This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, I'm very, very grateful to be here, and I hope I can remain awake. I know. And, you know, I wanted to give a talk, I think, about You may know there's some books here called American Sutra. It's a book that came out a little bit earlier this year. And I think this is the subject upon which I will be speaking. But because this is a Dhamma talk, I thought maybe instead of giving my usual more academic kind of talk, I'd like to try to talk about this book in in terms of the Dharma and in terms of some Buddhist ideas that underlie the book.

[01:09]

So in the next while, I hope I can share with you some of the things I found and I write about in the book. But I hope to share with you some things from, you know... I also happen to be Soto Zen Buddhist person, so shared Buddhist lineage. And so the first term, if I can move to the next slide, goen. I wanted to maybe over the course of the next 45 minutes or so speak about seven kind of like just Buddhist words in Japanese way of saying it, goen. I translated Mysteric Karmic Connections, but I thought I will use these Buddhist words to help structure what I hope to present to you. So, just as a show of hands, how many people know the term goe and use it in Japanese way? Oh, not so many people, okay.

[02:13]

Then I better explain. So... The first character, go, is just an honorific. You find it in front of many Japanese terms. And then second character, ing, is the ing, ing. Maybe people have heard of this one. It's kind of like causes and conditions. Pratityasamutpada in the Sanskrit. I think usually translated into English as dependent arising or dependent co-arising or mutual arising, words like that. And in Japanese... interpretation of that word, they have a slight twist on it. And it means, of course, the idea that I exist because you exist, or this microphone exists and I exist, or audience exists or speaker exists, you know, all of that. But things arise, you know, together. But it also has a sense of, like, sometimes in life we meet people or we meet people

[03:13]

an artifact, or we meet something that somehow very mysteriously moves us into a certain situation. Go in. So like meeting, for many of you, we would say, if you meet your teacher, the person who you become like, oh, this is, let's go in. So some circumstance allowed you to meet. And many different millions and millions of causes and conditions needed to have come together for such a thing to have happened. And for this book, and I've written like other books, but this one took me a little over 17 years. So I'm so glad many of you are here because you put something out there. Hopefully there's a response. But this book, if I could go to the next slide, the go-in or the mysterious comic circumstance that made me bother to take 17 years to write this book, was this document.

[04:14]

It's hard to see. And even if you are close by, if you can't read that style of Japanese cursive, it's hard to read. But it came about that I had just finished my doctor work at Harvard, and I had been studying with a very eminent scholar of Buddhism, Masato Shinagatomi. He was 1958... the very first professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard University. And as you can imagine, over the years, he's like Robert Thurman and Stanley Weinstein and Jeffrey Hopkins, like a lot of interesting scholars worked with him. And I was his last student and not very good. I originally went to do Indian Buddhism because I had studied Sanskrit as an undergraduate major and so forth. But he was like, Duncan, you know, Japanese is your first language and your Sanskrit is not so good.

[05:17]

So maybe you should become Japanese Buddhism specialist instead. So that's what I became. And I just finished my PhD decision and I got the word from his wife that he had unfortunately passed away. And the family wanted me to... helped perform the memorial service for him. And I did so together with President Mark Uno, a former student of his as well. And he was known to be somebody who could do everything from Indian Buddhism to Tibetan to Chinese to Japanese, everything. And he had this collection in his office that was full of manuscripts from... in Pali and in hybrid Buddhist Sanskrit and classical Chinese. So the family wanted to gift this amazing collection to a library, but asked me, in addition to the memorial service, can you go to the office and pull out anything that looks personal, especially things written in Japanese, so that we can save that for the family and we can gift the academic books to a library.

[06:38]

And so that's when I came across this document. It was in the midst, this is one page of many pages, it was in the midst of dissertation chapters and letters of recommendation for somebody. It was kind of hidden inside his office, but clearly important to him. And I used to have to, as his teaching assistant, transcribe some of his Japanese handwriting. and putting into English to make notes and so forth. And I could tell right away it wasn't his handwriting. And what I would discover was that it was his father's handwriting. That's his father on the upper right side, Reverend Shinjo Nagatomi. And he was a Buddhist priest in the Jodo Shinshu, Nishonganji tradition. And he had written this... piece of paper and many papers like it, which was a diary and also, because we did Dharma talk today, like notes for his Dharma talks, but written between the period of 1942 to 1945 in a place called Manzanar, California, a Japanese-American camp where roughly 10,000-some people

