And then we will begin. An unsurpassed, penetrating and perfect Dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million Kalpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept. I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Reverend Angel and Abbas Fu. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for joining us and a special welcome to, there's a good number of us here that are part of the Radical Dharma Embodying Race, Love and Liberation Retreat. that I have the honor of co-holding with Abbas Fu Schrader.

[01:01]

And so we are bringing our retreat to you. We're just in our first morning of it and thought that a perhaps valuable thing in our Dharma dialogue would be to set up a little bit and share a little bit of a framing conversation about how we are how we have come to be in this particular moment. And as the title of the talk is, what's Zen got to do with it? And so is not lost on anyone that we are in, as many people have said, unprecedented times. And this unprecedented time was already in process in the form of the global coronavirus pandemic. And then in the United States, yet another incident of a murder of a black man, George Floyd, took place on, I believe it was May, June 1st, I think it is June 1st.

[02:13]

And that particular incidents, though it was certainly not the first, though it is certainly, not actually entirely unusual for that kind of violence to be brought upon Black people's bodies because of the advent of social media, of the ability to have cameras, particularly the young white woman that was willing to stay and hold her camera for the entire duration of those eight minutes and 46 seconds, as well as a little time before and after that The officer held his neck until the breath left George Floyd's body. As the breath left George Floyd's body, we were struck by it. And that gave rise to not only national, but also global uprisings, we would say around the cause and the movement of Black Lives Matter.

[03:15]

But I want to add a little bit of context that I think is relevant for especially those of us that hold our life in a way in which we understand ourselves as having a practice, and particularly those of us that have a practice that forms itself around the notion of retreat and the power of retreating, the power of coming into a place of, I like to say, dynamic stillness and all of what that gives rise to. So in my awareness, the way that I have come to understand and really even before the uprisings, one of the things that I was in conversation with different people as we were trying to navigate and make sense of like what it is we're experiencing collectively and how people are managing the coronavirus pandemic, what we... What I have spoken to is really that what we were seeing is for the first time in many of our lives, we were having a shared experience of something.

[04:24]

And there's many ways that we talk about our sense of oneness. We talk about ourselves as one global family. But for the first time, that global family had its attention turned to the same thing. And that is unprecedented, not only in terms of the fact of the coronavirus, we've had pandemics before, but also because of the advent of media and global media and the ability to be aware of not only that we are facing this thing together, but also how different people are facing it. We ended up... with this collectivized experience of going through something together. Now, of course, as a result of all of the facets of social inequities, we are touched and impacted by that global experience in very, very different ways. And so that certainly has to be acknowledged.

[05:26]

A very clear cut way to say that is while many of us were asked to shelter in place, many of us in fact did not have shelter in order to be in place. And we didn't have safe shelter. We didn't have, we had sheltering conditions in which, for instance, for many women to shelter in place was actually dangerous. And the uptick in domestic violence was quite significant. And so the global pandemic would land on us in different ways. And yet... we had a vast awareness that people all over the world, all over the world, from, you know, from large countries, the largest countries in the world, India and China, to as little as in those tiny islands, you know, in the stretch of islands in Hawaii, we're all facing and having to grapple with this global experience. And part of that global experience because of the response to it of shelter-in-place orders, stay-at-home orders, the various ways that we named those things.

[06:36]

And what we also experienced is what I would like to say was a forced retreat, that we had a communication from the earth to have a kind of global timeout where all of us were... held in place except obviously those people that were called essential workers. The irony of many of those people that were called essential workers actually having had the experience of being the most overlooked workers, the people that have been overlooked as a result of social inequities is not to be missed. But many of us in fact were brought to a kind of physical movement standstill. Many of us were compelled to, you know, to be on Zoom a lot. We were compelled to be on all sorts of machinations trying to figure out what to do with ourselves in the face of such, you know, powerful uncertainty and an emotion and experience that is perhaps the most difficult for human beings to...

[07:42]

managed in themselves, especially if you don't have some kind of a practice in order to manage. And so we saw increased anxiety. We saw increased depression. We see increased mental health challenges as a result. But there we were in a kind of forced retreat experience of a quieting of a stilling of our physical movement. Some of that stilling having an extraordinary impact on being able to actually see the impact that human beings are having on the health of our ecosystem. And some of that stilling simply being about not a lot of movement, not a lot of energy expended, not nearly as much distraction. And that particular time, Also, I want to say over the arc of the hope that things will return to just the way they were. I think by the time George, the incident with George Floyd and George Floyd's murder came about, in my experience of retreats over a few decades, we had also kind of worn ourselves out collectively of the spinning around that we do when we go on retreat, when we're sort of trying to escape the reality that we are in fact in retreat.

[09:00]

that we are in fact brought to a kind of stillness. And so there is a human experience that occurs when we're in retreat, in which there's a, especially if ones are still newer to retreat experience, where we find ourselves trying to escape the reality, we brought ourselves to retreat, but we're trying to escape it at the same time. we can see that effort to escape in our minds, the kind of uptake of noise and energy. We see it in our bodies. We itch and we have sensations in parts of our bodies that we didn't even know exist. That happens when we sit on our cushion, when we get on our mat, all of the ways in which we try to bring ourselves to an attention awareness of our direct experience. when that happens, when we bring ourselves to that effort towards that kind of a stillness that allows for attention and awareness, all of this uprising of distraction happens. So globally, collectively, in particular in the States, we had gotten through the arc of that process, right, as a kind of a process, the phase in which we're sort of fighting against the truth of like we are in a global pandemic.

