welcome to the dharma talk from green gulch farm this morning today's talk will be offered by green gulch abiding abbess fu schrader if you would please chant along with me the opening chant it should show on your screen now an unsurpassed penetrating and the 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 ways. Good morning, everybody. This morning I'm going to read to you a letter that was written in 1963 on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

[02:15]

This letter was written by James Baldwin to his nephew and namesake. It's called, My Dungeon Shook, from Baldwin's masterwork, The Fire Next Time. And here's the master himself. Dear James, I have begun this letter five times and torn it up five times. I keep seeing your face, which is also the face of your father and my brother. Like him, you are tough, dark, vulnerable, needy, with a very definite tendency to sound truculent, because you want no one to think you are soft. You may be like your grandfather in this, I don't know, but certainly both you and your father resemble him very much physically. Well, he is dead. He never saw you, and he had a terrible life.

[03:17]

He was defeated long before he died because, at the bottom of his heart, he really believed what white people said about him. This is one of the reasons that he became so holy. I am sure that your father has told you something about all that. Neither you nor your father exhibit any tendencies towards holiness. You really are of another era. Part of what happened when the Negro left the land and came into what the late E. Franklin Frazier called the cities of destruction. You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls by the N-word. I tell you this because I love you. And please don't you ever forget it. I've known both you all your lives. I've carried your daddy in my arms and on my shoulders, kissed and spanked him and watched him learn to walk. I don't know if you've known anybody from that far back, if you've loved anybody that long, first as an infant, then as a child, then as a man.

[04:27]

gain a strange perspective on time and human pain and effort other people cannot see what i see whenever i look into your father's face for behind your father's face as it is today are all those other faces which were his let him laugh and i see a cellar your father does not remember and a house he does not remember and i hear in his present laughter his laughter as a child Let him curse and I remember him falling down the cellar steps and howling. And I remember with pain his tears which my hand or your grandmother is so easily wiped away. But no one's hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today. Which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs. I know what the world has done to my brother and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know. which is much worse. And this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I, nor time, nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.

[05:46]

One can be, indeed, one must strive to become tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death. this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man but it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent it is the innocence which constitutes the crime now my dear namesake these innocent and well-meaning people your countrymen have caused you to be born under conditions not very far removed from those described for us by Charles Dickens in the London of more than a hundred years ago. I hear the chorus of the innocent screaming, no, this is not true, how bitter you are. But I am writing this letter to you to try to tell you something about how to handle them. For most of them do not yet really know that you exist. I know the conditions under which you were born, for I was there.

[06:50]

Your countrymen were not there and haven't made it yet. Your grandmother was also there, and no one has ever accused her of being bitter. I suggest that the innocents check with her. She isn't hard to find. Your countrymen don't know that she exists either, though she has been working for them all their lives. While you were born, here you came, something like 15 years ago. And your father, mother, and grandmother, looking about the streets through which they were carrying you, staring at the walls into which they brought you, had every reason to be heavy-hearted, yet they were not. For here you were, Big James, named for me. You were a big baby. I was not. Here you were to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that. I know how black it looks today for you.

[07:53]

It looked bad that day too. Yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling. But if we had not loved each other, none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you. And for the sake of your children and your children's children. This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish. Let me spell out precisely what I mean by that. For the heart of the matter is here and the root of my dispute with my country. You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were thus expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity. and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You were not expected to aspire to excellence. You were not expected to make peace with mediocrity.

[08:56]

Wherever you have turned, James, in your short time on this earth, you have been told where you could go and what you could do and how you could do it and where you could live and whom you could marry. I know your countrymen do not agree with me about this, and I hear them saying, you exaggerate. They do not know Harlem, and I do, and so do you. Take no one's word for anything, including mine, but trust your experience. Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go. The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority, but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, to the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words acceptance and integration.

[10:03]

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people, and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them. And accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand. And until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them indeed know better, but as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger in the minds of most white Americans is the loss of their identity.

[11:06]

Try to imagine how you would feel if you woke up one morning to find the sun shining and all the stars aflame. you would be frightened because it is out of the order of nature. Any upheaval in the universe is terrifying because it so profoundly attacks one's sense of one's own reality. Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar. And as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You don't be afraid. I said that it was intended that you should perish in the ghetto. Perish by never being allowed to go behind the white man's definitions, by never being allowed to spell your proper name. You have and many of us have defeated this intention. And by a terrible law, a terrible paradox, those innocents who believed that your imprisonment made them safe are losing their grip of reality.