[08:03]

were incarcerated in that one camp. And at some point, he was the only Buddhist priest there. So as I read this diary, and the family asked me to translate some of it into English, I would come to learn about my professor's father, who was in this camp, what his experiences were like, and as a Buddhist priest, what he was saying to people to give them some guidance and also maybe uplift a little bit. And as I was translating this document, I realized I grew up in Japan until I was born in Tokyo. When I was 17, I came to this country. And so I didn't know very much about the whole World War II Japanese-American. And as I said, my main specialization was late medieval, early modern Japanese Buddhist texts. And so I had no real knowledge about World War II, what happened to the Japanese American community, and 120,000 people suddenly uprooted from their homes and put in these camps.

[09:08]

And I would read in this diary, trying to translate for the family, words like, mess hall. I didn't know what that was. So it became this point of education. I had to educate myself about what happened, just so that I could do this job of translating... as respect for my teacher, the diary for the family. His wife, my professor's wife, she, unlike my professor who was also born in Japan like me, she was born in America in a small Central Valley, California town called Madera, California. It's not so far from Fresno. And at that time, Japanese-American students people were doing a lot of agricultural work in the Central Valley. And her parents were no different. They had come from Wakayama and settled there. And as I was translating this diary about her husband's father, Mrs. Naatomi started to share with me some of her family's experience about what happened to their family during World War II.

[10:21]

And she mentioned that just after Pearl Harbor, In the weeks thereafter, there was a lot of tension in that small Japanese-American community in Madera, California, because the community leaders were being rounded up by the FBI. There was a lot of talk about reprisals against the Japanese and Japanese-American community because of what happened at Pearl Harbor. So she was only like 10 or 11 years old, but she was hearing all these things, and she was sharing this with me, and it would... maybe take like four visits where I would go in with new translations, and little by little, the story of her family emerged. And basically, the story she told was one where, again, she's like 10 years old at Pearl Harbor, December 1941. She comes home from school one day, and she comes back to the farm and sees her father at the front door being beaten by some men in suits.

[11:22]

And she peers into the farmhouse and she sees her mother sitting at the kitchen table very, very still because somebody's trained a shotgun to her head. And because she was so young, she was very frightened. I mean, I don't think you have to be young to be frightened, but she mentioned she was so frightened. But she knew she had to be brave and go in the middle of this situation because she realized her parents don't have very much English. And clearly these men in suits didn't have any Japanese language ability. So she had to serve as a translator. And so she went. And soon it became apparent that the men in suits were agents, special agents of the FBI. And they explained that they were there because her father was a member of the board of the local Buddhist association, Madera Buddhist Association. And that as such, he was on an FBI list of that would later come to be, she would come to learn, was called the ABC list, different levels of threat to national security.

[12:27]

Her dad was on some kind of list of people to be investigated, interrogated by the FBI because of his association with the Buddhist temple. And then she also was able to explain to these agents, you know, they thought they were under threat. Apparently her dad... had been in the lettuce fields and there were some rabbits or something there. And so he was shooting in the air to try to scare off the rabbits. But that had been the precise moment when the FBI arrived at the house. And so that's why this whole commotion was happening. And once they got a little bit of understanding what was going on, the FBI agent said, you know what, your dad is not on our list of people to be arrested right away. So we're going to come back tomorrow. And in fact, they came back several more times to question him and his involvement at the Buddhist temple. And as the days went on, the father was like, you know, we may be Japanese, we may have a link to this country that attacked the United States, and we may be Buddhist, but that doesn't mean that...

[13:39]

we're some kind of threat to American national security or we're not spies or we're not saboteurs or anything like that. And so he said, we need to show and demonstrate our loyalty to America. And what he did was he went around the entire house, farmhouse, anything that had made in Japan, Japanese characters, kanji, characters on it, they just got out and threw into a fire. And for her as a 10-year-old girl, the worst thing was when he collected, it's called the Hinamatsuri Ningyo, the Girls' Day Doll Collection, and took the dolls and threw that into the fire. But she ends this story, she recollected the story by saying her dad had one last set of documents that he kind of hesitated and couldn't get himself to throw into the fire. And what they were was a bound copy of... because he's Jodo Shinshu, Nishonganji tradition, the Pure Land Sutras that had been handed down in his family generation to generation.

