the Saturday Dharma talk at San Francisco Zen Center. At the invitation of our head of practice, the speaker for this morning is Duncan Ryuken Williams. Duncan Ryuken Williams is professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California. He is also the director of the USC Shinzo Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture. Ryuken was also ordained as a Soto Zen priest in 1993 at Kotakuji Temple in Nagano, Japan, and received his PhD from Harvard University in 2000. Ryuken is the author of many books and collections, including American Sutra and The Other Side of Zen. Welcome to you all. We will begin with the Sutra opening verse, which you see in the chat. Please follow along with microphones muted. and perfect dharma is rarely met with, even in a hundred thousand million kalpas, having it to see and listen to, to remember and accept.

[09:00]

I vow to taste the truth of the Tathagata's words. Well, good morning, everyone. So nice to join you. I'm further south from you in Los Angeles, but very nice to join you by this method. I believe last time I visited San Francisco Zen Center was when the book American Sutra first came out in 2019, what Kodo mentioned. And so I'm glad to join you now and see some old friends on the video. And well, I'd like to today give some kind of talk, Dharma talk or Dharma message that well relates to some things that I'm working on around a Buddhist monument right now.

[10:04]

And usually, you know, sometimes I get the guidance of like, everyone is right now studying, like a couple of weeks ago, Green Gulch asked me to see it. And they were like, everybody's studying sandokai. So you should say something. So I did something like that. But it gave me a lot of freedom to say whatever I want. So today, if you don't mind, I'm going to share with you some things that are on my mind and alive for me in my thinking and practice of Buddhism. And it has something to do with building this monument. And I want to use that as a way to reflect on ancestors, reflect on these days we've been calling karma of a nation, but like the kind of racial history of United States of America. And then thinking about how to repair some of the hurt and damages of, you know, racialized,

[11:11]

violence and so forth and exclusions and that kind of thing. So I want to share with you, if it's okay, a slide PowerPoint, and then from there, be able to talk you through this up until I think 11 a.m. So I don't know if, you know, I think some of you I've seen come to my temple in LA, little Tokyo, temple, so it's your mission. And so some of you, I think, will know the person in this photograph, Reverend Kenko Yamashita. He was a former, I believe he was eighth, no, I'm sorry, 10th abbot of our temple. And next year, we're celebrating centennial, so 100 years. And then He was a 10th one, Abbot, and an eighth Kaikyo Fukyo Sokan, so the Bishop of North America, Soto Zen Buddhism.

[12:20]

And so he served, some of the maybe older members of your temple will know him, and he served Zen Shuji and served as bishop late 1960s into the late 1980s, which is, I was a college student at that time, and I got to know him maybe two years before I became ordained, but I want to start with him because of our connection as Soto Zen Buddhist people, and we have a little bit different, of course, lineage of people, but we are like cousins, so I wanted to mention, you know, Reverend Yamashita, and how should we say, there's a little text in the It's hard to read in Japanese, but it's basically his memoir. And when I first met him, I asked him a little bit about his history with the temple and also with the Japanese-American community since Zenshuji is a historic Japanese-American temple in little Tokyo.

[13:29]

And he mentioned something about the fact that during World War II, he, like many other members of the community, was put in some kind of internment camp. And that the temple suffered during that time, and many families were separated. And he makes a slight mention of this in the memoir, but it's a memoir called Donguri Korokoro. It just means like a chestnut that is rolling down the hill kind of thing. And so he had a very kind of flippant way of talking about, oh, it wasn't... such a bad thing, but, you know, some members, we experienced some hardships and so forth. And over the time, I came to learn that when he was a young man like this, this is 19, a photograph of him in like 1939 or something like that, he, he, you know, was at the Zenishuji Temple and also taught at the Riverside Japanese Language School. At that time, it's very common for our temples to also, because the first generation people couldn't speak much English, to have these language schools so that, you know, the American-born children could speak to their parents.

