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. Good evening, everyone. For those of you who were hoping to hear my teacher, Minzo Ed Satterson, the central abbot of San Francisco Zen Center. Tonight, he's under the weather, and so I was asked to step in at what I consider to be the last minute, but what most of you might consider to be last week sometime. And so my apologies to you. I am a poor substitute, but I will do the very best that I possibly can. I would like to thank him for being my teacher and hope that he will get better soon, as I'm sure all of you hope will be the case.

[01:07]

I also want to thank, as always, Nancy Petron, our tanto, our beloved tanto, for giving me this opportunity, and David Zimmerman, our abiding abbot at City Center, where, as Kodo said, I practice. Thank you. I had a really great talk. I was going to talk about Dogen, who's our 13th century founder in Japan. He's got a wonderful fascicle called Ocean Mudra Samadhi, very heavy. I was going to talk about that. But a Dharma talk is a collaboration. It's a collaboration between the person who sits in the Dharma seat, that's me, and Those who are in the assembly, that's you. And even though we're not in the same room, it's possible my awareness of the sangha, the assembly, has become more fine-tuned.

[02:20]

And I just, as yesterday was closing, I realized I needed to change the topic and speak about something else. So those of you who can't wait to hear about Dogen's Ocean Mudra Samadhi, you're going to have to wait. Hopefully I'll have another chance. As Buddhists, we're asked to be fully where we are. And For those of us who are on the American continent, that means being aware of who it is that was here before, and that means, of course, Native Americans. We're asked to be in relationship as Buddhists with those who came before us, and to make contact with what it is that we know

[03:26]

of what happened where it is that we practiced before, and take care of our karmic responsibilities as best we possibly can. We have to be truthful about what it is that we have here, and the suffering that getting it caused. And for us in the Bay Area, and specifically here in San Francisco, that means trying to make contact with the Ramitash, of the Ohlone people. I tried to be in relationship with them. And now for much of the 20th century, as far as developing anthropology was concerned, the Ramitash had ceased to be. They were extinguished and were said to have been wiped out by our ancestors, by white people. ancestors, ancestors of white people.

[04:29]

But that wasn't the case. That was just the people who had the power over institutions and had the power to say things like that. The Ramitesh have been living and continue to live in various ways in the Bay Area and even in San Francisco. Our training in Zen asks us to do the best we can to be in relationship more and more. We have been making land acknowledgments in our Dharma talks, and I just wanted to go a little bit further with that and talk about land acknowledgment is very important, but it's important to really try to be in relationship as best we possibly can. Present training asks us to open to all phenomena, so back in history, forward into the future.

[05:34]

It asks us to, in the present, turn around, to the best of our ability, our karmic responsibilities, so that the future will be different than if we didn't address our karmic responsibilities. And we have to begin right here, where we sit. We begin not just here in this body, but in this place. That's why we do this strange thing. Those of you who've been into our Zendo, we bow to our cushions. And then we turn around and we bow to the rest of the Zendo. And my understanding is... This is what it is that I'm always doing anyway. Hopefully someone will straighten me out if this isn't what I'm supposed to be doing. But I promise you, someone will. I'm pretty sure it's what I'm supposed to be doing. I'm bowing. When I bow to the cushion, I'm bowing to everyone who sat on that cushion before me and everyone who's going to sit in the future.

[06:42]

I'm bowing to the people who made the cushion. I'm bowing... to the people who pick the beans or the kapok that's inside of the cushion. And feeling this kind of connection and trying to feel that kind of connection throughout our day is our Zen training and it's what opens us up. It opens up our awareness. We say that it opens up our heart-mind, hopefully, eventually, to all phenomena. I'm not quite there yet, but I'm doing the best I can. And this is the training that we practice in our more esoteric writing. We call this going beyond birth and death. And people hear this... And it's very inspiring, the idea of opening up to the past and the future, right here in the present, opening up through space and time.