[12:08]

But these men are your brothers, your lost younger brothers. And if the word integration means anything, this is what it means. That we, with love, shall force our brothers to see themselves as they are, to cease fleeing from reality and begin to change it. For this is your home, my friend. Do not be driven away from it. Great men have done great things here and will again. And we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity. You come from a long line of great poets, some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said, The very time I thought I was lost. my dungeon shook and my chains fell off.

[13:10]

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating 100 years of freedom, 100 years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you, James, and Godspeed. Your Uncle James. Now what? Now what? Where do we go from this place where we, and by we I mean those of us racialized as white people? We've been located and defended for the entirety of our lives.

[14:12]

By our parents and our police, by our army, our government, the presidents. Defended behind the boundaries of our property. our wealth, our education, our laws, and our mythology for over 400 years. The game we're playing here in this country and in this world has been rigged in our favor. And therefore, it is up to us, the ones who rigged it, not only to yield and to listen, but to actively engage in changing the rules towards something our better selves would recognize as fair play. And more than that, roles that would establish as their primary values, compassion and wisdom. We know, as James Baldwin said, and again, I am speaking to those of you like me, racialized as white, that we are innocent and well-meaning people.

[15:14]

How does that sound? Innocent and well-meaning. Doesn't sound so good, does it? Not anymore. For as he also said, it's innocence that constitutes the crime. So now what? Given the life I've chosen for myself, I have no other recourse than to look to the teachings of the ancestors, not only the ancestors in the Buddhist tradition, but in all traditions. teachings that are as fresh and relevant today as they have been for long over 10,000 years. When we look at those teachings, the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, Suzuki Roshi, Tony Morrison, Angel Kyoto Williams, Zenju, Earthland Manuel, James Baldwin, and all the other compassionate and heart-sick humans, what they are always talking about is just two things, suffering and the cessation of suffering. These wise humans are in truth the world's great physicians.

[16:20]

They have diagnosed our illness and prescribed a cure. And not as some abstract philosophy, but as street wisdom in a world where oppression and violence and injustice are as prevalent now as they were in the Buddha's day. What James Baldwin calls our innocence, the Buddha called our ignorance. Or as Jesus said from the cross, forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do. So behind that opaque veil of ignorance, the crimes that got many of us to this privileged place in history are hidden from our view. In 2001, shortly after what we call 9-11, His Holiness the Dalai Nama said, don't look for blame, look for causes. In other words, find the roots of the illness that is killing black people in this country and by and by will be killing us all. These roots are well known among Buddhists as the three poisons, greed, hatred, and ignorance.

[17:24]

Poisons that are deeply embedded in a culture that makes whiteness supreme. It is beyond all doubt that we will leave this poisonous legacy for the generations to come unless we do something, a very real something, each and every day, starting now. Here at Green Gulch, there is this insidious plant called bindweed that invades our soil and eventually chokes our crops. I've spent several hours recently trying to uproot patches of bindweed, which are never hard to find. The best one can hope for is a single longish root grown up from a vast underground network, the progenitor of all bindweed. And just like beginningness, greed, hatred, and ignorance, bindweed like racism will thrive as long as we neglect what is sprouting in our gardens and in each of our own hearts it's easy for me to think at times like this when i am feeling discouraged like this that our world under the dominance of the human species is truly beyond repair and maybe so and yet at the very same time

[18:38]

I was reminded of a particular story from the old wisdom teachings of the Pali Canon, spoken by the Buddha 2,500 years ago, a story about a skillful turning toward justice and kindness that the Buddha brought about in a petty tyrant of his day. This story is just a story. However, it's stories themselves that we pass on to our children, hopefully stories about how goodness, in the end, wins the day. Thus have I heard. At Savati, King Pasendi of Kosala approached the Buddha in the middle of the day, and on arrival, having bowed down, sat to one side. As he was sitting there, the Blessed One said to him, Well now, great king, where are you coming from in the middle of the day? The king replied, Just now, lord, I was engaged in this sort of royal affairs. typical of noble warrior kings, intoxicated with sovereignty and obsessed by greed for sensual pleasure.

