This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. So we thought we'd start today saying a little bit more about the work we do at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. But in some ways, our time together already has been a great example of what Buddhist Peace Fellowship does, which is really just about connecting folks in conversation around issues of Buddhism and politics or activism. And so our conversations yesterday and the great conversations we've had with you all over meals and out on the rock, out back, have been, I think, this is what we do, is just really connect folks to be able to explore this intersection together. And BPF's actually been doing this kind of work since the late 70s.

[01:04]

We were actually started, I believe, on the back porch of Robert Aiken Roshi's house in Hawaii. Norman Fisher may have been there. So it actually really grew out of the Zen tradition, I think, as a place where you know, from the ideal of the Bodhisattva and this idea of really bringing our practice out into the world, I think has been really grounded in the Zen tradition, maybe even more so than in my own tradition that I practice in, the Theravada. So I appreciate greatly the roots of this organization coming out of Zen. And you can imagine in the past 35 years, like, what it means to do political work has changed significantly since that time. And so we've been going through what we've been calling our radical rebirth, really trying to get back to the roots of what it was that BPF was trying to do so many years ago, as well as bring a certain kind of politics to this work that we thought we'd talk more about today.

[02:13]

When you said you can imagine how it's changed, I can't imagine. Sure. Um, so a lot of the organizing in the seventies was around like the Vietnam war, uh, and an anti-militarization movement, um, very specifically around like the draft and things that are sort of just less salient today. Obviously war is still an issue to us, but I think other issues, I think the issues around climate change have become more salient for folks. That's the banner. Um, You know, I think the world, how our prison, our judicial system works has changed. I was reading, it might have been in the book, The New Jim Crow. I don't know if you guys have heard about this, but it's a great book of really, by Michelle Alexander that talks about how the system of mass incarceration was built. And she talks in that book about how folks who were studying prisons in the 70s thought, you know, there was a very small population.

[03:17]

They're like, will be closing prisons in the next few years because there really won't be a need for them anymore. And now we have the U.S. has this enormous amount of prison population because it's economically viable to people in prison. So I think that political issues have changed and some might say that urgency as well around some of these issues has been really important. I also think that just historically there were a lot of anti-colonial revolutions in the 60s and 70s that were motivated in part by efforts to bring in political and economic systems different from capitalism, so socialist and communist kinds of societies. And I think we've seen a huge disillusionment on many levels since then with those experiments and the Cold War and this kind of like, Actually, many of these countries that claim to be communist actually, some would say, are state capitalist or the state is the main capitalist and we're very authoritarian.

[04:26]

So I think that we, in understanding causes and conditions, we look to history a bit, which we're going to talk about a little later, to try to understand where we're at now and why the organizing forms now look a certain way because... people are coming out of like the McCarthyist era and communists and what does it mean to call yourself an anti-capitalist and sort of all of this stuff that might be different than what people were dealing with in the 70s too. Great, thank you. Yeah, that's a good question. And please feel free to, yeah, raise your hand, shout out questions, whatever, feels good. Yeah, and so I think another thing we wanted to get into today is just a little bit more in the gritty is like, Yesterday we talked about activism more broadly, but there are, of course, many approaches to activism and many ideologies, many methodologies, many styles, that kind of thing. So today we wanted to talk a little bit about what are some of the principles that are guiding the work of Buddhist Peace Fellowship right now specifically and that we really believe in and just offering them for you all to try on or push back against or whatever you...

[05:35]

resonate with or are like, whoa, what is that all about? So to spell that out a little bit more, number one, we in the last couple of years have decided that something really important to us is to focus on systems and not just individuals. So for example, in interpreting the five precepts of Dharma practice and Buddhist ethics, how do we make it not just about a personal improvement project and like well, I'm not killing anyone, therefore everything's cool. But looking at a systemic level, what does it mean to have a militarized society? What does it mean to have mass incarcerations, have state violence on all these levels? And how are we relating to those realities, right? And I think partly there's a tendency in our society of materialism and kind of late capitalist hyper-commodification. to turn everything into like this shiny product that you can sell and buy, right?

