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. So good morning and good day. Because the period that we're in, in which almost everything has been... put onto the Zoom platform is one in which our Sangha, our spiritual community, has expanded to include people from time zones of affinity. And of course, if things are recorded, then they can look at it anytime. So even as during this time of pandemic, If you're like me, our physical circumstances, and I haven't been more than five miles away from my home since mid-March.

[01:13]

So that's a really long time because now it's November. Even as our space physically in which we might move has been in many cases constricted radically. paradoxically, our ability to connect with dharma kin and spiritual friends and new friends who might not call themselves spiritual all over the world has radically increased for those who have access to the internet and not everyone does. So thank you for that introduction. And I'll start out by again greeting you friends and relatives of both affinity and non-affinity. So I'll take a step backward there and say that my original Zen training was in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ann Arbor, Michigan.

[02:22]

And I also spent time at our mother temple, the Zen Buddhist temple of Toronto, Canada, in the early 1980s. And the teacher of that group, Korean Zen master Samu Sinim, used to say things like, we're all relatives, and there are relatives of affinity, and there are relatives of non-affinity. That's something to think about. especially in our polarized political situation here in the United States, of which I am a citizen and a resident. So friends and relatives of both affinity and non-affinity. The title of this talk I've prepared, and it's really more a way of trying to reach out and connect, connect through the affinity of people our practice through the affinity of the goodness of our hearts with all of you.

[03:27]

The title of this talk is First Responders in this Burning World, Bodhisattva Vows for Now. My name is Mushim Patricia Ikeda. Mushim is a Korean Dharma name. It's the same as Mushin in the Japanese Zen. My pronouns are she, her, and I'm connecting to you. So that's what I'm doing right now. I don't have some like ultimate wisdom to lay on you. What I want to do is connect with you. I'm connecting to you from my home, which is on unceded land of the confederated villages of the Lishan, L-I-S-J-A-N, also known as Oakland, California in the United States. So, of this moment, this time we're in now, historically, I personally think it's fair to say that we are in, not only in crises, plural, but that also we are in the midst of intersecting, interconnected, and cascading crises.

[04:53]

confluence of global climate crisis, global pandemic, and the danger of an attempted coup d'etat here in the United States. This is what my friend David Trelevin, author of Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness, has called a high-intensity global activation event. So I'll repeat that. I think it's worth thinking about. A high-intensity global activation event. Activation means activation of trauma. And the question has risen up for many people and very understandably, I think particularly at the start of when the pandemic hit here in the United States, which was mid-March of this year, 2020. Today is November 21st, almost the end of November 2020.

[05:55]

And of course, it was so understandable that parents who suddenly found that their daily schedules were totally blown up and suddenly they had jobs to perform from home and screaming children and everything about our parents. quote-unquote, normal way of life was not only disrupted, it was suddenly disrupted, to state the obvious. So the question did arise, again so understandable, of when will this be over? When can we go back to how things were? When can we go back to normal? So a wonderful statement, I feel, which I've been using steadily in all of the teaching I've been doing since mid-March, is this.

[06:57]

And it came out around this time, that time. It's by the activist who is a woman of color, Sonia Renee Taylor, author of the book and the website, The Body is Not an Apology. The Body is Not an Apology. Sonia Renee Taylor said this, we will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona COVID-19 virus, our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, extraction, disconnection, confusion, rage, hoarding, hate and lack. We should not long to return, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment, one that fits all of humanity and nature.

[08:07]

So I know many of us here today are in the San Francisco Zen Center community. And y'all do a lot of sewing. Korean Buddhists use tailors. However, you folks are great at sewing. I just saw someone's expression at sewing your own robes and rakasus, which is a beautiful practice. So just for a moment, I'd like to ask you to reflect. What does it mean to you if you agree with this? What is... the opportunity to stitch a new garment, one that fits all of humanity and nature. And how will we do this together? Just a moment of mindfulness. And once again, for the record, and because I do think it's important to situate ourselves in historical time, chronological time, as well as we know as meditation practitioners that there's also deep time that is not calendar time.

[09:40]

So in historical time, today is November 21st, 2020. This is historical for me in that it's the first day. of the COVID-19 pandemic-related curfew here in Alameda County in California, where I live. This curfew has also been extended to 40 counties, as I understand it, in California. We have gone from the orange... of the pandemic crisis in which some restaurants, some gymnasiums, and other spaces were allowed to open in a limited way. And we are now today in the purple tier, the most restrictive and, as I understand it, the highest danger of this virus. So we are in a historical moment, I feel.