[19:43]

I maintain control of my country by conquering a great sphere of territory on the earth. To which the Blessed One then said, what do you think, great king? Suppose a person trustworthy and reliable were to come to you from the east and on arrival would say... If it please your majesty, you should know that I come from the east. There I saw a great mountain as high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings in its path. Do whatever you think should be done. Then a second person were to come to you from the west, a third from the north, a fourth from the south, and on arrival each would say... If it please you, your majesty, you should know that I saw a great mountain as high as the clouds coming this way, crushing all living beings. Do whatever you think should be done. If great king, the Buddha then asked, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, the human state being so hard to obtain, what should be done?

[20:52]

The king replied, If, Lord Buddha, such a great peril should arise, such a terrible destruction of human life, what else should be done but to live by truth, by right conduct, skillful actions, and meritorious deeds? So it is, great king, so it is. As aging and death are rolling in on you, what else should be done but to live by truth, by right conduct, skillful actions, and meritorious deeds? Having said that, the world-honored one, the teacher, further said this. Like massive boulders, mountains pressing against the sky, moving in from all sides, crushing the four directions, so aging and death come rolling over living beings, noble warriors, brahmins, merchants, workers, outcasts, and scavengers. They spare nothing. They trample everything. Here, elephant troops can hold no ground.

[21:56]

nor can chariots or infantry, nor can a battle of wits or wealth win out. So a wise person, seeing their own good, steadfast, secures confidence in the Buddha, in the Dharma, and in the Sangha. One who practices the Dharma in thought, word, and deed, receives praise here on earth and ends their days in peaceful rest. So I don't know if any of you found this story comforting or not. Actually, I don't think it's intended to be comforting, but rather to be an encouragement to turn toward the so-called facts of life. One huge fact being that nothing and no one continues forever. And yet here we are together, at least temporarily, in a miraculous and continuously transforming appearance that we call reality. We can't really point at reality or bottle it.

[22:56]

We can't possess it or even give it away. It's not for sale. However, we can look deeply into reality in wonder and in awe. We can recognize that there are choices to be made about our life and how we pass our days. According to the Buddha, those choices follow particular patterns called karma. The word karma itself meaning action. Actions coming from causes and in turn creating effects, cause and effect. As the Buddha famously said in a verse from the Dhammapada, the path of truth, what we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday and our present thoughts will build our life of tomorrow. Our life is a creation of our mind. The basic law of cause and effect is fairly simple. Good actions lead to good outcomes, and bad actions do not. Reminding ourselves again of the Dalai Lama's teaching, don't look for blame, look for causes.

[24:02]

I'm not sure we've gotten around to that as yet. It seems like we, the innocent, are still in the midst of a prolonged period of denial and revenge, maybe starting way back in our evolutionary history. to when the very first living cells began taking bites out of one another. Regardless of who started it and who we'd like to blame, there must be some other way, some time or place when the killing can be brought to an end. And so we must choose, each of us inside our own hearts, with our own voices and by our own hands, we have to choose which side we are on. One being the side of greed, hatred and delusion, and the other of compassion, morality, and wisdom. I'm not pretending that the issues of police violence and ancestral hatred can be easily transformed by those of us here in this room today, although that would be very nice.

[25:05]

I'm only proposing that each one of us needs to know for ourselves, as did the warrior king Pasendi, what we're going to do with this one and most likely only precious life, given that our time on earth is short and our legacy truly is at hand. Now, I don't know how it is for all of you, but for me, this threat of mountains closing in, the metaphor the Buddha uses to remind us of our mortality, is most importantly about our morality, the ethical foundation upon which we stake our lives. The basic thing I'm talking about this morning is the very same thing we're always talking about here at the Zen Center. And that the Buddha was talking about during his 80 years of life among the villages of Northern India. And what James Baldwin is talking about in his essay to modern day America. And that is that there is a choice to be made. We can choose to be awake while we live. We can choose to be nonviolent and generous, inclusive.

