This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Sam, the attendant asked me as I was standing out there waiting to come in if I was nervous. I get nervous before talks and I said, oh yes. And I also just reminded myself that before me is a sea of love. So every time I give a talk, I am nervous. And every time I remind myself, this is a notion of love. So that calms me and soothes me in some way and reminds me that we are not separate. Reminds me that together we bring forth the Dharma. So... To set the stage for today's talk, let me first start with the poem.

[01:04]

Love is a place, and through this place of love move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes, live. skillfully curled, all worlds. Love is a place, and through this place of love, move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes, live, skillfully curled, All worlds. So join me in a moment of arriving in this place.

[02:10]

Abiding in this room, in these particular bodies, in this moment just as it is. To actually feel and appreciate our embodied conscious experience. To feel our breath, feel our connection to the environment around us, our seats, the air, the sounds in the room and beyond. Simply allowing our consciousness to register open to and affirm the diversity and complexity of our experience. Feel that. Know that.

[03:16]

Now we'd like to invite you to turn your awareness outward and take a moment to look around, to Observe and silently welcome all the embodied beings who are near you. It's okay, you can do that. I know sometimes in Zen we're told, don't look around, don't look at others, keep focused. Now's your chance. See each other. I invite you, if you're comfortable, to maybe connect with the gaze of another person in the room. Making eye tangta, simply observing to the degree that feels okay with you. To feel and acknowledge and affirm in whatever way is appropriate for you the presence of everyone who is here in whatever way they are manifesting. Noticing how it is that we bring each other into being just by our aware presence.

[04:30]

that. And a warm welcome to everyone. For those of you who may not know me, my name is Tenzin David Zimmerman, and I've been a resident and student at San Francisco Zen Center for close to 20 years. And just earlier this year in March, I stepped into the role of Abiding Abbot at City Center, which is our sister temple in San Francisco, also known as Beginner's Mind Temple. And so the last four months, I have been kind of settling into the role, trying to figure out what is this? What is the scope? What are the responsibilities? What are the numerous requests that are coming forward? And I'm beginning to realize that it's all pretty boundless and pretty endless, right? There is no end to the 10,000 things coming forward and meeting them in every moment.

[05:39]

So I just do my best and offer great appreciation to everyone who is supporting me and encouraging me and being patient as I take up this responsibility. It's a very humbling thing to do. I also want to express my gratitude to Jiryu, who is the head of practice here at Green Gulch Farm. I know he's not here today. I think he's at Tassahara, if I remember. He invited me to speak so that all of you perhaps could get to know me a little bit more. And it also just so happens that this is the first time I've given a Dharma talk at Green Gulch Farm. So even though I've lived both at City Center and Tassajara Monastery in Big Sur. I've never had the opportunity to live here. And I say that with a little bit of chagrin. My apologies, I'm sorry. But it always feels, whenever I come here for meetings or ceremonies or other opportunities, like coming to the home of a beloved sibling.

[06:48]

There's a deep sense of familiarity, and there's certain things that I still don't know, like... I don't think I entered correctly in the timing when I came in today. So, okay, that's okay. I'm sure I'll be informed of the correct way of doing it next time, if there is a next time. We'll see if they invite me back. I imagine that most of you are aware that today we're celebrating the conclusion of Pride Month. And we're doing that in the city with the 49th San Francisco Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Pride Parade. It is worthy of a clap. Yeah. Almost half a century, right? It's pretty amazing. So for some reason, I thought most of you would probably be in the city marching or kind of taking part of the festivities.

[07:51]

but maybe you're introverts like me and I would rather be out in a quiet area and boarding all the chaos there. And the reality is, I'll just say this, when this date was picked for me to give the talk, both Jira and I forgot that it was actually Pride Sunday. So it just so happens it's by coincidence that you have a gay man up here giving the Dharma talk. So it's a fortunate coincidence. And regardless of your sexual orientation and identity, I think that pride celebrations serve as a beneficial reminder of the importance of being in touch with our own unique expression of being, while also appreciating our commonality. The word pride, of course, speaks to the importance for those of us who are LGBTQIA and that you could shorten that to just the alphabet of being, of alphabet sangha, you could say.

[08:56]

It supports us to have a sense of confidence and worth in our own dignity, importance and innate goodness. Regardless of how often we're told by others that somehow we are second-class citizens or sinful, or less than human, that we don't deserve to be alive in some way. To counter this, it's important to tell our stories, to celebrate our personal and shared narratives, to understand the narratives of difference as they are lived and breathed by each of us. Our work as Dharma practitioners is to recognize and embrace our unique Dharma positions in each moment. And the particular karma causes and conditions that have come together to form the rainbow of multifaceted jewels that we all are.