[10:16]

We are in an experience that is not going to simply go away. It's not an anomaly that has just happened and it will just disappear and we can go back to business as usual. We are in a thing. This is the reality for now. This is something that we're going to have to navigate for an unknown period of time. In fact, in many ways, we will never... We will never, ever, no matter if we get a vaccine or anything else, we will never return to pre-pandemic. We will always have the embodied experience of what it now means to move around in our lives with a sense of a kind of low-level caution, a kind of, for many of us, an outright fear. a different way of seeing our neighbors and the people that we come in contact with, the people that we just bypassed, that perhaps once upon a time we just bypassed in the street and didn't give them much thought. You may be wondering about whether or not they have the virus, whether or not we're at risk, wearing masks, all of these things, all of this exists in our bodies.

[11:23]

This is not something that our bodies will readily forget the truth of, even if our conscious mind forgets the truth of. And so in that space, in that space, we had come to the awareness of the murder of George Floyd. And I believe and I submit that as a result of that quieting, as a result of having reached that particular point in which the strong resistance to reality as it is had passed and we were really confronted with this murder, with the egregiousness of it, with the extraordinary inhumanity of it, with the there's not an excuse we can find to try to make sense of it. And as a result of that quieting, the result of the stilling of our own bodies, the stilling of our movement, the pervasiveness of the

[12:31]

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

[13:44]

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

[14:46]

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

[15:51]

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

[16:55]

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

[17:58]

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

[19:18]

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

[20:25]

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

[21:29]

There's an aperture of view. There's a big mind, as Suzuki Rishi called it, of what's in the big mind, you know, not the universe. That's getting a little too big. What's in the big context, historic context in the relative world of how we came to this time, this time of white supremacy, of the abuse of people of color and taking of this land and all of the other things that we were not taught in our schools. And so this workshop, which we've held at Tassajara for now since 2017, this would have been our fourth year together. As I said again to the workshop people last night, the first year we had nine people and it was a wonderful conversation. I appreciated every single person that was there. And then this time right now, we have 350 people. By virtue of this pandemic, we have had to open our walls. The walls of the temple, the walls of the Zen center, which are quite restrictive. They're very narrow. It costs a lot of money to go to Tassajara.

[22:31]

There's a way in which we've really created a system of privilege around the Dharma that I wanted to acknowledge and I want to say and I want to say to all of you and I want to say to my own community. We have created a walled city and there's a teaching in the Lotus Sutra called the Magical City. And the Buddha leads the people who are thirsting for truth, thirsting for liberation. He leads them to this magical city in the desert, and there's tables of food and drink, and everyone's being taken care of. And then he says, excuse me, but this isn't the place. You're just starting this journey. This is just an apparition to get you some energy and some enthusiasm for continuing. So back out the door. You've got a long way to go. This is what Angel calls radical. Radical is the unknown territory that lies ahead. We're not there, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said. I can see it, but I'm not getting there. I'm not going to be there. I know I'm not going to be there.

[23:32]

Angel's not going to be there. But some of you might be there if you don't stop and feel like, oh, this is good enough. Oh, this is great enough. I have a nice situation going for me, which I do, and it's not good enough. It was. a while, but I feel like the challenge really is this is not good enough. Anyway, I wanted to back up a little bit and get to a smaller aperture for a moment in terms of this workshop and just let you know that, as I said, we've had this workshop. I hope you'll maybe come to Tassahara, but I also don't want to lose this aperture either so that we keep having this conversation is really important to me. We don't just go back to our tiny little conversations among ourselves and a few of our friends. So I wanted to read to you the mission of this workshop, which we put online. San Francisco Zen Center website advertises its summer workshops. Most of them are yoga and Zen. This one was radical Dharma and Zen.

[24:34]

And the yoga retreats are full. There's 40 people. And over here in our little room, we've got 12. But this is, we need the big room now. This is the big room. We need this big conversation to be happening for all of us. If I were still a Christian child, I would say to save our souls. That's what is at stake here. So we said that this workshop will allow us time to speak openly and deeply about our collective pain at being separated from one another by perceived differences, not only of race, but also of gender, ability, age, and sexual identity. We will endeavor to connect to one another through our shared commitment to Buddhist teachings of ethics and compassion as expressions of the Bodhisattva vow. And using the historical context, which you just heard, our own embodied practice and a commitment to radical candor, our intention as leaders of this workshop is to explore the necessary conditions for creating an enlightened society for all together, everybody.

[25:39]

Everybody. All in. That's what this is all about. So, for those of you who aren't familiar with Reverend Angel, and now you are, and I think you ought to stay that way. She has written some beautiful things. I've been rereading her book on Radical Dharma, her and her two writing partners. Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. I want to read you a quote from that book as well. Angel said... It wouldn't be an overstatement to say that the discovery and assertion of Siddhartha Gautama, the historic Buddha, that every human being, irrespective of caste, race, creed, gender, or birth, has within them the potential for waking up to the ultimate truth of reality. This is one of the most radically life-altering propositions for human life on and in relationship to the planet, one that we need right now. However, here's the big but.

[26:40]

The Buddhist institutions, too, must be freed from cultural dominance by white people in the West. And here we are. Buddhist institutions in the West are dominated by white people. And I'm a case in point. And I really can feel the weight of that identity more than I ever could have imagined possible, you know. I was just getting ready to retire. That was my next big adventure. And now it's come to this, you know, reality, like slapped in the face. Wake up. Wake up. What have you missed? You know, where have you been? You know, Angel said to me just a little while ago, he said, why don't you begin with a little history of the Zen Center? Kind of an innocent question. Oh, you mean how we got the property and how we raised funds and how successful we've been and, you know, how people love Green's Restaurant? I mean, that story that we like to tell? Yeah. And then she said, you know, like, did you notice who was there? Did you look around? I think we did.