[26:12]

moral, patient, focused, and wise. And that is because we humans are not things, solid things that are set in stone. We are processes, meaning a natural and for the most part involuntary series of changes, in particular the biological journey from our birth to our death. And while we don't control the earth, water, fire, or air, we don't control aging, illness, death, hatred, greed, or ignorance. We are made of those forces, and we are made to meet them. Our bodies are built to sit upright under the weight of gravity. Our eyes, hands, ears, and mouth face forward in search of food, in search of love, and in search of a safe place to spend the night. And we have the mammal's instinct to nurture and protect our young. And still we have to choose. the same choices that had been there before us all along.

[27:14]

Simple choices. But as Birdnest Roshi said from up in his tree when he was asked by a monk the secret of Buddhist practice, Do good, avoid evil, and purify your mind. To which the monk responded, Well, that's easy. Even a child of three can understand that. Birdnest then replied, Yes, a child of three can understand it. but a person of 80 years may not be able to practice it. The monk's question is the same that's being asked of us now. What is the secret of Buddhist practice? A question that's being aimed at the very heart of our innocence. Our community is expecting more from us, the leadership, than is being given, much more. They are demanding the just slaughter of our innocence, and rightfully so. The ugly reality of institutional racism that persists and continues to resolve in deadly consequences and repeated trauma for Black Americans is evil.

[28:19]

Murder is evil. Abuse of power is evil. Silence in the face of evil is complicity. Complicity is evil. We must stand with those whose lives are impacted by police brutality and with those who are speaking out publicly about injustice. We must call for and encourage the harnessing of our skills as meditators and Dharma teachers to demand enforcement of just laws. And we must not forget that we have promised to do so, because that truly is our greatest sin. We forget, just as my parents forgot. And their parents forgot. And I forgot. And through forgetting, our children will be born into innocence once again. I read this book by James Baldwin when I was a junior in high school nearly 60 years ago. And now I read it again today.

[29:21]

The prophecy is unchanged. And yet beneath the running tones of anger and fear and grief... This eloquent, courageous, and deeply spiritual man holds up a mirror to our innocence and begs us to look and then to see. Some closing words from the final essay in James Baldwin's book called Down at the Cross, Letter from a Region in My Mind. When I was very young and was dealing with my buddies in those wine and urine stained hallways, Something in me wondered, what will happen to all that beauty? For black people, though I am aware that some of us, black and white, do not know it, are very beautiful. I wonder when talk of God or Allah's vengeance has been achieved, what will happen to all that beauty? I could also see that the intransigence and ignorance of the white world might make that vengeance inevitable.

[30:27]

a vengeance that does not really depend on and cannot really be executed by any person or organization and that cannot be prevented by any police force or army historical vengeance a cosmic vengeance based on the law that we recognize when we say whatever goes up must come down and here we are at the center of the ark trapped in the gaudiest most valuable and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen everything now we must assume is in our hands we have no right to assume otherwise if we and now i mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks who must like lovers insist on or create the consciousness of the others do not falter in our duty now we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare and achieve our country and change the history of the world.

[31:32]

If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us. God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time. I'm going to end this talk with what I have been taught is the Hawaiian practice for forgiveness and reconciliation. Ho'oponopono. I am sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you. I love you. Tension equally extended to every being and place.

[32:35]

With the true merit of Buddha's way, beings are numberless. I vow to save them. Delusions are inexhaustible. I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Bhatta's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. I don't know if any of you want to say anything or offer your own reflections, but you're certainly welcome to do something.

[33:46]

If you'd like to offer a question or comment, please raise your hand virtually. You should see a button on your device that says raise hand. I don't know. Thankful Butler, it looks like. Please. That's me, but Frederick actually has the question today. Nice to see you both. Thank you.

[34:58]

Well, I really thank you wholeheartedly. for your powerful call of conscience for us who have privilege to recognize the place where we stand. And I feel so moved by your closure that may be the beginning for me. The closure of your conversation was, I am sorry. And maybe that is the beginning for me to say, tell me about you. Tell me your story. And maybe these open conversations would be a beginning. for us to sit quiet and listen to the history that's not been told, that we only know in a way that I feel is removed from my life, certainly, quite removed.

[36:13]

But to hear personally would be, I feel, a call for me. I also feel that there's a role for our to be approached in a way of thanking for their service and also to invite into this conversation. Because I can't see that specific individuals are more responsible than any of the others of us. Isn't this all the culture of racism, capitalism, which reduces everything to dollars and cents, and will allow people to live in abject poverty while others have so much.