[06:39]

So mindfulness is experiencing this big trendy phase right now. And it's like mindfulness for better focus, mindfulness to calm you down and stress relief, mindfulness to make you a more effective and efficient worker in the workplace. But what we find is that that doesn't actually really address some of the very central issues around workplace environments, for instance, and like, what is making your workplace stressful? Is it bad, you know, unsafe conditions? Is it sexual harassment in your workplace? Like, there's all these other kind of causes and conditions, again, that might contribute to somebody feeling the type of stress that might lead them to mindfulness. And if we only locate the source of suffering within the individual, then we might be missing out on some larger than the individual small self that are contributing to social suffering. Well, and I think some of you might have read or be familiar with David Loy's work around this, where he articulates a vision of the three poisons of greed, anger, and delusion on a systemic level, where greed is an economic system based on just accumulating as much as possible, which we might call capitalism, the economic system we live in today in the US.

[07:58]

Aversion or anger being exemplified by our military as a whole system that is angry at everything. And delusion being exemplified by our media and the ways that the media has become not something that gives us useful information about what's going on in the world, but really spends it in a way that we never can really actually quite trust what's true or not true that is coming out of the media. So we actually just, it might, I don't know if it will be heading to the Tassajara Library, but we brought a book of his called Money, Sex, War, Karma. War, Power, War, Karma. Yes. David Loy, Money, Sex, Something, Karma. So you might already have that. You might already have that too. Yeah. Good point. Good, great. So that's a great resource. If you're sort of curious about, like, how do I think about some of these Buddhist concepts, not just of how I practice them personally, but also on a systemic level?

[09:05]

It's got some good stuff in there. And another example that feels relevant to Buddhists, particularly around the personal and the systemic, is that we have, these days, a pretty common practice of teaching meditation in prisons to folks who are locked up. Buddhist Peace Fellowship was actually pretty much the first Buddhist organization to start doing that in the West, in the US. And since then, many other great organizations have taken it on and are doing it. But what we see is that if we focus on the properties of meditation only as kind of individual liberation and awakening, of course, there's deep value to that. And like, what does it mean in how we relate to the mass incarceration and the skyrocketing prison populations of the U.S. right now. I mean, do we have anything to say about that? Do we think anything about that? Do we think anything about the practice of solitary confinement in prisons, which has been deemed torture by international organizations?

[10:09]

So we're kind of trying to see what it means to move from, like, only prison dharma to also thinking about prison abolition or these other forms of social activism that we resonate with and how to match it in with what's already going on with so many people who are practicing dharma now inside. So, any questions about that so far? Individual, systemic? This about prison, do you, you probably don't have an answer, but how is to work in this other way? How is the Buddha Peace Fellowship is doing kind of this working, looking to the system? Right, right, doing it systemically instead of individually. Yeah, how it happens. Yeah, totally. I think we'll get to that a little bit in number five, which is about action. So what you're talking about is something that has troubled me about Buddhist teaching for a long time.

[11:16]

is its lack of articulacy about systemic phenomena. And it's like your focus on a personalistic phenomenology. So like, I'm just curious, because I've been trying to figure this out, are there Buddhist sources for thinking in this kind of systemic way? And like, what are they, or are there academics, scholars who are working on re-serializing Buddhism in this direction? I wish there were more. Yeah, right? But a couple of good ones besides David Loy, Ajahn Sulak Sivaraksa, who's in Thailand, writes about this pandemic and is like a really fierce, awesome voice about this kind of stuff. One of his books called Global Healing, which I brought last summer when I was here, I think should be in the library here. And then there's this really cool, I don't know, there's this really cool... or a book called What the... No, is it What the Buddha Taught?

[12:20]

There's a person, an Indian scholar named Suarez, his last name is Suarez, who talks about karma as basically historical materialism under a Marxist lens. I nerd out over that stuff, so I'm really into it. But yeah, I'll try to find that information and get it to you later. But there's sort of, yeah, looking at how do we... inherit systems that are created by previous generations of human beings, and what does it mean to relate to those in the society we live in now? In some ways, I think it points to the second point that we have, that from our perspective, our spiritual education is really important to us, and it is not a substitute for political education, in part because so much of the teaching feels focused on ourselves as individuals but from my experience I feel like as I get more political education and what I mean by that is studying some of these larger systems so whether we want to study the system of prisons like how did they come to be and who are they incarcerating and who are they not incarcerating and how are they growing or whether we want to study economic systems like capitalism and communism or other economic systems and try to make sense of

[13:43]

that for me as I start to study that then I can see how the Buddhist teachings are talking about the systems as well like it is there I wouldn't say that it's not there but I think partly perhaps because of my own or like our collective understanding of the world like it's just easier to for us to see it on the individual level so for me digging in deeply around different kinds of political education has been a really important component to being able to see how this plays out on the systems level as well. Did you have an example there? I mean, I guess we see this often in different, Dharma influenced organizations that, for example, hope that by encouraging people to meditate, they will vote better or vote differently.