[27:42]

I think we noticed and we did a few things. We had a few workshops about race and diversity. We had a committee. We have a committee now, you know. So we've been doing that little bit of conversation for quite a long time. So I feel like when she asked me that question, she said, what were you people thinking? What were you thinking? And my first response, having been at the Zen Center for 40 years, was, we weren't. And then I thought, that's too easy. That's way too easy. You better start thinking. You better start studying. As much as you devoted yourselves to the study of the Dharma, to the first sermon, Majamaka teachings and the Yoga Tarot teachings. You know, I've done that work. I love that. I'm now looking at racism. I'm studying the ancient history of my people. And our, you know, dominance of this planet, our cultural dominance of other beings, you know, the privileges that I have unearned and I have received, you know, like mother's milk.

[28:45]

So it's time to turn back, you know, turn back toward the truth of reality, not the truth that we were taught or led to believe, but the actual truth. How'd this happen? How'd you get here from there? As the Dalai Lama said after 9-11, don't look for blame. Look for causes. How did this happen? Why did they attack you? You're such good people. You're so, you know, American and virtuous. That's what I was taught. So this crushing blow to my personal ego is equivalent to the crushing blow to my cultural ego, my national ego, and every other ego that hides me from the pain that's inside of here that I don't want to feel. Now, Angel also says in her book that when we're feeling pain, what do we want to do? We want to change it. We want it to stop. We want this pandemic to be over. And we want this racial thing to get fixed really quick.

[29:47]

Let's just fix the schools and, you know, everyone hires somebody and they'll take care of it. That'll clean this up. Should take about two weeks, maybe something like that. So this teaching, this truth that we have to turn toward is toward ourselves first. We need to take that backward step, turn the light around, look at our own. How did I get to be here? What brought me here? Causes and conditions. What privileges have I had? And then from a quieted place and a place of locating the suffering, you know, the layers of that. Some of it injustice to me as a woman. I've been treated unjustly. and not underappreciated and talked over the top of, and I've been hit and all kinds of stuff. I can go there and I can say, well, see, I know exactly all about that. I don't know about it from the point of view of a person of color. I don't know anything about that. That would be a lie. So I have to not equivocate.

[30:47]

I have to really say these are specific sufferings. Black lives matter. Black lives matter. Not everybody. Of course everybody matters. That's this horizontal truth. Yeah, everybody matters. Yeah, of course. The ocean of suffering. We're all in it together. Yeah, but what about each single fish, each single being, each single suffering creature? That's our commitment is to suffering. Those who suffer, that's where we're called as students of the Dharma, as those takers of the Bodhisattva vow. Get over yourself. None of us are important. It's... Others that are important, you know, their suffering is important. So I was thinking that, you know, how to go forward is a question of hand in hand. You know, as my teacher once said, walking hand in hand through birth and death. Am I going to be in front of the parade? Am I going to be with the parade? Am I going to be where am I going to be in the parade?

[31:49]

How do we hold leadership roles? How do each of us take a role? Angel and I are holding some leadership role for this weekend, trying our best to bring our own friendship and our own studies of these issues to each other and to the people who joined us. So we have tried our best to meet our own wish to be a benefit to others. So then the question is to each of you as well. How are you going to bring that benefit from your precious life? How are you going to benefit this world? And the only way this is going to work is if we go together. I have no power. Zero power. People always say to me, oh, you're the abbess. You have a lot of power. Are you kidding? People don't do what I tell them to do. They do what they want to do. And I'm really grateful when they want to do is the same thing that I wish they would do. I mean, that's really nice. It's like raising children. Anytime my daughter did something I wanted her to do, it was like a miracle. Like, well, how nice is that? So you love the child. You don't like the behavior. And that's what's going on here.

[32:51]

We love all beings. And we don't like the behavior. And it really has to stop. And I'll do what I can in my lifetime to stop my own behavior, my own micro. And someone said there's no microaggressions. There's only aggressions. And I think that's true. So stop our aggression. Stop our presumptions of belonging wherever we go. And really be welcomers. Be hosts to this world and to all that come. So I'm very much interested in... getting out of the walled city of privilege. And I've been very proud of ourselves because we don't have anybody with the virus at its end center yet. Isn't that good? Why? Because we have a lot of control over who gets in and who goes out. So we've managed to do something that most people can't do. And, you know, this is a privilege. And I feel as though that's what we need to offer is to break down the walls, break down the privilege.

[33:52]

bring whatever we have outside and not invite you to come in. You have to come in if you want it. You know, that's arrogance. So there's something happening here. There's a turning. You talk about turning the light around toward oneself, and then you turn it around again toward everything else. For those of you who know about the Oxfordine pictures, you know, the eighth picture is a blank circle that's supposed to be Nirvana, enlightenment, the goal, blank circle. But several centuries ago, the guys who drew these pictures realized that wasn't good. That was a bad place to leave it. So they made the next circle. The ninth picture is full of, it's like this flower. These are lights actually. Behind me are full of blossoms, trees and birds and the world. The ninth circle is looking back at the world. So first you look inwardly. Turn the light inwardly. Then you turn it back around the other way.

[34:53]

Eyeballs go that way. And you see the world and you devote yourself to the world. And picture number 10 is this ragtag older person playing with kids and being goofy. And everyone laughs at them. And there's like the happy bodhisattva who's just meeting every situation wholehearted with joy, with gifts, with simplicity, and with the outcome of their practice. This is our path. This is the enchantment of just this is it. And this is the devotion I think that all of us that are here are endeavoring to embody, as Angel says. We have to embody it. We have to know it for ourselves. So on that note, I shall bounce the ball back into your court. I think that this is a perfect segue into the understanding also of what it is that we are embodying.