[14:46]

He didn't feel like he could throw the sutra or the Buddhist scripture into the fire. And as a board member, head board member of the local Buddhist association, he had held all the minutes of the board from the founding of the temple through the decades up to December 1941. He didn't feel like that was something he could throw in the fire either. And so he got a box, got the backhoe out, there's a large tree next to the garage and that was his kind of X marks the spot, dug a hole there and buried, buried this box there. Long story short, she mentioned, you know, they had to go to camp at the Fresno Assembly Center nearby and when they returned after the war, after having had to sell their farm for 1 20th of its market value. They came back after the war and they found that the new owners, A, were unwilling to sell that farm back except at market value.

[15:53]

And since they didn't make any money during the war, they couldn't buy their farm back. They had relatives in Los Angeles, so they knew they were going to go there at that point. But the dad was like, I've got to find that farm that box with the Buddhist Sutra and this history of our temple. But during the war, the new owners had cut down all the large trees and broken down the garage. And so he roughly knew where it was but didn't have the clear marker. And so he never recovered that box. So somewhere in the soil of California is a Buddhist scripture and Buddhist temple history that's buried. And what I took from that story she told me, this is my professor's wife, she told me that many years ago, 17 plus years ago, was the first thing I learned was, oh, okay, there's something about these buried treasures. It could be the buried diary I found in my professor's office.

[16:57]

It could be these type of boxes that people hid about their faith life at the time of the war. But it's also about people's memories and what they've tucked away and not told. But it also struck me that the dad was like, we can, you know, to say that we belong in America, we can burn away our Japanese-ness. But one thing he couldn't burn away was his faith and his Buddhist faith. And he had to kind of let that be buried for a while. But this idea that it's not a... contradiction to be both Buddhist and American at the same time. That was something that this was one family story but I would come to learn the 120,000 Japanese Americans who were put in these camps from the west coast of the United States during World War II the vast majority of them over two-thirds of that community was Buddhist and so I came to learn over time I translated my

[18:04]

professor's father's diary, but I would come to translate many, many other diaries over the 17 years. I would come to interview about 120 camp survivors. I would come to go into the archives in Washington, D.C., many different temple archives, and that's what this book is based on. But it all started with Goen, some kind of thing, some kind of Something happened, and then I was like, now I had to do it. I had to do it. And one of the things I learned, because we're Zen tradition here, I'm going to mention, I would come to learn another interesting little story in Wyoming. There was a camp there, also a very large camp, roughly the same size as Manzanar. And there was, I think... you know, because he has a history also here in San Francisco area, maybe, I don't know if anybody's ever heard of Nyogen Senzaki.

[19:06]

Okay, a few people. He is a Rinzai tradition Zen teacher who lived in San Francisco before the war. He was a disciple of Shakusouen, the first Zen Buddhist priest to come to the United States on an official delegation to represent Japan at the World Parliament of Religions. And his translator was D.T. Suzuki and so forth. Anyway, one other student, Nyogen Senzaki, a young man, he had studied, he had read the biography of Benjamin Franklin in Japan. And he had always dreamed of going to America because of what his teacher told him. And he came to the United States, to San Francisco, 1906, I think. And eventually he moved down to L.A. and had a Zen community before the war, a multi-ethnic one. in Los Angeles, Japanese nationals, Japanese Americans, Latino members and Caucasian members. He had a community in LA, but then he would go to this place, Wyoming, in one of these camps, and set up, in his own barrack, he set up a Zen, he called it Tozen Zenkutsu, like a Zen hall of Tozen, eastward

[20:25]

advance to means east and zen means to advance to move to flow and it's based on this word so the eastward flow of the Dharma the Buddha's teachings is based on a prophecy that the Buddha made before his death that after he died he would no longer be physically available as a teacher but that his teachings, the Dharma, would remain. And he predicted that the Dharma would advance or flow, move eastward. And in Japan, this word, is used in early texts, later texts like early classical texts of Japanese history to refer to the fact that Buddhism began in India, went through China eastward, went to Korea, and then finally landed on this easternmost islands of Asia called Japan.