[07:55]

It's very inspiring. It's aspirational. It attracts those who need the Dharma, the teachings of the Buddha, as a treatment for their suffering. It's not always enjoyable, however. This can be a big disappointment for some people who come around, but not a surprise to most people who come around. Zen is not about always living in bliss. And right now in history, in America, in California, right now, just like making a karmic connection with native people, it's very painful to be alive. after two presidential impeachments, a bitter election, an insurrection in the capital, and over 500,000 people killed by this virus, COVID, many people living in seclusion of their homes.

[09:11]

On top of it, we are having to enter once again into the question of our racial relations in our culture. And once again, the denial is being ripped away and we have to dive once again into this great and painful wound of racism, the trial of George Floyd's murder is bringing back to us once again. And I had to investigate it as a white male, racialized in a culture that is dominated by white males. I had to do it from the standpoint of the group who have benefited the most from the division. There was a time last year, probably 10 months ago, where even though I knew about my privilege as a white male, and I had spent my entire life as an anti-racist, it was only the death of George Floyd and the aftermath of it

[10:44]

that it was made clear to me that everything I have in my life, my education, my housing, my intimate relationships, all of my relationships, I have in my life because I'm a white male living in a white dominated society. This is very hard to have made patently clear to me, but it's undeniable. And I have to look at it, my Zen training tells me. Investigate, said Dogen. Investigate, investigate. He's constantly admonishing us to study. Study this. Study this deeply. Now, some are not convinced that the investigation of racism is useful to us as Buddhists, but we have to investigate suffering in all of its forms as they arise in the place we are with the language, no matter how limited that we have.

[12:05]

And we investigate it because it's what we call delusion. And delusion, the Buddha said, is what stands in the way of our awakening. We cling to the delusions, said the Buddha, that we won't get old, we won't get sick, and we won't die. But those weren't the only delusions that we had, as it's turned out over the last 2,500 years. There's... Lots of delusions that we have, myriad delusions. That was true for the Buddha in his time, because he continued to teach after he became enlightened for 40 years. And it was true in the time of Dogen, myriad delusions, and it's true for us now. Koshio Uchiyama, who was a great...

[13:11]

teacher and Dogen scholar and sort of a cousin to us, our lineage. He said, we must enter into delusion. We must enter into delusion as a way to investigate it. We don't push it away. We don't try to get rid of it. We enter into it to investigate it. And in that way, it can begin to break down. At San Francisco Zen Center, where I've been coming to City Center for over 20, a little bit over 20 years now, two decades. Just seems like yesterday, my first time that I came terrified through those doors. But we've been studying racism that whole time in lots of different ways. We haven't been studying it always in the ways that everyone wanted us to be studying it, and perhaps the changes from that studying hasn't occurred at the pace that many people have wanted it to come.

[14:18]

But the studying of it has been consistent in the time that I've been there. The conversation has changed as the conditioning around racism has changed. Tova Green, our beloved Tova Green has for some time now been holding the Unpacking Whiteness group that is now meeting once a month. You can find that on our website. And the Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility Committee has recently started having monthly workshops for those of us in the community. And we've had two of them so far. And in the first one, we were asked to look at a talk by Professor Ibram X. Kindy, who is an amazing and wonderful scholar and writer who's written about the history of racism.

[15:25]

and has written a book called How to Be an Antiracist. And in this book, or in the talk that he gave, he likened racism to addiction. He likened it to a disease that we have that we know is very bad for us. It's killing us in many ways. but we continue doing it. And it's very similar to addiction. He talked about the denial that there is in racism and around racism for whites and how it is that it's a broad spectrum of denial from anything to... Things are much better now for African-Americans and people of color than they have been in the past.

[16:30]

We live in a post-racial society where racism is no longer in existence. That was the case during the Obama years. That was argued by many people. These are all the different forms of denial that there are. And the role that denial plays in addiction is what it is that perpetuates it. in fact and i'm familiar i'm very familiar with that kind of denial because uh for almost as long as i was a i've been a buddhist i was before that an alcoholic and a drug addict and i've been in recovery uh in fact it was my the beginning of my recovery that brought me to zen center in the first place Recovery comes in lots of different forms. There's lots of different kinds of recovery, and oftentimes people mix together a bunch of different things.