[35:59]

For far too long, the conversation about race has been a conversation about the problems that black people have, the problems that brown people have, the problems that people of color have. And as you were saying, Fu, that the idea that we have to do this together and we are doing a campaign right now that I'll share about and the, I wanna say not tagline, the keystone statement is we didn't learn racism alone. We cannot unlearn it alone. We did not learn it alone. Not one single one of us ever learned it alone, whether it's internalized racism or overt racism, whether it's polite white supremacy like we like to say. that is rampant in progressive spaces, rampant in our spiritual communities, the polite white supremacy, whatever it is, we didn't learn it alone, we cannot unlearn it alone. But I also know that for as long as we keep having a conversation in which race is black people's problems or brown people's problems or people of color's problems or indigenous people's problems, then we will not

[37:16]

solve the scourge of racism and white supremacy. Because when we even frame it that way, it's very like a subtle kind of slight of hand or slight of mouth as I like to say. What we're doing when we have conversations about race that only consider or only have the internal idea that raises some problem that is for black, about black people or for black people, we reify the location of power and dominance of white people. So we actually, when we have a conversation that does not include the harm and the suffering that is also visited upon white people, perhaps not material, but all of the spiritual suffering, all of the gross and coarse and subtle ways in which a white body person has to contract and remove themselves from direct contact with the suffering of the world in order to protect that space of rarefied privilege.

[38:40]

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

[39:51]

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

[41:06]

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

[42:34]

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

[43:35]

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

[44:59]

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

[46:04]

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

[47:15]

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

[48:29]

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

[49:33]

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

[50:43]

that divides our sense of care and connection and compassion with one another. I hope each of us will take up our role. Thank you so much. Reverend Angel, thank you very much. We'll proceed with a closing chant. You can find the text in your chat window just now, and then we can move to some Q&A and discussion. May our intention equally extend to every being and place with the true merit of Buddha's ways. Beings are numberless, I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible, I vow to end them.

[51:50]

Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable, I vow to become it. Now the floor is available. If you would like to offer a question or a comment, you can raise your blue hand opening the participants window, and we can unmute you. Reverend Angel Abbas Fu, would you prefer that I call on participants, or would you prefer to do that? I think that we will call on participants. So I'm going to also say that we will leave a moment of space for people that being able to navigate the chat is perhaps not easy for them.

[52:54]

And so the last question we make sure to take is someone that maybe will just have to bring themselves on mute because navigating the chat or the little hand things is not conducive to their ability. So I would like to invite, there's a difficult to see a whole of it being here. Maybe Miguel, would you please speak? Thank you for the opportunity to speak. I appreciate the talk and I'm appreciating this workshop. It's pretty powerful, this has been that's kind of been lingering on my mind throughout this whole, through the pandemic, through the upswell in Black Lives Matter. It's just touching on this pain specifically, I'm trying to find the note that I, that it made us like this.

[54:02]

I find it difficult to touch on the suffering, racial disparity on the grief that comes with the suffering. Because suddenly I grieve the opportunities that I lost. I grieve just the pain of being a big Mexican in this world, which has meant having security in some buildings following me around, and more or less trying to find my place in the Dharma. I guess I'll cut through the shaft to get straight to the root here. Finding my place in the Dharma in an institution in which, to this day, I'm not exactly reflected around. It's very hard for me to embody that practice. I often feel like I'm, you know, meditating by myself around...

[55:07]

the little campfire. So I guess what I'm asking is, we talked about how white supremacy has to be resolved by including everyone, but what do you do with that angry feeling, with that hard feeling that no matter how long you've sat doesn't soften? It just feels that has to be able to protect you from being pushed out of the institution or being excluded because of the way the places run. And I'm not just picking on the religious institutions here. I mean, I'm talking about work. I'm talking about, hell, even navigating a profile online, have to use Mike instead of Miguel to get taken seriously on some sites, whether their job or otherwise. Thank you. I could answer that in a couple of ways.

[56:08]

The first thing I will say to you as a Dharma student is that your liberation is not worth your continued suffering in holding yourself hard and tight in that way. So you have to make a decision that if you're choosing to stay in this place, in the places that you are that are overwhelmingly inhabited, run, dominated by white-bodied folks, that if you're going to choose to stay there, that you're going to choose to stay there in a way that allows you to thrive. And so put it aside. Don't fight all the battles at once. Be there and make yourself available to the teachings. You folks that have come up after me, when you tell me, that, you know, there's something five of us or seven, I'm like, you know, you're a black person that I ever see.

[57:16]

People always ask, you know, black woman that lived three thousand, you know, color purple. So, this could be directly to you, Miguel. Be the archer of your own liberation. Do not turn it over. Don't wait until the institution that you're in get it together. Right? You obviously are resonating with the practice. And so choose to be here in a way that says, I'm putting aside a fight. I need to be here. And be present on the practice and make myself available to me. Take up that fight. Thank you, Reverend. The other thing I say is you do soften. I can tell you that from my own experience.

[58:18]

Could you repeat that, please? You do, it will soften. You said the hard thing will never soften. It will soften. And it will soften by inner choice. It will soften not because somebody made the thing the way they wanted it to be or imagined it should be. We know how it ought to be. but it was often because you will decide that your liberation is entirely to wait until structures acquiesce. Thank you. Reverend Angel, I'm noticing that there's some cutting out of your microphone. We started to hear during the last response. If I could also respond to your really important question, because I think it's a big one for the entire group of us.

