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. Good morning, everyone. My name is Tova Green. I practice and live in and work at City Center, San Francisco Zen Center's urban temple. And I'm very happy to be here this morning at Green Dragon Temple. I'd like to thank Jeremy Levy, the head of practice, for inviting me this morning, and my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, for all her support over many years. I just want to mention that On the way here this morning, I pulled over to call my sister, Helen, because I had received a phone message from her yesterday that she went to see an oncologist last week.

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And she told me that she has been diagnosed with liver cancer that spread to her lungs and other organs. So just absorbing that information and... realizing the preciousness of our human lives and how we never know when that kind of news can come to ourselves or our loved one. That's not what I wanted to talk about this morning, but I just wanted to acknowledge that I'm kind of processing my sister's news. So... This morning, also before I left the city, I had breakfast with my Dharma brother, Dario Girolami, and his wife, Annalisa. They're from Rome. And Dario told me that yesterday, 25,000 people marched in the Pride Parade in Rome.

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And the mayor of Rome led the parade. This is pretty amazing for a city. that's primarily Catholic. I live in San Francisco, and all up and down Market Street this month are rainbow flags. And the last Sunday of this month will be the 45th Pride Parade in San Francisco. And the theme of it this year is Equality Without Exception. For the past six years, I think, San Francisco Zen Center has marched in the Pride Parade with people from Greenvalge City Center and Tassajara, as well as a number of other sanghas, families, friends. And it's been a very joyous experience to march down Market Street. And I think it's...

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very important to celebrate Pride, not only for those of us who may be LGBTIQ, and I'll explain those letters, but for everyone. And I'm going to come back to that in my talk. My theme this morning is meeting others on equal ground. And I thought it was just a coincidence. I picked that theme before I knew what the theme of the Pride Parade was, equality without exception. And this is one of the precepts. I want to ask first, is there anyone who's here for the first time today? Wow, quite a few of you. So welcome to Green Dragon Temple, and I hope you find much nourishment in your time here this morning. So I might explain a few words here. Meeting others on equal ground is another way of expressing one of the precepts, which are our guidelines for ethical behavior.

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The seventh precept, not praising self at the expense of others. And that precept is very closely related to the one before it, which we often describe as not slandering or not finding fault with others. But another way of saying that also is speaking of others with openness. So all the precepts can be phrased in the affirmative as well as the prohibitory, not to do various things, but to do other things instead. So what does it actually take to meet others on equal ground? especially if we have felt marginalized because of some aspect of our identity, or we may be feeling less than, not as good as others for some other reasons in our past experience or present experience.

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And what would it look like if we lived in a society where all beings met one another with openness and on equal ground. One of the roots of not praising self at the expense of others is our comparing mind, our mind that may judge ourselves or others, that wants to be at least as good, if not better, than someone else in some way. And we may see ourselves as better than others because we don't see how we're all interconnected. And this can be a root of great suffering. When we compare ourselves to others, we may also devalue our own abilities or achievements. And self-praise and self-blame are two sides of the same coin, and both are painful and isolating.

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One way out of this comparison, comparing mind, is through developing self-respect and understanding that even though we are each unique, there isn't really an independent self, a self that is separate from others. One of the... books about the precepts that many of you may be familiar with is Tenshin Roshi's book, Being Upright. And when he talks about the precept of meeting others on equal ground, he says, he calls our sense of separate self the fundamental human disaster. That's pretty strong, the fundamental human disaster. He writes, not seeing how all beings... kindly support and sustain our virtue and goodness. It is possible to speak of our own virtue as something separate from others.

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In such a state of ignorance, you forget that it is really only due to the support of countless others that you accomplish anything of merit. And we do sometimes forget that we think we do things on our own, but really we are supported by by our family, our friends, our community. I think this is especially easy to see when you live in a community like Green Gulch or City Center where you do your dish shift every week knowing that the dishes will be done by other members of the community all the rest of the time. Or you do your zendo job, maybe it's lighting the altar or taking care of the cheating, cleaning the altar. And meanwhile, other people are ringing the bells and announcing the chants. And there's a sense of interdependence that happens in our daily life.

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But I think no matter where we live, we know we need our neighbors. We need the people who serve us at the grocery store and on and on, that our lives are supported by so many beings, seen and unseen. And yet, while that is true and in the ultimate realm we're all interconnected in our conditioned lives, we also run into so many situations where competitiveness and comparison is fostered and valued. We're taught to compare ourselves with others and to judge ourselves and others often harshly. And this can happen in our families, in school, in the workplace. And so I think practice and practicing with an awareness of how we're ultimately not separate selves can help us balance those messages that we may receive in other parts of our lives and may have received

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as children. And one example of this can share that when I was young, I was the oldest, and my sister Helen is a year and a half younger than me. And my mother... compared us by saying, I was the smart one and she was the pretty one. And that wasn't very good for either one of us, I think. So as the older child, I was also expected to set a good example. And because I was the smart one, when we were in high school, I was asked to tutor her in math, which I loved. I loved math. I didn't love tutoring my sister. And I don't think she liked it either. And when I left for college, her grades went up, which I think, just to show, wasn't so useful.