[10:05]

We might as well embrace it because we can't escape it. We can't escape who we are. The slightest move to avoid our truth, either in the direction of desire or aversion or numbing out, is going to be the beginning of suffering. So when we can stand with confidence and dignity in our Dharma position, then we can more easily be in harmonious relationship with all things and each other. We learn in this way to love and embrace each other. in our fullness, in our complexity. I think it's also helpful to consider the meaning of pride that refers to a group or a family, such as a pride of lions. Ours is a pride of belonging, a belonging to the family of being, or as Thich Nhat Hanh says, interbeing.

[11:17]

Acknowledging this initial step on the path is taking us on the path of compassion and wisdom. The Buddhist teachings of interbeing or dependent arising illuminate for us how we are intricately connected. We are intimate beyond our knowing. Our task as practitioners is to make the effort to free our minds oppressed by delusions of separateness. But to free our minds, we need to go into the dark places, into the places of pain and sorrow, to see what they consist of, to bring to the light of awareness these places so that they don't have the same power over us. The courage to be who we are first requires the courage to see who we are.

[12:22]

And then from this place of clear seeing, we can develop the capacity to meet each other as we really are, rather than being fooled by mere appearances or superficial labels and identities. Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind Beginner's Mind, when you are you, Zen, is Zen. When you are you, you see things as they are, things as it is, and you become one with your surroundings. There, in that location, is your true self. So given that it's pride, and given the importance of sharing our stories of how it is that we are here, I thought I would give what we call in Zen a mini way-seeking mind talk. In this case, maybe given the occasion of pride, I might call it a gay-seeking mind talk. While I intrinsically knew that I was gay from the age of four, I didn't really tell anyone until I was 19.

[13:44]

And when I finally came out in my first semester of college, it was in part supported by the fact that I had found a group of LGBTQ people who had a little support group at the university that I was at. And so I joined them and got to join the group and participate in some of the gatherings that they offered. And I think what the moment that most for me was transformative, was one day a hallmate, I was in the dorms across the way, who was actually friends, the dorm mate of one of my friends, who I just made at college, who I suspected was gay, but we actually hadn't talked about it. This person, one day as I was coming back to my room, passed me in the hallway and said to me, faggot. And I was like, what? He said, you're a faggot. And in that moment, all these years of denial or not wanting to turn towards or concern about speaking my truth dropped away.

[14:57]

And I responded, so? He said, so you're a faggot. I said, so what? What's it to you? And having spoken my truth, however, unleashed the floodgates of a lot of harassment and humiliation, you know, for the next several weeks. There would be different situations in which as I walked down the hall, some of the guys would line up because I was in the men's dorm in a gauntlet, and as I walked by, would spit on me or push me. And other times I would find on my door the words, die, faggot, die, you know? Or they would put Vaseline on the doorknob. Or call me on my phone and say, die. Or they would make some kind of stories up about my latest sexual escapades, posted in the bathrooms for everyone to see.

[15:59]

Just made up stories. So I was living in a state of constant fear and anxiety about what was going to happen. It didn't feel safe for me to go back to my room. And that continued for a period of time until finally some of the other residents on the dorm, including some of the women from the other floors, finally confronted the perpetrators and told them to stop or they would report them. And even though it kind of settled down, it was still this tension that was in the air for a long time until I actually moved out of the dorm at the end of the semester. And about that same time, a month or so later, I actually wrote a letter to my parents coming out to them as well. And they wrote a letter back to me saying that as God-fearing Christians, they could no longer associate with me because my life was sinful. And they didn't want to submit themselves or my baby brother. They had just had a child who was less than a year old to my immoral ways.

[17:04]

And so I was basically ostracized for the next three and a half years, unable to see my family or be in contact with them. And that continued until finally my father got cancer. And, you know, sometimes when a diagnosis, you know, that seriousness, you know, the pending threat of death makes us kind of revisit what our relationships and why we are in relationship to others. So they reopened communications with me. But we never talked about what happened or my life. And even now, with my father's dead, but with my stepmother, we don't really talk about it. It's not something that's brought forward. I first came to Zen Center in 1991. several years after I had graduated from college and moved to San Francisco. And at the time I was facing a lot of particular challenges. It was the height of the AIDS epidemic and friends and acquaintances of mine were being diagnosed with HIV or actively dying of AIDS.