[14:40]

So he was an instructor in Japanese language and culture, as well as Buddhism. And... This is him with his wife crossing, you know, on the Tayomaru boat coming to the United States. And then the other photo is of him inside the Santa Fe internment camp in New Mexico. And he, over time, told us a story about his time during the war where his wife was pregnant. And they already had... two small children, but one baby on the way when Pearl Harbor happened. And that right after Pearl Harbor, a few weeks later, the FBI came to arrest both him and also his wife, because she was also teaching at the language school. And Buddhist priests and Japanese language school teachers were seen at that time in the United States by the government as a threat to national security.

[15:42]

And so the FBI came to arrest him. They had arrest warrants for both him and his wife. And when, thankfully, the FBI agent in charge of the arrest had the warrant, but then he saw the two kids and he felt bad that if he took both the mom and the dad, the two children would have no parents. And then also she was pregnant. So he ripped up his wife's, the wife's, warrant of arrest, and took Reverend Yamashita just by himself. And if you come to Zenshuji today, or you know our temple and have had tea ceremony there, you know that the head of the tea club at the temple is Hiromi Yamashita, the daughter, the one that was pregnant at the time of the Pearl Harbor. She was born in one of the camps, and she's now the head of our our tea club. But this is a type of temple, you know, that I'm affiliated with.

[16:49]

So I try to learn about our history and who came before us, all of our ancestors and who is in our lineage. And so I wanted to share that little anecdote with you about, you know, we're like our cousin temples. So like inside of our Soto Zen lineage, we have this kind of interesting type of history that is related to how in the United States sometimes race as well as religion can be the ways in which some people are included or excluded or made normal, regular citizens or kind of like second-class citizens and so forth. I wanted to just introduce that as a way to say that, you know, this is the current abbot of our temple, Kojima Sensei, I think many of you know.

[17:51]

He drew this picture about my book about what happened during back then in World War II. It's a book called American Sutra about Buddhism and both how Buddhism and being Asian American at that time was seen as problematic in America and as grounds for arresting people, putting them in different camps, but also how Buddhism was a kind of, you know, repository, a refuge from the teachings and practices and from Sangha community, how to endure, persevere in that moment when you lose your freedom or your life is disrupted. And so I'm just going to reference briefly this historical moment about the different camps that people went to. Reverend Yamashita went to a whole bunch of them, the one in Santa Fe in New Mexico. And eventually he reunites with his family in a place called Crystal City in Texas.

[18:56]

It was called the Crystal City Family Reunification Camp, but it was one of the places that these families that have been separated were able to come together. Still behind barbed wire with armed guards, but at least they're together again. And so I wanted to just say a quick word about why people, our temple and other temples vandalized during World War II, why people were picked up and why temples had been under surveillance. I just wanted to mention that the very first person right after Pearl Harbor, even before the smoke had cleared after the attack on December, 7th, 1941. The first person picked up was a, you know, Humpahonganji Buddhist priest, head of the main Hawaii temple in Honolulu. And the second person picked up was Taiheiji Sotozen Temple Buddhist priest. And here you see Reverend Asayadai getting picked up from the Shingonji Mission in Liliha Street in Honolulu.

[20:05]

And so, how should we say, somehow Buddhist priests we were considered somehow danger to the nation. And we were on these lists. For example, Reverend Miyamoto, you can see his FBI case file form where he's clearly marked as being picked up on December 8th. And then he's in group A, individuals believed to be most dangerous, who in all probability should be interned in the event of war. The Buddhist priest as a category of person was deemed like a threat national security. And this is his arrest warrant and it's getting picked up. But where does this come from? And so I want to move into this idea that recently we've had at our neighbor temple, also a little Tokyo kind of vandalism. And we have been hearing about the kind of anti-Asian

[21:09]

animus and violence and vandalism, things like this happening over the last year and some. But this is not new. And I just wanted to make a note that the Buddhist people, from the very beginning of American Buddhism, before Japanese people, were Chinese people. And they formed the first temples and communities, sanghas around the country. And they were also seen as a threat. because you're in San Francisco, I think you'll find it kind of amusing. But like, for example, this pamphlet from 1873 talking about the fear of establishment of a heathen Chinese despotism in San Francisco and warnings about a Chinese invasion. There are so many migrants coming and the need in Harper's Weekly in this illustration to build a Chinese wall symbolically on the Pacific to keep a certain country people out because of their not just racial difference, but the fact that they're heathen or not Christian.