[17:32]

So I went to outpatient clinic for a while, and I went to a bunch of different kinds of meetings, and I started to build a community of other people who were in recovery. I had lots of therapy, lots of group therapy and individual therapy, all kinds of therapy. And I needed all of it because the conditioning of addiction is so very deep. Because I was killing myself, I worked very hard at it. I practiced as my recovery as if my hair was on fire. And although, once again, it's something that I stopped doing, I haven't had a drink or any drugs for over two decades, I'm still an addict. And I felt like this is something that Ibram X. Kindy was bringing up.

[18:42]

I continue to investigate my addiction. the addictive side of me. I continue to investigate that and go deeper and deeper. I use the tools of recovery that I have chosen. I've continued sort of off and on to go to therapy, I call it. I go back to therapy when I'm in extremis, I call it. I can tell when there's something big coming up that is not being addressed by my recovery and only can be addressed by therapy and I feel very grateful to be able to have been able to be able to identify when that is and to have that available to me also in large part because I'm white. My friend Roger at City Center, he doesn't actually live there now, but he will be back there again.

[19:49]

He's been there coming to City Center for a long time as well. And he and I, we're translating some of the tools around addiction for treatment for addiction and applying them to racism right now. And this is all to investigate as deeply as we can with as many tools as we can gather to help us investigate the delusion. around racism. Once again, Dogon admonishes us to investigate. In the Genjo Koan, he says, and I quote, those who have great realization of delusion are Buddhists, end quote. Investigate, investigate, study, study, and this leads to realization.

[20:50]

This leads to awakening. In Quoke, he says, those who are greatly deluded about realization are sentient beings. So many of us are attracted to this idea of going beyond birth and death. We're attracted to the idea of enlightenment. We're attracted to various elements of Zen Buddhism. But we can't bypass... the painful and difficult delusions that we have. We can't just focus on the meditation or the dogon or the silence. We are bodhisattvas in training and so Avalokiteshvara bodhisattva asks us to hear the cries of the world. Oftentimes the cause of those cries are the delusions that we can investigate on a daily basis. Once again, Dogen says in the Genja Koan, quote, further, there are those who continue realization beyond realization and those who are in delusion throughout delusion.

[22:05]

In other words, there are those who are stuck in an endless cycle of self-perpetuating delusion. And that sounds to me like not fully entering into delusion, facing delusion, as it presents itself to us as a Dharma gate every day in our lives. So in many of the different ways of treatments that there are for addiction, there's such a thing that many of you will have heard of called a bottom, reaching a bottom. In Zen, we have sort of an equivalent which is called uh uh receiving turning words so it's an awakening and in recovery we say you have to reach a bottom because delusion and denial are the the form of delusion and addiction denial is so strong it has to be broken somehow and um

[23:14]

Bottoms are different for everyone, but most of us say you've got to reach some kind of a point, and it's not possible to spell that out for someone else, for someone who's an addict. It's personally identified by the addict and treated by the addict according to the addict's ability to break through the denial. It's different for everyone. For some people, it's an event in addiction. A lot of people get into like terrible car accidents or they injure someone and occasionally they kill someone by accident, usually. Sometimes addicts overdose. I've known addicts who have overdosed multiple times and for some reason, the seventh time or the 15th time that they overdosed was when it is that they reached their bottom. Some people have dramatic breakups. They lose their houses.

[24:17]

They lose their jobs. They get divorced. Their children are taken away from them. For me, mine was not very dramatic at all. My bottom lasted six years. It was very dull. I was what's called a maintenance user and drinker, which basically means that you are doing this very special balancing act between reality and denial and trying to make it so you don't have to come to terms with the fact that you're an addict and an alcoholic and therefore don't have to get into recovery. So you don't really have any drama. You don't lose your job. You try to work at something that you can do and not lose that job. But it's very, very painful. It's really painful. It was the bottom, and it lasted six years for me.

[25:18]

It's a downward spiral, like that downward delusion upon delusion that Dogen was talking about. Now, for most addicts, certainly for me, your bottom is traumatic. It's a period of trauma. And trauma is a very broad topic, one we have been taking out more and more in our Zen practice as we see it as an experience, trauma that is, that people share as a form of suffering. It's hard to say about trauma that it's a spectrum. Some people have event trauma. So some people go through a traumatic physical event or series of events around physical or sexual abuse. For some people, trauma is cumulative.