[18:14]

And my father was also losing his four year battle with cancer. And I had just been laid off of my job from the San Francisco AIDS Foundation. And I was struggling to find what is my career path? Where do I want to go with this? How do I want to live right livelihood in the world? And so I had kind of remembered I was reading Stephen Levine's book on death and dying about meditation. So I asked a colleague, where can I learn how to meditate? And he recommended the San Francisco Zen Center. He said, City Center has a Saturday morning program. You can go to learn how to meditate. So I went. And I found myself immediately kind of resonating in some way with the practice and the aspects of the community. And for me, there was a certain sense of wanting to come home to myself. A lot of my life has been a sense of not being at home in my own being in some way, in part because of my childhood.

[19:18]

I had often spent, after my parents separated, years in children's homes and foster homes. So one kind of disruption after another of my early life. And so the sense of where do I belong? What is my true home? Was always a question that was close to the surface for me. And so coming to Zen was a way for me to answer that question at a much deeper level. I... practiced as a non-resident for about nine years. And then finally, after several years in Asia, I came back to the States and moved into city center in the fall of 2000 to take up residency for what I thought was going to just be a year or two. And here I am 20 years later. So watch what happens when you come here. You never know where it's going to take you.

[20:19]

In the summer of 2000, a few months before I moved into city center, I received the Bodhisattva precepts from my teacher, Tia Strozer. And I remember the particular moment in the Jukai ceremony in which Tia announced my new Dharma name. Now, I've had three different Dharma names. So my Jukai name, and then when I became a priest, I got a different set of names. And then when I received... government transmission, I received a third set of names. So by original name that she gave me, however, in Japanese is Kozan Zengan. And then she followed it with the English translation, which is Rainbow Mountain, Complete Perfect Vow. Now, for those of you, you all know that the rainbow is a symbol of LGBTQ solidarity and community. And I did a little bit of research about what... What are the colors of the rainbow? What do they mean in this? And there used to be, there's anywhere between six to nine colors that have been used, although currently the rainbow flag that's used has six.

[21:31]

And the color of red represents life. The color of orange represents healing. Yellow represents sunlight. Green represents nature. Blue represents harmony, and purple represents spirit. So the flag represents, of course, the diversity of sexual expression and being, but also all these other qualities. So I think that's beautiful. However, I'm a little embarrassed to say that when she announced my name, I was not a happy camper. I was actually... The first, the second part of the name was fine. Couldn't be a perfect bow. Okay, great. I got it. But the first part, Rainbow Mountain, I was like, what? It sounds like a children's ride at a theme park. Welcome to Rainbow Mountain. Whee! And I was just like, you know, thinking, I wonder if she gave me this name because I'm gay.

[22:34]

Right? So I asked her, you know, you know, being respectful, of course, you know, I said, Why rainbow? And she acknowledged that she indeed had used to reference my being queer. And in my head, I'm like, I am not a rainbow flag. I am not a walking symbol of queerness. I don't want my being to be limited to just my sexual orientation. I'm much bigger than that. And I wanted my Dharma practice to represent a much bigger expression than just my sexual orientation. And, you know, in some ways, perhaps in there, maybe there's both the truth of, yes, I wanted something more, but also a certain aspect of internalized homophobia. Not really be able to accept, you know, in some way still, the full expression of my identity and experience as a gay man. As I later discerned, my teacher was using rainbow as a double entendre, indicating both my identity as a gay man, but also pointing to the Buddhist teaching of selflessness or not-self.

[23:53]

And she wrote on my rakasu, a little phrase, a rainbow vividly arises from sun, rain, and angle. Looking closely, nothing is found. And yet there it is. shining in the sky. So there is now nothing in and of itself that is a rainbow, right? A rainbow is merely an appearance arising out of the coming together of different conditions. You've got air, moisture, and light arranged in a certain way. And out of those conditions, a rainbow appears. Pretty miraculous, huh? But there's no substantial thingness to the rainbow. It's simply an appearance arising out of certain conditions that pass in a brief time often. So we can say that the self is also like a rainbow.

[24:55]

There is indeed an appearance of the self, right? All you are appearing, right? And at the level of appearance, the self exists. Just like it is true that we have the experience of what we call a rainbow. We can see it. So on the relative level, we do relate to one another as individuals. So it's not to deny the appearance of the self, but to realize that it is only an appearance. When we go beyond and see through or begin to understand the conditions that are giving rise to the appearance, particularly, we say in Buddhism, the five skandhas of form or matter, sensations, perceptions, mental activity, and consciousness, then we can taste the profound teachings of the Buddha on emptiness. Emptiness does not mean that things aren't there.