[21:31]

But this man, Zen priest in Wyoming, called his kind of Zen center of internment camp, the Zen hall of eastward movement. And I wanted to use this to evoke another idea in my book. Now, because all of you are here in San Francisco Bay Area, I'm going to ask one more show of hands. How many people, this is across the bay, so maybe it's more difficult, but there's UC Berkeley and the city of Berkeley. How many people know why Berkeley is called Berkeley? No. Named after what? Yes, an Anglican bishop, George Barclay, in the British pronunciation, but a person who was well known as a poet, a philosopher, an Anglican bishop, who apparently, if you go to UC Berkeley, this place called Founders Rock, if you stand there and look, obviously there's no Golden Gate at the time the university was founded, but at the time of its founding...

[22:49]

the Regents of the College of California, which is in Oakland at that time, were thinking of building a university. And they were standing where UC Berkeley is today, looking westward across the Pacific. And one of them recalled a poem by a man called George Berkeley. A poem titled America. In fact, go to the next slide. One verse of which says... Westward, the course of empire takes its way. The first four acts already passed. A fifth shall close the drama with the day. Time's noblest offspring is the last. This is the British view, right, of what is America. The idea that civilization, including Christianity, would be moving from England to a place called New England. York would become New York. And that somehow God had chosen America as this new world where that civilization in Europe, which he felt under decay, would be renewed, come anew with this kind of westward movement.

[24:02]

And so that's why one story of America is often this idea of kind of westward ho. That's why the Portland Trailblazers are called... The idea that the American story is the unfolding and the movement of civilization across the plains, across the Midwest and into the Pacific. And apparently those people that founded the University of California wanted to name that place Berkeley because they viewed the idea that that place would be the outpost of civilization, higher learning, as America expanded even further westward, across the Pacific, to Hawaii, to the Philippines, et cetera, Asia. So I mentioned this poem because there's a poem written by the Zen monk, Yogen Senzaki, that I found as an interesting parallel. If I go to the next slide.

[25:03]

So I mentioned he set up a temple in his own barracks, at one of these Japanese-American camps called Harp. It's in Wyoming. It was called Harp Mountain, Wyoming. It's near Powell and Cody, Wyoming today. And he writes this poem as he's leaving. The poem's title is called Leaving Santa Anita. He was sent from, you know, forcibly removed from his home in Los Angeles to go to the Santa Anita racetracks. It's like he was living in a horse stable. in the spring and summer of 1942, while the big camps were being built in the American interior, like Harb Mountain, Wyoming. And he learns he's about to go there, and so he writes a poem. This morning, the winding train like a big black snake takes us as far as Wyoming. The current of Buddhist thought always runs eastward. this policy may support the tendency of the teaching.

[26:08]

Who knows? And of course, by this policy, he meant the U.S. Army's policy of forced removal of the entire Japanese American population from the West Coast. And, well, I mean, first of all, he's kind of an optimistic, poor-looking guy. He's like, you know, maybe by moving, you know, from California to Wyoming, I'm fulfilling the Buddhist prophecy of eastward transmission of the Dharma. So that was one thing. But it also, to me, raised this other question about what is America. Because it occurred to me that, you know, yes, we talk about manifest destiny, the westward kind of story of the making of America. But for Asian people, like Nyogai Senzaki and other people who immigrated, you know, from Asia to the United States, their story is not that western story. It's a different story.

[27:10]

And once we recognize there are, you know, there's an eastward migration, there's a northward migration. Like, there's actually migrations from many different corners of the world, people bringing their cultures, languages, food, and religion to America. And that's also what constitutes... So I found that poem to be something that also provoked in me this idea of, like, what is America? And what is American Buddhism? If I go to the next slide. And this was because, as another kind of curious fact that I found, that I write about in my book, the very first people picked up by the FBI... Even before the smoke had cleared on December 7th, 1941, which was a Sunday, so many Buddhist temples were having in Honolulu services and so forth.

[28:15]

3.30 that day, martial law was declared and the civilian government kicked out, and the military took over. But even before martial law had been declared, the FBI started rounding up people. The very first person Gikyo Kuchiba, the head Buddhist priest at the Honganji Buddhist temple, largest Buddhist temple in Honolulu. Second person picked up, a Soto Zen Buddhist priest at a Thai age temple in Waipahu, near Honolulu. Buddhist priest, you'd think maybe they'd pick up consular officials, but no, it was Buddhist priests that were seen as a threat to national security, such a threat to that they needed to be prioritized in terms of being picked up by the FBI as potential threats to national security. So in that period, I talk about in the book this period that's right after Pearl Harbor where religion matters.

