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. Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, for joining us. And a special welcome to... There's a good number of us here that are part of the Radical Dharma Embodying Race, Love, and Liberation Retreat. And I have the honor of co-holding with Abbas Hu Schrader. And so we are bringing our retreat to you. We're just in our first morning of it and thought that perhaps... valuable thing in our Dharma dialogue would be to set up a little bit and share a little bit of a framing conversation about how we are, how we have come to be in this particular moment, and as the title of the talk is, what's Zen got to do with it.

[01:04]

And so it is not lost on anyone that we are in, as many people have said, unprecedented times. And this unprecedented time was already in process in the form of the global coronavirus pandemic. And then in the United States, yet another incident of a murder of a black man, George Floyd, took place on, I believe it was... May, June 1st, I think it is June 1st. And that particular incidence, though it was certainly not the first, though it is certainly not actually entirely unusual for that kind of violence to be brought upon Black people's bodies. Because of the advent of social media, of the ability to have cameras, particularly the young white woman that was willing to stay and hold her camera for the entire duration of those eight minutes and 46 seconds, as well as a little time before and after that, the officer held his neck until the breath left George Floyd's body.

[02:32]

As the breath left George Floyd's body, we were struck by it. And that gave rise to not only national but also global uprisings, we would say, around the cause and the movement of Black Lives Matter. But I want to add a little bit of context that I think is relevant for especially those of us that hold our life in a way in which we understand ourselves as having a practice, and particularly those of us that have a practice that forms itself around the notion of retreat, And the power of retreating, the power of coming into a place of, I like to say, dynamic stillness and and all of what that gives rise to. So in my my awareness, the way that I have come to understand and really even before the uprisings, one of the things that I. was in conversation with different people as we were trying to navigate and make sense of like what it is we're experiencing collectively and how people are managing the coronavirus pandemic.

[03:42]

What I have spoken to is really that what we were seeing is for the first time in many of our lives, we were having a shared experience of something. And there's many ways that we talk about our sense of oneness. We talk about ourselves as, you know, one global family. But for the first time, that global family had its attention turned to the same thing. And that is unprecedented, not only in terms of the fact of the coronavirus. We've had pandemics before, but also because of the pandemic The advent of media and global media and the ability to be aware of not only that we are facing this thing together, but also how different people are facing it. We ended up with this collectivized experience of going through something together.

[04:46]

Now, of course, as a result of all of the... facets of social inequities, we are touched and impacted by that global experience in very, very different ways. And so that certainly has to be acknowledged a very... clear-cut way to say that is while many of us were asked to shelter in place, many of us, in fact, did not have shelter in order to be in place. And we didn't have safe shelter. We had sheltering conditions in which, for instance, for many women, to shelter in place was actually dangerous, and the uptick in domestic violence was quite significant. And so the global pandemic would land on us in different ways, and yet we had a vast awareness that people all over the world, all over the world, from, you know, from large countries, the largest countries in the world, India and China, to as little as, you know, tiny islands, you know, and in the stretch of islands in Hawaii, we're all facing and having to grapple with this global experience.

[06:00]

And part of that global experience, because of the response to it of shelter in place orders, stay at home orders, the various ways that we named those things. And what we also experienced is what I would like to say was a forced retreat, that we had a communication from the earth to have a kind of global timeout where all of us were held in place, except obviously those people that were the irony of many of those people that were called essential workers actually having had the experience of being the most overlooked workers, the people that have been overlooked as a result of social inequities is not to be missed. But many of us, in fact, were brought to a kind of physical movement standstill. Many of us were We're compelled to be on Zoom a lot.

[07:03]

We were compelled to be on all sorts of machinations trying to figure out what to do with ourselves in the face of such powerful uncertainty and an emotion and experience that is perhaps the most difficult for human beings to manage in themselves, especially if you don't have some kind of a practice in order to manage. And so we saw increased anxiety. We saw it... depression. We see increased mental health challenges as a result. But there we were in a kind of forced retreat experience of a quieting, of a stilling of our physical movement. Some of that stilling having an extraordinary impact on being able to actually see the impact that human beings are having on the health of our ecosystem. And some of that stilling simply being about not a lot of movement, not a lot of energy expended, not nearly as much distraction. And that particular time, and also I wanna say over the arc of the hope that things will return to just the way they were.