[25:58]

It means that they do not have some self-existing nature independent of conditions. When we see this in our own experience, we begin to understand the selflessness of this whole life process that we are. And the deeper the wisdom of selflessness, the more love and compassion can flow freely. So in Buddhism, we understand that our sense of self is nothing more than a confluence and interplay of conditions with which we then have a tendency to identify with. This brings to mind, for me, a word that I often hear used in conversations on identity and diversity, which is intersectionality. Is anyone here familiar with that term? My friend, Lama Rod Owens, who identifies himself as a black, polyqueer, able-bodied, cisgender male lama who is of mixed class and radically minded.

[27:14]

So there's a whole alphabet right there, a being, right? He often writes about and talks on intersectionality, including in the book that he co-authored, Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. And if you haven't read that, I would highly recommend it. And so Lama Rad says that intersectionality speaks to the reality that we are influenced by any number of identities, all of which are informed further still by our social and political locations. We are not just straight or gay or transgender or white or black or male or female, etc. We are an expression of a community of identities and influences that may not be apparent to those around us or even to us. So when I reflect on my own intersectionality and the various locations and influences informing them, I can recognize myself as being queer, white, or white racialized, cisgendered,

[28:27]

meaning identify with the gender that I was born with or that I was enabled with at birth, able-bodied, male Zen priest of a mixed class. So I came from a very low economic class and by going to college was able to elevate my economic class. So you could say these identities make for the various colors of the particular rainbow that I am as a person. Each of these stripes or locations have both advantages and disadvantages. Or you could say privileges and disprivileges, right? Depending on who else I find myself among at any particular time and place. While I have experienced a lot of harm and oppression as someone who is gay, I have also experienced a lot of benefits and relative safety as someone who is white and male. If I am truly committed to being an awake, compassionate human being and a mindful participant in our society, then it's important for me to be as fully conscious as I can be of what intersectionalities are being engaged at any particular time in relationship to others.

[29:44]

I need to be aware of the impact they have on others, particularly if harmful or perpetuating some form of inequality or inequity. Just because I'm gay doesn't mean that I can dismiss the ways that my engaging with others might be harmful, particularly to women or to people of color or to people who are differently abled. It doesn't neutralize that reality. I still have to own the vocation and this particular, be responsible for my engagement from this place and how it's come to me. So my identities can either serve as pathways of liberation or oppression, depending on how I and others relate to them. So I hear heartbreaking stories of how it is that

[30:49]

LGBTQ folks don't feel at home in their own intersectionalities. And often when I'm on social media, particularly Facebook, I hear how, for example, suicide is the number one cause of death for young gay men in Canada. And I hear how so many young queer and transgender people kill themselves, either because they can no longer bear how they are being treated by others, because they're unable to be at ease in their own bodies and beings. And then this ongoing persecution of those who identify as LGBTQ. Despite the advances in the last number of years, despite being able to marry here in this country and other countries, persecution still continues. in myriad ways. Beheadings, rape, torture, humiliation, bullying, laws that keep those of us who are queer from fully expressing and living and contributing to society.

[32:04]

So what is needed to create an authentic Sangha in society that is both radically inclusive as well as radically present. Radical inclusion insofar as everyone is welcomed and radical presence in terms of how it is that we can authentically show up for ourselves and others. So Lama Rad says that radical, the word radical, speaks to a sense of remembering and returning to a simple and basic way of being in the world, one that reduces the violence to oneself and others. It honors one's own passions and aspirations and relates to the world from a place of equanimity. When we choose this way of being in the world, we feel at home in our own body with no desire to lead it. Because we feel at home in the body, we feel at home in the world. That is radical presence.

[33:10]

And at its heart is an awareness of one's own intersectionality. Where do you locate yourself? What are your intersectionalities? What are the stripes of the rainbow of your own being? Are you aware of them? Are you at home in them? Have you taken responsibility for them? Or maybe at least take responsibility for educating yourself about them? It's not an easy task. It can be intimidating, it can be scary, it can be uncomfortable. But if we are to be a society in which all beings are liberated, all beings are free, all beings are supported to fully manifest their true self, then we need to do this work.

[34:12]

It's the work of the Bodhisattva. I want to talk about love for a few moments and then wrap up. You guys okay with me talking about love? Yeah? Okay. I still have ringing in my ear Lin-Manuel Miranda's statement at the 2016 Tony Awards. And this happened basically a week after the Pulse shootings in which 49 people died. And he did it as an expression not only of love for his wife, but recognition of those who had died in that particular massacre. And he said, love is [...] love. Maybe there's one more in there. is love. Love is endless.