[10:42]

And at the same time, Whereas this time has been called by so many folks that this is an unprecedented time for us, we might also inquire, is it in fact unprecedented? I was given by one of my many wonderful Dharma relatives, artist Therese LaHaye. over here in the East Bay, where I live. And she is a student of Tibetan Buddhism. And when the pandemic started, my understanding is that her teacher, Zikr Kontrol Rinpoche, that's D-Z-I-G-A-R-K-O-N-G-T-R-U-L, Rinpoche teacher, requested that his students take up this practice of chanting or reading aloud a certain prayer six times per day.

[11:50]

And it is available for download. And you can print it out, which is really cool. It looks like that. I'll have to switch to my messy room. The background is I have been given permission to use it very generously. It's the Asian Art Museum. Very nice gallery. So I'll show you where I'm actually zooming in from. And sorry, it's really messy because I've just been working all the time. So thus it is. I just saw someone bow. Thank you. I just, you know. I only have so much time. So you can print it out. And it looks like these traditional Tibetan chanting cards or, you know, sutra or sacred text cards. So it's really cool.

[12:54]

It's on three. And this is around 200 years old, as I understand it. A Prayer for Peace and Stability in the World by Jamgon Kongtrolodro Thay. I don't know how to pronounce that, sorry. Who lived... from 1813 to 1899 in Tibet. So that's J-A-M-G-O-N-K-O-N-G-T-R-U-L-L-O-D-R-O-T-H-A-Y-E. And as their Donna, their generous giving, they have made this available today. So it has a text in Tibetan and then Romanized Tibetan and then an English translation. And it starts out, of course, with invoking Avalokiteshvara, protector of the world, and Tara, Padmasambhava, and, you know, like, come to our help now, folks, great beings.

[14:03]

And then it says, interestingly, beings of this degenerate age think and act in perverse ways. And disturbances in the elements, both inner and outer, mean that disease and pestilence, unknown in ages past, threaten human beings and animals alike. Oh, thank you so much. Kodo has put that in the chat. So if you want to capture it, now's your time. So disease and pestilence unknown in ages past threaten human beings and animals alike. It goes on to say planetary forces, nagas, galpo, obstructing spirits and elemental forces cause blight, Frost and hail, poor harvest, war and conflict, untimely rains and portents, ominous portents for the world.

[15:07]

And there is fear of earthquakes, fire, adversaries, and environmental catastrophe. Doesn't that just sum it up? So when I begin, and I am practicing with this prayer, I find it very helpful. So I think that it may not be much reassurance. However, I think it's good to recall as we read this 200-year-old prayer for peace and stability in the world from Tibet, that as human beings, we have been through this kind of thing before. and many times. This isn't unprecedented. And there's also, I think, the fact that though many of us enter into this narrow passage of multiple crises and disease, fewer of us will come out on the other side.

[16:16]

That is true. So I personally feel in my own practice that... As Sonia Renee Taylor says, we do have an opportunity here, one which I had personally had hoped that I would die before anything like this would happen. I was just going to chicken out. I'm going to turn 67 soon. So I really had hoped I would never deal with this. We're here. So in our practice, I feel that we do have an opportunity. We have an opportunity. And that opportunity is to go big or go home. To be able to expand, to hold all of this with tears and sometimes laughter. And in the beginning and the end, the great equanimity. And this opportunity offers an open space for very specific actions for each of us as individuals.

[17:24]

And as collectives and as communities, both larger and small, I can't tell you what actions to take. However, I have faith that you will know, not as individuals, as collectives, in compassionate and sometimes difficult dialogue with one another. When I was asked to do this talk, and thank you for the invite, I spoke to some members of the San Francisco Zen Center Cindy Center community and said, what should I talk about? And they all said, basically, we're in a huge hot mess and therefore, how should we practice? So since you've asked, And this is just me, really.

[18:25]

This is just Mushim. This is just me. Because you need to find your own answers. And in connecting to one another, maybe, you know, there's one me and there's one you. And the sang of one and one, in this case, equals three. So that means that we can come up with something new, folks. We have that opportunity right now. right now with these people who are here on the Zoom. So this is just me. How do we practice? So I'll just talk about a couple of things. And one is the practice of non-fear. The practice of non-fear. I myself tend to more towards anxiety than to depression. Of course, these days, everything rises up. Anxiety, depression, anxiety. post-traumatic stress, it's all rolling all the time.

