This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Wow. Good evening, everybody. I'd forgotten what this was like. It's a very strange sensation to have your every breath magnified a thousand times. Forgive me if I seem a little startled by the whole experience, this digital thing. Good evening. Thank you all for coming. Even those of you who had to come, thank you for coming. And particularly those of you who didn't have to come, thank you for coming. I really appreciate it. Is anybody here for the first time? Ooh, welcome, welcome, welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple.

[01:06]

You're in exactly the right place. My name's Jean, and I come from Ireland, and I lived here for a long time, and I went back a year and a bit ago to live in Belfast. So... I'm literally just passing through on the way from our monastery back to Ireland. And David, thank you very much, invited me to give the talk, the Wednesday night talk. So I feel very grateful for that. And I see lots of familiar faces and some of the people who are also left Tazahara today and dropped by so today you know I was wondering what I would talk about I thought I thought of various things to talk about I thought when we were kids in school I don't know if this happens in the US but one of the kind of programmatic templates you're given for writing essays is what I did on my vacation

[02:27]

And we did it in English and in Gaelic, in Irish and in French. So I can tell you what I did in my vacation in three languages. And I've just been to Tassajara for nine days and I thought, really, how wonderful I get to say what I did on my vacation. I went to a monastery where everything was beautiful and everybody was really... soft and open. They had spent 90 days in silent meditation and they were just so full of joy and tenderness. It was really beautiful to meet people like that. And the first few days were cold and then the sun shone and the buds opened and the butterflies arrived. So we would go for long walks. surrounded by swarms of butterflies that are like... It's like driving in traffic, except it's silent and beautiful.

[03:30]

All these creatures just flitting around. I think they dance. Why else would they do that? Beautiful creatures in the air. But then I realized and... Jehovah confirmed and reminded me again that today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And what else would you talk about on this day? What else could we talk about if not Martin Luther King? I feel a little, you know, I suppose a little white up here. my Irish accent. So forgive me. But I will try to speak to that really profound teaching that great Bodhisattva, Dr. Martin Luther King.

[04:32]

The quote from Martin Luther King that think first struck me was darkness cannot drive out darkness only light can do that hate cannot drive out hate only love can do that and the first time I read that because I didn't grow up in this country and I had read Buddhist texts before I read the teachings of Martin Luther I thought oh that's the Dhammapada that's the verses, the pairs at the beginning. Do you know the Dhammapada? It's, I think, the earliest recorded teachings of the Buddha. And it's a really sweet little book. I recommend it if anybody doesn't know it. Investigate it.

[05:34]

And I love Gil Fronstel's translation. And the phrase, the sentence that I enjoyed And that meets that is hatred does not cease by hatred. Hatred ceases by love. This is the eternal law. So, this is, in theory, the words of the Buddha. And these are the words of Martin Luther King. He understood that. intimately that profound teaching, that raging against injustice, that fighting back doesn't help, that there's another way to work with, to work with suffering. There's another way to work with injustice.

[06:35]

When someone hits me, if I hit back, I'm just perpetuating the unhappiness, and I am meeting it on its level. I really, the first time I read that verse from the Dhammapada, it was like a light went on. I thought, of course, of course. I had been, I suppose I still am, an anti-war activist. in Ireland. And I remember it, I think it was 2003, just before the last big adventure of the United States in Iran. And the group I was with wanted to come up with a name.

[07:43]

Every title we came up with was anti. It was like what we were against, where fighting for peace was kind of how that was phrased. We were going to force these people to do it our way. And I had been sitting, I had been to Green Gulch for a few January intensives, and I began to feel... just the kind of offness of fighting for peace, battling against the things that were wrong with the world. And that teaching of Thich Nhat Hanh, of the Buddha, of Martin Luther King, that love is bigger than hatred, and can accommodate and envelop hatred was extremely helpful for me.

[08:53]

The name we came up with eventually was something like Guardians of the Peace in Irish, in Gaelic. So, that's all very well. Theoretically, we have these great teachers encouraging us to, these great bodhisattvas, these wise mentors encouraging us to practice peace when we're triggered. Practice peacefully in times of challenge. But how do we actually do that? I mean, I go around the place thinking I'm going to be peaceful, I'm going to be calm, and then someone pulls out in front of me in traffic, and... I am reacting.

[09:58]

My... startle response seems to generate an adrenaline-charged reaction to... I think what I'm learning, what I have learned, is that the practice of not reacting requires courage. Because not fighting, just sitting with what arises, allows the fight-or-flight responses to settle in my body and doesn't give me that hormonal resource of being reactive.

