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. So, good morning and welcome to San Francisco Zen Center. My name is Wendy Lewis, and this morning I'm going to talk about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. So every year, this is the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and so we give a special talk. So I was a little nervous about this talk and wondering, hmm, how do we think about this? And I was listening to KDFC, the classical music station.

[01:01]

And the announcer, they often sort of talk about what's happening. And the announcer said, well, you know, this is the Martin Luther King Jr. weekend. And so, you know, we reflect on this thinking how much further we still have to achieve his dream. Further to go, we have to achieve his dream. And I thought, yeah. So, Today, this weekend, we could celebrate that 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the American Civil War, we've had an American president with African ancestry in the White House for two terms. Amazing. Not amazing. Wonderful. Odd. What? And then we could also be concerned about white privilege and racism and how they continue to be a primary quality of our political and our social, economic, and our spiritual segregation and stagnation.

[02:19]

So this year, there was this consideration that we would invite a person of color to give this talk. And I said, well, doesn't that imply we're not doing our own work? And I also said, well, you know, I usually find these talks kind of a dud. You know, they don't really get me, grab me. And then I'm sitting up here after all that, and so I feel some anxiety. partly because of making those comments and thinking about where they came from in me. So what do we talk about at San Francisco Zen Center when we talk about the Reverend Martin Luther King and his legacy? So I considered, you know, how do we relate his life and his legacy to our Buddhist ideology? and teaching, and practice.

[03:25]

So, Buddhism, you know, in sort of our general cultural sense, tends to be presented as focusing on compassion. So, emphasizing the bodhisattva called Avalokiteshvara or Kuan Yin. But there are other bodhisattvas. There is the bodhisattva of wisdom, Manjushri, the bodhisattva of faith or practice and reflection, Samantabhadra, and the future Buddha, bodhisattva Maitreya, the friend. And whenever I think of this future Buddha being called the friend, I wonder how these other bodhisattvas are leading up to that view of wisdom. When I first moved into San Francisco Zen Center, Taigen Dan Leighton, who is now the teacher at the Zen Center in Chicago, taught a class called Bodhisattva Archetypes.

[04:47]

And he taught about all these different archetypes. And the... What he was teaching was also the foundation for a book he was writing, which was eventually published with that title. Then when the book came out in a second printing, the title was changed to Faces of Compassion. And I thought, you know, it sounded like kind of a marketing ploy or something like that, you know. That's how we think of Buddhism. And yet there were all these other levels and qualities to these bodhisattvas. And Teigen identifies Martin Luther King Jr. as an exemplar of Samantabhadra, as I said, the bodhisattva of faith and practice and reflection. And in theology, this combination of qualities is...

[05:50]

referred to through this term called orthopraxis, and it literally means correct action, or the belief that right action is as important as religious faith. And Taigen describes this bodhisattva as representing the application of wisdom, actively benefiting the world, and as particularly radiant. It just so happened that in that class, Samanta Bhadra was my favorite Bodhisattva. My first Zen Center class of my favorite Bodhisattva. And I think it was because those qualities gave me courage regarding my own spiritual path. And I think what these qualities offer, that kind of courage, give...

[06:53]

a quality of depth and calm to the cutting through of wisdom, and they allow us to challenge the tendency of complacency of compassion. So this is the courage of self-reflection, self-knowledge, and that courage is moving towards transformation. So Taigan comments that given these qualities this Bodhisattva represents, it is not surprising that Samanta Bhadra is difficult to encounter. I thought, well, that's an interesting comment, yeah. That reflective quality. What am I doing? How do I do this thing of bringing some kind of right action into the world? through wisdom. And I'm certainly not saying that King was not motivated by compassion, but I think he referred to compassion in its mature form of unconditional love based in faith.

[08:10]

And that type of love does not require masochism or conformity. In his letter from a Birmingham jail, King expressed his disappointment with the white moderate who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom. So, you know, King wrote this in 1963 and yet it's still a past. What do I do when I talk about Martin Luther King? What do I talk about? So I think one of the overriding issues is privilege or white privilege. The word privilege means private law, and it means that someone or a group of people can...