[19:28]

So how do we do the practice of non-fear? And many of us know here that in the wonderful explosion of art and creativity that has accompanied the tradition of the Bodhisattva in the Mahayana Buddhism, so much creativity that And it asks us, you know, I think in what's called, I think at Zen Center, the appropriate response. I think that means creative response, especially now. So most of us know that in Buddhist art and Buddhist figures that the position... of the hands is important. Everything's important. It all symbolizes something. And the importance of the hands, the position of the hands is called mudra, M-U-D-R-A. And these various positions symbolize something. So my understanding is that the mudra of non-fear, of dissolving fear, of that

[20:36]

You know, just that wonderful moment when we're so ridden with anxiety and someone says that kind word. Or we hear a piece of music. Or, you know, a child laughs. Or our animal companion comes and curls up with us. Really, it could be almost anything. We see the sunlight as though we've never seen it before. the blessing of the rain, we're still in drought here, had a little bit of rain, that we can experience perhaps even momentarily when the fear is gone. It's just gone. That's a wonderful moment of safety, of refuge, of non-fear. So how do we extend that to ourselves and to one another? So I hope This is right, I'm not a Buddhist art expert, but I always have this photo printed out of a Buddha figure.

[21:44]

I think that's a position of non-fear. So in this case, the Buddha's right hand is up like that. Non-fear. So if you like, yeah, okay, yep, some of you are doing it. Let's embody this, embody practice. Oh, see, I'm seeing those of you with your video on. Some, there are two of you there, yay. Okay, non-fear, we signify that to one another. And I myself, being Japanese American, also think of it as kind of like, hello kitty, you know, the maneki niko. Good luck. So we'll ask, we might ask ourselves, how does fear feel in my body? How do I experience fear? Kodo says, when Buddha laid his hand on the trunk of the raging elephant to calm it.

[22:49]

I guess that means a raging elephant in front of me and it's getting ready to run me over. And so its trunk is, It's coming forward. And I'm like, chill out, elephant. You don't need to murder me today. I didn't know that. Thanks. So I'll ask, just ask, go for a moment. If you like, close your eyes. Go inward. You can keep your eyes open. And just in a safe way for a mindful moment, ask, what does fear feel like in my body? And then, because I know you contain so much wisdom, what are my practices of non-fear? If you like, you might take some deep breaths or not.

[23:54]

That can help us with what's called self-regulation. Or really, whatever works for you. Yeah, I see some people practicing self-touch. Perhaps a hand on the heart. Just a gesture of self-care. Thank you for your practice. I think the practice of non-fear is also the practice of what can be called bold, capital B, compassion, capital C. And I'm just going to lean aside. You probably can't see it, but I'm pointing. I live in one room. So in the back of my head is the door of my closet.

[24:59]

And at the top of it, which I'm pointing to, is this sign, big sign printed out in black and red. And that was a present to me from one of my students after I gave a talk on bold compassion. And so Carmen, I don't know, got access to a commercial printer or something and printed out this heck of big paper banner. It's really nice. It says bold compassion twice, once in red and one in black. And I just found it, so I thought, oh, I'll put it up to remind myself. So I know that during your fall practice period at San Francisco Zen Center City Center that you've been studying bodhisattva archetypes. I also am exploring the path of the bodhisattva with my home temple, East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, this fall. And it came to me as I was leading these classes that from what I know of, and I'm thinking about bold compassion, that in Tibetan Buddhism, what I know of the green Tara Bodhisattva archetype, so that's, again, one of the embodiments of compassion, that their characteristics are

[26:28]

As I understand that boldly, swiftly, like boldness, swiftness, not dithering around. Boldly, swiftly, decisively, and compassionately, compassionately arriving to help us. To relieve us of our fear. To help us be clear-sighted in what we can do in this moment. And I believe that Green Tara has many forms. And what came to me is that this form of compassion, bold, swift, wise, that these forms of compassion are first responders. So there's been so much appreciation and love for our first responders and the medical professions during this global pandemic.

[27:42]

And all the medical personnel. So if you like, send a burst of metta or unconditional loving kindness and appreciation. And some of you may be first responders, for which I deeply thank you. So I do think these times require all of us to become first responders. So to recap, how is it that we practice now? So number one. I invite you to practice non-fear and investigate what that means for you. To practice non-fear, we do need to look into what we're afraid of and do the Hello Kitty thing. Hi there. And we have many wonderful spiritual practices.

[28:50]

Some of us have wonderful therapists. They're healers in many modalities, in the many communities and backgrounds from which we come. We do come from different backgrounds. We are diverse. Our ancestors, our people, our indigenous and traditional ways of healing may be available to us. Let us bring together whatever tools we have at this time. in culturally appropriate, not appropriating ways. So number two of two suggestions. First is non-fear. The second is be a goose in flight. Many of you may be familiar with Adrienne Marie Brown's just really radically transformative, I feel, book, which came out a number of years ago, Emergent Strategy.