[22:15]

So the assumption that I think Buddhist people have tried to, and including Reverend Yamashita, was trying to handle in his times was, and I feel like it may be even an enduring problem today, is that there's a generalized notion of America as a white Christian nation, one that The norm or the standard is one of being white and being Christian is normal. And that if you are neither religiously or racially, that somehow you're un-American, if not anti-American. In this set of images, I think you can see what I'm trying to get at. That conflation of race and religion that has... long been a part of our nation's thinking about how we understand belonging, citizenship, and so forth. Here, you know, on the right is literally the term was the yellow peril, this kind of mass of Asians coming over.

[23:22]

And here it's symbolized, right, by the Buddha appearing in those dark, ominous clouds approaching a land of illumination, a land illuminated by the Christian cross. And this idea of a threat that is coming from the yellow peoples or the Asian peoples. And then during World War II itself, that same thematic in another different popular magazine, you can see this militarized tank with the Buddha on top of it and a samurai figure in the back, that kind of idea of the Japanese and Buddhism and kind of military attack, all kind of coming together. And I think when I talk to my Muslim American friends, especially post 9-11, they also get conflated that way of like somehow their religion is somehow linked to some kind of threat to national security. It's all kind of lumped together in these kind of large groupings of masses of people that are somehow very dangerous.

[24:25]

And so I wanted to offer a different vision or different way to think about America that is one about multiplicity that is about hybridity so multiplicity instead of singularity or hybridity instead of purity because usually the reason why and by the way it's not just you know United States but Buddhists engage in this kind of thing too sometimes I think we all know about the case of Myanmar and how there are political parties there, literally titled the Party for the Protection of Race and Religion, meaning the Burmese people and their Buddhism against the Rohingya people who are Muslim. And somehow the idea of some kind of need to protect some monolithic, singular, not only race, but also... peoples in this kind of supremacy.

[25:27]

You can find it in Modi's international. It's not limited to the United States. But in the United States, there have always been some voices of people who've had an alternate view of what is America and what America aspires to be. And so when the Chinese were being excluded, and of course, you may all know that in 1881, there was the first federal immigration law that says certain people shouldn't be here because of their race and their religion. The slur word used was the heathen chini, this kind of religiously unacceptable and racially unassimilable group to which somebody like Frederick Douglass in his famous 1869 speech in Boston, sometimes called the composite nation speech, gives a very strong articulation of and vision of a nation that is composed has a kind of composite nature, a hybrid nature, one that is multiple in its makeup of race, ethnicity, creed.

[26:34]

And it's a different vision of America, one that is multi-ethnic in nature, and two, religiously plural, in fact, being inspired by religious freedom. requires plurality as opposed to singularity. And so Douglas made a really important case for inclusion of Asian Americans. He also made a point about immigration to America that had to do with himself as a formerly enslaved person. He became known as a great orator and thinker, but of course he had his own life as an enslaved person and a great abolitionist. He gave a vision that I think is, to me, like a Buddhist vision. And it's kind of reflected in, you know, Reverend Imamura Emiyo's comments about the hybrid and mixed race.

[27:40]

Like, you know, today, Japanese Americans are about 50%, 1.3 million Japanese Americans, about 50% are multiracial, Black and Japanese, Latino and Japanese, lots of different mixture of people. And that orientation towards hybridity, mixture, and not about some kind of purity and protection of it, because I think we Buddhists recognize the interlinked nature of reality. We recognize the dynamic, impermanence and change of people, of artificial categories like race. So I think there is a way to talk about America that is not about exclusion and about purity, but one about America as a nation of becoming a nation of...

[28:41]

plurality and composed of people of different backgrounds. And so what I want to do today is talk a little bit about what I'm trying to do recently to think about issues about Buddhist approaches to race relations, to reparations, to remembrance about America's racial history. and this particular project I'm doing about names and about building a names monument for people like Reverend Kenko Yamashita and his wife, and even his daughter is still, you know, she was born in camp, but she's still alive. I'm making a monument to all of the people who experienced incarceration back in World War II as a kind of Buddhist, just one project, like a Buddhist project for people remembrance and reparation. So before I talk about that in particular, I want to kind of zone out for a second and talk about kind of ways that we, you know, what are the tools we have and the ways to see things analytically from a Buddhist perspective when it comes to trying to reflect on and reckon with America's racial past and where we are in the present.

