This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everyone. Good to have you here on a rainy Saturday in Beginner's Mind Temple, the second time that we've been back in this hall, in the Buddha Hall, since we had our renovation of this beautiful old Julia Morgan building. So I'm glad that you all can come back here and be with us today, even through the rain you came here. So doubly thanks for your efforts as you're sitting there maybe damp. And thank you to all of the online folks. Good to have you with us. There's a whole community out there that, well, I'm imagining, I actually don't know. I mean, they might have heard that I was speaking and there could only be one person. I mean, you just, you never know. And maybe like my mom, you know, it's like, but anyway, I'm assuming there's a lot of online folks that are there as well. So is there anyone here that's here for the first time?

[01:03]

One, two, three, four, five, six. Seven. I'm always surprised it's always someone's first time. And this is the Beginner's Mind Temple. And when I first came here, I literally thought that's what it meant. This is where all the beginners came. And then you went to other monasteries after you quit being a beginner. Then I learned that that's not true. We kind of celebrate the beginners because there's this certain mind that you have when you first come here that is kind of like the baby bird, just kind of wide open. Like, yeah, I need to be fed. What's this about? I don't know. And trying to keep that same sort of spirit as you move through your practice. It can be harder and harder as you start to think you know things. But this is the beginner's mind temple. And it's great to have you all with us. I want to start off with someone who sometimes gets obscured in history that I think is just a lovely person, a character, a story that has to do with the human spirit and with

[02:23]

justice, with equality, with finding your voice. And I don't know if any of you know the name, some of you might do, but know the name of Irene Morgan. Irene Morgan was a black woman in 1944 working in the B-26 plant during the war in Virginia. And she had two kids and then she had a miscarriage. And she had some complications with that, as well as you could imagine the psychological kind of things to work through. So she wants to go see her mom. And she goes and sees her mom. And on the way back, she's taking a bus. And she's kind of a little bit psychologically kind of feeling heavy. Physically, she's still feeling kind of, you know, not herself. And this is at a time in Virginia where there's separation on the buses between where blacks sit and where whites sit.

[03:27]

And she was sitting in the section for black people. And then the bus started to get kind of full. And this is in 1944, still one year before the end of World War II. She's working in this plant, you know, helping the war effort. She's this mother. And then this white couple gets on the bus and there isn't so much room in the front. There's still some room in the back. So the bus driver gets up and says, I know this is blacks only section here, but I need you to get up and move. I need you to go to the back over there. And it just didn't hit Irene as being the thing to do. It just seemed unfair. And so she said, no, I'm not going to move. And she looked at the woman next to her that had a small baby in her arms. And she said, I don't think you should move either. And the bus driver wasn't going to get into any of this.

[04:29]

And so he just went and started driving the bus to the police station. Now, I don't know if you all have ever had stress at work or at home or whatever, but I would find it kind of stressful if I knew that because of what I did, the bus driver was driving me and a bunch of people to the police station, you know. And he gets there, and one of the sheriffs gets on. I do find this a little bit humorous. He goes to Irene. He stands there. He writes out this ticket and hands it to her like... You know, I've given you a ticket, so surely now you're going to be upset with this $10 fine and you're going to go to the back of the bus. And she stands up and she tears up the ticket and she throws it out the window. And he's staring at her kind of in disbelief. So then he grabs her by the arm to, like, pull her off the bus. And she kicks him in the groin. And he doubles over in pain and leaves the bus.

[05:30]

And it's like, now what's going to happen? And then another sheriff came in and he tried to grab Irene. And Irene says, I would have bit him, but he looked dirty. So she clawed him instead. And they clawed at each other, ripping each other's shirts for about the next 30 seconds. And eventually he got her off the bus. That was Irene Morgan in 1944. This case then goes to the Supreme Court and it was tried by then an unknown lawyer who was making his way up the ranks named Thurgood Marshall. And he argues this case before the Supreme Court and wins a six to one decision that this is actually, it was an interstate bus so she was crossing bus lines so it was a big case because then it had to do with people traveling all across America. And in 1946, Morgan v. Virginia was a landmark case that sometimes is forgotten. But this case has to do with the fact that people thought that we should have separate but equal, that we really shouldn't be paying so much attention to gender, race, all that sort of thing.