[29:19]

They didn't pick up Christian ministers for being Christian ministers, even though they were also community leaders in this period. Japanese American Committee, it was the Buddhists that were targeted. And I would come to learn by doing archival research that the Office of Naval Intelligence, Army G2, and the FBI had been, since 1938, so this is some years prior to Pearl Harbor, already doing surveillance on temples, making registries and lists of people in different classifications of dangerousness to America in case of war with Japan. So while Pearl Harbor... Because an attack was a surprise. I think every intelligence agency thought Manila would be attacked and the Japanese Imperial fleet wouldn't come as far as Pearl Harbor. That was a surprise for the military and intelligence communities of the time. They were fully prepared for a potential war with Japan. And they had documents on how to roll out martial law, how to shut down radio stations, and how to pick up Buddhist priests.

[30:25]

So that's what happened in the weeks that followed, and that's why my professor's wife was anxious, because everybody in the community was a leader, especially if you're a religious leader in the Buddhist or Shinto communities, you were picked up. But by the time of spring of 1942, including here in San Francisco, including, you know, I think many of you know, Shigeru Suzuki's... temple also priests, Soko-ji temple, and in LA, Seishu-ji temple, all the historic Japanese American Buddhist temples, and all the other sects of Buddhism, the priests are taken away, but also in the spring, everybody else is taken away. That's the mass incarceration. This is not targeting people because they're on one list or another. This is about the wholesale removal of an entire ethnic community. And that was done on the basis of an executive order, Executive Order 9066, issued by President Roosevelt in February 19, 1942, that gave the U.S.

[31:33]

Army the authority to take everyone living in the Western Defense Command Zone, which is from Washington, Oregon, California, the west coast of the United States, and Alaska, to take anybody that they deemed even a potential threat to national security to round them up. Because the executive order itself doesn't say Japan or Japanese. There's no words like that in there. It just gives army authority to do whatever it wants. And so what did it do? It did, in fact, pick up every single person. Even if you're like me, if you're mixed race, up to 1 16th was the rule. If you have 1 16th blood of Japanese in you, you are eligible. to be picked up. And basically, there was no one at that time who was, you know, more than that. So basically it meant everybody. It meant everybody. And one of the things I would come to learn how thorough the roundup was, the mass incarceration and forced removal, what that entailed, was a discussion held by one of the so-called chief architects of the forced removal and incarceration, Colonel Carl Bendiston.

[32:47]

He was down in L.A., at an orphanage, and he was asked by the director of the orphanage, you know, we have these babies and three-year-olds, five-year-olds, seven-year-olds, these kids, are they also subject to the executive order? And his reply was, if they have a single drop of Japanese blood in them, I want them in camp. So that's his words, not my words, that's his words. So it meant that if you were a little baby, or if you're an infirm grandmother living here in San Francisco, it didn't matter. If you're a U.S. citizen or a Japanese national, it didn't matter. Anybody with a drop of what they viewed as Japanese blood was rounded up, 120,000. And in his 1943 final report, Lieutenant General John DeWitt, the head of this Western Defense Command Zone, writes a report about why this was necessary. And he writes, The reason is necessary, and he calls the Japanese-American community a great menace, that's his words, that was linked to the enemy nation through ties of race, customs, culture, and religion.

[34:02]

The fact that the majority of the community was Buddhist and not Christian, in his mind, in this westward, eastward idea of what is America, who belongs who, is excluded from the idea of America. Who can be a true, authentic American, loyal American? In his mind, the fact that this community is a majority Buddhist was a factor in why they needed to be rounded up in this very thorough manner. So, if I could go to the next slide. The next word, Buddhist word, I want to share with you. In Sanskrit, sometimes it's upaya. And I think usually the English translation is something like skillful means, something like that. I'm like, what does that mean? What's skillful mean? So Hube is really about trying to adapt things for the situation in front of you. And it comes from, of course, the Buddha's own Dharma teachings that is said to be multifold and multifold in part because he tried to give...

[35:13]

lectures or teachings that was appropriate for the condition of the people that was in front of him. So if there are certain kinds of Jain practitioners, he would say something. If they're lay people, they would say something else. And he would try to adjust the teachings to that situation, persons, actual people, so that Dharma is not abstract, but real. So... hoben has also been used in the Buddhist tradition 2000 some years now, you know, as a whole to fit circumstances. So when it moves from India to Tibet or China or China to Japan or Japan to here, hoben, adaptation, skillfully. And one of the things I would come to learn about people that went to these camps was that they had to learn how to skillfully adapt themselves as Buddhists in these new circumstances.