[11:00]

So my body softens when I'm not all adrenalized by anger. I breathe into my belly and and open my shoulders and meet what comes. In Belfast, where I'm living now, there's, we have an uneasy peace in Belfast that's lasted almost exactly 20 years. People still react very strongly to what they imagine is the other. It's really interesting to be a southerner with an accent that identifies me as, you know, I'm a barbaric Fenian as far as the people north of the border are concerned.

[12:08]

So... as long as I keep my mouth shut, I look like everybody else. But as soon as I open my mouth, in stores, sometimes people pull back. They're judging me based on my accent. It's a really interesting thing to be going through. So, I have a little experience of being a person of a different race. I'm of a different culture. I'm one with a marker that singles me out. There's not that many people from the south in the north of Ireland. I drove around a car with southern plates for a while in the north, a provocative shade of green. I don't know if anyone appreciates what... So... And... People were mean to me.

[13:09]

They'd lean on the horn when I made mistakes. I, you know, I was driving on the left again. It was really scary. And whizzed past me. I finally, finally, after three weeks, I switched it for a car with local plates, and everybody calmed down. It was really clear I was being discriminated against. So in an environment where people have been hurt by someone who belongs to another group, there's a very high level of alertness to which group you belong to. So I'm there in the role of a Zen priest to try to settle to try to encourage people to find some stillness with this drama that goes on in all our heads.

[14:20]

It's quite a responsibility and I've been there for a year and three months and it's beginning, people are beginning to settle down. They're beginning to trust that I'm not a terrorist. different kind of terror. I think the experience of being Irish in the US has been similar in a way. My culture is close to what is the norm here, but it's not completely it doesn't completely coincide and I find myself misjudging things quite comprehensively sometimes I think something's really funny and then I look and people are gazing at me in horror because I've transgressed some boundary and I think oh what's wrong with you people

[15:35]

Beings are humorless. But I've learned a lot about listening rather than wisecracking. It's hard not to wisecrack, but I've learned about being more careful with my speech, about apologizing immediately if I transgress. and about trying to empathize with the person I'm speaking to. I feel more at home. I thought coming here after a year back in Ireland, that it would feel like I was returning to a kind of home. But of course... you can never go home. Zen Center has moved and in its fluidity, all sorts of different people have shown up.

[16:48]

There are different dynamic structures in the community. The people who come to this talk are new. I'm meeting it in a new way. And I feel... unhomed, unheimlich. The ceremony of ordination for a priest, and we had one last weekend, Diego-san, is called Shūkei Tokudo, which is... the ceremony of leaving home, the practice of taking up the rope, shaving the head, and sometimes this gets shaved, and leaving all attachments behind is going out, going out without any

[18:02]

baggage. I was very taken by Zenju Earthland Manual's new book, which I'm going to hold up. This is like an advertisement for Zenju's book, Sanctuary, available in our bookstore. And It's sanctuary, a meditation on home, homelessness, and belonging. And has anybody read it? I would encourage you to read it. She writes a beautiful poetry that's very profound, very intimate. She writes about being an African American in this country, and how uneasy, how unloved she feels, and how her ordination as a Zen priest helped her, encouraged her to meet her uneasiness.

[19:31]

and to find a home on the cushion, to find a home in Zazen. She, I want to quote just her comment on Dogen, who is the founder of this school. He uses the term Shinzo, S-H-I-N-Z-O, which means ever intimate. Shinzo. I think that's a lovely and very useful term. Shinzo. When we are ever intimate with the tensions between personal and collective suffering, we experience liberation enlightened to who we are as human beings. She's encouraging us, and she talks a lot about Martin Luther King, to see how the structure of the society we're living in excludes and alienates large numbers of people.

[20:54]

an increasing number of people, an increasing number of us who are feeling uneasy, unloved, unwanted in the way that society, particularly in the US, is beginning to harden. I remember reading a science fiction story as a young person. I read a lot of science fiction stories. And this one imagined alien beings who came from another planet. I think it was from another galaxy, in fact. And they were having a discussion about the planet Earth and what was going on here. And they said, on this scale of evolution, they are so primitive because they still fight for their land masses.

[21:56]

They still draw national borders around their continents or their islands. And of course, as beings evolve, they begin to understand that you draw a border around the entire globe or around the entire solar system or the entire galaxy because it's all intimately involved. And it was... or so and this seemed like a really helpful idea that we began as tribes fighting amongst each other we began to have bigger and bigger groups but we're still only at the stage where our groups are maybe not even coextensive with the boundaries of a country that we're drawing lines in the case of Ireland, across the middle of a country, and the case of the United States, above and below a continent's landmass.