[06:49]

It'll be okay. It's not that much suffering. We'll just have some decent facilities over here for these folks and decent. Because of that landmark case, because of what she did, because the fact that Thurgood Marshall, who at the time was the attorney for the NAACP and was making his way up the ranks, eventually, as you all probably know, became the first African-American justice on the Supreme Court. One of the cases that made his career was Morgan versus Virginia. And because of that, you were able to really have the freedom riders. Because of that, Rosa Parks knew about this case in 1955 when she did the same thing 11 years later. Because one of the first things that Martin Luther King Jr. did after he came back to the South after getting his doctorate in the Northeast was he started leading interstate busing protests. And if it wasn't for this case, it would have been a lot harder. But it was actually the law of the land since 1946. People just weren't actually observing it.

[07:52]

But then they had something to shine a light on. So today is the first day of Black History Month. And I don't know if you have heard, but in this country right now, there is a lot of things assailing things like Black History Month, things that are assailing anything that has to do with looking at our differences. And someone could actually look at Zen Buddhism and say, but what about documents like the Harmony of Difference and Equality? Aren't we just supposed to forget all about our gender and our differences and black and white, young and old, poor and rich? We should just like melt that away? And maybe we should just completely forget Black History Month? As Winston Churchill once said, those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. And there's a lot in our history that we do not want to repeat. Now, this could be a time for a lot of folks to shy away from celebrating diversity, from looking at equality, from taking care of the disadvantaged in our country.

[09:04]

Because the political climate is changing. And some people could even use things like the harmony of difference and equality and Zen practice to say that we should stop actually paying attention to these sorts of things. And this morning, I'm going to talk about why I don't think that's true and why I think it's actually in harmony with Zen for us to be celebrating these things. And to kick off Black History Month, which we will start a workshop next Monday, that will run for several Mondays about the harmony of difference and equality and talking about that and how it applies to our Zen practice and how this actually plays out in the world that we live in. It's powerful to recount stories like Irene Morgan's because it connects my heart to someone else's experience In my head, I can know that I want things to be fair.

[10:08]

I think I want things to be fair. I buy into that concept. Let's be fair. But to be fair, I don't see things clearly. Have you ever known someone who saw things clearly all the time? No. Have you ever known someone who was perfect, who didn't make any mistakes, who didn't have any blind spots, who didn't have any weaknesses, who didn't have any tendencies? No. So in all of society, you always have power structures, either implied or officially written down. And that just means that whoever's the person, the people, the group that's in charge are made up of human beings. And if human beings have blind spots, then that means those human beings are going to have blind spots. And that means that those human beings are going to have imperfections. And that's the way in which things are going to play out. people will suffer where there is not equality.

[11:09]

And so when we recount stories like the one from Irene Morgan, you can almost try, even though I am not female, I am not black, I am not living in the 1940s, there is still some part of my heart that can imagine what it would be like to be on a bus, a little bit psychologically distraught, a little bit physically distraught, knowing that momentum in society that is against a lot of the things that I hold dear, and to be driven to a police station. That connects my heart to that. That makes me start to feel that. And in Zen, we talk about wisdom and compassion rising up together. And if too much, you get over here on like the wisdom side, let's say, or maybe knowledge side, and then compassion doesn't rise up so much, you kind of have, they say, like an educated barbarian. And if the other side rises up too much and you have like a whole bunch of compassion with not a lot of wisdom, then you kind of have basically a fool who causes a lot of harm by setting no boundaries and basically empowers a lot of neuroses.