[08:13]

I think by the time George, the incident with George Floyd and George Floyd's murder came about, In my experience of retreats over a few decades, we had also kind of worn ourselves out collectively of the spinning around that we do when we go on retreat, when we're sort of trying to escape the reality that we are in fact in retreat, that we are in fact brought to a kind of stillness. And so there is a human experience that occurs when we're in retreat in which there's a, especially if one are still, newer to retreat experience where we find ourselves trying to escape the reality. We brought ourselves to retreat, but we're trying to escape it at the same time. We can see that effort to escape in our minds, the kind of uptake of noise and energy. We see it in our bodies. We itch and we have sensations in parts of our bodies that we didn't even know exist. That happens when we sit on our cushion, when we get on our mat, all of the ways in which we try to bring ourselves to an attention awareness of our direct experience.

[09:22]

when that happens, when we bring ourselves to that effort towards that kind of a stillness that allows for attention and awareness, all of this uprising of distraction happens. So globally, collectively, in particular in the States, we had gotten through the arc of that process, right? As a kind of a process, the phase in which we're sort of fighting against the truth of like, we are in a global pandemic. We are in an experience that is not going to simply go away. It's not an anomaly that has just happened and it will just disappear and we can go back to business as usual. We are in a thing. This is the reality for now. This is something that we're going to have to navigate for an unknown period of time. In fact, in many ways, we will never... We will never, ever, no matter if we get a vaccine or anything else, we will never return to pre-pandemic. We will always have the embodied experience of what it now means to move around in our lives with a sense of a kind of low-level caution, a kind of, for many of us, an outright fear.

[10:37]

a different way of seeing our neighbors and the people that we come in contact with, the people that we just bypassed, that perhaps once upon a time we just bypassed in the street and didn't give them much thought. You may be wondering about whether or not they have the virus, whether or not we're at risk, wearing masks, all of these things, all of this exists in our bodies. This is not something that our bodies will readily forget the truth of, even if our conscious mind forgets the truth of. And so in that space, in that space, we had come to the awareness of the murder of George Floyd. And I believe and I submit that as a result of that quieting, as a result of having reached that particular point in which the the the strong resistance to reality as it is had passed and we were. really confronted with this murder, with the egregiousness of it, with the extraordinary inhumanity of it, with the there's not an excuse we can find to try to make sense of it.

[11:54]

That as a result of that quieting, the result of the stilling of our own bodies, the stilling of our movement, the pervasiveness of the media representation, whether it's in social media or in the news or all of those things, the kind of panoramic awareness of this experience coming into direct relationship with the quieting, with the collective quieting, that we were able to feel the truth of that harm, the truth of that harm in that moment and the harm that moment represents historically in a way that we've never been able to feel it before. That in fact, our retreat, just in the way our intentional and willful going on retreat is a practice of allowing ourselves to come to a kind of rest, a kind of stillness so that we can be in direct relationship with reality as it exists rather than pitching forward into the future, trying to renegotiate the past.

[13:05]

that our retreat, that our practice is about being able to give ourselves the permission and the conditions to confront reality as it is right now, right in front of us. And so here we are, compelled, compelled by the conditions that were set forth by this global pandemic of this era, we were compelled, we are compelled to confront the pandemic of slavery, the enslavement of peoples, anti-blackness, and its direct creator, white supremacy, as this 400-year-old pandemic. this nation in particular, and distributed throughout other nations in different ways. And I think that that is an extraordinary opportunity in the same way that when we go and retreat, we have an extraordinary opportunity to decide whether or not the information, the direct experience, that direct touching...

[14:22]

is going to be the moment that we are going to continue to be in relationship to our reality, or if we will turn our back, reach back to the past, and try to cling to the ignorance of the time before. Whether or not we are going to take this moment of our collective retreat and our embodied experience of the suffering that white supremacy has caused and continues to cause individually, personally, particularly on the bodies of black people, particularly on the health and wellness and vitality of indigenous communities, particularly in the form of patriarchy and capitalism on the bodies of all people, on the bodies of women, on the bodies of people that are not empowered to not measure their lives against a bar of what did they produce.