[59:29]

And I don't mean this to be an equivalency, but when I came to Zen Center 40 years ago, this was an entirely white male dominated community without exception. And there may have been as many as 40 or 50 white male ordained. There were some females, but very few ordained male priests and they were in rows. And I felt very safe because that was my usual position was to be in the back of a male phalanx protected. And then at some point I thought, this seems like I'm missing out on something here. And I said to my teacher, who became my teacher, where are the women teachers? And his response was, look under your nose. And I thought he was making fun of me, actually. I felt insulted by that. Like, aren't you going to help me? Aren't you going to do something for me? Protect me or whatever you do. So it was only by the good fortune of bad karma on the part of our white male leaders who got themselves in all kinds of trouble by sexual mis...

[60:36]

conduct, that those white males, for the most part, I'd say 90% of them, left the community leaving a female layer behind. And so the reason I'm an abbess and the reason other abbesses have appeared is because of something that happened to those who were in front of us and who were the parfait of white male privilege. And now so the white female privilege got to rise up. Now I feel like the next layer of this liberation parfait is coming up and saying, okay, that was good. Now let's get on with this next one. Don't overlook the fact that you've been lifted up ahead of others. And so I think it's time for us to get real and look at the whole parfait. Who's being left out here? Whose turn is it to rise up and to become the leadership of this beautiful Dharma that doesn't belong to us? It's... a global inheritance of compassion and wisdom teachings. And I just hope, Miguel, that you'll see yourself in that light as, you know, look under your nose, and I'm not being facetious or disrespectful.

[61:42]

Thank you. I hope my mind is better. I'm going to invite Jane Davis. Oh, wow. Thanks. Thanks very much. I have a question based on something that you were saying a few minutes ago when you were talking about Dharma and whiteness. And there was a previous meeting where I had asked you about, a few of us asked you about, you know, being a person of color in these predominantly white meditation or Buddhist communities. And I did follow your advice then when you said sometimes Get out. But when you're in a community where there are a lot of valuable teachings and a lot of seemingly enlightened people, but there's also white privilege in the sense of whiteness being understood by many of the white people in the group as raceless and universal.

[62:57]

And it can be a real slap in the face. I mean, when it rises up sometimes, like mentioning something about George Floyd, and you're seeing that just completely outside of what, you know, we're here for. So what I'm, I want, what I need for you to do is to explain what you meant about, you know, Dharma and whiteness. So I can understand the groups. that I've been in, that are valuable, that I don't want to leave, but that become periodically intolerable. Periodically. I can change my mic. Does that help? The mic better? Yes. Thank you so much. Any given thing, anything we receive is interpreted by our experience.

[64:01]

And so if I get this glass of water, I interpret this glass of water by my own experience. And so the Dharma as we have received it was interpreted by the experience of whiteness because that's who had the means to go and go into mother lands, mother countries. And so they necessarily interpret it by the experience. So this is not unusual and it's kind of expected. But once I assume a position or a location or an assumption that my interpretation of the experience is the only valuable and worthy interpretation, then we have a problem. And so the Dharma has been handled in that way, that it has been interpreted necessarily by out of the experience of the people that initially, quote unquote, brought Dharma to the West.

[65:09]

And so we don't have to be mad that that's what people will do, you know, because I'm going to interpret this not out of your experience, I'm going to interpret it out of mine. But if you came and you said, well, actually, this is what I think about that that class and I said, well, yeah, but whatever you think doesn't matter at all. You don't really know because I know all and anything else that is not, does not align with the way that I interpret out of my experience is invalid. So there's dogma and whiteness and nobody was thinking like, oh, I'm interpreting that as whiteness. They just thought I'm interpreting it. And then because of, because white supremacy white supremacist ideology in particular, perceives itself as the height of humanity, the measure by which all else is mashed up against, then the assumption is that my interpretations are the interpretations. So this is flawed, not only, but it's just flawed.

[66:15]

Just when I say it, you can hear how flawed it is, right? Just saying it, it's like, oh, that's flawed. That didn't mean it. And so you just have to hold it with that. And then you can appreciate that, you know, I may have interpretations that are actually useful and resonant for you. And maybe that's what you're connected with. And ultimately, you have to decide whether or not, as I spoke to Mikael, that whether or not the on balance, the experience is one that is degenerative and contributing to you or one that is, you know, in order to get a little bit of sweet, you have to be, you know, have your face dipped into bitter every single time. Maybe you just have to give that little bit of sweet up and go find some sweetness somewhere else because there are many, many different places. I also want to invoke, not to you specifically, but just for the sake of all people of color, that internalize

[67:20]

internalized racism is real. And so our being enamored with what white people think is part of our own work and our own labor to do. We have been just as inculcated into the idea that white people know better, that they got the goods, they have the stuff. And they certainly have the institutions and so on and so forth because of the coalescence of power and money and all of that. But those institutions and so on don't don't necessarily equate to the kind of knowledge and awareness that we need. And so be careful that you let capitalist ideas and measures of where truth lies and where it should lie obscure your own understanding of what it is that you need in order to flourish. And that's true for anybody's body. anybody's body, whatever body you're in, right?

[68:22]

That we equate institutional wealth and big stuff with that must be where the truth is. That's just what money is. They're not the same thing. They could be, but they're not necessarily the same. And so our labor is to come to a kind of ability to hear the distinction, like truth has a sound, it has a resonance. And it doesn't stay the same. So the truth for us today might change five years from now. Take that complexity and go forth. I'm sorry. What do you want to say? Computer. Funny computer things happening. Well, I thought what you said was very important and helpful, and I would only want to go, yeah, I think that's absolutely right.