[12:23]

you have wisdom and compassion rising up together. And so, as a white male in this society, I think it is incredibly important for me, I think it's incredibly important for everyone, but especially because white males have been in power in this country since its foundings. And I think it's very important for me to connect my heart to the experience of those who do not have the power. And the gatsas that you have in the monastery, you go to the restroom here. I mean, what are you more in a rush than when you want to skip through a form and just skip it when you have to use the restroom? So they intentionally place them right outside the restrooms. So you actually stop and at Tassajara, before you go into the baths, you have this entire thing that you kind of stand there and chant. I've skipped through that before, I have to admit it. But there's this thing that's just stopping you. to remember, because we forget.

[13:26]

Oh yeah, my practice. I'm connecting to my practice. You have a little altar there. Someone puts a flower on it. You have a little piece, an icon there. Something to remember, a type of a Buddha or, you know, a Gata. Remembering that the Ramatush Ohlone were on this land for thousands of years before it became settled by first the Spanish Christians and then the white folks who came later. And they knew all about different sorts of plants and different sorts of ways to heal and the seasons and fire and what have you. And all of that's lost because folks come in and there's just a complete disregard. The only things I know that are in my vision have to do with Western science that have to do with Western ecology. And I come in and I place those things all on top of what I find. This is a great time to stop and to have a gata, to remember black history.

[14:36]

It's a great time to remember that the relationship with the people in our country who identify as black I don't usually use African-American because I consider myself an American, and I think it just seems unfair to have to have somebody else put another word in front of it. It's like we're all Americans. To actually stop and to connect to that history, which is one of the deepest, oldest scars in our country's history. And so much has been predicated upon that injustice, that oppression that was fostered for hundreds of years and continues to this day. One time I remember seeing the Dalai Lama interviewed by Dan Rather, and he asked him about some monks that had been in jail who had just been released after 15 years.

[15:42]

And he said, did those monks ever fear for their lives? And the Dalai Lama said, no. Well, there was one of the monks, for a period of time, feared that he might lose compassion for his captors. And I thought about that, and I thought, okay, that's deep practice. That's not where I'm at. In the monastery, we have the conceptual and we have the experiential. The conceptual about the concepts right here, we're putting things into language. We're talking about the concepts of the harmony of difference and equality. We're talking about Black History Month. We're sharing concepts. We're putting them into language. As soon as we do that, it's in a duality. So there's a lot of things we do in the monastery where we walk around, where we just experience each other, where we just step outside of language. We quit describing things to each other. We learn the forms and then we flow with each other. We just take a step with our left foot into the zendo.

[16:46]

And we have our hands in shashu. And we go to our seat and we bow, giving thanks to all the people who came before us. And all these things can be concepts or they can be things that eventually become internalized and you step outside of language and you're just in the room and you're just doing the forms and you're just flowing with the sangha. In the monastery and in Zen practice, we do want to find a way for us to touch, as we call it, the ultimate reality. Because in the ultimate reality, we're all just human beings that are interconnected, like you have a river that is flowing. And every now and then you'll notice a little whirlpool gets formed in that river. Maybe some leaves get trapped in the little whirlpool. And that whirlpool might exist for a few minutes or a few hours, and then it just becomes a part of the river again. And we're all just little whirlpools in this river, existing for some little period of time, all with very much the same DNA, all interconnected like an interest net with mirrors, all pointing to each other.

[17:56]

And everything that we do impacting each other. And learning to be with that stepping outside of language. When you see a beautiful moon, and you're standing there in the summertime, and you're in the middle of a field, you don't say to yourself, Michael, the contrast of that circle against the backdrop makes me feel like, and you start, you know, you just go, huh? Huh? Pure experience. You're just touching what's going on. You learn to sit zazen. And once you get your somatic pose kind of down, you're just sitting there with the things that pop up outside of language, just pure experience, noticing what's happening moment after moment, practicing to be with other people that way. Because that's not the way that our hearts normally are.