[36:17]

As I mentioned, the executive order went out. Next, there were notices around town all across San Francisco, Japan, town area. These notices would go up. And people had between a week and ten days to sell their property or businesses or anything they had in their homes that they couldn't carry. The rule was that you could take what you could carry, which I think for most people meant like a suitcase, like a simple suitcase. And so you'd have to scour your apartment or house and figure out what, you know, if the government told you you have a week or ten days to go to a destination at that point unknown for a time indefinite, what would you put in that suitcase? And so that's what people were faced with. And that's why, like my professor's wife's family, they had to sell their farm for 120th of the market. They had to somehow get ready to go to some camp that they had no idea where it was going to be. And so people ended up at these so-called, euphemistically called, they call them assembly centers.

[37:28]

And as I mentioned, when Yogi Senzaki was in a horse race stall, here in San Francisco area, Tamforan, Another horse racing track. Everyone from San Francisco went there. Fewer Japanese. This was up in Seattle, located about 30 miles south of Seattle for everyone living, Japanese blood living in Washington State. You'd ended up with these horse racing tracks, livestock centers, and county fairgrounds. And you would be living in these spaces that were formerly, just a few weeks earlier, you know, horse stalls. You could smell the manure and the urine, even though they had tried to lay down some fresh wooden planks on the floor. It was not so pleasant. It was not so pleasant, but skillful adaptation. People tried to adapt. People tried to make do with what they had. And if I go to the next slide. And so this was in Portland.

[38:31]

at the International Livestock and Expo Center in North Portland, still there. But it was, you know, places that livestock lived in. And this one family, as you can see, they tried to make their surroundings, you know, decent, livable, have some dignity. And so they had brought enough things from in those suitcases. They clearly, you know, had a... hot for the baby. And it's actually the quarters of Reverend Tansai Terakawa's family. He was the head Buddhist priest of the Oregon Buddhist Church in Portland. And that's his daughter, Hiroko Terakawa, and her friend, Lily and Hayashi, they're playing checkers on the bed. But the other thing, if you might notice, is there's a picture of the Buddha and an American flag. And this is another theme, you know, like the Buried Sutra and Temple History.

[39:38]

This is another family that said, you know what? Even though we come to these camps, we're going to say we belong. That we're not disloyal. That we can be both Buddhist and American at the same time. Because what they were told when they got to these camps initially... you have that suitcase and what they do is they search it for contraband. And clearly if you have weapons, contraband, right? But other things that were deemed contraband by the U.S. Army was anything written like a book, for example. Published book in Japanese was considered contraband. If you had a Buddhist sutra, contraband. If you had a book of poetry, also contraband. seemed to be subversive, to be taken away when you came to camp. The only two exceptions was a dictionary, an English-Japanese dictionary.

[40:39]

If you had Japanese, that was okay. And the other exception was a Christian Bible written in Japanese. So what was the message that these Buddhist families were receiving? They're being told, if you, I sometimes call it Anglo-Protestant normativity, like Anglo in the sense of whiteness, but also in the sense of English only, that America was... If you were trying to learn English and needed a dictionary, that was Americanization. And if you wanted to be American, you had to convert to, if not Protestantism, at least Christianity. So that kind of idea of America as a white Christian nation was so dominant... in the minds of the army at that time, that that was their litmus test for what was contraband or not, what was allowable or not. But this family is like, no, we're going to be American, but we're going to be Buddhist as well. So this is to me a very interesting way that these people in camp asserted this very American principle and promise in the constitution of religious freedom.

[41:49]

And it's something that I wanted to mention. as a kind of important part of American Buddhist history, that these people are kind of standing up and asserting their right to belong as Buddhists in America. But I've talked about skillful adaptation of Hoban. So one of the things that they did, in addition to trying to make the living quarters livable, was in that moment of dislocation, in that moment of loss, you're going to turn when you've been deprived of freedom, you've been defied of material things, you might turn to your faith, and because the community was so dominantly Buddhist, they've tried to find a way to revive their Buddhist practice in camp. Amongst them, one of the stories I relate in the book is a group that's in camp in April of 42, among the first that are rounded up. They're in camp, and

[42:51]