[23:04]

It's like, why would we do that? What a strange thing to do when viewed from the perspective of somebody who isn't from this planet. So... The idea of home comes up in a poem by Dogen where the line is, do not ask me where I am going. Every step I take in this limitless world is my home. I feel that I am traveling back and forth between the south of Ireland, where I originate, and the north of Ireland, where I live with my American husband, and the United States, and other countries in Europe.

[24:05]

I woke up one morning in Tassajara and in that moment before I hardened into my name and my labels where am I? I really didn't know. And then I remembered where I was. I was in Pine 3. It's pretty cool. But that moment, a teacher in Tassajara once invited me to explore that moment before I completely wake up as a place of openness, a place before the labels all arrive, before the words show up. It's like that sensation of just opening my eyes and experiencing, like, wow. So...

[25:16]

The uneasiness of my not having a fixed abode anymore. My parents' home has changed quite radically because my father is ill and had to go to a nursing home, and my mother is in and out of hospital. It's like the opposite of emptiness syndrome. I go to my parents' house and they're not there. And how empty it feels. I walk around these echoing rooms and think, oh, where's my mom? Where's she gone? But of course, this, this is where my mom lives. Oh, my father. This is my home. There's, I'm going to end with this. There's a poem that

[26:20]

and forgive me those who heard this at Tassahara, but there's a poem that Paul read during the Sishin that I really appreciated, and it's by William Stafford, who was a poet laureate at some stage. It's called You and Art. And it goes, your exact errors make a music that nobody hears. Your straying feet find the great dance walking alone. And you live on a world where stumbling always leads home. So, you live on a world, brought me back to thinking about aliens, where stumbling always leads home. I thought, There are no mistakes.

[27:21]

There's nothing to apologize for. My discomfort, my unease, my feeling of being unhomed is perfectly as it should be. I'm a homeless one. And I live in a world, I live on a world, where stumbling always leads home. The practice of listening, paying attention, breathing into my belly, dropping and opening my shoulders, and meeting everything as it comes, teaches me that every moment is home. So I'm not going to say anything else because I've gone on for a bit.

[28:28]

And if anybody would like to say anything or ask a question or make a comment, now is your time. It's amazing, isn't it?

[29:31]

It's like there's a moment in there when you have a choice. Do you react and become the thing that they think you are? Or do you just breathe for a moment? Just not react. Someone years ago pointed out that the words reactive and creative are anagrams of each other. That if I can still my reactive response, that I create a whole new reality. But it takes, it's quite an active thing to do. It's not just like sitting there and allowing people to project stuff onto you. It's like sit up, straighten your back, Drop your shoulders. Breathe into your belly.

[30:32]

And meet it. I know you do. I've heard you talk about it before. I think you have great wisdom in this. Thank you. I know in this room there are 40 people going, I want to go to bed. Please. Annie, you said you'd ask a question. Hi. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing with anger because I think as women there's some kind of programming involved that if we're firm, we're seen as angry.

[32:12]

Or perhaps that in order to have boundaries, we energize ourselves with anger. And I don't know if we have to do that. I mean, I know we don't have to do that. I know we can go, no. No. quietly and go, no, not gonna happen, no. You can laugh and go. My view of anger is something that's, that you get consumed by, that it's a kind of a, you know, an incontinent rage that takes you over. And it's tempting. to go into that, you know, warp stage. But then it becomes a thing. You become the monster. You're bigger than that. You don't need to do that.

[33:15]

Tassajara was helpful for me like that. I was like, I was not someone who ever stated her needs or said no. And in that intimate crucible of learning, I had to, I really had to start saying, no. Some of us learn to say no in Tassajara. Most of us are there going, hi, yes. And some of us, particularly girls, are going, no, it takes a lot of courage. It's lovely to hear you talk again. I'm wondering about, I appreciate your not talking about your seminal vacation at Tassahara, but bringing up Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King's teachings, and wondering how they apply in Belfast.

[34:22]

We certainly see the similarities in the structures, the problems that have continued. You know, we had our Bloody Sunday and the echoes parallel that of the civil rights movement in the United States was also a civil rights movement in Ireland. I don't know if people explicitly use Dr. King's teachings, but certainly people like Martin McGinnis and Reverend Ian Paisley, who came together from very extreme polar opposite ends of the political spectrum and made, created a relationship. It was... phenomenal to see. It's worth checking them out.

[35:42]

They were known as the Chuckle Brothers. They used to laugh so much. And they never really... I mean, they're still in opposition. And they're both dead now, which is part of what's happened. Martin died relatively recently. He and Paisley a few years ago. So... But they're really seen as the models of how to use humor and lightheartedness to undermine the tension. I think the evangelical style of Martin Luther King's great speeches is kind of different from how these guys worked. And yet, you know, a great role model. the non-violent practice. Is it bedtime?

[36:52]

Okay. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[37:17]

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