[19:01]

Now, thankfully, we get a little glimpse. We get a little glimpse, just naturally, most of us, in regard to love. There's things that we care about outside of ourselves. So we kind of get this little glimpse of what it would be like if we realized we were connected to all people, if we realized that all people have humanity that we want to respect. So we have this thing where we love our grandma, or we love our baby, or we love our partner. We experience this, something outside of us. So even if it feels a little selfish, we get a little taste of what that would be like. Someone asked, forget who it was now, but one of the senior teachers in Japan whose son had died and he was taking time away from a ceremony to grieve. And someone said, but if we're all just, you know, people die every day in Japan and you don't take time to, you know, go to all of the funerals, obviously, or to grieve or what have you.

[20:09]

He said, I'm still a human being. I'm still a human being. Now, if out here at this intersection of Page and Laguna, if my dear grandmother was walking through that intersection and somebody hit her with a car, and that person, because they were texting, was too afraid that they were going to get in trouble, so they speed off and they do a hit and run. And my grandma dies. And the person is found guilty, but they only serve like six months in jail. And they're not even really all that repentant. That would be incredibly heavy. I would probably live with that for many years, maybe the rest of my life that would just pop up. The sense of injustice, my injustice, my family, my grandmother, the sense of love.

[21:11]

Worse things than that happen every day in the Bay Area that I do not live with the rest of my life. And this Zen practice is not a matter of lowering my love for my grandmother. It's about raising my love for all the other folks. It's about raising my connectedness to all the other people. It's about being with them in that sort of way. Where I do start to have a softened heart, where I do cultivate my compassion for the lives that other people are living. Having a connection, having a gata, something that stops us so that we intentionally pay attention, so that we broaden our view. Recently in 340 Page, which is next door, we had an ant invasion. And It was not convenient.

[22:17]

It rained a while back, and then the ants decided that they didn't want to be where they were, they wanted to be where I was. And they decided to start coming into the apartment and doing their ant stuff. And I noticed that I had this aversion toward ants. I just, I mean, I generally think that they're really cool you know, little creatures. And I know that they dig tunnels and they work all day and they have like the queen and, you know, they carry stuff and you see it and it's really neat. And like, I have a general appreciation for ants. It's not like I don't appreciate ants, but I don't want them like all over the thing that I left on the counter for just three minutes because I went into the other room for a second and I come back and I'm just like, no, that was mine. Now it's yours. Ants. So I realized I had no compassion for ants in that regard. I had compassion for ants as long as they didn't get in my stuff. Then I lost my compassion for ants. So I thought, what would help me cultivate compassion for ants? So I started reading about ants.

[23:19]

And I got really fascinated with these little creatures. You know, I turned my attention. Whatever you put your attention on, you kind of energize. And so I put my attention on ants and, you know, in the wintertime, where do they go? I mean, they're really, really, really tiny. Why don't they die? I mean, if I was outside with no clothes for like most of the winter, I would die. but they don't die, and they have way less clothes than me, and they're really, really thin. They have this metabolism that completely slows down, and they intentionally eat a lot in the fall, apparently, and I didn't know ants could get fat, but apparently ants can get fat, and they get fat, and they have a whole bunch of extra stuff in their whatever it is, their exoskeleton, and then they go, and then they actually close all their tunnels very, very deliberately, and then they go, and they have hive mind where they all share the same heat, and they all get together in a huge clump underground with the queen, and it's still too cold in many places, so then their metabolism drops, and they can't even move.

[24:20]

They're totally static. And then as soon as it starts to warm back up, they reanimate. And then they start to move again. And they've been actually totally still. And their body's just been like churning through those little tiny calories that they had from the fall. And then all of a sudden, they send out a few scouts. And the scouts go and they undo the tunnels. And they go out and they find out where there's food. And they come back and they leave a trail of scent so that everybody knows where the food is. And everyone goes, okay, now follow the scent. Then they all leave and they follow the scent. It's like, I was so amazed at this. And then I started noticing the ants on my counter. And I felt totally different about them. You know, I'm just like, they're just doing ant stuff, you know. So I started cleaning my place even a little bit more. I realized they like the grease on the stove and other things like that, you know. And I kind of made peace with them. And they still come in. They've got this little trail somewhere. And this one little trail that never actually stopped, but it's still kind of going. And I don't really know what they're doing, but all my stuff is like completely closed up. So, you know, it works out just fine.