[15:26]

We call that capitalism. And we have in this moment a revelation, a revealing and illuminating of the suffering that has been in our midst all along. Just as when we go on retreat, we come to realize, we come to touch our suffering that has been with us all along. But our moment of choice, I would say choice is liberation, the path to liberation. Our moment of choice is to decide whether we are going to be with that reality, act on the truth of our direct touching of suffering, or if we're going to do the other kind of retreat back into ignorance, the other kind of retreat back into willful unknowing, willful not knowing. The historic Buddha talked about greed, anger, and ignorance.

[16:31]

And we do a very funny thing with us, those of us that abide by and appreciate whatever religious path we may be on. But those of us that appreciate the profundity of looking at the three poisons or some would say the three evils of greed, anger, or ill will, and ignorance, we do a funny thing with that and we say, oh, greed, yes, we can get, that's terrible. Oh, anger, we can get, that's terrible. Ignorance is a kind of benign thing. Why would it have been a benign thing? It's willful ignorance. The ignorance that the Buddha meant was a willful ignorance. An intentional shrouding ourselves from the truth is the poison that has poisoned our collective capacity to wake up, to become more awake and more aware to the truth that we're facing.

[17:33]

So I share that as a way to frame and make some sense perhaps of why now, why this moment in the long, too long history of so many black peoples, so many brown peoples, indigenous peoples, but particularly in this notion of anti-blackness and the dichotomy, the false dichotomy of... white as good and black as bad that has been constructed in this country. Why now has there been these uprisings and this embodied convulsive response? Because understanding a little bit about how it is that has come to strike us now will allow us to be empowered to not disappear this moment into being merely an anomaly, but rather to understand it as a part of the process of what each of us come to be benefited by when we have an experience and have a practice of creating the conditions to come into and then choose to stay awake and aware.

[18:53]

I think my... holder of this space who will have some additional things to share and by way of a frame of how we might be thinking about this moment right now and what Zen has to do with it. As always, I always begin after listening to you teach with a bit of stunned silence. And I want to acknowledge that At this moment, this stunned silence is very painful because what you just narrated, that context of our conversation today, but every day, is incredibly painful. And then I also want to reflect on something you said to me yesterday. It's like, don't let your pain of your white shame overwhelm the fact that there's another kind of pain that you're ashamed of. And why don't you keep the focus on that pain? So I want to be very mindful of how my own sense of responsibility and shame and learning the history which I'm shamefully, woefully have not learned from my childhood on.

[20:07]

I've been taught white history, Western civilization, and I am a product of that learning, and I no longer wish to be ignorant in that way. And as I said to all of those people in the workshop yesterday, One of the quotes that I was most struck by, I've been reading James Baldwin again after 50 years. I read him in college, and 50 years later, I read it again, and as Angel said, it hasn't changed a bit. The same thing he said, as you said, Angel, it's not prophetic, it's truth. It's truth now, it was truth then, and it's been truth for hundreds and hundreds of years. So he said that, you know, white people are innocent, and it's innocence that constitutes the crime. So I am so grateful to be in what we're calling a workshop. I mean, the whole, you just gave the large aperture. There's an aperture of a view. There's a big mind, as Suzuki Rishi called it, of what's in the big mind, you know, not the universe.

[21:12]

That's getting a little too big. What's in the big context, historic context in the relative world of how we came to this time, this time of... white supremacy of the abuse of people of color and taking of this land and all of the other things that we were not taught in our schools. And so this workshop, which we've held at Tassajara for now since 2017, this would have been our fourth year together. As I said again to the workshop people last night, the first year we had nine people and it was a wonderful conversation. I appreciated every single person that was there. And then This time right now, we have 350 people. By virtue of this pandemic, we have had to open our walls, the walls of the temple, the walls of the Zen Center, which are quite restrictive. They're very narrow. It costs a lot of money to go to Tassajara. There's a way in which we've really created a system of privilege around the Dharma that I wanted to acknowledge and I want to say to all of you and I want to say to my own community.