[09:20]

with power, money, property, and so on, can make their own laws or rules or apply the laws and rules in place differently for themselves and those who they favor and those who they do not. And the privileged want to maintain the status quo to their continued benefit. So this is this place of reflection. How do I look at this? And how do I question it? So one type of acquired privilege my mother used to refer to as when a mouse gets a house. And there's this British television program called QI, quite interesting. And one of the questions they asked the panel was, what is the connection between someone who wins the lottery and this very conservative newspaper?

[10:31]

And so it turned out that when people suddenly come into a lot of money, they also suddenly become much more conservative, protecting their status has changed. They see the world differently. So I think power in particular, because it can sort of come into play at many different levels in our lives, confers privilege. And at Zen Center, I'm struck over and over again by this kind of petty tyranny that people adopt when they step into a position of some authority or leadership. I'm just like, what? And I know they have good intentions, but I wonder who benefits from that kind of tone of voice and that style of authority and that being the example for anyone else who would step into those positions of authority.

[11:46]

And that's a kind of internal comment, so I won't go into it, and you don't have to worry about it, but you've all seen it in other contexts. This week, Wednesday evening, there was a community meeting, and we were sort of discussing changes in the buildings that comprise city center. And I wondered if anyone else noticed who spoke, what their tone of voice was, who spoke more than once, The response of the facilitators and who did not speak was very striking, who did not speak and who did. And it just reflected this sort of structure of Zen Center to me. And so there's this curious quality of fear in the lives of people

[12:50]

At San Francisco Zen Center, that might surprise you a little, but it's also like you've experienced it in work situations and stuff like that. But here at Zen Center, if you observe the people who are in leadership, they all look pretty much the same. And you sort of get this impression that there's certain favoritism and privilege in the way they talk to some people and to others. So spiritual effort includes a certain type of masochism. When you think of the Buddha's path, he goes off into the forest, he leads this very ascetic life, and he nearly starves himself to death in his effort, his spiritual effort.

[13:52]

And you know, Zen students engage in these retreats that are very constricted and difficult, and also experience kind of openings and insights in the midst of that. So this sort of tendency to that type of masochism can be easy to manipulate, or susceptible, I should say, to manipulation. And I always feel a little uncomfortable when people are encouraged to find a teacher or to think the teacher is wiser than they are. It just makes me, I question our way of seeing that. And I'm not talking about mentors or guides or anything like that, but there's this way of having this teacher who cannot be questioned. So our teachers and Martin Luther King and all of our heroes and us, of course, are flawed, fallible, ordinary human beings.

[15:03]

And we choose what to honor and what to excuse and what to blame and so on in their lives and their actions. And usually if we agree with someone or the way they are... or the way they act, or the way they seem is familiar to us and supports us, we tend to excuse certain things or ignore, you know, questionable habits and behavior, which you've, you know, a lot of us know about this from Buddhist teachers who, it turns out, you know, have done a lot of questionable things, and yet nobody said anything. And those who did were out, thrown out of the community for disturbing things. And so if we disagree with someone or they're not like us, we have a tendency to be a little more critical of them and hold them to kind of higher standards than we do with people who are like us or with whom we agree.

[16:13]

Interesting, I keep rearranging my seat and I'm thinking, yes, I am uncomfortable. So, you know, our heroes or any kind of heroes gain that status in hindsight. In the moment that something is happening or in the period that they are this hero, they have no idea what history is going to remember about them or not. And so we tend to look at our heroes with both extra judgment and extra permission. We put them in a special category. And most of you may be aware that some accusations or comments or judgments have been made about Martin Luther King. And if you don't know about them, you can look it up on the Internet. I'm not going to talk about it. But what I think is amazing about however we may judge this person,

[17:24]

as a person. Can we even imagine what it was like for him to risk what he did? You know, for questioning the ingrained habits of America, American culture, regarding African Americans in particular, but also... You know, the privileged assumptions of American culture regarding race in general, gender, class, and legalized violence, including warfare. And King was assassinated in 1968, and he was only 39 years old. So I was wondering, you know, that was about the time that Zen Center was founded. And I was wondering, ah, you know, what if he had lived to 50, 60, 70, and was invited to speak here?

[18:38]

What would he see as he looked out? What would he see? Um... during Barack Obama's campaign and all through his presidency, I've been worried about him and his family surviving, literally surviving, not being killed in some way, assassinated. And what has actually happened is that his image and his voice and his family have been in our daily lives, nationally and internationally, for now seven, and hopefully eight years. And I wonder, you know, these images and representations.