[69:31]

And, you know, I always have to kind of turn the dynamic from you're speaking to a person I think probably identifies as a black person, and you identify as a black person, and I'm over here, you know, like... In some ways, the object of this conversation is like, what have they done? What are they doing? What are they thinking? What have they done? How are they doing this magic trick, as you said? Do you guys know how you're doing your little trick of creating a white magic show that is covering everything up? And I would say, no, I don't think so. In fact, when you did that retreat with us, which was stunning of having us, you said, okay, let's start with the white people. List all white characteristics. You know, we had pieces of paper and we wrote, oh, yeah, on time. That's really important. And, you know, that you got the right clothes on. I don't know. Well, this whole list of stuff that was, you know, familiar. And then you said, OK, to the people of color in the room, what did they leave out?

[70:31]

And I'm like, what do you mean? You know, and sure enough, there was a whole list of things that we left out. And I think that one that was remained in my head is the most stunning one was they're whiny. I was like, oh, my God, it's true. It's really true. We're so whiny. So anyway, I think there's so much that that reflection of us being the white face being said, look at you guys. Let's tell you a little bit about what we're seeing because you obviously don't get it. That innocence is overdue to be broken, broken through. That face of innocence is just not cutting it anymore. No excuses. So I feel like any gift that comes to me and they're all painful, they're like arrows of truth, you know, ouch, is welcome. And I think we all need to welcome those arrows of truth. And you said too, you know, you've got some of those too coming at you. So we're all in pincushion world here.

[71:35]

And I think we need to bear the pain of it and not get overwhelmed by pain because it's, you know, it's that kind of, it's this pain and we need to wake up. And use the pain, you know, as medicine for healing. It's like that skin that has to come off after you get burned. You got to get to that clean skin underneath that is really raw for all of us. It's very raw from this crazy racial, you know, crazy. It's crazy. So we have to get on crazy. And we're going to need to do it together because the voices I'm hearing from the people of color are critical. to my salvation or else I'm just going to be stuck till my death in my ignorance. So I thank you. I thank all of you. I thank you. The woman who's Jane, Jane. Thanks very much. That was all very powerful, especially getting on crazy, internalized racism, which can be there even when we don't think it is.

[72:42]

And just really being aware of our own mind and our own nourishment. So thank you very much. That was immeasurably helpful. and how we are, where we are, because I want to make sure to say two things are still important. Reverend Angel, so I heard the request about time, and as relates to our usual Dharma Talk schedule, we are coming to a close. Of course, it's... in your hands if you feel like the conversation ought to continue.

[73:48]

We're happy to do that. I did notice with your mic just that it improved for a good stretch, and it's just starting to cut out again. I just changed it again. That's great. Great. Thank you. Okay. So here's what I'm going to invite. So I know people get... you know, a little twisted about time. So what I'm going to invite is, this is an extraordinary conversation and a unique moment in time and in history, and we're a unique coming together. So those of you that wish, or just, you know, no harm, no foul, we have a sit that we do called No Big Deal Sit, and we say, come as you are and leave as you must. So those of you that need to go, I want to just share that right now we are holding and we have like the doors are open to what we call the Great Radical Race Read. I won't say a whole lot about it because you can just go and find out on the site.

[74:52]

I'm going to put a link in and it's basically an invitation for us to do some unlearning together. to do some unlearning together. And part of it is that we have five weeks of going kind of along a path of what are the possible conditions. We reverse engineered the ideas of Radical Dharma and brought them into five pillars, if you will. So each of the five weeks, we will go through those. And so you're invited to... grab some people that you love or grab some people that you just know need to be there and bring them into a reading circle. It's also a fundraiser. And there's information about that. And it's optional to fundraise. And so on, there's information about that. So you're invited to do that. There's five books, but you can also choose a book that you're already working with. And so I wanna just invite people to that. I put the link in the, in the,

[75:53]

And for those of you that maybe can't see or would like that to come some other way, I'd like to invite that we will share the link out. Is that okay, Kodo? Okay, we'll share the link out for anybody that registered so then you're not also having to worry about it in this particular moment. So I wanna share that. And then Fusan, do you feel good about maybe another 10 minutes here? Because there's some very juicy questions. And I want to note that it was specific when I couldn't see anyone, that I chose a person whose name I would associate with being a person of color. And I was specific about choosing... Jane to speak who has identified herself as black in her profile and that this is important and intentional to raise up and lift up brown and black people's voices and their experiences because we all learn from their experience and there's risk involved in their sharing their experience and so those

[77:13]

you that may be sort of uncomfortable or taken aback by people sharing and coming to like that's all the that's all the beauty that's the beauty of our practice to be able to go whoa I had like a feeling about that you don't even have to be sure about how you feel about that there's no prescription here there's just being beginning by noticing by taking notice and having a sense of awareness of how things are landing with you, right? So I want to, and this is especially true for those of us that are in the workshop together, the encounter with race together to really hold this space in an embodied way of not so much grasping around the words and ideas, which is tempting, I love language food uses, and so I love to hear that. But to actually, I'm going to speak louder. Someone's telling me, thank you. To actually allow this to see how this is an embodied experience and to see how it lands in you and to perhaps settle on where it's landing with you before you kind of jump to questions or even your own questions.

[78:25]

internal dialogue, that would be how we would practice and hold this as a conversation that is a crack conversation of practice, of embodied practice. So I'll say that. I want to invite Iteya Yakar, and please correct me in the pronunciation of your name, who is also here to ask questions. And for those of you that it would be... kind to your reality to exit, you're welcome to do that and not feel any shame or blame about it. So just go ahead and do what you need to do, and we'll carry on for another 10 minutes-ish here. So please, if we could bring... Yes. Hello, Reverend Angel. Thank you so much for this wonderful talk, and thank you, Fu. And my name in Turkish is pronounced Etir. Here, yeah, people call me Etir.