[30:03]

And I think... because this is not news, but we have two major lines of thinking in Buddhism, one represented by majamaka and kind of deconstruction into emptiness and the other represented by yogachara and mind only and the kind of idea of being able to imagine worlds. And so we, on the one hand, you know, every day we chant, whether in Japanese or I guess in the English way, you may also chant this no eyes or ears, all of the no's. in our tradition, the negation and the deconstruction of things we imagine to be real or solid or permanent, or we deconstruct it. So that's the, you know, from Nagarjuna on, very important line of thinking in our lineage.

[31:09]

And then we also have, as you can see here in the quotation from Nagarjuna, that we also have a lineage of thinking that because it's empty, our world is playful and we can imagine things. And in fact, imagination, creativity is a kind of major way to also get past our karmic, you know, things we inherit as stuck things, stereotypes and artificial notions of things that sometimes having some creative or imaginative way is also a very important way to freedom. So we have two styles of analysis. And so what I want to do today is kind of maybe lean, well, talk a little bit about these two things and then lean into one a little bit more.

[32:16]

So on the emptiness side, this is something, and this is how I'm going to, eventually I'm going to connect it to Y ancestors and whatnot. But in our own lineage, you know, in Soto Shu lineage, we have idea of emptiness or empty circle as the circle before, you know, that we chant all these names in our lineage and that we understand ourselves to be in some kind of line of transmission and line of teaching and line of... that is ultimately also linked to the empty circle. And so, you know, we have many, many, how should we say, teachings and images from... our history and our lineage. Very, of course, the famously beyond Ketchi Miyako is the ten oxardine pictures, and we see the, and so there, and very important, you know, kind of commentary about how ultimately we join the ancestors when we

[33:43]

understand this aspect of ourselves and then but that also we are also just as we are and we are also as we come in particular karmic formations and so I've been trying to think out of all of that how to think about reparations, racial reparations, how to deal with, when I say all of that we hold, I mean like, so we have a book club that I've been running with another professor in African-American studies and so forth. But then this is what I wanted to try to link it back to lineage and ancestors and why we should care about the karmic imprints that we receive from those who have come before.

[34:47]

And this is a photo, well, one is about this in Little Tokyo, a group of Buddhist people got together in the period when we were, how should we say, linking what Asian American people and also other Buddhist people in general can say and do regarding the issue of police violence and black lives, that discussion. And you can see on the left-hand side, I've got a certificate in my hand. It's a naturalization certificate. And it was actually in the midst of all of the protests that was going on on of all days, just a kind of go-in or karmic, I don't know, mysterious karmic causes and conditions.

[35:49]

But on Juneteenth of 2020, I became a US citizen. And that day is really about the history of delay, right? That news about the abolition of slavery gets to that part of Texas a little bit late. And there's always this kind of story about America aspires to certain ideals, but it's late in getting there. Or it takes time. And one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot about citizenship, especially because I'm a new citizen, is these comments I sometimes get from inside immigrant society. groups and communities, like, hey, Duncan, I know you're talking a lot about America's racial past, but we weren't, you know, our ancestors weren't involved with that.

[36:51]

We weren't enslaved people. We weren't slave owners. We weren't. So why should we care about those type of issues? We have enough problems as, you know. So I've been thinking about that a lot. Why should everybody these days still care about the legacy of racism, how it's embedded and structured into even, you know, these enduring qualities that kind of pop up again and again, even in our current times. Why should we care about all of this? And it's a big coin, you know, it's a good question. And so I've been talking a lot with Larry Ward, one of the teachers in the... Thich Nhat Plum Village lineage. And we've been doing a lot of meetings and thinking through. He wrote a very, very nice book. I'm going to recommend to everybody if you haven't read it. It's called America's Racial Karma. But the term, the karma of a nation, originally I learned about it some, you know, many years ago when I was doing research for American Sutra.

