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. Good evening. Good to be with you all and be back up here in this place. Oh, yes, that's on. Great. Well, welcome. Welcome back. And for anyone who is new or newish, whether here in the room or online, thank you for coming. And if you have any questions, I will do my best to leave a little time for questions at the end. But always feel free to ask questions to anyone who has a robe or a rakasu. We are always happy to... give people whatever information we might have.

[01:02]

So my name is Dan Gudgel. I'm one of the resident priests here at San Francisco Zen Center. I'm also the director of online content, so I spend quite a bit of time with our online sangha, as well as the beloved community here on Page Street. So tonight I'll speak for a little while, and then we'll have a little stretch break before we do a question and answer. And we will be done by 8.30 tonight. Each morning in this temple, as one of the very first things that we give our voices to after our nighttime hours of silence, we chant the confession and repentance verse. We do the robe chant first, and then the first thing that we chant in our morning service is the confession and repentance verse.

[02:15]

And that goes like so. For those of you who have chant books, it is in your chant book on page two, but it's also quite short. All my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. And what I want to talk about today is that very last piece, the avowing of karma. But I do think there are a few sort of general or fundamental things about karma to mention first, just so that this little verse makes shared sense to us all. And first I'll say that karma is quite a broad and varied subject.

[03:26]

And I'm not going to get into the... deep nuances of karma itself. So if you have a particular interest in learning more about karma, certainly ask your teachers, ask your Dharma friends. There is much great teaching that has already been done on what is karma. But essentially, karma is volitional action. The things we choose to think, or say or do, and the repercussions of those choices which ripple out from that moment of choice. If I choose to do something informed by my background and in the context of the world that I live in, that is my karma. And when some reaction happens, that is the fruit of my karma. The fruits of this karma may not show up right away.

[04:29]

I may not even experience them directly in this body. But every action causes a reaction. Everything we do matters. And this verse says that karma is ancient and twisted. And that means we are affected by and reacting to and moving within the experience of the ripples of our past choices and the choices of other human beings that stretch back well beyond and outside our awareness. We have free will. We have some choices that we can make in any moment. And that appears to be within the bounds of the world we actually find ourselves in. I cannot... choose to have not had the experiences that I've had.

[05:30]

I can't choose, for instance, to not be the product of this particular moment in the United States. And that is a product of all of world history, which is related to the entire history of this universe. Karma is ancient and twisted. This verse also says that Greed, hate, and delusion are beginningless. If I look for the start of greed, hate, and delusion, which I think of as shorthand for these negative states that perpetuate our suffering, if I look for the start of greed, hate, and delusion, I can't find it. Certainly greed, hate, and delusion were not a new development in the Buddha's time, 2,500 years ago. the roots of greed, hate, and delusion are lost in the mists of time.

[06:33]

And so we say that greed, hate, and delusion are beginningless. And so if karma is ancient and twisted and beginningless, it seems to me that we must be sharing a lot of that karma. It's not like I have my own personal stream of ancient twisted karma, and other people have their own completely separate streams of ancient twisted karma. My life is deeply affected by the colonization of North America by Western Europeans. And when I say the colonization of North America by Western Europeans, what I'm actually talking about is innumerable moments of individual choices by actual individual human beings who, in their own moments, had free will and the ability to choose what they did.

[07:38]

They made their choices, and the ripples of those choices continue to reverberate. We cannot choose what has come before, but we can choose what we do in this moment. This verse also says that karma is born through body, speech, and mind. Some of the things that I find in my mind seem as if they were put there without my conscious choice. The English language, my cultural and racial conditioning, biological compounds produced by this body, those things just seem to be in my mind. some things in my mind I've put there incidentally or intentionally. Meditation training, a knowledge of Zen spiritualism, poetry, every episode of Star Trek Deep Space Nine, countless things I have chosen to put into my mind.

[08:52]

Within the matrix of all of these influences, I can make some choices about where I focus my mind, what I encourage and what I discourage. But this mind, as it is, is what I have to start with. Thought becomes word, word becomes action. So what I put into my mind and what I nurture will shape how I think, what I say, and what I do. So with a little shared unpacking of this ancient twisted karma verse, let's look a little more closely at this last line. I now fully avow. When I first encountered this short chant,

[09:55]

I had an incorrect understanding of the word avow. And in talking to others, I found that I'm not the only one who was confused about this. I think partly because I was coming from a Christian background, knowledge of sin and of forgiveness of sin, I originally took avow to mean to give up or to stop. So I was chanting this verse with the intent of all that bad stuff that I've done. I'm not going to do that anymore. But that's not actually what the word avow means. Avow means to publicly confess or accept or acknowledge. It means, yes, I did that. It's admitting who I really am.