[79:27]

I really appreciated both of your talks. And I have one question for each of you, if that's okay. And my question is similar to Miguel's and James's. And how to do self-care and balance speaking up and caring for ourselves when we practice in a white sangha. And, you know, do we have a... Responsibility to keep speaking up because it's emotionally very exhausting and demoralizing sometimes. That's my question to you, Reverend Angel. And then my question to who is thank you so much for making space for this open and, you know, difficult conversation. I have a question about what you mentioned about costs, sometimes building privilege, you know, costs around classes, attending. Tassahara or workshops at Zen Center. And that's something I've been aware of since I started coming to Zen Center. And I know it's one of the major factors keeping the walls up, you know, not making it welcoming or inclusive.

[80:36]

So I'm curious, is Zen Center considering other avenues of funding for itself? Like, for example, the EBMC has more of a donation-based model. You know, are there more inclusive ways of sustaining Zen Center? to make it easier, you know, with the goal of making everyone feel welcome and included. But thank you both very much. Usain, why don't you go first? Can you hear me? My computer's acting a little odd. Yeah, thank you for that, Atiyah. Well, this is an ongoing conversation of financial, I don't want to say survival, but it kind of feels like that sometimes. And right now, since all of our income sources are gone, Tassahara, where Angel and I would have been down there, you know, helping to kind of fundraise for Zen Center by offering workshops, which is our main source of revenue.

[81:44]

And then there's a guest program at Green Gulch. There's the guest program at the City Center. There's Green's Restaurant, and they're all closed. So right now, the thought of donation only or Donna only is sort of like, well, that might – I don't know. I don't know. Because we're residential, we have these huge expenses that are beyond belief like health insurance and all kinds of stuff. So without pulling up the graft of our finances and boring everyone with like, oh, that's too bad. what we call the scary graph, our expenses and our income have never really done all that well together. And now it's right now, it's just like rocketed out of reach pretty much. And we are living on donations from people who want Sense Center to continue to be here. So for the foreseeable future, I'm not sure how we're going to survive. Somebody said we might be in a chrysalis mode for a while, which is down to a few people maintaining the properties. And it may be so. I don't know. We can't congregate.

[82:45]

We can't have anyone here. And that's why we're doing this. So I don't want to be excusing us. And I think if we ever go back to anything even close to normal, like that we can congregate, how we reopen the doors of the Zendo and of the community to everyone, I would love it to be in that way that you say, by Donna, by generosity. And I think it's a wonderful idea. I would love to see if we could do that. So I appreciate that. the wish, and I wish it too. And I don't know anything about the reality of that. So that's all I can only say. Thank you. I wrote Radical Dharma in the bulk of it in Istanbul. So thank you for giving me the correct pronunciation of your name. I... feel very strongly that we are on different points of the spectrum in terms of our own internal resources for navigating conversations around race and pressing up against the resistance to navigating race and white supremacy, confronting white supremacy.

[84:01]

And I don't think any person, particularly any person of color, no person of color should Be doing it when you're not resourced yourself. You just shouldn't. Let somebody else do it. Let me, let me, I've got the, you know, in Black Panther, you know, the suit and things would just like bounce off the suit and you can actually get stronger when folks come at you. So I've got that suit. There's a bunch of us that have that suit and let us do that, right, while you resource yourself. Please stop martyring yourself on behalf of fixing white institutions. You have to stop doing that, right? That's what we need to really take in is that we need to stop martyring ourselves and paining ourselves, you know, adding insult to injury for ourselves, trying to, you know... compel resistant institutions. That's why I'm in this conversation with Fu, because I'm not pressing up against the resistance.

[85:04]

Through our relationship, and this often, as often happens, through relationships of love and care, of care and love, it is where we begin to find some unfolding and some moving. And so... You know, you may be thinking about your workplace and like, how am I going to find some relationships of love there? I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. But I do know that you martyring yourself, there are too many of us martyred in the streets. George Floyd was martyred. Breonna Taylor is martyred. Michael Brown is martyred. We have to stop martyring Brown and Black and Indigenous peoples. and Asian folks and people of color writ large for the sake of fixing white institutions. And that's why we're here, because white folks have to do their own labor of pulling it together and know that when you're not doing your labor, that you are subjecting people of color and black people and indigenous people to immense amounts of suffering, to immense amounts of suffering,

[86:10]

Because out of your unwillingness and you're complicit in just that alone. And that is something that you need to hear and you need to hear clearly. It is not passive. And your inaction is standing within the flow and continue to help the river of white supremacy to land heavily upon the backs and the bodies of these people. that you are contributing. There's no innocent bystander here. There's no neutral. If you're not actively, proactively engaging, grappling, interrogating yourself around where it is that you are and moving your feet to do something, to learn and unlearn, to at least start there, that Great Radical Race Read is about that, to start somewhere so that you can get yourself, get right with yourself.

[87:13]

As Fu and I were saying, yes, but to get grown up, to grow up, to get grown up about race, right? To put yourself in. And folks of color, like, if you know, if it's like you kind of go and you're like... Just some other day. Take another day. If you're walking in, you're like, huh, you have to contract, embrace yourself. Not your day. Not your day. It's okay. Let your beloved white family, kindred, sisters, brothers, siblings, go and get on the front lines for you. Back up. Let them take the front lines. Let them put their bodies on the line as we saw in these uprisings. Let them put their bodies because white people are going to turn around and see other white bodies there and their whole design of what is appropriate as a response is going to shift.