[14:45]

And it's like, maybe, but what about actually the political education for us to be able to make conscious choices about how we're voting or interacting with our political systems? So I think there can be a little bit of like, assuming that, oh, if we meditate or if we get in touch with our compassion, we will make better or more compassionate political choices. And I would say that this is not the approach that Buddhist Peace Fellowship takes. It's not to say that it could never work in some cases, but when we see, especially CEOs like the CEO of Whole Foods, who has in some ways a very progressive sort of and mindfulness practice and it's connected to Buddhism, but it's extremely anti-union and extremely anti-organized labor. And so, you know, you still have these very mixed results politically. It's like, of course, just by studying Dharma, you're not necessarily going to come to a certain position on organized labor.

[15:46]

Like, why would you? So that's just being responsible for our own political education. It's just a value that we carry. Yeah. I don't know if this is the book that you were thinking of, and I also can't remember the title, but there are some scholars in India who come as our advocates and scholars within the Delhi community and movement in India who are very clear in, for example, scholarship on the food is life, you know, that Hinduism, a caste, goes very much in that. that the Buddha was responding to the conditions of his own culture and time. And so they looked very carefully at things like, what was that community like? How was property defined and shared by a community according to Buddha's direction? It's very political, actually.

[16:49]

The way that they've expressed it has a very different... inflection, a political inflection, than any of the other. Except for someone named Ling, who was in the 70s, I think that was to be Trevor Ling, wrote a biography after that. Oh, I just heard about that. Joanna Macy had mentioned it. I haven't read it, though. It's an old one. Yeah. You talked about the 60s and 70s. The books were The period seems to be the figure was much more the social reformer. It's all about social reform, with maybe the risk that at times it was a bit impersonal. But then that was the culture of the day. And today it seems to be, especially Buddhism, was about healing. The figure is much more the healer. It feeds in well with the whole culture of well-being, care.

[17:52]

with the risk maybe of becoming a bit narcissistic. And I wonder how one reconciles the figure of the social reformer and the healer, maybe even insisting on the fact that healing has to include social reform or social reform for the healing, otherwise they are sort of orphans. Is there an approach to that and Buddhism that... that the premise to say healing is about social reform? Yeah, I mean, I think that to the extent, like Don was saying yesterday, to the extent that we care about suffering, of course we care about the policies that exacerbate or help to heal suffering in our society, and not just for ourselves personally, but people we care about, and then larger and larger, wider and wider circles of our community. And I mean, the experience for me of being in especially retreat spaces where there are a lot of particular structures that are set up to try to encourage and create an environment where we can actually go really deeply into Dharma practice, to me is also a reflection of the ways that in society we can structure things to encourage compassion and generosity.

[19:22]

And vice versa, we can structure things to encourage greed and not thinking about who we might be harming or impacting through our personal and political decisions, right? So absolutely, I mean, I think the people I'm most inspired by is a very natural... integration of the structural and political with the healing and sort of spiritual component of why that even matters. Why does it matter for us to reform things? Because we want people to experience wellbeing and ease suffering in the world. Maybe that moves us towards number three. This is the longest one. We'll figure out how to make it more pithy at some point, probably. But anti-impression or sort of like working around issues of diversity. And from our perspective of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, we're really encouraging ourselves and others to move beyond what we might think of as tolerance of diversity or just trying to be more comfortable with diversity towards actively redistributing power.

[20:33]

And I think in many ways, I've really appreciated sort of observing what's happening at Sassahara. I've seen that there's been a real practice of supporting women's leadership in particular at Sassahara. I think there's a great example of like, okay, how do we pay attention to structures and hierarchies in society that might just, that do, privilege folks of some genders over others. So, you know, in the world we live in now, males might have more power privilege than women or gender not performing folks or trans folks. You know, we see hierarchies around race, around sexual orientation, around disability. And so, you know, when we're building communities like this, or we're in sangha with each other, how do we take the knowledge that we have coming out of our political education and looking at systems to be able to say, oh, well, we actually have some power in this community to shift that, to actually make things feel less of a hierarchy and more of a place where everybody can bring their full selves.