[38:02]

about this term that was raised by Reverend Kyoshiro Tokunaga of San Jose Buddhist Temple's Jodo Shinshi Temple in the Bay Area. And he, like Reverend Yamashita, was taken by the FBI to one of these internment camps. And he was very ill on the train ride. And one of the African-American train porters kind of nursed him back to health. And also during that time, they had a chance to talk about what was happening and reflecting on different communities' experience of racial discrimination and so forth. And after the war, he went to the same camp as Reverend Yamashita in Texas. And at that time, they had, I guess, trains were segregated into black and white, and he didn't know which section to go to. But because of his conversation with black poor, he went to the black section.

[39:04]

And after the war, he would talk a lot about this idea that it's not just individuals, but that nations have a karma and that we inherit that. And so when I think about things as a newer citizen, I talk to different people about what have they inherited in their minds and in their bodies, both the positive things as well as negative things that we inherit from those who've come before us, our ancestors. What can we do to take all of those ingredients and, you know, Dogan's Senzo Kyokun way, cook it into something worthy? And so when, you know, as you know, I mentioned earlier, We had a vandalism at our own temple, you know, neighborhood temple. And in Orange County, a few miles south from us, six different temples were vandalized. And what do you call it? Graffiti was put on the statuaries outside.

[40:05]

Some people put Jesus on the back of one of the statues. You know, people like your neighbor in San Francisco, many people saw that security camera footage from earlier in the year about... and being kind of attacked senselessly, Thai community coming, you know, Buddhist community coming around to help the family and the Atlanta shoot. There's so many things that have been happening. And I realized that one of the things that we often face in these things is because Asian people or black people, like somehow it's seen as some kind of amorphous group Remember those, like, these heathens that are coming? Like, it's just, it's like nobody can attend to people carefully as a jewel in the jewel of Indra, but it's just this murky, you know, so it's not as particulars. And so there's a whole history, at least with Japanese-Americans and Asian-Americans, you know, of, like, during the camp days, you just a number, you get a tag with a number on it.

[41:15]

The other things are called bongo. The first Japanese that came to America and settled in Hawaiian Islands, they worked on the sugar plantation. Nobody cared about their names. It just was a number, 405-7369, like that. And so I started thinking these days about a lot of importance about the names. in one of the most important books on Black reparations by A. Kirsten Mullen and William Darity from Duke, From Here to Equality, they put the photograph of the names of those who experienced racial terrorism in the American South in the form of lynching. And this is the so-called national, you know, formerly the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally and more commonly known as the lynching memorial in Alabama, where the names from each of these different counties in the American South where lynching happened there, they did the research to find out the names and honor the individuals, not just a mass of people, individuals who experience this kind of thing.

[42:39]

And this is the kind of way of doing You know, there's reparations in the kind of like Christian sense, there's reparations in the kind of fiscal sense. But I think there's something a little bit different about this kind of reparations, about remembrance and honoring and ancestors. So when I say Christian sense, I mean like originally the word reparation comes from the, you know, the Catholic tradition. Yeah. reparations for the mass of Christ, you know, in the French late medieval period, there are lots of these things to atone for original sin, the idea of that. And, you know, Martin Luther King often referred to that kind of idea of a slavery is America's original sin, the need for recompense fiscally, you know, 40 acres on a meal, but that... check and bounce. So there's many things that refer back to that kind of idea.

[43:40]

But I think there's a different way that we can, as Buddhist people, understand reparations and racial repair work that is not Christian-based or isn't based on some kind of idea of this is the originary. Because I'm always like, a way to say genocide of Native Americans, you know, that's earlier than, you know, translating slave trade. Like, It's not like there's only one singular thing. It's a bunch of interlinked histories that constitute America's racial past. And we need to think in multiplicity and not as some kind of singular origin as in, you know, I think a more Christian way of thinking. And so I've been thinking about names in terms of, you know, Buddhist practice of ninbutsu. Of course, in Soto Shu, we don't chant in quite the same way as my colleagues in Jodo Shu or Jodo Shin Shu or whatever.