[37:17]

So perhaps I am approaching this with wide open ears and an open heart. and a desire to listen. Thank you, brother. Thank you, Fu. George. Thank you for an excellent Sharma talk, Fu. I work with young people a great deal, and there's a sense of hopelessness that seems to be very common that's leading to a lot of stress and even to suicidal thoughts. They look at the future as very bleak. What advice would you have for young people in how to deal with this very dark time that we're in?

[38:19]

Well, George, I have always felt like you're listening and being with young people is the medicine that we all need to to be offering to each other not just the young ones but to each other as well you know i was ashamed the other day i we had a family we play you know games online with the family members and my daughter who's biracial um A number of people had been talking from the family about how their feelings about this week and how sad they feel and they're going to do this and that. And my daughter said to me this morning, no one asked me how I was doing. And I was just stunned. And that she would feel like, there she is, the one person in our group of white people who has a black father and came from... history of people with drug addiction and so on, poverty and so on. And, you know, to not even remember that it matters to her.

[39:27]

It affects her. So I think we have to come home to our own hearts and our own way of meeting, you know, within our families and our friendships and these kids. Someone said, you know, look at those kids admiringly. Don't look at them with fear. Those handsome young black boys and women. You know, look at them and smile. Don't, like, wonder what they're doing at Whole Foods. You know, this is a crazy place where we live. Marin, as we know, is... I don't want to name it, but... But I do want to name it, but I won't. It's really... It's getting to be, you know, it's sickening how we live. And I think we're all getting sick. So, you know, George, I... Just so grateful for your work all these years and continuing that. And I'm hoping, I just watched Sesame Street did a racism town hall for kids, and it was fantastic. And they have all these different kids saying, why do you hate us?

[40:30]

What's wrong with us? You know, four-year-olds and eight-year-olds. And then they spoke to the kids. These grown-ups spoke with them. And I've asked Zen Center to put the, if they can legally, to put the town hall on our website. So whatever you can do, whatever you can throw into the soup, I think that would be, if we all do that, we'll have a very, very luscious outcome. Just not forget. I think that's the main thing I'm telling myself. Don't forget. Don't forget. Thanks, George. So much. Well, Kelly. Good morning, Fu. Thank you for your beautiful presentation. I was so happy to hear some more work by James Baldwin. We just, as a family, watched I Am Not Your Negro just a few days ago, and I would like to recommend that to everyone in the sangha.

[41:42]

It's available on the internet, and it's... It really is an eye-opener. For me, anyway. Thank you. You're welcome. A few years ago, I went to talk with some people at the Redwoods here in North Valley. It's a retirement senior living place. And there were about 15 or 20 very old white people in the room. And they only... blackface that I saw were the people attending them. And so we were talking about the program we were doing at Green Gulch on racism and bringing black speakers, people of color, different non-white groups to speak to us about their experience. And this old man raised his hand. He said, is that still happening? I thought, oh my God, you know, James Baldwin was writing in 1963.

[42:48]

This is 60 years ago. Is that still happening? So what have we been doing? What have we been thinking? Took care of that? So this is a refresher course for all of us. Some of you weren't even born, I get that, but a lot of us were. And it's like, it's still happening. And it may be worse than ever, you know, because the forces that turned back the clock, did it very much on purpose. We are turning again towards this terrible racism and darkening it. So lightening it. So I want to join forces with all of you. And I want to, and the Zen Center is doing so as well. We're so slow in getting the word out, but we are really talking and we're really making an effort to communicate our thoughts. And please stay tuned. We're doing our best and we need you all to help. I think there was one more question maybe from Kat.

[43:51]

All right, Kat, I'll unmute you. You can let us know if you did indeed have a question. Oh, I do. Thank you very much, Fu-Sensei. Thank you. Thank you. You just said something about anger, fear, and grief. Now, I'm a martial artist of a long time, and I would say I'm a peaceful martial art. And anger and fear are really a good place to help with that. And I want to ask you about grief because I hadn't added that word to that as a cause of this problem that we have between us. So I'm wondering if you could say something about grief, something more about grief and meditation with it or whatever you think would be helpful. Thank you. Yeah, grief isn't one of my favorite feelings.