[19:41]

I was watching the State of the Union address, and I just, you know, the diversity of people in that room was completely different than it has been for a long time. Long time. I was really struck. Noticed. Who was in the room? So how do these images and this presence, I'm curious how they, what effect they will have over time. I have some sense of the effect, but I'm not a politician or a sociologist, so I just have those things in the back of my mind. So how do we reflect? What are our resources for reflection? I recently read a review of a book about the New York Public Library.

[20:46]

And the library had been in trouble since the Second World War, financially. They were not making it. And I'm not sure what that means for libraries. But in the late 2000s, the president and trustees decided that in order to save the library, they were going to get rid of all the books. Really. And all these three million volumes were going to be stored in a warehouse. And the library was going to be reconfigured and redesigned to be a kind of internet cafe. So many of the decisions about this renovation were made in secret meetings, you know, executive session. And no minutes were kept and no outsiders were allowed to hear these discussions. And the people involved were like real estate investors and people who looked at property in maybe a slightly different way than people.

[21:57]

say a librarian would, or a scholar, or something like that. And the people, this book is like looking back at this whole project, right? So it turned out that people who were involved in doing all this, the architects, the investors, and so on, one investor said that he would only be involved if the renovated library was named after him. So these people involved were all absorbing lots of the money in high salaries. And eventually it was determined that removing the stacks around which the building was constructed would undermine the building's stability. So this whole project wasn't even going to work. So there was also a protest from scholars and bibliographers, particularly.

[22:58]

Something I noticed about the San Francisco Zen Center Library, it just occurred to me recently, was when I go to check out a book in there, a rare thing, apparently, certainly from my experience, but I look at the card and I see all the other people who've checked it out before me. Some of those people have died, some of those people have gone, and I'm just curious about this history, this sort of bibliographical history of San Francisco Zen Center that's down there. But what I think libraries contain and represent and serve is what could be called our intellectual capital. It doesn't get much investment, but it's essential. And libraries have never been really popular places, but they provide access to that complexity and that material for reflection. So that was what struck me about the article.

[24:00]

I was like, there's this little sort of place where we are thinking about, you know, how do we hold our intellectual capital? How do we foster it? How do we shape it? in a way that it can develop and mature. So not too long ago, I finished a master's in theology program at the University of San Francisco. And I find when I mention it in, you know, kind of with senior leadership and stuff like that, everyone seems to be sort of irritated and find it, you know. And I thought, well, I wonder if I sound arrogant or something. You know, like I'm... saying, oh, well, I have a master's, you know. And so I wanted to explain a little why I wanted to do that. One thing is we don't have an educational program here, and I thought we should probably have a few people who have some kind of degrees teaching here.

[25:07]

And I don't mean that in an arrogant way at all. I just, you know, that sort of... Anyway, the... So I thought, well, is it possible to work full-time here and engage in the practice and go to school? Well, it was very difficult, and I heard a lot of judgmental comments about myself while I was in the midst of it, and very stressful, and I used my vacation time to write my papers and all that kind of thing. So it was a long three years and so wonderful. I think it's probably tops every wonderful intellectual, personal experience I've ever had. So, also, my ambition at Zen Center has never been to be part of the administration. I did some of that because that's my...

[26:09]

you know, my way of serving the community. But I did a lot of that before I came to Zen Center, too, and it just was like, ah, that's okay. I've done it enough. And what I wanted to examine and promote for Zen Center was a way of valuing our intellectual capital and potential. You know, a sort of congruent path of study and teaching that I thought would be a benefit to me and to others. So, when I was in the program, we had to do a lot of research and writing. And there was a quality to it of kind of updating my mental software, kind of training my mind to be a little more accurate, in inquisitive and think in more complex ways.

[27:11]

So when I was researching a particular topic, there were a couple of things I used to do. One was I would look up modern contemporary journal articles and look at the bibliography, see who they were referring to. And then I would, you know, look up some call numbers in the area... of that topic, and I would go to that section of the library and I would look and pull out the books, touch them. And they, you know, library books are pretty unprepossessing. You know, one of my very favorite ones had a dark blue cover and the title was only on the spine. That was it. No beautiful pictures or anything like that. And it was just a brilliant book. And so I often found books that seemed like they were going to be difficult and too scholarly ended up being the most exciting and inspiring ones. So I'm going to tell you a little story about one of my experiences up there.