[22:19]

We have created a walled city and there's a teaching in the Lotus Sutra called the magical city. And the Buddha leads the people who are thirsting for truth, thirsting for liberation. He leads them to this magical city in the desert and there's tables of food and drink and everyone's being taken care of. And, you know, and then he says, excuse me, but this isn't the place. You're just starting this journey. This is just an apparition to get you some energy. Some enthusiasm for continuing. So back out the door. You've got a long way to go. This is what Angel calls radical. Radical is the unknown territory that lies ahead. We're not there, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. I can see it, but I'm not getting there. I'm not going to be there. I know I'm not going to be there. Angel's not going to be there. But some of you might be there if you don't stop and feel like, oh, this is good enough. Oh, this is great enough. I have a nice situation going for me. which I do, and it's not good enough.

[23:22]

It was for a while, but I feel like the challenge really is this is not good enough. And so anyway, I wanted to back up a little bit and get to a smaller aperture for a moment in terms of this workshop and just let you know that, as I said, we've had this workshop. I hope you'll maybe come to Tassajara, but I also don't want to lose this aperture either. So that we keep having this conversation is really important to me. We don't just go back to our tiny little conversations among ourselves and a few of our friends. So I wanted to read to you the mission of this workshop, which we put online. San Francisco Zen Center website advertises its summer workshops. Most of them are yoga and Zen. This one was radical Dharma and Zen. And the yoga retreats are full. There's 40 people. And over here in our little room, we've got... 12, but we need the big room now. This is the big room. We need this big conversation to be happening for all of us. If I were still a Christian child, I would say to save our souls.

[24:26]

That's what is at stake here. So we said that this workshop will allow us time to speak openly and deeply about our collective pain at being separated from one another by perceived differences, not only of race, but also of gender, ability, age, and sexual identity. We will endeavor to connect to one another through our shared commitment to Buddhist teachings of ethics and compassion as expressions of the Bodhisattva vow. And using the historical context, which you just heard, our own embodied practice and a commitment to radical candor, our intention as leaders of this workshop is to explore the necessary conditions for creating an enlightened society for all together, everybody. Everybody. All in. That's what this is all about. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with Reverend Angel, and now you are, and I think you ought to stay that way. She has written some beautiful things.

[25:27]

I've been rereading her book on Radical Dharma, her and her two writing partners. Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. I want to read you a quote from that book as well. Angel said... It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that the discovery and assertion of Siddhartha Gautama, the historic Buddha, that every human being, irrespective of caste, race, creed, gender, or birth, has within them the potential for waking up to the ultimate truth of reality. This is one of the most radically life-altering propositions for human life on and in relationship to the planet, one that we need right now. However, here's the big but. The Buddhist institutions, too, must be freed from cultural dominance by white people in the West. And here we are. Buddhist institutions in the West are dominated by white people.

[26:29]

And I'm a case in point. And I really can feel the weight of that identity more than I ever could have imagined possible, you know. I was just getting ready to retire. That was my next big adventure. And now it's come to this, you know, reality, like slapped in the face. Wake up. Wake up. What have you missed? You know, where have you been? You know, Angel said to me just a little while ago, he said, why don't you begin with a little history of the Zen Center? Kind of an innocent question. Oh, you mean how we got the property and how we raised funds and how successful we've been and, you know, how people love Green's Restaurant? You mean that story that we like to tell? Yeah. And then she said, you know, like, did you notice who was there? Did you look around? I think we did. I think we noticed and we did a few things. We had a few workshops about race and diversity. We had a committee. We have a committee now, you know. So we've been doing that little bit of conversation for quite a long time.

[27:31]

So I feel like when she asked me that question, she said, what were you people thinking? What were you thinking? And my first response, having been at the Zen Center for 40 years, was, we weren't. And then I thought, that's too easy. That's way too easy. You better start thinking. You better start studying. As much as you devoted yourselves to the study of the Dharma, to the first sermon, Majamaka teachings, and the Yoga Tarot teachings. You know, I've done that work. I love that work. I'm now looking at racism. I'm studying the ancient history of my people. And our dominance of this planet, our cultural dominance of other beings, the privileges that I have unearned and I have received like mother's milk. So it's time to turn back, turn back toward the truth of reality, not the truth that we were taught or led to believe, but the actual truth. How'd this happen? How'd you get here from there?