[44:44]

But, you know, in their lineage, so important, and we do it too, where we chant the names of the Buddhas. We also chant every morning, the names of all the ancestors in our lineage. And, you know, originally, Buddha Anusmirti, the idea of originally meant to visualize, to make appear by your imagination the Buddha who is no longer there. Because the Buddha was there and then left teachings but died. And so we sometimes take refuge in the teaching of Dharma. But we also try to recall and say the name of the Buddha to you know, make the Buddha alive today. And so it's a Buddha of our past, but it's also our own Buddha. We come to actualize it when we utter things.

[45:50]

So this is a power, you know, in also our Sotoshi tradition. So we have very strong influence from... Mantra, [...] and, and, and, and it's took Buddhist lineage tradition of utterance as a way to make something absent, real, manifest, actualized. So that's why some of you from San Francisco also joined me, you know, when we went to do some protests some years ago now, when the former Japanese American internment camp was going to be used for Central American migrant children. more recently Fort Bliss in Texas, and earlier this was Fort Sill in Oklahoma. We went to say the names of the people who passed away back in World War II in that camp, shot by guards, and that kind of thing, and worried about children and others who've lost their lives in border patrol and ice detention facilities today, because these exclusions around religion when it comes to...

[46:56]

travel bans around Muslims or race when it comes to the same kind of fears of migrant caravans invading America on the American southern border. This is kind of history repeating itself. And so we have held many ceremonies. This is in little Tokyo ceremony where we did ceremonies for different groups of people, individuals who we named. After we chant our sutras, we dedicate the merit, any positive merit to the people and have their names be highlighted. And so this gets me to what I'm trying to build, some kind of monument of all the people like Reverend Yamashita, who back in World War II experienced incarceration. This is a picture of Reverend Shinjo Nagatomi. father of my mentor and teacher in Buddhist studies at Harvard University when I was a graduate student.

[48:02]

His father, I started that American Stitcher's project because I found this man's World War II diaries from Manzanar in my professor's office after my professor suddenly passed away. And I translated for the family and that became this almost like 17 year process of trying to write that book to honor Reverend Nagatomi. He was, at the time, one of the only Buddhist priests in this camp called Manzanar in California. And he was performing so many funerals and memorial services because those barracks were very hastily built and poorly constructed. And so many babies and elderly people passing away that first winter into spring. And for Obom period, which I think all of you know, in summertime, we have a major ritual for ancestors. remembering especially called Nibon, the first Obon of people who've passed away that previous year. He wanted to build a monument, and it's called the Iretō. Tō means tower, i means to console, and re means the spirits, the spirits of the recently deceased as well as the ancestors.

[49:13]

And he wanted to build this, and the Young Buddhist Association... kind of built it out of concrete, and he dedicated on Obon of 1943, this monument. And so in honor of this monument, which still stands in the California desert, in the cemetery section of that camp, one of the only things that survived from the period, kind of inspired by that, I'm trying to build a physical installation but also a book of names, just like we have, you know, I don't know if at Zen Center you have the same thing, but most temples in Loto, we have our kakochou on the right-hand side of the altar. It's the... book of names of the temple members who, you know, we do like a monthly memorial service. We read after the sutras, all the names of the people, for example, that passed away in November. We read all the names from founding of the temple to now.

[50:15]

And so we have a tradition of putting names in books as a kind of sacred act of remembrance. And by uttering their names, we kind of recall them back into the present moment. And so I wanted to build a website, an actual physical monument where we project the names and so on and so forth. I won't go into so much detail, and I want to make sure I leave time for questions, so I'll stop talking, I promise. But during World War II, the one in Manzanar is on the right from more present times, and then the rower one built by Reverend Hayashima Daitets, another Buddhist priest in Arkansas. cemetery of the camps there. These type of structures, I'm using it to kind of help design a new monument where we will kind of using light projection over one hour period show the names of 125,000 approximately individuals to kind of recall this history.

[51:25]

And We are going to make it in a ceramic form and build it like the Iretto of Manzanar, but with cracks built into the ceramic to recall a way of thinking about repair work that is from a very long Buddhist and Japanese cultural kind of heritage. And so I think many of you know, you know, in the pottery world or ceramics world, that we have a repair tradition called kintsugi. Tsugi comes from the verb tsugu, to join, or in this case, rejoin. And then kin means gold. But it's the practice of when, you know, if you have a tea ceremony cup that you break or favor... plate or anything, it doesn't happen, but it's something that you, it seems wrong to throw away.