[28:25]

In our class on church history, I chose a topic called conciliarism. Conciliarism. And this was a movement in the Middle Ages to establish an ecumenical council that was equal to the Pope in power and decision-making, and that the Pope would be answerable to. This was really radical. And it was at a time when the church had split, and I won't go into that. But... One of the people involved in this was the 15th century French theologian and Professor Jean Garçon. And he was a friend of Christine de Pisan, who was a writer whose father had been an astrologer at the Court of France, invited there from Italy, who had taught her to read and write. And she ended up making her living copying manuscripts and all that. So she knew a lot. And she wrote this book called The Book of the City of Ladies.

[29:28]

And it was a book where she described the building of this city, and each block represented a woman from history. Or it was either classical history, biblical history, or secular history. And she would tell a story. She tells a story about each of them. And I had read this book. So here I was... Writing this. Oh, and she and Jean Gerson got involved in this dispute with the authors of The Romance of the Rose because of its misogynist depiction of women. So she and Jean were involved in that. So here I was writing a paper for the history of the church, and all of these things came together. And those are the kinds of layers, I think, of study and research that sort of are full of vitality. They're not like, oh, you know, grinding study and worry and all that kind of stuff only.

[30:32]

Some of that. But they are about associations, historical circumstances, you know, and interpretations and all these ways that history kind of blends and... And I know that not everyone is interested in that kind of thinking. But what I think it does, it kind of sort of takes our mind on these side roads. Usually we think along these kind of rutted paths that we're used to. And suddenly there's these side roads we haven't considered. So one of the reasons I told all this was because the current version of the master plan for city center includes the elimination of the library. You know, for practical reasons, maybe that makes sense, and we don't really know what will be decided.

[31:33]

But I wonder what it implied. What does that imply about what we value, what we care about? And we don't, you know, there's not any requirement to study... either for the teachers or the students. And so people aren't encouraged to use the library. And it's fairly inaccessible. And these are my opinions. You don't have to agree with me. But this is just how I see it. And even there's this kind of view that studying is not true practice or true Zen. So I'm concerned about intellectual capital. Our intellectual capital, it's not a matter of who's smarter or smartest, but having people in an organization who question themselves and those in authority about meaning, messaging, professional standards, and vision.

[32:40]

And these are the types of questions that Samanta Bhadra considers. So the issue of privilege and white privilege has always been kind of in my life and bothered me. And it's partly because I grew up very poor. And it's very remarkable to me how many people, when I tell them that, say... oh, well, you weren't really poor, you know, you have an education, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And what they don't say is, you're white. You know, and I just, you know, based on my parents, they're rewriting my biography for me. So I had this image, you know, of a dog or a cat. And, you know, when a drop of water falls on their fur... or some object or something, they'll usually just, and I guess actually horses I've seen do this too, they'll just kind of flick the skin, you know?

[33:44]

Just flick it. And then if it continues, they'll flick it some more, and then they'll kind of turn around and do something about it, or walk away, you know? Start to realize that something's actually happening. And so I think that incidents, comments, You know, repeated actions and attitudes of any kind can kind of feel that way. You know, I just get this feeling sometimes of this flicking of my skin. And at some point, maybe you turn around and say something or do something. So, whatever... outward changes occur, of course, our Shiva nature will stay pretty much the same. But I do think that transformation is possible.

[34:45]

And it requires effort and also these other qualities that are called the six perfections. Generosity, ethics, patience, meditation, reflection, and wisdom. And I think what transformation offers is a way of looking at and evaluating the world that is different from either a fearful or a privileged way. Now, in traditional Buddhism, enlightenment is freedom from suffering accompanied by deep ethical commitments. It's not a power position. even though we tend to interpret it that way. George Yancey, who's a professor of philosophy at Emory University, conducted a series of interviews with other philosophers on the topic of race. And he commented in his interview with Cornell West, entitled, The Fire of a New Generation.