[21:50]

Because this is the work that we're doing spiritually is to be able to you know, find the self, but forget the self. But we're here, you know, we're here to, we're here to investigate and bring that forward. So for me, this one, you know, I just, I really appreciate communities that are trying to redistribute that power in a way that resists the hierarchies that exist in society. So. Yeah. And I think, I mean, we've recently seen in some of the organizing around Black Lives Matter and around police violence that we actually have more of an opportunity to put into practice some of the anti-oppression philosophies that I know, like I had sort of learned or studied in college, but it

[22:50]

became a lot about just sort of pointing out privilege or pointing out oppression and not a ton of methodology about how do we actually intervene in society in a way to redistribute power effectively. And when we have our own communities where we have a little bit of control over how power is distributed, that's actually like an amazing opportunity to practice that kind of stuff. but it's maybe harder to practice in the larger political systems. But also, I mean, like we had mentioned yesterday with this action in shutting down the police department headquarters where different affinity groups based on identity were taking different positions of risk or vulnerability to police violence. And that's like a way of really redistributing some of the danger of interacting with the police. So, I mean, and I know for me, like, it's been strange and sort of disorienting growing up at a time when there was a lot of debate about affirmative action when I was growing up and sort of diversity on that level.

[24:02]

But some of the strongest arguments for diversity tended to be a little bit tokenizing and kind of like, we want things to look good on the brochure of, you know, like people of different skin tones and we want like women to look like they're having a good time. But, you know, we just have to like really take the responsibility to go deeper than that. And to understand that after the karma of for so long having hierarchies in place that are really painful and rigid and, and, uh, can be invisible to the people who enjoy privileges within the structures, that there'll be discomfort, right? There'll be discomfort in real meaningful diversity. It's not that easy. And that's okay. And like, that's why Sangha is so important in being able to draw on our abilities to listen deeply, to be with discomfort and to kind of have our hearts broken together in community rather than through a lot of blame.

[25:09]

being our only reaction to discomfort. Maybe I'll say something, too. I mean, around the issue of race as a white person, it can feel really destabilizing to start to look at hierarchies and pay attention to where I have experienced privilege where I just didn't even ever realize it was happening before. And it's been really helpful to me to actually explore that in Dharma community. I've been part of a couple of groups, one through the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, and one actually that's starting up right now through the Community Dharma Leaders Program at Spirit Rock. And there's a website that's being formed that's called whiteawake.org, I think. Because, you know, you think about, like, destabilization of the self is a huge part of what we work with in practice. And so for me, sort of looking at that overlaid with what does it feel like to destabilize my political sense of self, you know, whether it's white identity, gender identity, all of these things, actually is a really rich place of practice for me because...

[26:25]

I can feel like, oh, when I start to feel off kilter or like uncomfortable in a place, oh great, here's an opportunity to practice with feeling uncomfortable with, am I doing the right thing? Am I taking up too much space? Am I not taking up enough space? That actually can be a place for investigation of all of the places that I create a sense of self through race or through other identities that I don't even normally notice. So that's been a really interesting and rich place where, like, practice and political education have actually been really useful to do together. Yeah? I guess I've always been more of a proponent of a meritocracy when it comes to filling power positions and leadership roles, in that I think you should give... those positions to people that have earned it through their own hard work.

[27:26]

Do you think, with that in mind, do you think it's hard for us to objectively evaluate people? I mean, and have that pure meritocracy, or do you think inevitably our own backgrounds and upbringings and all these things get in the way to make that difficult? That's a good question. I mean, Partly, it seems like it depends how we define the merit of meritocracy. What are the skills and qualities we're looking for and how broadly do we define those? So the most basic example that comes to mind is with the SATs to get into colleges. Is it really measuring how... smart you are, or is it measuring how good you are at taking the SATs? Because you took a bunch of practice tests. And it's been shown that there's also just sort of cultural assumptions built into certain standardized measurements of merit that might be relevant to one population, but might not be relevant to other populations.

[28:35]

And so to me, part of where the gleeful diversity that tends to be kind of superficial but sometimes gets it right is like actually there's a ton that we get to learn by challenging our own assumptions about who is working the hardest or who is doing it the best because that can be defined in a lot of different ways and sometimes people who are able to succeed or achieve or thrive according to how it's always been done that's fine, but there can also be other people who can succeed and thrive and contribute in really different ways that just don't really have the space to come forth in the current system. Another way that was put to me one time that I really appreciated is someone said, they often observe a tyranny of the articulate. So people who are able to express their ideas in the most articulate way often their ideas become the most popular because people are like, oh, that sounds really good.