[35:14]

I propose that radical inclusivity and radical presence is nothing other than the manifestation of love. All genuine and wholesome expressions of love come from a place of deep presencing, deeply recognizing our true nature and the true nature of another. I looked up the dictionary definition of love, and one of them was a deep, unconditional feeling of admiration, affection, attunement, and connection. I've been playing around with my own definition of love recently, and I taught a practice period this spring on the Brahma Viharas, which are often considered the abodes of love, or they're framed called the abodes of love. And my working of working definition of love recently has been that love is the knowing of our shared being. Love is the knowing of our shared being.

[36:19]

So the experience of love is simply the felt, felt, felt knowing of our shared being. And in Zen, another name for the knowing of our own being is Buddha, being awake or being aware of being. And that being is not a noun, it's a verb. It's not something we are, it's how we are. So we could say that awakening, or you can sometimes use the term enlightenment, is the direct knowing or recognition of our Buddha nature, being aware of our true nature as non-dual and thus peaceful and luminous. So the experience of shared being is the direct experience of non-separation from others. When we love, we feel and recognize in the vibrational quality of our being that we are one with others.

[37:23]

Again, pointing back to what Thich Nhat Hanh says, a felt sense of our interbeing, our direct experience of interconnectedness. So love could be said to be a dissolution of any boundaries or borders which seem to separate us from one another. I recently came across a definition of love by the Benedictine monk, Brother David Stendlerast, that I really appreciated. Some of you might know that Brother David Stendlerast was actually a student at Zen Center for a short period of time. He lived at Tassajara, I don't know, was it a year? Do you know? And he still has a connection to San Francisco Zen Center and has taught retreats, particularly at Tassajara with Paul Haller. And Brother David was interviewed by Oprah Winfrey, part of her Supersouls series. And she asked him about his definition of love. And he responded, love is a lived yes to belonging. Love is a lived yes to belonging.

[38:28]

Isn't that beautiful? So again, his definition brings to mind the poem that I read at the beginning I shared with you. It's a poem by E.E. Cummings. I'll say it once more. Love is a place, and through this place of love move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes live, skillfully curled, all worlds. So love is a place, it's a realm through which all places, all beings belong and peacefully move. True love is boundless. It's immeasurable. It's unconditional. It's radiant like the sun. It shines out on everything. No one is not included in the radiance of true love.

[39:29]

And from a Buddhist perspective, The brightness of peace that's mentioned in the poem is the light of our Buddha nature, the luminosity of awareness itself, its quiescent, silent, luminous heart-mind of our true nature. And when we can rest there, know it, we can be at peace. And Zen practice, particularly the practice of Zazen, is also the practice of a lived yes. It's a live yes to the world of being human and to all that we experience in being alive. So in my case, it's a live yes to being queer, to being male, to being five foot six, you know, balding. Everything that I am in this moment, it's a live yes to that. There's a whole world of being human and being alive.

[40:31]

And in such a way it's profoundly inclusive. To live, yes, to knowingly belonging to the subsequent aches and pains that we feel, maybe sitting in zazen, maybe right now, you know, the kind of fidgetiness that I want to go now to get some, what are we serving, muffins and tea, right? The minor slights as well as the deep sorrows. The homophobic slur that's written on the wall in front of you. A loved one dying of AIDS. The simultaneous discomfort and joys of being human. That is coming out to your parents. Finding a group of friends who love you just the way you are. and the overwhelming ruptures in the fabric of trust and safety due to violence, trauma, and various forms of oppression.

[41:32]

I think that all our personal and communal efforts in the name of equality and social justice are fundamentally about belonging and love. True equality exists when we're able to integrate into our interpersonal relationships and our social structures, you know, a manifestation of collective love. And I would say that all the work of Zen is fundamentally about love. Although in Zen we're more inclined to call love intimacy, a profound intimacy with our own being, our experience of being human. as well as our inescapable intimacy with each other as dependently co-arisen beings. The bodhisattva path, the vow to live our lives for the benefit of all beings and support them to discover their innate liberation, is fundamentally an expression of collective love.

[42:42]

So in the Dharma, we all belong to the rainbow. What is it to reside there in that place? Love is a place, and through this place of love move with brightness of peace all places. Yes is a world, and in this world of yes, live, carefully curl all worlds. Thank you for your kind attention. And happy pride to all of you. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize

[43:49]

the practice of giving, by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[44:04]

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