[26:21]

So, for instance, for many women and many members of the LGBTQI community, it's cumulative over their lifetimes. The trauma is built up from trauma. both microaggressions and macroaggressions. And watching as I have over the last several days at different times in the day, watching the news, over and over again I've heard how the experience of having this trial is re-traumatizing people. It's retraumatizing the commentators who speak about it. It's retraumatizing the witnesses who were there. It's retraumatizing many of the people who took to the streets and demonstrated against this continual line of killing of black men, of African-American men.

[27:31]

But I hear also over and over again from African-Americans how it's been a permanent state of trauma for the black community, that it goes back 500 years for African-Americans in this country. The only thing that's different right now is that we're able to see it in the white community because it's being recorded and it's being transmitted very quickly. And this is a huge difference. We see in front of us and are continuing to be shown again the killing of a human being in front of us. And for some, it's too much to see.

[28:39]

It's important for me to watch it, even though it makes me physically sick. And it's important for me to hear when I hear African-Americans saying, this is how it's always been. We must enter into the delusion that we've had around racism. It's difficult. It's exhausting, but it's necessary in order for us to practice honestly as Buddhists. And we talk a lot about practice. It's a relatively benign word for doing what it is that is oftentimes extremely painful. Our practice asks us to turn towards the truth in all its forms. We enter into practice no matter how painful it is.

[29:46]

We do it in community, which is what we're doing right here. This is called sangha. Even if this is your first time here, we're entering into this practice of breaking through delusion together. We do it with wisdom. So we look after ourselves and we look after each other. this is a dharma gate for us to enter. We're constantly talking about dharma gates. People roll their eyes at San Francisco, dead sense, and it's difficult things of dharma gates. A bottom in addiction is a dharma gate. It's a gate that if you reach a good bottom, we talk about good bottoms, if you reach a good bottom and you enter in deeply into recovery... And you can have successful recovery if you have a good bottom and enter fully into that dharma gate. After 20 years in recovery, I have to say that I'm actually very grateful to be an addict right now.

[30:55]

I wish that I wasn't an addict and we don't know how much of it is environmental, how much of it is genetic. But I'm only grateful for it, I know, because of the recovery that I have around it. And so it has been a source of inspiration for me to continue this investigation. And I get special knowledge. People who are addicts in recovery get special knowledge that non-addicts don't get. We get to study craving and attachment in its very deepest form. And we have to study it because if we don't, we will die. And for that special knowledge, I'm very, very grateful. But it doesn't mean that I'm not an addict. I'm still an addict. And this was Professor Kindy's point, is that we can continue to live and be conditioned in a racist culture, but can get some recovery around it.

[32:03]

So in this way, racism is a disease, just like addiction is considered a disease by the American Medical Association, a very conservative organization that doesn't easily come around to new descriptions. But to the AMA, addiction is a disease. And many people have been thinking of racism as a virus. is a disease that is transmitted between individuals who are careless or not taking responsibility for the possibility that they are infected already. And I think that it might be possible with recovery to begin to get the lessons from entering deeply into the delusion around racism that I've been able to get around drug addiction and alcoholism.

[33:14]

Now, I just want to close by mentioning some people who I don't think really get thanked enough from this seat right here. And... They are the members of the Central Committee of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity and Accessibility Central Committee. And those are Lindy Galleon and Joe Rodriguez, my dear Dharma brother, Eli Brown Stevenson, the indefatigable Tova Green, civil rights activist for decades, Green Gulch abiding abbess Fu Schroeder, City Center abiding abbess David Zimmerman, for work that they have sometimes been not always supported for, and Lauren Boye as well.

[34:24]

I hope that's not her married name. She's been married recently. But I just really want to thank them all for the work that they've been doing. And I am very hopeful for us as an institution and perhaps foolishly hopeful for us as a society that we'll be able to learn the great lessons that racism will teach us as we enter into the bottom that we have. Thank you all very much for listening. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered free of charge and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[35:26]

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