[44:54]

You know, I think most of my life I've tried to find ways to, you know, overcome my grief. And, you know, it starts pretty young. I was a child following the Second World War, and one of my first exposures to the so-called real world was a magazine my brother had hidden in his closet along with his Playboy magazines. And I snuck in there one day when I was about seven. And I pulled down a Life magazine, black and white pictures of the Second World War. And I can still remember sitting there on the floor, just stunned and crying at the pictures of the Holocaust and the piles of bodies and skulls and watches and the horror, you know. And I had no clue. I had no idea. I was living in a white ghetto. I had no idea that the world outside of my compound was filled with such horror.

[45:56]

And I don't think that impact has never left my life. So in some sense, the underpinning of my life as a Buddhist, running away to a monastery, trying to escape, find another safe haven, a sanctuary. And little by little, it's so obvious Sanctuary is going to have to be everywhere. And it's going to have to be for everyone. As our Bodhisattva vow says, we're going to have to grieve for everyone, not just for ourselves. So my heart's very sad right now, again. And that's not good enough. You know, I have to reach out beyond the boundaries of my own suffering and sadness. I have the privilege of being sad here at Green Gulchings. So I have to keep remembering how privileged I am and how much I need to offer whatever I can to those without privilege.

[47:00]

So the talk is cheap. Thank you. We got to get moving. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Also, a couple of people have asked for the reference of the essay and piece from Baldwin that you read. It's from his masterwork, I think it's his masterwork, called The Fire Next Time, which is the same as the biblical quote of God gave Noah the rainbow sun, no more water, the fire next time. 1963. You know, I've been looking at James Baldwin for years, and I recently started looking at some YouTubes of him when he was invited as a guest of Dick Cavett, for those of you who remember Dick Cavett. And this professor comes on, this white professor, saying, well, I don't agree with everything you've said.

[48:04]

I think there's a lot that's been done. And he went on and on in this very professorial way. And James Baldwin just nailed. It was so inspiring. He was fearless in his love. amazing teacher and um so i highly suggest you all watch this you know i'm not your negro powerful and also read james baldwin this this is a very it's a very thin book you know it will take you maybe an hour and a half and uh and many other books that he's written all of them listed in front of this one so ah he's one of the great ones So we need to read. Netflix has put out all kinds of free movies for us about the riots, the LA riots, and all of these other, Moonlight, all of these films that are really painful and necessary for us to see and feel, to grieve. And then commit ourselves.

[49:07]

My friend, I'm friends with... Angel Kilda Williams, who's a wonderful teacher, another person to check out. She has a website and she does many teachings. She offered a sitting for black Buddhists and there were a thousand people came online. So the call is out. The gatherings are happening and we need to gather together. As he said, as lovers, black and white people of conscience need to become lovers. And create the conscience of the world together. It's inspiring. Maria? Martinez? Hi, Fu. Thank you very much for your talk and bringing this topic. I just want to share that... in the work we did during the spring practice, I notice it is also important to be aware of the way we have charged the colors, like the positive and negative way we talk about, like difficult times are dark times, no?

[50:32]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And this came because in the practice we were doing with Tonglen, we needed to first imagine or get in contact with bodhicitta. And the image that came to me was this dark space. The most space is dark. And there is when I realized, wow, it's like... the way we are so used to, very easy to compare, to understand darkness as something with a negative connotation or a difficult connotation. And I remember the day I was walking in a forest in which all trees, their trunk, one side was all this green, soft side and the rough side of the other side.

[51:42]

And there is when I realized, wow, it's just one is soft and the other is rough. It's not that one is good and the other is bad. It was like a realization that good and bad are really many cultural traditions. This it brought all these problems from ourselves, like myself considering things bad. And I think this consciousness about the colors are also important to having this remembering too. Thank you. I like that James Baldwin used the rainbow sign. God gave Noah the rainbows, all the colors. Also, there's a wonderful article in this month's issue, June 1st issue of Lion's Roar magazine by Zenju Earthland Manuel, who is a Dharma-transmitted teacher from Zen Center, a disciple of Blanche Hartman.