Do you do Hanamatsuri here in April, the Buddha's birthday? Yeah. So, you know, Japanese word for Buddha's birthday, Hanamatsuri festival, literally flower festival. And it comes from the Buddhist classical texts that say that when the Buddha was born, the heavens were so happy that it rained sweet rain and flowers. And so there's usually a little shrine with flowers. And you usually take some sweet tea and pour it onto a statue of the baby Buddha, right? So they tried to do that, but in their suitcase, nobody had a shrine. Nobody had, obviously they're in the middle of a desert camp, so they don't have flowers. And they don't have a baby Buddha statue. And they have no sweet tea, but they do have army rations, sugar, and coffee, so they make a sweet coffee drink. They have beets in the mess hall. So they take some toilet paper and dye the beets red and fold like origami style some paper.

[43:54]

And they go into the mess hall and find the biggest carrot that they can find. And one of the young men, Arthur Yamabe, he's a member of the YVA or the Young Buddhist Association, he carves a beautiful Buddha statue out of a carrot. So they pour that sweet coffee onto the carrot Buddha. That's Hoban, skillful adaptation. I'm sorry, if I could just go back. People made altars. People made ojuzur, you know, Buddhist prayer beads, out of peach pits. They had a ration of one piece of fruit per week. They would keep the peach pits to make it. That was a Soto Zen priest who made that one. But that's how people adapted. Actually, one more, please. No, I'm sorry. If you go two ahead. Okay. Hotoke. So, you know, usually we read this character, this is a newer writing of Butsu, or in Japanese, reading Hotoke, and it means the Buddha.

[44:59]

But in Japan, Hotoke also refers to like a corpse, a dead person. And so there's this kind of strange eliding of the idea of the Buddha with the idea of a dead person. And in camp, That became one of the big areas of Buddhist concern. Those camps of 10,000 people, they were really hastily made in these interior regions of Wyoming and Eastern California and Idaho and Arizona. And those tar paper barracks were made hastily, a lot of holes in them, very hot during the day, desert kind of heat, very cold at night. And so what it meant... was that the vulnerable in the population, the very elderly, the young, many died that first winter and spring. And so one of the responsibilities of a Buddhist priest was to, you know, the diary I mentioned, Reverend Nagatomi, my professor's father, he's just doing funerals all the time that first winter and spring because of so many people dying.

[46:10]

It was... you know, a time when the government didn't seem to care that much. But for the people themselves, they were like, we have to memorialize it. We've had these families that lost everything they worked so hard for up until the war began. And now in camp, they're losing family members. And so this is a, you know, funeral of us. You can see how small the coffin is of a baby in camp. If I go to the next slide. And this is Reverend Nagatomi, my professor's father, standing in front of a monument at Manzanar. It's still there today. It's called the Iretto. It's a big, white, concrete monument. Iretto, the word to means tower or monument, and I and re means to honor or give homage to the re or the spirits, the spirits of those who have died recently, but also of the ancestors. And in the Japanese Buddhist sects, they would consider that the hotoke or the Buddha, people who died.

[47:20]

And so he wanted to create a monument to not forget these people who had died and find a way to console the families. And that was another very, very important part of ritual or ritualizing Buddhism that was so meaningful for people. who needed some kind of guidance and direction at this very difficult time. And the metaphor that people would use constantly in these diaries was about the renge or the lotus flower. And I think many of you, I'm sure already know that this, if you go to the next slide, this Reverend Kojima, I don't know how many of you know him, I think. He's now the head of Zenshuji Temple in Soto Zen Temple in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles. He drew this for me.

[48:21]

You can see this lotus flower and some barbed wire and a little pond that looks like America. And this metaphor of this idea of the lotus flower kind of blossoming above muddy water. It's a very basic Mahayana Buddhist imagery. But this idea of the lotus flower representing the Buddha, and the Buddha's awakening, coming from muddy waters. This idea that one can emerge from the world of suffering, the world of muddiness, and have this kind of pure flower kind of above. That's a basic image, but in camp, the way they interpreted this image, there was one gentleman who was arrested on Sunday, December 7th, 1941, in his robes. It was as if the FBI came in. I'm not in robes today, but they took him away at the temple, didn't allow him to go home, so he was in his robes in April 1942, from December 1941 to April, not having a change of clothes.