[28:32]

As the Dalai Lama said after 9-11, don't look for blame. Look for causes. How did this happen? Why did they attack you? You're such good people. You're so, you know, American and virtuous. That's what I was taught. So this crushing blow to my personal ego is equivalent to the crushing blow to my cultural ego, my national ego, and every other ego that hides me from the pain that's inside of here that I don't want to feel. You know, Angel also says in her book that when we're feeling pain, what do we want to do? We want to change it. We want it to stop. We want this pandemic to be over. And we want this racial thing to get fixed really quick. Let's just fix the schools and, you know, everyone hires somebody and that'll take care of it. That'll clean this up. Should take about two weeks, maybe something like that. So this teaching, this truth that we have to turn toward is toward ourselves first.

[29:38]

We need to take that backward step, turn the light around, look at our own. How did I get to be here? What had brought me here? Causes and conditions. What privileges have I had? And then from a quieted place and a place of locating the suffering, you know, the layers of that. Some of it, injustice to me as a woman. I've been treated unjustly. I've been... and not underappreciated and talked over the top of, and I've been hit and all kinds of stuff. I can go there and I can say, well, see, I know exactly all about that. I don't know all about it from the point of view of a person of color. I don't know anything about that. That would be a lie. So I have to not equivocate. I have to really say these are specific sufferings. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Not everybody. Of course everybody matters. That's this horizontal truth. Yeah, everybody matters. Yeah, of course. The ocean of suffering. We're all in it together.

[30:38]

Yeah, but what about each single fish, each single being, each single suffering creature? That's our commitment is to suffering. Those who suffer, that's where we're called as students of the Dharma, as those takers of the Bodhisattva vow. Get over yourself. None of us are important. It's... Others that are important, you know, their suffering is important. So I was thinking that, you know, how to go forward is a question of hand in hand. You know, as my teacher once said, walking hand in hand through birth and death. Am I going to be in front of the parade? Am I going to be with the parade? Am I going to be where am I going to be in the parade? How do we hold leadership roles? How do each of us take a role? Angel and I are holding some leadership role for this weekend, trying our best to bring our own friendship and our own studies of these issues to each other and to the people who joined us. So we have tried our best to meet our own wish to be a benefit to others.

[31:44]

So then the question is to each of you as well. How are you going to bring that benefit from your precious life? How are you going to benefit this world? And the only way this is going to work is if we go together. I have no power. Zero power. People always say to me, oh, you're the abbess. You have a lot of power. Are you kidding? People don't do what I tell them to do. They do what they want to do. And I'm really grateful when that they want to do is the same thing that I wish they would do. I mean, that's really nice. It's like raising children. Anytime my daughter did something I wanted her to do, it was like a miracle. Like, well, how nice is that? So you love the child. You don't like the behavior. And that's what's going on here. We love all beings. And we don't like the behavior. And it really has to stop. And I'll do what I can in my lifetime to stop my own behavior, my own micro. And someone said there's no microaggressions. There's only aggressions. And I think that's true. So stop our aggression. Stop our presumptions of belonging, you know, wherever we go.

[32:49]

And really be welcomers, you know, be hosts to this world and to all that come. So I'm very much interested in. getting out of the walled city of privilege. And I've been very proud of ourselves because we don't have anybody with the virus at its end center yet. Isn't that good? Why? Because we have a lot of control over who gets in and who goes out. So we've managed to do something that most people can't do. And, you know, this is a privilege. And I feel as though that's what we need to offer is to break down the walls, break down the privilege. bring whatever we have outside and not invite you to come in. You have to come in if you want it. You know, that's arrogance. So there's something happening here. There's a turning. You talk about turning the light around toward oneself, and then you turn it around again toward everything else. For those of you who know about the Oxfordine pictures, you know, the eighth picture is a blank circle that's supposed to be

[33:57]