[25:21]

But, yeah, I had to cultivate a compassion process. for ants. And what happens when you don't cultivate compassion for something that's much bigger? I mean, you can put five 10-year-olds in a room, they say the first day of school, and they meet each other for the first time. And let's just say these five 10-year-olds are the same gender, same race, same religion, same socioeconomic background, all of that. They're all just 10 years old. By lunchtime, they'll know who the pretty one is, who the smart one is, who the funny one is, who the shy one is. They'll have them all kind of categorized and labeled. Because that's what we do. We have discerning mind. We had to protect ourselves from danger, so we look out for danger. We learn how to stick labels on you, you, you, and you. It was a way of protecting ourselves. The discerning mind. It's where we live all day long.

[26:24]

planning, organizing our day, figuring out what we should do next, exercising that discerning mind. And if we don't intentionally cultivate a compassion for the things that we don't normally look at, sometimes I tell students a fun game is to go to the BART station and waiting out there on the platform when you're just kind of bored waiting for the train. And play the game of who do I not notice. You ever intentionally notice who you don't notice? You know, you're just like, oh, I wouldn't have noticed that person over there. You know. And just realize that there's a whole awareness that we just bring to every moment that's formed by our entire lens of the past, what we were given by our culture, what we were given growing up. We have a lens that we view everything with. The discerning mind can be incredibly beautiful and it can be incredibly harmful.

[27:27]

And if we don't get in touch with what our mind is actually discerning, what our lens is, we can do a lot of harm, especially the more that we manage teams or have children or take up something in our neighborhood or whatever it is that we do. Any activity that we engage in where we have any sort of impact, like just being a human being and interacting with others, you can have a negative impact on the planet, just with our blind spots. Now, you can burn out in discernment, and that's kind of why we have these places of practice, is that we get stuck in this discerning mind. We get stuck in this labeling mind. And it's great to come and to just flow with the other folks, to be in the zendo, to be with the forms, Sometimes we say, don't wear clothing in the Zendo that has a lot of writing on it. Just stay outside of language so you aren't walking around and you see Edith Job's Crab Shack or something.

[28:32]

You're just staying outside of language, staying outside of concepts. Noticing your body reactions without having to label them or categorize them. Like you're noticing that beautiful moon. You don't have to describe a twinge in your chest to yourself. You can just be with it. Learning to flow with other people in that way. What I give attention to, I energize and my vision is always limited. So we will be talking about the Sando Kai, the harmony of difference and equality. There's a really brilliant book if you want to check it out. That is a collection of talks. given i believe in this room starting on may 6th of 1970 by suzuki roshi our founder and they were on the sandokai the sandokai is the harmony of difference and equality and it actually was a document from um is a poem written by sekito kisen one of our lineage

[29:46]

One of the people in our lineage, a priest in Japan, 7th century, 8th century in Japan. And he actually used the exact same title as a document that was predated Buddhism in China that was also called the Harmony of Difference and Equality that came from Taoism. But it's getting at the exact same thing. And Suzuki Roshi gave a series of talks on this in this room about how it is that we hold our differences, how it is that I hold my identity as a fixed self, how it is I look outside the window and I say, that's a tree. And when I cut a carrot, I hold the carrot and I say, that's a carrot. And he starts taking these things apart. I invite you to come and take the workshop that we're going to have over the next month on the harmony of difference and equality going through the Sandokai. In the beginning of this, there's a forward to the book, the collection of talks that have Suzuki Roshi talking about the harmony of difference and equality, or the Sandokai, if you will.

