be very different from my own, and whose way of using language words that I knew were different from my own. I mean, I could just tell because I really couldn't understand them. And I just learned to just to be there with them.

[38:05]

And even if I didn't understand, not to particularly ask them to try to explain everything because that would have just ended up taking far too long. And so I sat through many meetings listening to many people whom... I grew to maybe slowly understand them more and their point of view over the years, if there were years, and I just really let go of trying to understand everything in a kind of clinical way as much as just listen to how they spoke and what I could feel from where their interest and their passion was and to acknowledge that there were many things... that I did not understand, that I might never understand, but I needed to create the space for them to express themselves in exactly their own way. And this is, I have found, is really one of the most precious things about cultural humility is not coming in too quickly

[39:18]

out of a very good intention to say, well, gee, I don't understand you. Can you please explain it to me? Can you please explain it to me in ways that I understand? Can you please explain it to me in my terms, in my language, and in the way I understand things? Because in doing so, not everything translates, and a lot can be lost. Let's see. I see three that just popped up all together. How are we doing for time? Can we be brief? Yes. Okay, so maybe start at that end, if that's okay. One, two, three. I'm wondering why there are so few African-Americans. You're wondering why there are so few... Why I think? Yeah. I think that there are so few African Americans in the American Zen community because we haven't yet been able to build up what I call critical mass.

[40:28]

And it's very difficult to feel as though you're the, even if people are actually pretty friendly and welcoming, it's very difficult to feel I'm the only one. I'm the only person. only one. So as we can start building up... So for instance, when we do have groups and retreats for people of color, that's everyone who self-identifies as people of color. And within that, there's enormous diversity. And still, in general, we'll tend to have a critical mass. So more than one... African-American, more than one Latina, more than one Latino, more than one Asian-American. And within that, that starts to build up a culture of support. Thank you. I'm very impressed by the way you talk about the uncovering stories. My experience is that one of the major barriers is our fear of uncovering pain.

[41:33]

in other spokespains and sort of sitting with that thing. Can you talk a little bit about that piece of work and how it helps? Yes. Thank you so much. Of course, of course. We're good-hearted people, and we fear the uncovering of pain that is so deep, that is intergenerational, that is inconceivable, really. And so in order to create this revolution, if you will, Grace Lee Boggs' terms, and I believe she means it peacefully and positively, I think that we also need, through cultural humility, to also build up the ability to receive and to tolerate not just... like I'm enduring it, to tolerate in a sense of to be able to hold enormous amounts of pain with the knowledge that with that will come precious gifts of information and of human-to-human connection that we cannot achieve in any other way.

[42:56]

We should have big boxes of Kleenex in all our meditation halls. And one more, and then we'll end. Thank you. I'll try to make this brief exactly. But first, I just want to thank you for your time, I think, having a space and talking about diversity and different struggles that you've faced in your life. and the East Bay has been going on in there. But to just have to talk about that incident and really, really great to hear. I wanted to ask sort of how to make some examples or how you sort of navigated the blend between activism and activism, which is two things that I very much believe in, especially with sort of the changing political climate. For example, I'm happy to talk about Occupy one day, but Occupy, my second sister, was they actually had meditation circles and stuff happening there.

[44:04]

And I just, in my personal life, it's been harder and harder for me to meditate with all that's happening, and violence, and finding public space, and just the area to do that. how to let that Buddhist sort of action. Thank you so much. So as I'm hearing it, the question is, how do we bring together our Buddhism and our study and practice of Dharma with social justice activism? And you named Occupy San Francisco as the example of one sphere of your activities. Did I hear you correctly? Well, I would just, I don't even see her. Don, where are you? Okay, everyone look over at Don. Don, stand up and just like wave, sort of like the Queen of England. Okay, so this is Don Haney, whom I'm very pleased accompanying me here tonight, and she's a co-director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

[45:05]

So there might be a minute or two where you can catch her outside after this talk, and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship brings together exactly the two streams that you are talking about, and they have a wonderful online presence now called the Turning Wheel Media Site with a lot of great writing posted there. So I urge you to take a look at that. And just to end up, I will say to you from my own experience, how I bring them together is in approaching social justice work, which in my experience is so huge, can be so crushing, can be so frightening and so depressing and so... soul-destroying, if I may even use those words, and I do, that we can use our dharma and we can use our practice in order to look at our own anger, our own fear, our own separation, and then hopefully to really little by little transform them so that as we are addressing injustice, we're not

[46:16]

consuming ourselves alive with our own anger, which may seem certainly justifiable and will in the end often be still very harmful to ourselves, to our health, to those who love us and to those who are close to us. We need to learn how to transform that. so that we're operating more out of the positive states of compassion, of equanimity, of universal friendship or loving kindness, and those bases which our practice can help us so much with. That would be, and very imperfectly too, by the way. I'm not talking in some ideal way. I'm talking really where the rubber meets the road, still learning how to base ourselves in that. So that, as they say, in the Martin Luther King Jr.

[47:19]

based Kingian nonviolence movement that is now going on in the Bay Area, as well as across the nation, my friend Kazu Haga and Jonathan Lewis are doing these trainings in the Bay Area, and what they teach is, from Dr. King, they say, no person is our enemy. Injustice itself is our enemy. So we need to remember that no person, that means none, is our enemy. So if we can live in that way, I think it will be helpful. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[48:21]

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