[29:54]

And Brown talks about the ways in which we can overcome and dissolve the ills of humanity. individualism as it manifests in our society in afflictive ways by, in our organizations, adopting the metaphor of flying geese. So if many of you know, when geese fly, when they're migrating or when they're just going from one place to another, they're members of a flock and they travel in this wonderful V formation. I love to see Canada geese flying and hearing them because they always usually honk.

[31:00]

So they're really noisy. They're large and they're noisy. They're very large birds. And they're very coordinated. So as they're flying along through the sky, you see this wonderful wavering V. And there's one goose at the top that has the most wind resistance. So that's the toughest flying. And then there are the ones behind. And they always seem to know where they're going. And they do. So once again, embodiment is very, very important. As we know, people who do a lot of stationary meditation in the seated or lying down posture, if there's spinal injury or chronic fatigue, and other practices as well. Our practices are not transcending our body. I mean, do... 100 prostrations or something, and it's just no joking matter. It's very, very physical. And all those hours that many of you folks have done in the Zendo, very, very physical.

[32:05]

So some organizations, and I would invite you to do this, you might try it, just be playful if you haven't done it already, is when you gather together in your staff meetings, in your whatever little groups you have, where you might be together in person, So I know in city center that you've quarantined pretty well and you are together in person. If you haven't done it, do the geese flying thing. And you can arrange yourselves like you could do it in your dining hall or some appropriate place or in the courtyard. And just make yourself into a V formation with the various people. And then you flap your wings. And you go honk, [...] honk. And you flap your wings and you're flying. You don't have to actually move because that's kind of dangerous. So you're flying. And then here's the thing. The goose at the front is not an elected leader. It just happens to be there or for whatever reason.

[33:07]

That's the point goose. When the goose in front gets tired, so just goose in front, get tired, drop back. And then someone else moves to the point. And keep doing that until you cycle through all of the people on your team. I first saw this some years ago here in Oakland at an open house for the FELC. You might want to put that in the chat, the Sustainable Economies Law Center. They practice shared leadership, which means a flattening of the hierarchy of the organization, while at the same time maintaining separation of roles. and distribution of labor. And we are practicing shared leadership at East Bay Meditation Center. We're evolving a model. And as I've done some thinking about it, and I'm going to do some writing about it, really what's come to me as a Buddhist practitioner and just as a person is that shared leadership is based on becoming less conflict avoidant.

[34:14]

We were told that by a consultant. So that's not for me. And for me, what I thought is that means that we have to, if we practice shared leadership as an answer to this burning dumpster of the times we're in, that we're able to realize more and more the ideal of non-fear. So it has been said. Hierarchy in and of itself is not an evil thing. It's a way of organizing things. However, for people of what might be called a lower position in the hierarchy to be afraid of the people in the higher position, for me, that is sowing the seeds of destruction. So we can ask, I mean, How afraid are we of one another? So I think it's profound.

[35:22]

It's profound to be a goose and to be geese in flight because this is using all of our senses, our navigational instincts that we may not even know we have as we head into the unknowable future. I believe this is... a manifestation of non-self, what's called non-self in Buddhism, and collective action in the face of emergency. And emergency also means emergent realities, realities that are emerging. We can't see all of them. We just kind of see these like, I don't know, tendrils and tentacles. Every once in a while, there's a giant blow up and then it's Godzilla. And we're like, oh, my God, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? Geese. You know, geese know what to do. They're just going to start flying and they know how to navigate. So just three or maybe a couple of examples of what I'm talking about, collective selfless action and how we can develop that.

[36:29]

And you have all the fundamentals really from your practice together, which is collective, usually in Zen. of meditating together and working together and eating together and, you know, all those sessions when you're doing everything together. And for myself, I believe we really need to think of, in a certain way, how to take that out into the world. Sometimes the phrase is used into the marketplace. I don't even really like to talk about it that way myself because... Yeah, I think it's just being willing to be an ordinary person and not label oneself zen or separate oneself from other people. It's kind of my mommy self-talking. I've been with a lot of kids and believe me, they really don't care about whether we say the practice or something like that. They want their snack.