[29:39]

But like someone else might have a really, really good idea, but because they're not saying it in the way that comes across, it doesn't get picked up. So to me, it's like an ongoing practice of, yeah, meritocracy, that's one thing that we value, like being able to have people, you know, rewarded or placed based on their abilities and skill and yet like there's all kinds of other questions that come along with that including do we want to set limits to the amount of reward that people get for being good at things because it might tend to create inequality or exacerbate inequality and resentment within a community do we want to like become really good at identifying and celebrating whatever it is that people are good at, even if it doesn't fit into what the existing structure is. So it's a long, yeah, but I appreciate that. And it's a very, it's like kind of at the heart of what we often have is through the world.

[30:43]

Yeah. I wanted to go off of that saying that the saying that like, if you can just work your way up, you know, by the, by your bootstraps or just work really hard and you'll make the American dream. It's like a myth and it kind of catches the immigrants and like the poor people like to think that, oh, we just keep working hard. We're going to achieve the American dream. We're going to have a house. We're going to, you know, have enough money. And now it's not, I mean, that American dream, it's kind of like, If you're not white, it's going to be really hard. And then also this democracy, we live in a democracy, that's kind of a myth too, because look at the top 1% people, they have so much money that they can influence the politics.

[31:49]

But we want to believe we live in a democracy, We have a representative working for us. And part of it, it's like a shi'an. I think the people who are in power, I think they're afraid that if they give it, if they redistribute it to... the poor or the foreigners, people who don't look like them, who have a different religion, who are not the same, who have some different sexuality or something, it's very... I think there's a lot of fear and a lot of anger. And so it seems like they want to make it seem like, oh, those people, they're just not working hard enough.

[32:50]

they're lazy or something. And there's also a lot of unconscious bias that, like they've done studies where someone who has, they write, these are lawyers, one's like a white lawyer and the one's an African-American lawyer and they have the same name, Thomas Meyer. And they write the exact same memo and but they know what race they are of, and then the one who's white, they get more positive praises and have more mentorship options, whereas the African-American one, same as that memo, it has lower, it's regarded lower. So, I mean, So I think we want to think that we're not biased, that we give everyone a fair shot, but I think below, based on the karma and our past experiences, it influences what we decide.

[34:07]

I'm thinking of, you met him in D.C., who's working on unconscious bias with meditation. So people might have heard of mindfulness-based stress reduction. This person's working on mindfulness-based bias reduction, meaning implicit bias that people have, regardless of race. Even black folks carry unconscious bias towards other black folks. They have a tool that comes out of, I think it comes out of Harvard, that called an implicit bias measurement. So you can kind of tell if you are quicker to associate a white face with positive attributes and darker faces with negative attributes. I took the test like that. Yeah, it's kind of wild. But yeah, absolutely. So some Buddhists are into that too. Yeah. In the last week or so, I've really been thinking about actually bed with that exact word meritocracy and kind of ambition among various members of the sangha that i've seen here and i was talking about it with somebody um and i was thinking about democracy and and um like kind of just everybody having one voice or one voice each and that decision is being made like that and i see here the same power structures that i see in the regular world i mean they're

[35:36]

They're different here, but they're still the same. I mean, we're basically a republic, and there's a pyramid kind of organization of labor. And I wonder if there's like... Actually, so I guess I was trying to see if I could just not make this more of a just open-ended observation, but rather a question. Is there... thinking based on maybe the direct democracy practices seen in Occupy, in the Occupy movements, about how to redistribute power within, I mean, communities, intentional communities like this one, or where we're trying to refashion things in a way where the meritocracy or the trappings behind the meritocracy in our society are not... or even just like kind of the traditional way that we organize power is not, those things are not gonna come through, still skew the structures of power in our organizations?

[36:49]

That's a big question. So I'm like, where do I wanna go with it? I think you and I might also think differently about this. I'll say from my perspective, I tend to think, like, there's not one perfect structure that works in all situations in terms of, like, to me, always having, like, everyone in a circle with everyone having a voice trying to make a decision. Like, if you've ever been in, like, an hours-long meeting with, like, too many people in the room trying to make a decision that's just, let's just have a committee go off and decide that. Like, I just don't have the patience or we don't have the time. to do that for every single decision. So there's some places where it's useful to be like, we authorize you to make a decision on behalf of us, go. And then there's other situations where that kind of more direct democracy of everyone having a voice, trying to find some consensus, trying to find something that's workable for everyone is more useful.