[35:54]

Both you and King share a blues sensibility. that places emphasis on touching the pain and yet transcending the pain. And West replied, oh, absolutely. We're both very similar in terms of never allowing hatred to have the last word, not allowing despair to have the last word, telling the truth about structures of domination of various sorts, keeping track of the variety of forms of oppression. So we don't become ghettoized and tied to just one single issue. Yet at the same time, we're trying to sustain hope by being a hope. Hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you are. So I've given this topic, the topic of diversity, some attention for a long time, and Zen centers had, you know,

[36:56]

Many, many workshops and presentations about it. And the trainees at Sun Center don't seem to have made any difference, which I think is pretty interesting and frustrating. And another of the people that George Yancey interviewed was Bell Hooks. And her interview is entitled Buddhism, the Beats, and Loving Blackness. And it begins with Yancey asking bell hooks about an expression she uses to describe the underlying social order. And this is it. Imperialist, white, supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy. And she explains... That phrase always reminds me of a global context, of the context of class, of empire, of capitalism, of racism, and of patriarchy.

[38:01]

Those things are all linked, an interlocking system. But then Yancey, the next question he asked her, is about the role of humor in her work and her thinking. And she replied that, Anytime a group tries to move forward politically in a radical way, when they're humorless, they fail. So what is humor? I often think of it as the ability to have perspective. So this juxtaposition of the, you know, her imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy with this sense of humor. Because without humor or perspective, any failures or mistakes we make seem permanent and unaddressable.

[39:01]

So we're afraid to make the effort because we're afraid to fail, and we won't have any sense of humor about it, so it will seem like there's nothing we can do. They're permanent failures. But then how can we address this kind of... Well, this is how it came to mind, the intermittent unbearableness of a static status quo. I think anger is part of that, but so is this perspective and this self-awareness. And the humor that Bell Hooks refers to moves toward the development of the future Buddha traits, of the Bodhisattva Maitreya. It's about the kind of friendship that's possible when we disagree, don't understand each other, but don't silence each other for the expedience of an apparent we or an apparent harmony and agreement.

[40:13]

So for many years, the leadership at San Francisco Zen Center has been criticized for a lack of transparency. And this is like the meetings of the people working on the New York Public Library, these secret meetings. And I think secrecy and privilege is not a promising foundation for responding to the imperative for transformation. I don't know how to ask about it, question it. I don't know if it's, you know, am I imagining this? I don't think so. I've heard other people talk about it. So what do we, this we at Zen Center, talk about when we talk about Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and his legacy and his life? In her interview, Bell Hooks says, I tell people that intellectual work is a laboratory that I go into every day.

[41:29]

It's a privilege to think critically. And this is the alternate word of the use of the word privilege, to mean an honor given to or experienced by an individual. And to think critically... is Samantabhadra's reflective function, that link between wisdom and compassion. And its reflection based on this reverberation of critical thinking and the reverberation of faith. Samantabhadra does this with calmness and radiance and not passivity. which was exemplified in King's adherence to nonviolent protest. Calmness and radiance. So I think an emphasis on compassion is tricky because it can be manipulated to support privilege.

[42:33]

Somebody wants or needs something and you give it to them as a reward and aren't you wonderful and kind? And you withhold it as a way of training them. And I've seen this way of discussing compassion, and I question it. It's a power relationship. And I think that that's how tokenism can undermine true diversity, and not just diversity of race. The underlying message is you should be grateful. And I hear in the back of my mind, after all I've done for you, So the poet Morgan Parker describes five side effects of tokenism. And the first one is, you will get tired. You will be loved and it will make you tired. You'll be tired because you will never stop wondering if your attention and success is only because of your race or gender or orientation.

[43:38]

And the fifth and last one is, you will be ashamed of your ambition. You have enough. They are trying. At least you have this. Be grateful. So remembering that there is a variety of bodhisattvas, that they all inform each other, and that the bodhisattva, Maitreya, is the Buddha of the future. And the Bodhisattva Maitreya, I think, represents this kind of piercing friendliness and the assumption of equality. So this morning I've attempted to address the question, what do we, what do I talk about when I talk about Martin Luther King Jr.

[44:56]

and his legacy? And I know I haven't said anything new, and I doubt that anything I say will make any difference, and yet I'm still hopeful. I'm always hopeful, deep, in a very deep way. in his interview, Cornel West also said, so in the end, all we have is who we are. Hey, that's the way it is. 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.

[45:53]

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