[10:57]

And what are the constituent parts that make this particular being? And looking at my experience with this verse, I see now that this practice of private, silent confession of karma was one of the things that I found reassuring about Zen. In some way, I could keep my failures to myself. I didn't have to confess them to a priest. But it turns out that this, for me, also makes it much too easy to sidestep my responsibility to repair the harms that I've caused. And just like the way the colonization of North America was actually a series of individual decisions by individual human beings, So this concept I think of as collective suffering is actually an unequally distributed sum of the specific instances of suffering of innumerable real human beings right now.

[12:13]

This collective suffering includes my own suffering and I've realized is actually deepened That suffering is deepened, my own and the collective suffering, when I try to hide my own involvement and connection to the causes of that suffering. I was raised in Warren, Ohio, a moderately sized industrial city near the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. And I grew up there between the late 1970s and the early 1990s. And Warren, Ohio at that time was a statistically very diverse town. That was an outcome of the steel manufacturing boom that brought southern black labor up as part of the Great Migration and also brought poor black and white laborers out of Appalachia.

[13:23]

So this town I grew up in was, as I said, statistically diverse, but in actuality was enormously segregated by race, religion, gender, sexuality, and wealth. I was taught many messages of love, coexistence, and equality, but I did not actually see that love practiced very much in the world around me. What I learned was which words to use in which context and how to behave differently around different groups of people. The fundamental message was, take care of your friends. In my adult life, I've chosen to put other ideas and stories into my head. Yet I am still subject to the effects of that karma from my youth. Those racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, and generally anti-other attitudes that I was immersed in as a child are a part of who I am.

[14:39]

It may be that similarly to how a later life of exercise and healthy eating might balance poor choices from youth, I may be able to balance some of that early conditioning with what I've since chosen to put into my mind. But it's still a poor second option behind starting from a place of health. For example, when I was about 10 or 11 years old, I realized quite suddenly and with no hesitation on my own part that I was bisexual. I also realized immediately in that same moment that it was not safe to express that publicly in Warren, Ohio in 1987. As I lived with this realization about myself, I also saw that everyone just assumed I was straight and that

[15:53]

since I seemed to lean more towards relationships with women, I could present a very convincing picture of straightness. It was also very evident to me, maybe not in a really explicit way as a 10 or 11-year-old, but still quite obvious to me, that I had a great amount of male-bodied, middle-class, white racialized privilege, and that this fiction of straightness protected that privilege. 1987 was also in the midst of the AIDS epidemic, and so queerness itself was seen as fundamentally unsafe. I didn't see good things happening for queer people anywhere, and so I othered and kept queer people away. even pushing away any queerness I found inside myself.

[16:56]

I kept my sexuality secret until I had left Warren and gone to college. Until then, I explicitly perpetuated the lie that I was straight, and those choices, words, and actions affected me deeply. I've realized only in the last few years that there are still homophobic ideas in my mind, and they're still capable of affecting my actions today. I may not be repeating jokes that I heard in high school, but I can still be uneasy with my own queerness and around other queer people. And I see that this makes my life poorer and removes me as an ally to those who are suffering. This causes harm. And this is an example of this ancient twisted nature of karma.

[18:01]

My own karma is so intertwined with collective karma that I'm not only perpetuating harm, I'm also making choices that are not in my own best interest and that have the potential to harm me. And in similar fashion, I can see racist karma, sexist karma, classist karma, Eurocentric karma, Christian-centric karma actively arising in my daily life and in the lives of those around me. I grew up almost exclusively among white, middle-class Christians. And in my adult life, I've mostly chosen to be in white, middle-class Christian-influenced spaces. And again, this makes my life poorer, smaller, and limited, and perpetuates the harms of systemic racism and rapacious capitalism.

[19:04]

And it removes my voice from supporting those who deserve it. I didn't choose the conditions that I was born in, but I have made many choices since then to preserve those conditions. as they benefit me personally. And in my personal choices, I can in fact perpetuate the systems that cause great harm to other human beings. These deep, twisted roots of karma sometimes seem overwhelming. It's tempting to give in to a feeling of inertia that These problems are so big and so deeply rooted that there's nothing I can do. But this is only coming from a very limited, self-focused perspective. It may be true that some of the content of my mind and experience is so deeply embedded that it'll be with me for the rest of my life.