[38:05]

And so to me, it's less of a like, this is right or wrong, but more like what is right for the community at the time? Because it can also change over time. You know, if, I think the common example is often like, if there's a fire, you don't want to like try to get consensus among 10 people about what to do about it. You want somebody to be like, okay, you there, you there, you there, go. You know, because it's a fire and we need to make a decision immediately. So there are some situations that call for that and other situations where more voices will help us make a more informed decision. Because if it's something that's affecting all of us, like, especially, you know, like, I couldn't make a decision for this group here. I don't know you all enough to know what different needs exist or... what it is that might be important to each of you. So it'd be really challenging for me to be in a position of making a decision that might really impact your lives in a difficult way.

[39:09]

So there's a balance for me often in terms of what feels right for a community at any given time. Yeah. And I think kind of related to this anti-oppression principle too, like, sometimes I see in efforts towards democracy, uh, a glossing over of difference and that like, we want to get to the place where we're all equal, which is like, of course we do. Cause that's great. And people are socialized so differently and, and come to our kind of shared social environments in different places. So to me, it's, I'm kind of more interested in, and I think what we explore a little bit, is different technologies of working with oppression as it is, as it exists, and trying to figure out how to create collaborative and engaging community structures that, again, just redistribute power, decision-making power, representative power, creating, like the sangha we're done mostly goes as...

[40:26]

They have a night for folks of color, people of color night, a night for queer folks. They call it Alphabet Songda, LGBTQI, G-S-I-U. All the letters. Yeah. And the first time I encountered a caucus system of white folks here and people of color here, First of all, I was super confused. I was like, where do I go? I don't know. I have a lot of light-skinned privilege, but I'm also black. And sometimes it makes people really upset, and they're like, this is reverse racism, why are you separating people, da-da-da. So it's like, these are tools that we choose to use because we find them helpful. We've seen the ways that having spaces where people... might share a more common socialization pattern allows some space to be able to work through things that are just really difficult in shared spaces um and that along with that though needs to come like a very kind of real acknowledgement of okay like what does what

[41:41]

What are some of the concerns or demands coming out of the People of Color Caucus or the Women's Caucus or the Queer Caucus? And how can the allies be more in support of those? Which isn't to say that allies don't have an opinion or a voice or a vote or aren't people with feelings. And we need to work on ourselves to be able to be in a place of support to the people who are experiencing oppression and marginalization in more direct ways, according to that particular way. Very roundabout answers. Sorry. But yes, there are different communities working on intentional community power structures. Right. For sure. Well, and looking at the time, still wanting to at least touch on these last two. This is the complex. We could spend a long time continuing to talk about this. So I'm glad to be working that conversation here and we can continue beyond. But... A couple of other things that we found useful to think about as well is that confrontation can be compassionate.

[42:49]

I hear that you all have been doing some work on interpersonal conflict and confrontation. And so you can think about it on that level of like, oh, how do I actually work with maybe talking to somebody about something that felt harmful to me in a way that still respects their humanity, respects my humanity, and just is about teaching each other about, oh, here's what works for me and here's what doesn't. And we often then think about it as well on not just an interpersonal level, but on a systems level or a systemic level of what kinds of political actions that are more confrontational, which I think In some Buddhist communities, folks can tend to shy away from anything that feels very confrontational. We have a tendency to be conflict-avoidant bunch, perhaps. And so I think we're really trying to bring that practice of confrontation that feels compassionate still and try to find the space where that works.

[43:57]

So one example of that... is that we did an actual blockade sitting in meditation of a hotel that was getting ready to post a conference of police departments to learn more about how they could use militarized weapons with their SWAT teams and all of this. And this was actually about three weeks after Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson. And so the issue of militarized policing, especially with how strong the police force responded to people being out on the streets just in grief about his death, we just really felt like, okay, we want to say something about this. So we actually cut our bodies in sitting meditation in front of the doors, which in some ways was really confrontational. Like the hotel staff, they weren't like, yay, we're so glad you're here. Don't do this. They were angry. They were really upset with us being there.