[52:32]

We try to repair it, and we use the lacquer to do the rejoining, and then on top of the rejoined cracks, put the, line it with gold. And to me, this is a metaphor for a Buddhist way of thinking about reparations, because it's, it's a way of saying reparations must start with, with a reckoning with, you know, hurt and breakage and fissures and, and, and that we're not going to hide away or look away from it. But in fact, we're going to refix it, repair it, heal it, and enhance it with gold, gold, you know, Of course, in the fiscal sense of fiduciary type of reparations, but gold in the sense of it's not something we shy away from, but we highlight and enhance.

[53:32]

And so, you know, Dogenzenji Shisho, you know, one of the chapter fascicles, I think they have studied. He has an important comment. about his own understanding of what we receive from ancestors. And he's in this quote, he's talking about meeting, you know, one of his teachers in China and being shown a particular kind of transmission document. As the first ancestor, Mahakashapa was awakened by Shakyamuni Buddha. Shakyamuni Buddha, was awakened by Kachapa Buddha. And then he says this is something really moving for him to understand what is the authentic way of transmission and what is the way that the Buddha ancestors come to help a descendant.

[54:39]

And it kind of raises the question of who is doing the... teaching and who is doing the receiving and who is, and how should we say, you know, we do recitation of names at memorial services. So we make, we make these things when, you know, one of our temple family, we lose a family member or, or it's a memorial. It might be seventh year anniversary or 13th year or something. And, and it seems like. our rituals are supposed to be we chant and create merit of different kinds and we transfer to the ancestors. And so we're trying to like assist them. But I think what doge is intimating and what I think we kind of all know is that sometimes when we do the ceremony, it's not about what are we doing to help

[55:41]

people of the past. That's true. We do some things. By doing some things now, we can actually change not only the future, but the past. But also the past can come to assist us. The ancestors can come to help descendants. But we have to do some ceremony, some ritual, some way of recognizing our people who come before us. And even recognizing things that may not be perfect, may not be easy, may even be hurtful or harmful for our mind or our body. How can we take that and transform? Transform and heal it is, to me, a big question for us. Of course, talking about race in America and so on, but in general, more general. How can we take the imprints that our parents or other ancestors imprinted on us and their expectations, hopes?

[56:50]

How do we take that and transmit what's useful and transform what's not helpful, that's nonsense or problematic? How can we heal that, transform it? And so to me, it's like when we do the... for Bodhisattva great vows, that's the first line. Sentient beings are numberless, yet we vow to liberate all. It means that it's one line that suggests like, oh, we are doing the vow, or we are doing the liberating. But actually, for this process to work, as Dogen's into me, sometimes, yes, we assist and we figure out how many hands we have, thousand arms of count, like how many eyes and hands.

[57:50]

But other times, we're the recipient, we're being helped. Ancestors are helping us. Other beings are helping us all the time. And we have to recognize that too. And so sometimes you have to be the recipient for somebody else to be the bodhisattva. And sometimes we take that role and we flip back and forth freely. And so that's the kind of work we might need to do in ceremony, in our thinking, in how we take all of this karma that we have inherited. You know, I think this... Formula I use for my youth classes, you know, we have young people, high schoolers. And like I would say, Buddhism is wisdom times compassion equals freedom. Very simple, like formulaic way of talking about Buddhism. But I would say in America, let's use the word freedom because American people, if you use awakening, enlightenment, they may not.

[58:58]

But if you say freedom, nobody be against it. So let's say that. That's the goal of our lineage and our Buddhist faith. But we have two big messages. One is about seeing things correctly. So that's wisdom. And then having the heart to feel each other's pain and joy and everything. Compassion. And so we have to multiply that together to, you know, like two wings of a bird to fly. to the sky or to freedom. And so sometimes it's about perspectival change, that something can change. Sometimes karma, we can handle it by just reframing or just changing something. And other times it's about the feeling we have with each other as an interlinked, you know, sangha or community. And so maybe with that, I will just end my random thoughts and open up for any of your questions or feedback or anything.