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So I think maybe you left because you can resonate with some things you may have been told. when you were growing up or some ways in which you've been set up in a way to compare yourself to others. And this can happen at work around promotions or in so many different stages of our life. And the precept of speaking with others with openness, which is the sixth precept of not finding fault with others or not slandering, points to a way to develop respect for oneself and others. My other favorite book on the precept is Diane Rossetto's book, Waking Up to What We Do. And she says about the precept of meeting others with openness,

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Studying the ways in which we discuss the faults of others can reveal how we place walls between ourselves and the world in general. When even the more self-serving intentions are added onto the words we convey about other people, we distance ourselves both from them and ourselves. By creating this separation, we encourage the specialness of me. We deeply harm others when we speak of them in degrading ways, and we harm ourselves as well because we deny acceptance, compassion, and generosity as part of the fullness of life. And she quotes James Baldwin, the writer who said, It is a terrible and inexorable law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own. In the face of one's victim, one sees oneself. And I think this awareness that James Baldwin writes about that we cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing ourselves has to do with our fundamental interconnectedness and how when anyone is treated

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in a way that demeans them, we are all affected by it. I recently read a wonderful novel by Sue Monk Kidd, who wrote The Secret Life of Bees, and this one is called The Inheritance of Wings. I very seldom read novels, but I was on my way to fly across the country, and I stopped in the bookstore, and it just leapt out at me. And it's the story of two sisters who live in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1800s. And their names are Sarah and Angelina Grimke. And it's a novel about two women who lived in that time, actually lived in that time and were early abolitionists. And the older one, Sarah, when she was 11, Her family owned slaves, and they lived in a big house in Charleston.

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When she was 11, she was given her personal slave, a young girl whose name was Handful. And the story, as it unfolds, is about the relationship between Sarah and Handful and what they learned from one another and the way in which Handful was not treated as someone who was fully respected by Sarah's parents, actually her mother in particular. And this was part of the impetus that led Sarah and then her younger sister, Angelina, to become abolitionists and Quakers. And at one point, at great cost to themselves, they couldn't go back to their hometown of Charleston once they became they gave talks and wrote manifestos and letters about the wrongs of slavery.

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And they lived their later years in the Northeast, I think first in Philadelphia. But anyway, I thought that sensitivity to someone else's pain and the awareness of the wrongs of that... kind of institutionalized harshness and really not seeing others as equal was so damaging to so many people, and the legacy of it still is. So finding faults with others or ourselves is a very common occurrence. And I think it's actually a journey to accept ourselves as we are and to accept others as they are.

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So Diane Rossetto also says, until we can be open to ourselves fully, We can never hope to view others as they are. We will always see them as less than or more than. And this is the meaning of fault. The word fault comes from Middle English and means lack. And it's also related to the Latin falsus, which means untrue. And put together, we get fault, which is imperfection. And finding fault with ourselves and others is born out of the thought of lacking and untrue. So when we find fault, we can watch how our thoughts create a story about people rather than letting people reveal themselves. And then we may form fixed views or frozen views of others and lose our ability to really see others freshly, meet others

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on open ground. And sometimes we don't recognize the negative frozen views or unconscious ways in which we have biases about others. And the others may be individuals or groups of people who are different from ourselves. And this can lead to exclusion, scapegoating, bullying and when it's institutionalized to discrimination. So I thought I might illustrate this from my own experience. When I graduated from college in 1964, I moved to Boston and I got a job as a research assistant at a psychiatric outpatient clinic that was part of a teaching clinic for one of the medical schools in Boston.

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And I had moved to Boston with my woman partner, and this was a new relationship, and we were living together. And as part of my research, I came across a diagnosis. This was part of the American Psychiatric Association's list of diagnoses that was character disorder homosexual. And that was very upsetting to me. And I didn't know anyone at the time. This was in the 60s. I didn't know anyone who was gay or lesbian with whom I could check it out or talk. And I felt a lot of shame and... didn't really know how to deal with it. And that early experience was kind of reinforced later on when I went to social work school.

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And after social work school, I wanted to do some psychotherapy and found a male psychotherapist who told me that I would be cured. when I was in a stable relationship with a man. So I got the very strong message from the mental health profession at that time, even though I was studying to be a therapist myself, that there was something wrong with me because of my sexual orientation. And luckily, not luckily, it took a lot of work, but that diagnosis is no longer in the APA. listing, thanks to the work of many both gay and lesbian and heterosexual psychotherapists who got it removed. But that kind of discrimination still goes on and I think affects many people.

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I just received, you know, we may think that we are We passed that kind of bias in our society, and yet there are still many instances of discrimination. I just received... the National Association of Social Workers newsletter, which I still subscribe to. And I read that in California, one of the more progressive states in Orange County, there's a lawyer who's trying to get enough signatures on the ballot to call for penalties against LGBT people, including the death sentence for participating in same-sex acts.