[20:12]

But my human life is not the end of my karma. The effects of my choices will continue to ripple out long after the matter in this body has been redistributed elsewhere. When I think about how much easier it would be to heal this collective trauma if my ancestors had made different choices, this should be something that reminds me that I am an ancestor of the future. If my ancestors had made different choices, I would have started my journey from a different place. If I'm careful and conscientious in this lifetime, I'm leaving a better starting place for someone else. So if I specifically avow my karma to myself, or as is sometimes recommended privately to an image of the Buddha,

[21:18]

if I really consider and enumerate and remember specific harmful choices that I've made, I do expect that that will affect my future. Explicit attention to my errors makes them more present in my mind from moment to moment, where their example can help me recognize further potentially harmful choices before I make them. And I see this kind of general avowal as generally, if maybe a little vaguely, positive. I also think that public avowal of karma has its own particular effect and benefit. Admitting my own faults, my mistakes, and the harmful influences that I've been subject to out loud To say these things to other living beings encourages truth and understanding between myself and others.

[22:23]

It lets people know that I'm not perfect. Hearing me avow my karma might encourage others to do so. It turns out it's okay for you to not be perfect either. And avowing karma offers a model to the wider world of real, complicated human lives lived with great thought. And just as avowing what feels like personal karma is important, so I think it's vitally important that human beings avow, that we become aware of the specifics of our collective and shared karma. If I don't shine a light into these deep corners, I'll never be able to cleanse those corners." Eihei Dogen, our revered founder of this Japanese lineage of Soto Zen, in his Eihei Koso Hotsugan Mon writes, Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we.

[23:41]

We in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors. Revering Buddhas and ancestors, we are one Buddha and one ancestor. Awakening Bodhi mind, we are one Bodhi mind. Because they extend their compassion to us freely and without limit, we are able to attain Buddhahood and let go of the attainment. Therefore, the Chan master Lung Ya said, Those who in past lives were not enlightened will now be enlightened. In this life, save the body which is the fruit of many lives. Before Buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we. Enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old. And this passage for me was a real breakthrough of sorts when I first heard it.

[24:54]

It was the first inkling that I had that this practice of enlightenment was really for me, was for everyday people, was for a being who had flaws. and was not sure where this path was taking him. Before Buddhas were enlightened, they were the same as we. Enlightened people of today are exactly as those of old. Human beings of past generations had real, individual, actual lives, moments of choice in their lives. And the choices that they made mattered and matter deeply to us now.

[25:57]

And so the choices that we make matter to people who we can't even imagine the existence of. So we begin with avowing. we admit the reality of the world around us. Each morning in this temple, once we've sat silently together and put on Buddha's robe, we explicitly confess and accept that we are beings who have caused harm. We are regular human beings, just like all of the other human beings. And we are recognizing our faults and trying to be better. And there's an image that I have been practicing with for a few months that I've found very helpful in this complicated world of looking at my own karma.

[27:09]

It's this image of Indra's net, which is often often brought up in these teaching situations. An Indra's net is usually described as a net encompassing all things where each meeting point on the net is a jewel representing one of us. And each jewel on that net reflects all of the others. But the piece that's been helpful for me is the connecting threads between those nodes on Indra's net. It feels to me as if maybe my ancient twisted karma tugs on that net in certain ways. And in my position, in this node, this meeting point that I'm in, I can lean a little bit. I can't

[28:11]

pull myself out of the net. I can't get up and walk away and go somewhere else. But I can lean a little bit. And if I feel this ancient twisted karma pulling me in one particular direction, in the same way that I bring myself back to sitting upright in the midst of zazen, I can lean a little bit away from where that deep twisted karma is trying to pull me. And so I think by avowing this karma, it's a little like that little node on the net is just saying to everyone around it, anyone who might hear, oh, I'm really feeling pulled in this direction, and I'm going to try to lean this other way to balance that out. And saying that encourages me to keep doing it. And maybe it encourages other people to lean in the same direction.

[29:12]

And so maybe if we avow our karma, if I continue to avow my karma, continue to be aware of it and react to it gently and kindly, I can bring some balance back to this system. So I I greatly recommend this practice of avowing karma. It is transformative, I think, to recognize the true nature of the reality that I'm swimming in and to see it with open eyes, to see it clearly. spoken at some length about this particular chant shall we finish just by reciting this chant once together avowing our ancient twisted karma and then after we avow our karma we'll give the eno a moment to hit that bell and we will do our closing chant and then have questions after the closing chant so

[30:41]

If anyone needs your chant book, it's on page two, and we will avow our karma. All of my ancient twisted karma, from meaningless greed and intuition, 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.

[31:42]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[31:44]

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