Nirvana, enlightenment, the goal, blank circle. But several centuries ago, the guys who drew these pictures realized that wasn't good. That was a bad place to leave it. So they made the next circle. The ninth picture is full of, it's like this flower. These are lights actually. Behind me are full of blossoms, trees and birds and the world. The ninth circle is looking back at the world. So first you look inwardly. Turn the light inwardly. Then you turn it back around the other way. Eyeballs go that way. And you see the world and you devote yourself to the world. And picture number 10 is this ragtag older person playing with kids and being goofy and everyone laughs at them and there's like the happy bodhisattva who's just meeting every situation wholehearted with joy, with gifts, with simplicity and with the outcome of their practice. So... This is our path. This is the enchantment of just this is it.

[34:59]

And this is the devotion I think that all of us that are here are endeavoring to embody, as Angel says. We have to embody it. We have to know it for ourselves. So on that note, I shall bounce the ball back into your court. I think that this is a perfect segue into the understanding also of what it is that we are embodying. For far too long, the conversation about race has been a conversation about the problems that black people have, the problems that brown people have, the problems that people of color have. And as you were saying, Fu, that the idea that we have to do this together And we are doing a campaign right now that I'll share about. And I want to say not tagline, the keystone statement is we didn't learn racism alone.

[36:06]

We cannot unlearn it alone. We did not learn it alone. Not one single one of us ever learned it alone, whether it's internalized racism or overt racism, whether it's polite white supremacy, like we like to say. that is rampant in progressive spaces, rampant in our spiritual communities, the polite white supremacy, whatever it is, we didn't learn it alone, we cannot unlearn it alone. But I also know that for as long as we keep having a conversation in which race is black people's problems or brown people's problems or people of color's problems or indigenous people's problems, then we will not solve the scourge of racism and white supremacy. Because when we even frame it that way, it's very like a subtle, right, kind of a slight of hand or slight of mouth, as I like to say.

[37:11]

What we're doing when we have conversations about race that only consider or only have the internal idea that race is some problem that is about Black people or for Black people, we reify the location of power and dominance of white people. So we actually, when we have a conversation that does not include the harm and the suffering that is also visited upon white people, perhaps not material, but all of the spiritual suffering, all of the gross and coarse and subtle ways in which a white body person has to contract and remove themselves from direct contact with the suffering of the world in order to protect that space of rarefied privilege.

[38:15]

All of the ways in which we have to contort spiritual arguments in order to maintain the idea that if you're having a problem, that's terrible and maybe I can come and help you. I can save all the beings and save you too, but I'm not suffering. Absolutely avoids the truth of our interconnectedness in the broad sense, but it also absolutely avoids and suppresses the reality that if we are not in direct relationship with the suffering that results because of being complicit in such a vast system of suffering, complicit mostly by silence, complicit mostly by willful ignorance, complicit by the unwillingness to interrogate beyond a frame that keeps you safe

[39:18]

from having to be in direct confrontation with what does it mean that I participate in this? What does it mean that I managed to stay unaware? What does it mean that the idea of Black Lives Matter makes me uncomfortable? What does it mean that having a reaction at all is indicative that there's resistance there? That there's resistance. And that the unwillingness to confront my resistance is itself indication of my own suffering. We understand that when it's personal. We understand that when it's personal. When someone says something and we tense up, we get taken aback, we withdraw. I would say... For those of us that maybe are not doing a really deep dive around the idea of dukkha or suffering, the word that was offered up by the historic Buddha to talk about the quality of life and what our life is characterized by this idea of suffering or the word we translate into suffering is dukkha.

[40:42]

We could talk about being stuck wheeled. But I would say that my modern expression, the way that I would say in a modern way is that if we could think of dukkha as not very far from contraction, if we want to have an embodied understanding of dukkha, that it's contraction, that which pulls away from life, that which causes us to withdraw, to pull back in ourselves, to... see to avoid direct experience, to avoid the truth. And that our promise of our practice, the promise of our willingness to lean in to direct experience, to direct knowing, to what it is that's happening here is to give ourselves not freedom from the experience of pain that unfolds in life, but to give ourselves experience of freedom and liberation from the impulse to avoid it, to impulse to avoid what life offers up to us so that we can meet life in all of its challenges and all of its pain and all of its, you know, the old age suffering death to all of those things that they come, that they are part of this great cycle.