[30:52]

There's a quote, there's two forwards, one by Michael Wenger, one by Mel Weitzman, both priests in our lineage, the late Mel Weitzman, and Michael Wenger now is up at Enso Village. Mel wrote in his foreword to the book that was basically a collection of those talks that Suzuki Roshi gave on the Sandokai. The book, if you want to look it up, is called The Branching Streams Flow in the Darkness. He says, if you think you are independent, that is wrong. If you think you are just dependent, that is not right either. Interdependent might seem like the correct word here, but Suzuki Roshi used interdependency. to express that ambivalent quality. He said the secret of Zen is yes, but. Usually we like to think of things in a linear fashion and thinking of things in a simultaneous way or even holding the possibility of things to be simultaneously going on and potentially in conflict is something we don't usually hold.

[32:04]

But yet we do these things all day long like the front and back foot and walking. Which one is better? Which one do you need more? One becomes the front and then one becomes the back and then one becomes the front and one becomes the back. There's a different purpose for all of these things and as they manifest they are seen different by all people because there are no fixed objects and there are no fixed people. And so you learn to hold things loosely and to let them unfold and manifest. When we said separate but equal in the Deep South, it was not honest. It was a lie. It was a concept that we actually are separate, which we aren't. And it was very clear with the people that went in and photographed schools and all sorts of other places in the 1930s and 40s to illuminate this, that things were clearly...

[33:06]

not equal even on the surface. I can think that I'm fair, I can think that I am seeing things, but unless I intentionally cultivate my vision, unless I learn to hold things loosely, unless I do not put pragmatism on a pedestal, pragmatism is beautiful, but when it is on a pedestal above all else, i.e. that which seems logical to my mind, it can cause a lot of harm. Quoting from Suzuki Roshi in his very first talk that he gave on May 6th about the harmony of difference and equality, he says, the sandokai, you know, san is things. You know, san is three. Sandokai, san is three. Do is sameness. Do means same, you know. To identify something else is Do.

[34:09]

And San is three. Do is actually oneness or one whole being. So we're talking about great mind. San is many beings. He's talking about the sando kai and the words, and he's actually at the time, he's doing ideograms on like a, well, so it's not in the book, but he's actually taking the Chinese and Japanese characters and he is drawing them and showing their different meanings of what they mean. And he elucidates this a little bit more in the next paragraph. He says, to have complete understanding of this relationship between one big hole and many things, which exists in one big hole, is kai. You know, the Kai means to shake hand, and he laughs and says, how are you? When you shake hands, you know, you feel you are really one. You have two people doing this one thing, Kai, to shake hands. You have a real feeling of relationship, you know.

[35:11]

So many things, one whole being, which includes many things. This person is a good friend, you know, or more than a friend, because it is originally one. If you say many, that is many. If you say one, that is one. So two names of the same thing. It is originally more than good friend, the little ideogram he's drawing. So we say, Kai, how are you? Good friend. We are friends. We are one. How are you? Sando Kai. That is the name you know. This is the sutra. Sando Kai. bringing together two in a heart space, creating the feeling of one friendship and allowing us to start to digest the fact that we are just that little whirlpool connected to that same river that is flowing.

[36:12]

And if someone in the tribe is suffering, we're all suffering. And if I am being unaware If I'm being selfish, that ripples out and it affects everyone else. There is a connection that's going on there. In this temple, we have a respect for humanity. And when you go and I see my teacher here, Ryushin Paul Haller, and when I see him, I don't give him the really big bow. And then when I see like the new person, I'm just like, well, welcome. You know, it's like regular bow, you know. No, because it is not about a person being different. It is about the fact that we're all humans same bow 45 degree angle up down and up down and up from the hips same relational distance of the hands to the nose. I respect you I respect your humanity. It's not saying you're my favorite friend is not saying that that thing you did yesterday I thought was skillful.