[88:15]

Do you see how people are responding to the federalization and arresting in Portland? Because we're not used to seeing white people treated that way and we're not gonna, and white America is not gonna abide by that too long. You're not gonna abide by white mamas with babies in their bellies being treated that way because they see themselves. And that's a problem that you don't see the same thing with their black bodies. That's a problem, but we're not there yet. And so let white bodies go and be on the line. And you white folks, you want to know what you do? Put yourself on the line. Put yourself on the line. Your silence is violence. It doesn't give rise to violence. Your silence is violence. In these conditions, in this reality, that is what is true. We all pray for a different reality. And as Fu said, if I were if I were still a Christian child, I would say you have to have your come to Jesus moment.

[89:20]

We are having our come to Jesus moment. Our back of the bus moment. Where will you stand? Where are you? And if you're back there somewhere waiting for someone else to fix it, you are you are engaging in suffering. That doesn't mean you have to have a protest sign in your hand all the time. Sometimes our, especially those of us that are engaging, I wouldn't do this. I wasn't called to do DEI work, anything like that. It's not my thing, right? I'm called to ending suffering. That's the only reason I'm in this conversation. because I see the profound possibility of these teachings of liberation. I know because I came to this conversation through these teachings. I wasn't a DAI person or a race person or any of that. I didn't come here. I touched the truth of the suffering of white supremacy and racism through my practice.

[90:22]

I'm not an infiltrator that came with my own agenda. I got it right out of these teachings. And then I looked up and said, where are the rest of you? And how could you not see it? Where are you? What are you stuck inside of that you could not see? And that's what I could say. Oh, there's the bubble called whiteness that is keeping you from your liberation. And I want that suffering to end for you. And I want your vows to be fully realized by not contributing. to the suffering of others by standing, by being a bystander. That's where my practice, that's where this comes from. That's where this book comes from. That's where all of this comes from. I was not a race person before I got to the Dharma because race is the truth right now, people. That is what it is. I got here because that is what was called for to put

[91:27]

an end to suffering. And I had to put an end to the suffering in my own body. And then because I can't really complete that end of suffering without other bodies, that's why I'm here. That's the only reason why I'm here. So y'all get off of that breeding suffering upon yourself. Please get off of that. And let your white siblings that are willing to go, and you're going to get it wrong. You are, because that's how it works. It's set up that way. The system is not broken. The system is doing exactly what it is intended to do. What is it designed to do? Therefore, the only way that you will know that you are actually succeeding in your effort is that the system will resist you. It will push back on you. And you will be perceived as wrong and out of line and off the charts. all of those things will become true.

[92:27]

And that is how you will know that you have stepped on your path. And everybody said it was probably like, oh no, she just created a bunch of monsters. I did. That's why we call you Reverend Angel. Why don't we take one question from a white person, lest anyone say that I was intentionally leaving white-bodied people out. And so Shannon, and this is because I can see, because Shannon put their name, put their profile. So Shannon, if you would go ahead, I'll try to be my scooch on the last question. Thank you.

[93:28]

And I feel uncomfortable because I'm the white person taking up space. I'm going to ask my question. And I want to give a little bit of context that this is a question that several of us have been asking of everyone who comes to this seat because we want a variety of answers. We want a full answer. And we want this question to continue to be a part of our dialogue, of our focus, of our truth. And I am aware that in asking you particularly this question may be putting you in a position of doing the labor. And so I'm going to ask it. But I'm also going to say we can go. Next question. Hold up, Shannon.

[94:30]

Yes. Yes. I'm in command of myself. Okay. I have to give me permission. That's what I mean. People have to be in positions in which they can be, right? So I'm going to be in charge of me. You be in charge of me. You ask your question, and then I will decide. And we're not going to create permission giving. Thank you. I'm sorry. No, no, no. No problem. I'm modeling. What can predominantly white sanghas do to include and do no harm to people of color? That's easy. Do your labor. Get to interrogate. Get to know your part. Get to know your place. Get to know your role. Get to know how you are participating. Get to know it, because until you're familiar with it, until you're intimate with it, then you will not have, like, right motivation.

[95:36]

I love that in Tibetan Buddhist teachings, they particularly talk about right motivation has to precede everything. They have to have motivation before you can even get to understanding. So that's the initial starting point. You have to have the motivation, and that motivation The most complete truth, the possibility of moving towards the most complete truth is when that motivation comes out of the desire to believe your own suffering. And if you're not seeing your suffering, then that's where you gotta go. To see your suffering, to allow yourself to really sit with what is going on here. So that's pretty easy. Thank you for a fairly easy question. And I also wanna say that when we're in spaces across the board, I know that there's a lot of things, language about white folks not taking up space, but we do have to be in this together.

[96:40]

In order to be in this together, you have to show up completely. So you can't do the shrinking back thing where it's like, oh, I wanna take up space. And so that's why we get into these... spaces that are formally, A-L-L, formally designed for us to be in here together. And then we can create caucus spaces and we can monitor the way that we call people forward so that people of color are centered, but not to the exclusion of white people. That's what caucus spaces are, right? So I don't want you to apologize for taking up space because you are here and you are taking up space. Okay. You are taking up space. Every single one of you are taking up space. How will you take up the space that you are inhabiting? How will you take up the space? Don't apologize for taking up space. We're all taking up space. The divine gave you the right to take up some space, but how are you taking up that space? And that's what you and every single one of us need to come to understand.

[97:44]

And it's my pleasure. I don't feel burdened by the question. Fusan, would you like to add anything before we close? I know we should probably let people go back.

[98:05]

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