[42:09]

but it is our resistance to it. It is our contraction. It is our pulling away that invites suffering, the perpetuating of suffering, of misery in our lives. That avoidance, whether it's a mental avoidance, whether it is an emotional avoidance, whether it is an embodied avoidance, whether it is individual avoidance, or whether it is collective avoidance, avoiding the collective truth of the history of this nation, avoiding the collective, smaller collective truth of where were we? What were we thinking of just our Dharma center or our family or our lineage? What were our people doing? How could they have abided? By such suffering.

[43:10]

What happened to us that we could have abided with such suffering? And that is the pain that so many people that inhabit white bodies have been able to avoid. But it doesn't take away that that suffering is there and it manifests. as our behaviors, it manifests as our unwillingness to see. It manifests as our avoidance. It manifests as dominance. It manifests as control, control of the people that show up in our spaces, in our communities, wanting to partake in the Dharma, wanting to partake in practices that invite liberation. And we close down on them. We prescribe an idea of how you ought to be that we profess is the Dharma and it turns out it's whiteness. It manifests as our inability to partition a distinction between what is my own truth and what do I understand as giving rise to potential and possibility and what is that which I inherited is just whiteness.

[44:34]

Fixation on time, fixation on productivity, fixation on things being just this particular way. How much of that is one's own nature and how much of that has been inherited? Can you tell the difference? Because I will say, my last point here, that perhaps one of the most powerful awarenesses that I live with in the collective field of bodies that are understood to be black or brown out of a vast array of cultural traditions and backgrounds and experiences and where we come from, that in some ways we have no more similarities, we have no more similarities to each other as black and brown and indigenous peoples of the world and of these particular nations.

[45:39]

We are no more the same than any white bodied people are the same coming from heritages that are Irish and Scottish and English and Italian and all of these other things. We're no more the same. We are gathered into that bunch of BIPOC people in direct response to the fact that we are not white peoples and as a result have a shared experience different right but we have a collective and shared variegated experience of what it means to be confronted with this monolithic whiteness we also have a shared awareness We have a shared awareness that no matter what spaces we go into that are inhabited by and dominated by white body people who have nothing really actually binding them together other than this notion of whiteness, this construct of whiteness, and yet we can pick out whiteness wherever we go.

[46:50]

Even though you're different people, you may be in different bodies, different heritage, you grew up in theory in different families and maybe even in different countries. And yet the signature of white supremacy that comes through as white culture is identifiable by all of us who also have nothing to, no similarities to each other other than the experience of being able to recognize whiteness when we see it. My question to white-bodied people, is do you understand and can you distinguish yourself from whiteness? How much of you as you understand yourself is actually whiteness? That those of us that inhabit black and brown and indigenous bodies and Asian and South Asian and so on and the many heritages are able to pick out and understand ourselves living under the dominance of a white cultural experience, regardless of the various spaces we go into.

[48:04]

So that there is a similarity that travels, whether we're in spiritual spaces, workspaces, environmental organizations, in the supermarket, on the highway, in the freeways, in the spaces from the top levels of government to just walking into the corner store. There is a persistent quality and culture that we call whiteness. And if you don't know how to distinguish that from your own truth, you have a labor to do that has to do with your own skin being in the game of coming to know who you are and being liberated from a contract with suffering that you may perhaps unknowingly continue to sign over and over again.

[49:08]

Do you want out of that contract? Do you want to know what that contract even is? Far too many of us are suffering materially, physically, and through the theft of the quality of our life experience and the theft of our lives themselves as a result of your not knowing. But you need to know that for yourself as your own project. And we that inhabit bodies of color and experience that cannot wait. For white folks to figure themselves out, we have to be in command of our own path to liberation. I hope each one of us will take our particular role in the labor of the collective work of liberating ourselves from this great scourge of humanity, this great illness, a kind of sociopathic illness.

[50:18]

that divides our sense of care and connection and compassion with one another. I hope each of us will take up our role. Thank you so much. 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.

[50:55]

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