[44:58]

Guests really wanted to get through and had to go around to some other door, and they were angry. The police showed up, and we were like, we're just sitting here. We'd sort of decided to have a silent protest, although we ended up having some monks there, so they did some chanting, which was beautiful. So we had a different kind of chanting than the political chanting. But we just sat there. And yet it was because of where we chose to sit, it had an implied sense of confrontation with police, with the hotel that was housing this, that we wanted them to not house it anymore, and with sort of this larger system of militarized policing. I think another element of the compassion and confrontation that we try to bring is with the messaging and actually giving an alternative or asking for the choice that we would rather people make.

[46:01]

So we're not there just for the sake of getting up in people's faces and making them upset. Like, that's not actually our purpose. Our purpose, in this case, is to ask the Marriott to stop hosting Urban Shield, which is this weapons expo where they not only train people, but... actively sold weapons in this in this place and actually because of the combined efforts of a larger coalition in oakland there was so much political pressure on the mayor that it was decided not to host urban shields anymore so for the first time in nine years it won't be hosted in oakland after this year so i think that and that's that's part of like your basic organizing strategy what anyone will tell you is that when you're going after a target important to remind them like you have a choice to make here you could decide to do this and then we'll go away or you know whatever it is so I think that also can take away from a little bit of like seeing this person as my eternal nemesis and enemy like actually you know if you if you just do this then we could be cool

[47:06]

Okay, and maybe we'll go for the last one quickly. So that's an example of what we would call a direct action. And does anyone, does anybody have a definition of a direct action that you think about? I'm just not allowed to direct action, I mean. Even in terms of abstaining away from, I mean, this wouldn't be like organizing, but let's say if there are products or, you know, products that you know that somewhere along the end there was karma inherited, you know, wouldn't want to be a part of. So... Boycott. Yeah. Boycott action. Yeah, so boycott, a strike, a sit-in, like the lunch counter sit-ins to integrate the lunch counters and the lights unit. Basically, we think of a direct action as something that comes from people power.

[48:08]

It's not where you're appealing to a politician or a decision maker to make a certain choice through like a petition or a march. It's actually you're using your actual people power to put pressure on somebody so that hopefully it becomes untenable for them to continue doing whatever they're doing that's harmful. So that's an example of kind of a disruptive or... more confrontational direct action. We also wanted to touch on, before we end, this other kind of direct action which comes from prefigurative politics. So prefigurative politics are like, how do we create the thing that we want to see? So again, the lunch counter sit-ins of the civil rights movement are an example of that because people were going there and asking to be served. And that was exactly the question. can we integrate these segregated spaces? And then other examples might be like we did an action recently with an urban farm that was under threat of being paved over by the city.

[49:14]

And people in the farm want to keep the farm the way it is. It's beautiful. It's this green space in the middle of a lot of concrete. And so they're actually working really hard to keep the farm going, and they don't want it to be paved over. Actions like that, I think, can be really, really refreshing and appealing for those of us who are used to being in the streets yelling about imperialism, which feels so abstract and really difficult to overcome. But doing things that are actually inspiring alternatives and seeing what that feels like to, oh, what if we lived in a system where people treated each other in this way is part of a prefigurative politic that really inspires us at BPF. Yeah. I just think that that's where monastic communities are, like, even since the Buddhist times, you know, a place where it's relatively passive, but it's, you know, it's really showing this other example, and it's open, often open for people to visit and experience this way for a shorter, a long time.

[50:20]

Yeah. Totally. That was actually going to be our last question to you all though maybe we only have time for a voluntary like stay afterwards and chat kind of thing but like where are elements being at Tassajara where you see pieces of the society that you would like to live in you know like what prefigurative elements are present for you here in your practice and living here and working here we've had some conversations with people about that but it's been really great so offering that to you for consideration and reflection. I think we should probably close for no reading. Yeah, I brought this awesome book also talking about prefigurative politics and social justice. So this is science fiction by social justice organizers, some of whom are writers, but many of whom are not. But the contents in here, like still their contents are like...

[51:22]

really amazing and there there's a passage um there's a passage from someone named alexis pauline gums who's a black feminist queer uh organizer and writer scholar um i think she's in north carolina and she's writing from her future post-capitalist self to her current like 2010 and describing the kind of society that she now lives in to her former self. So I think we may have time for people who can stay after, but we should probably close with the verses. 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, visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[52:25]

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