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That's really hard to believe that this is happening in California. It happens in other countries and in some other, but I, you know, in this day and age to have it come up in California is kind of, is shocking to me. And particularly when we've made so many advances around, like, LGBT marriage, for example, and how that is going to be coming up in the Supreme Court, maybe even this month. And attitudes towards gay marriage have changed so much over the years. So anyway, to come back to how do we meet that kind of bias when we encounter it in our lives or in the lives of others, And how do we heal from it? For myself, in the 70s, when the gay rights movement began, there were so many things that contradicted those messages I had received.

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And I also found a therapist who was accepting of my sexual orientation. At that time, I began going to meditation retreats. I lived in Boston. I started going to retreats at the Insight Meditation Society in Barrie. And that practice is what eventually led me to come to Zen Center. So I'm very grateful for practice because I feel that through the process of sitting and sitting, learning how to find more self-acceptance, more ease with some of my self-critical voices, and find an accepting community, a lot of healing has happened. So this past week I was at Tassajara leading an LGBT study week

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And we used a text that just came out this year by Zenju Earthland Manuel called The Way of Tenderness, Awakening Through Race, Sexuality, and Gender. Zenju is a Zen Center priest. She was ordained by Senke Blanche Hartman and has her own zendo called Still Breathing. It's in Oakland. And in... In this book, she describes a process. Well, I looked up the definitions of tender. There are many definitions, but there are two that were striking. One is the kind of tenderness we feel when we've been injured or wounded and we're hurting. And so our arm may be tender or some part of our body feels tender. And then there's the tenderness that has to do with being loving and kind and gentle.

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And so the process of internalizing those feelings, directing them towards ourselves when we have been experiencing the other kind of tenderness is a way of healing. And I just wanted to share Zenju's description of the way of tenderness She says, the way of tenderness is an experiential, non-intellectual, heartfelt acknowledgement of all embodied difference. It is a flexibility of perception rather than a settling into belief. It brings affirmation of life rather than of suffering center stage. It keeps alive the vow not to kill in a way that has nothing to do with being vegetarian or not. It is social action. It is a way to overcome what feels much stronger than us and what seems to pull us apart.

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So that kind of tenderness can really be fostered through zazen, through our experience of meeting ourselves minute after minute with kindness and compassion, with acknowledging our faults and also our fundamental goodness and interconnectedness with all life. So last week at Tassajara with this group, there were seven of us, including me, lesbian, gay, and transgender people. And even though the group and the environment of Tassajara provided a sense of safety, we found some irreconcilable differences in some of our experiences and views, irreconcilable in that some of the ways we had of thinking and seeing things were so different, and yet we didn't necessarily agree, but we were able to create a feeling of mutual respect and appreciation in the group and to benefit from the

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the great support of the community of Tassajara and the beauty of the mountains and the sound of the creek. And we're really supported by that whole community to be ourselves and to be able to transcend our differences, I would say, to acknowledge them and also acknowledge how deeply we came to care about each other even in five short days. So I wanted to see where I am with time. So there is a Buddhist critique of pride based on that, viewing it as an error to hold on. Well, it is an error in a sense to hold on to a permanent, substantially existent sense of I, the sense of self that Tenshin Roshi refers to as the fundamental human disaster.

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However, it's also really important for people who have not had a positive sense of self to counterbalance that, to be able to experience a positive regard. And sometimes taking pride in one's group, in one's history, is a wonderful antidote to that sense of self. being less than or not fully lovable or fully worthy. And to acknowledge that, as Zenju talks about in The Way of Tenderness, some of the ways in which we have been wounded can actually become sources of strain.

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So I wanted to end with a poem that talks about a definition of proud or pride. It uses the word proud flesh, which is the way in which wounds, especially this refers to horses, how wounds, when they heal, have scars which are very beautiful. And there's a poem by Jane Hirshfield that captures this image very beautifully. So I wanted to share that poem with you. The poem is called For What Binds Us. There are names for what binds us.

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Strong forces, weak forces. Look around, you can see them. The skin that forms in a half-empty cup. Nails rusting into the places they join. Joints dovetailed on their own weight. The way things stay so solidly wherever they've been set down. and gravity, scientists say, is weak. And see how the flesh grows back across a wound with a great vehemence, more strong than the simple, untested surface before. There's a name for it on horses when it comes back darker and raised, proud flesh, as all flesh is proud of its wounds. wears them as honors given out after battle, small triumphs pinned to the chest. And when two people have loved each other, see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud.

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How the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend. So if all people were to love each other, could we say that the scars between our bodies would be stronger, darker, and proud, and make of us a single fabric that nothing could tear or mend? I think this is equality without exception. So I wish all of us a joyful celebration of pride, pride in the sense of reclaiming fully all of who we are and can be and all the ways in which we can appreciate and support one another. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center.

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Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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