[37:16]

It's not a judgment on you as a human being. It's bringing me back to the fact that this is a human being. And I want to connect to humanity. We need reminders of these things because we get selfish. We get myopic. We get off on our own little corner with our own little sufferings. And we need the scaffolding to do the work. We need systems in place to help us do the work. Yes, the ultimate reality is for us to realize we're all the same and there's no difference between us. We all have the same beating heart with the same desires to thrive and to have our loved ones thrive. We all have that same existence and we have our different ways of getting there. And yet, if we don't also pay attention to the conventional world, there can be a lot of suffering. And so they both are important. Yes, but they're both important. both the ultimate reality and the conventional world. And this can really be seen in the subject of, for instance, marriage, because you start out with love, hopefully, attraction, appreciation.

[38:31]

Now, anyone that's ever been in a long-term romantic relationship knows that that's not the way that it goes from beginning to end, and there's no ups and downs. There's a whole lot of stuff to eventually learn about the vast differences between human beings. And when we start to realize that my perception and your perception, even though I'm a human being and you're a human being, I can hold it more loosely like maybe it's more like that person is an alien. Because how they actually view things and not have this expectation of how can they possibly view it this way? It's like, no, actually, if I start from the concept that there's oceans between people, then I'm more celebrating when it is that we don't actually see things in vastly different ways. And I don't walk around constantly being disappointed once we share our truths with each other. And I learned how to hold those vast differences with much more flexibility, with a much more open-hearted stance. I love the poet Rilke. I try not to quote Rilke every single Dharma talk.

[39:36]

So it's been a few years. But Rilke has this thing about... Rilke was a poet late 18th century, early 19th century, Switzerland, Austria, and just had this understanding about what makes a writer, what makes a person able to connect and touch humanity and then express the experience. And he writes this about marriage. And I think this is just... Wonderful. Whenever I do a wedding, I did one for a couple of young urban Zen folks last fall. And I always find a way to sneak this in there because it's just about all of this. It's about how we are so different. And yet, even when you have an affinity or there's love, there is still vast differences to understand and setting things up with that expectation allows us to actually move forward with each other in a more conventional world without so many hiccups and disappointments.

[40:38]

The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries. On the contrary, a good marriage is one which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude. And thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist is a hemming in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them. If they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing the other, then they will have themselves standing before an immense sky. I think Rilke would be very much in harmony with the Sandokai.

[41:42]

And understanding that, yes, you have one marriage. You have one relationship going forward. You have two people who feel very much distinct and feel at times on their own islands. And yet they are incredibly interconnected. And how do we actually work with each other? Because if we were to do away with things like Black History Month... we would start to not have reasons to remind us to go back and remember Irene Morgan and to go back and remember how we got here and the humanity and the struggle and how we don't want to repeat history because a lot of history we do not want to revisit again. And there are lessons to be learned there. We need things to remind us of Cinco de Mayo and to remind us of the workers' struggle and to remind us of the Ramatush and Ohlone. and to remind us of the different things that came before us and how we want to do better in the future. We do have our Zen practice. We do want to step outside of words. We do want to be in that field looking at that beautiful moon with our mouth open, totally outside of language, touching pure experience.

[42:50]

But we also have the practical so that we can flow together. What way do we turn in the Zendo? We also have power structures, which imply that we need to have better vision for the people that are in power. And we also have memory, because we all forget. We all forget. So let's not give in to the temptation with the things that happen in the next few years in regard to reducing the view of our celebration of diversity. And regardless of political party, we want people to feel comfortable here at Zen Center practicing with us. Anyone who shows up through the door who wants to look at their own karma and do it as best they can, we want them to feel welcome here. And I don't want to give in to the temptation because right now it is so easy to point at other people and say, how can they think like that? It is so easy to go down that path. Are they an alien?

[43:53]

No, they are a different person with a different experience, and I might think that what they're doing is causing harm, and I might even take some action and do some things. But do I divorce my heart from the fact that we are all human beings and how to actually touch the humanity in all the folks, whether I agree or disagree with them, or I think that they are logical or illogical? This is our invitation as Buddhists to be a gift to the world because we have cultivated as best as we can that lens that we place on the whole world moment after moment. 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.

[45:00]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[45:02]

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