[37:31]

So how do we use all of our... senses, ones that we don't even know we have, and bring forth our best in this time. So I remember, again, in the early days of my training in the early 80s in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the Zen Temple, that we were in this old two-story house. It was a pretty big house in Ann Arbor, Michigan. And the foundation was good. So that was good. Everything else needed a lot of help. And there were a lot of cockroaches, too. And so we knocked off the roof and made a dormer above the second floor. There was like a kind of an attic. There was attics. Yeah. So we made it into a dormer. And we were on the first floor in the meditation hall, sitting silently in meditation one Saturday morning.

[38:33]

And it had rained the night before, but it was a sunny morning. And the roofless attic had been covered tightly with some giant blue tarps by our carpenter monks. The teacher used to say, if the Zen student is not a carpenter when they come to me, they will be when they leave me. So we all did construction labor. And... So anyway, we were sitting and it was all serene and quiet and everything. And suddenly there was this really bad sound. Drip, drip, drip. And it was rain water that had, the tarp had blown off in the night. The attic was completely submerged in like a foot of water. And it had come down through the second floor and into the first floor. It was coming through our ceiling, the first floor of water. our Zendo, our, we didn't call it that, our meditation hall. And you know what? No one said anything. No one said anything.

[39:35]

And we were all trained, like, you just don't move. When the bell rings, you do not move. Without saying a word, it was just like an explosion. Everyone just literally jumped up. No words. We ran upstairs to the attic. We looked at it. Again, it almost seemed like it was like Star Trek or something, that people didn't even go up and down the stairs. There was just this materializing. Suddenly, people were there with bowls and anything they could grab from the kitchen and started bailing the water out and over the side of the building. And we were like, God, all these people were bailing the water out and the carpenters were going up and refastening the tarp. And As I recall, not a word was said. No one gave orders, nothing. We knew what to do. We knew what to do. And we acted in a leaderless fashion as one body in order to preserve our home.

[40:43]

I have seen these sudden... wordless explosions of collective and very directed, very clear, very effective action in other situations I've been in, in the Zen practice world, as well as with parents of young children and other groups and other people. We are not doomed. to fall apart from quibbling, from partisanship, from all of the many differences that can manifest in a positive way as the richness and abundance of diversity and in a negative way as warfare and as rivalry and as competition.

[41:47]

So we are not doomed to resign ourselves to the worst of what we are, because we do contain collectively the best of what we are. I know this. I've seen this. I've seen the first responder, the compassionate first responder bodhisattva action happen without words, without planning. For each of you, I do invite and request you to take up this action challenge to become a first responder of compassion in whatever your situation is, wherever you are, without using the formal vocabulary and the formal accoutrements of the practice to go out and meet others. all of our relatives of affinity and non-affinity and see what we can do together.

[42:55]

I must add in the few minutes that are remaining to me that I am not talking in a naive way about embracing or condoning our abusers and our oppressors. I am not talking about that. I am urging us to consider how our spiritual communities, our sanghas, can take action in the greater world, perhaps without dressing in a special way or talking in a special way and joining with others where they are, just as we need to join with children where they are in order to realize really, I think what is the greatest happiness of our bodhisattva vows to say that all beings are one body.

[43:56]

So in ending, thank you. And I'm going to invite if one of our tech bodhisattvas is here to share with you a two-minute video that is up on YouTube that was solicited from me. along with other Buddhist teachers and leaders, when Biden was declared to be the winner of this presidential election. It is contested, as we know. So we've got a ways to go. And Lion's Roar, the North American Buddhist media, invited a number of Buddhist teachers and leaders to respond. And I really thought about it. And this is what I had So I'll ask you to please share this video. And then we will, this Dharma talk will close. And my understanding is that we'll have an ending chant and that the Eno, I've requested to give the first invitation for questions or comments to BIPOC, Black Indigenous People of Color.

[45:13]

And then an open invitation to all. So if you could please play the video, I would love to share it with you if you haven't seen it. Today, November 6, 2020. The United States, my home, is a nation divided against itself, with all sides striving to win. This is the karma of white supremacy and colonization manifesting. in the midst of a global pandemic and climate crisis. I live in California, a state which is literally on fire. The Buddha said this. Winning gives birth to hostility. Losing, one lies down in pain. The calmed lie down with ease, having set winning and losing. aside.

[46:14]

Winning gives birth to hostility. Another translator, more colloquially, put it this way. The winner sows hatred because the loser suffers. I believe in strategic political action and liberatory movement building. I have cast my vote. And these are my bodhisattva vows as I move with you into the coming months and years. What actions can I take to lessen hostility and extreme reactivity and to encourage civil discourse and respectful democratic process? May we all complete the great journey of awakening together. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[47:34]

May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:37]

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