[49:37]

And he was talking about But he's asked to give the sermon at the Buddha's birthday. And he was talking about the fact that how dirty his robes were. And he said, look how muddy, dirty these robes are. But the Buddha taught that it's in the very midst of the muddiness that the lotus flower can bloom. When a lotus flower is put in like pure water, sterile water, it actually can't grow. it needs the nutrition from the mud to grow. And that's how you blossom above it. So this is the kind of teaching, I simply call it camp dharma. It's a dharma that comes from this yearning towards freedom in a place of non-freedom. And to me, this is another kind of big lesson from the camp days. And so I'm going to fast forward. people return to camp. I mentioned my professor's father's, I don't know, wife's family returning to their farm, not being able to get their farm back.

[50:45]

But the idea of, you know, when you say, , that word, to kind of, first of all, it means return, but usually when we say, you know, it means to go forth, but in Mahayana Buddhism, our Buddha nature is already there, so we're kind of returning. But we returned to the three refuges. And so, people, when they got back, found their temples also in a state of difficulty. San Jose Buddhist Church was burnt by arsonists. Many temples. Los Angeles Temple was vandalized. Thankfully, didn't experience it. This is up in Seattle, completely vandalized during the war. But the temples, despite that, became a refuge.

[51:46]

It became a place where people coming back from these camps after the war to restart their life again, their job life, their family life, their Buddhist life again. In fact, go to the next slide. These temples served, this is in Sesshin Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles. It says, welcome the Pope signage says welcome to the Buddhist hostel many temples served as hostels as refuges for people coming back finding job discrimination finding nobody will rent homes to Japanese coming back after the war and so this was a thing that temples became another kind of refuge not just in a kind of spiritual sense but literally a place of refuge for people. And it's in that context I want to kind of conclude this talk in thinking about what is home, what is refuge, what is combining American and Buddhism together.

[52:59]

I want to end with another poem by Nyogen Senzaki that Rinzai Zen Buddhist priest that initially came here to San Francisco from Japan. He wrote a poem that is kind of like the structure, it's part of the main structure of my book. But he gives this idea, he gives a poem to his multi-ethnic communities. In other words, the members who were not Japanese, Japanese American, who didn't have to go to camp, he wanted to give them some message. a Dharma teaching before he left the camp. And he wrote a poem called Parting. Just if I could go to the next sentence. And by the way, this is a hymn in his barrack. I mentioned the Eastward Transmission of Buddhism Hall in Wyoming. That's somebody who sketched him in his barrack. But if I could go to the next slide, which is the last slide, the poem.

[53:59]

He wrote this poem called Parting in May 1942. as I said, to his Zen Buddhist community. And he says, Thus have I heard. The army ordered all Japanese faces to be evacuated from the city of Los Angeles. This homeless monk has nothing but a Japanese face. He stayed here 13 springs meditating with all faces from all parts of the world and studied the teachings of Buddha with them. Wherever he goes, he may form other groups inviting friends. of all faces beckoning them with the empty hands of Zen this first line and if I could go back two slides thank you in Japanese thus have I heard it's the opening preamble the opening words to a Buddhist sutra

[55:00]

So I think many of you know that the Buddhist canon, the sutras, the scriptures were formulated in the first council. After the Buddha died, yes, he died, but his Dharma remained. And the person with apparently the best memory, Ananda, he was called on to recite from memory all of the Buddhist discourses, all of his Dharma talks. And I guess he wanted to hedge his bets a little bit. Because he says, thus have I heard. This is what I recall. And then what follows, what follows is usually like place and how many people were there and then the teachings. All right, let's go back to the poem. In this case, it's not a traditional Buddhist sutra where the teachings are laid out, you know, invoking... key Buddhist ideas that the Buddha taught.

[56:06]

But it does give a sense of the time and place. The time is World War II when the army is ordering people to move. And the place is Los Angeles, California. And then the teaching is mentioned. It's in the actual living the lived experience of forced removal, incarceration, and what would come about in these camps that were the teachings themselves that would constitute what the Buddha meant about actualizing the Buddha's teachings, even in the most difficult of situations, finding that notice of freedom, liberation, in the very midst of of incarceration. And Senzaki was a man who believed very much in America, very much in the concept of religious freedom.

[57:11]

He has another poem where he talks about the ideals of the Constitution are just words on a piece of paper unless people actualize and embody it. Equality under the law, due process, religious freedom. All of those are just words unless people practice it, actualize it, embody it. And thus the same way for Buddhism. Buddhist scriptures are also just words unless you embody it, actualize it. So thus have I heard. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[58:15]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[58:18]

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