[52:51]

And it's about the dark Mahakala, the dark female deity, that she is so grateful to find this image of this destroyer of... of harmful behaviors, the destroyer, protector of good behavior and so on. So there are a lot of those wrathful deities. And she was celebrating finding this one that's very quite common in Japan, protecting the Dharma. So it's a turning. Another way of turning is to see these deities is not just one color or another color. They're conjoined twins, black and white, depend on each other. If there's no light, there's no dark. If there's no up, there's no down. So these are all totally dependent. Exactly. Yeah. And freedom from choosing one side over the other is basically our practice. Yeah, it's like day and night. We have day and night. Day of light. Day and night.

[53:53]

If we get stuck on one side and the other, we're going to be in big trouble. We are in big trouble. Thank you for sharing your thought. We appreciate it. Mary, Mary. Mary S. Hi, Phu. Hi, Mary S. Hi. Thank you for your beautiful talk. Yeah, I feel compelled to put my voice in here a little bit. I share your tenderness and broken heart and the broken heart of so many people. And I cry every day, you know, these days it's, it's, it feels almost too much to bear a lot of times. But one thing I worry about is that we white people get a little, maybe a little too caught up in our broken hearts.

[55:01]

We, feel a little too like maybe that's our job is to have a broken heart. And sometimes, you know, reading James Baldwin and, you know, looking at injustice inflames the broken heart as it should. But I feel right now that the, thing that is actually the most useful that I could do is to do a deep study of my white privilege is to get very serious about that study and to look at exactly why it is that I'm so comfortable in the world and not just to inflame my broken heart over it but to be absolutely studious in my study.

[56:08]

So that is where I'm at today. May I join you in that, please? When I sent Angel a little message the day that the rights, no rights. protest began. And I said, I feel so sad. And she said, sad's okay, but now turn that into commitment. Yeah. Yeah. And I got, you know, it's like, whack. Oh yeah, be sad. Now get to vote. Yeah. Yeah. She also said, um, we have to be really clear about, um, the difference, uh, of our work here, the difference, uh, between the work that people of color, uh, have to do and the work that white people have to do. And there's a very, there's a very different, we want to like link arms and be, you know, appear to be united, but our work is very, very different.

[57:17]

The parties later. Yeah, absolutely. Way later. As you know, as a caterer. Absolutely. You got a lot of work. I'll be cooking for that. Yeah. There is a whiteness study group at Zen Center, and I'm wondering, I'm just thinking right now when you said that, that maybe we can open that to the Sangha at large, that they're studying texts and they're studying whiteness and they're bringing forth the challenge of looking at privilege. So I'll bring that to whoever it is that I bring things to and say, yeah, why don't we open that? I bet a lot of people would like to get the help of some of these readings and studies and so on. company of other white people doing the work together so actually i'll just put i'll just put a plug in here since we're doing this that this is the book that i'm reading right now called waking up white who's the author yeah debbie debbie irving okay great yeah it's a beautiful beautiful book thank you thank you foe thank you mary

[58:25]

11.15. I think it may be time to unplug. So I just want to thank you all for coming and staying and caring. I really trust that. Thank you, Fu. And in the chat now, I'm going to post the letter to a nephew and also the whiteness Unpacking Whiteness Group, AdSan Center is open to the public. And I'm posting that now, if you give me one moment. Thank you so much. There it is. Thank you all very much. And if you'd like to unmute yourself to say goodbye. Goodbye.

[59:35]

Thank you. Bye, everyone. Thank you so much, Boo. Thank you. Bye. Love to everybody. Bye. Bye. Great to see your faces. Bye. Unpacking reflection and action. Online meeting. Bye. Bye. Thanks. Please come back. Come again. And again. And again. Bye. Lucy Andrews? Thank you, Phil.

[60:38]

Where was it? Probably last week, there was some kind of conversation where, you know, some of this kind of white confusion and passiveness, and a black person said, oh, yeah, so we're supposed to, like, do all the heavy lifting again. Yeah, yeah, teach you guys what the deal is. Yeah, no, there's a big issue. Who's talking? This is really interesting. We can hear this conversation. I wonder who it is. You guys. Okay, that's all right. Nobody knows they're audible and visible. I didn't mean to interrupt. Now what? Now what? Leave your camera on. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.

[61:38]

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