[60:05]

I'd be happy to do the Q&A. Thank you very much. You can, we'll do a transition with the Bodhisattva vows and then we'll go to Q&A. May our intention extend to every being and place 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 Buddha's way is unsurpassable. Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you all very much. And if you would like to participate in the conversation with a question or comment, please raise your zoom hand and I can help to unmute you.

[61:12]

Miguel. Good morning. And I just want to say thank you very much for this Very poignant and very deep talk. It coincides with a lot that I'm working with, struggling with. I think one of the... Oh, and also I want to congratulate you, sir, on becoming a citizen. I remember when my mom became a citizen, that was a wonderful, beautiful, heartbreaking, and inspirational thing to see somebody become so immersed and study so hard toward this goal that I, as someone born here, take for granted. Which I guess kind of brings me to my point. When we do this kind of work, the challenge that I have found is patience. There is this need, this desire to see immediate results when we're trying to do this kind of like whole integration, this

[62:20]

acknowledgement of our great and racial karma. There is a divide that gets treated as imaginary, but it's also very real. There are those who are harmed. There are those who have harmed. There are those who are harming and those who have stopped harming. And at the same time, too, that distinction is not that important. But what I'm getting at mostly is that it's hard to get a Sangha community, hell, even a family. on that same page of like, this is the world we live in. This is the, this is what's happening. This is how we are hurt. This is how we're hurting. It's like, how do you cultivate the patience to go through these necessary stages? When sometimes it feels like, you know, nothing is changing at all. Thank you so much for such a perceptive kind of, you know, difficulty, which is, I think Buddha himself recognized, you know, patience is a paramita.

[63:29]

So we know that anything that's a paramita is like, we have to practice. It's not necessarily come so easy. So we already know it's going to be difficult. But yet, I feel like the Buddha was very realistic and practical. teacher and so he was like on the one hand real change over time and the one that's meaningful change and transformation takes time and i think he thought in time in a different way than maybe us in the contemporary time you know like everything has to be very quick like i need convenience like he thought in terms of kalpas you know like a very different kind of time but but then he also time where it's not unidirectional. As mentioning, like we do something now, we think it's one direction, you know, like past has informed the present, present will inform the future.

[64:30]

That's true. In a way it's true, but in a way what we do now, as I was trying to intimate, it can, it can, it's boundless. And so there's that aspect. The reason I said Buddha is practical is because when it comes to hurt and pain and so forth, remember that, you know, parable he gives about the brahmin who is asking all kinds of questions about theory and he is told you know like well what is the origin of you know this phenomenal world of creation and like uh is there this deity and the buddha gives the parable about um the you know in a in a conflict somebody is shot by some arrows And the arrow sticks is sticking in the shoulder or chest area. And there's a need to just take that arrow out instead of inquiring who shot the, which individual archer shot the arrow?

[65:30]

What is that person's name? What is that person's family background? What kind of, you know, instead of inquiring into all of those karmic conditions of that, just take the arrow out. So in a way, the Buddha, I feel like, gave a parallel teaching about, like, in the immediate real needs of people, sometimes just take the arrow out. We don't need to investigate every single deep causation of everything, you know? That said, he's, like, the real, you probably do want to know who shot that arrow, so you don't get shot a second time, you know? You probably do want, but in the immediate moment, the main thing to do is attend to trying to heal things and take care of things that's going to be most practical to help people in their hurt. So I feel like the Buddha taught two levels of teaching about that. And so I think what you're pointing to is very right, that we have some things we have to take care of that has a sense of like, just got to take that aura, it's urgent, take it out.

[66:40]

And then we have these other things that takes time, And when we pass something like, you know, Civil Rights Act 1988, Ronald Reagan signed it for Japanese American reparations. Hopefully, H.R. 40 got out of the Judiciary Committee. It will pass. But in the end, a piece of legislation passing Congress is not really going to heal the hearts and minds deeply of all American people. And that work is the boundless, infinite work that requires the patience to really do the deep healing. and transformation. And so we were given different frames and ideas of time by the Buddha and also Dogen gives us different ideas of time in Uji, the different teachings we have that allow us maybe to get perspective on this issue of patience in trying to see things heal and transform. Thank you. I kind of see that as when my nieces and nephews ask me, when will dinner be ready?

[67:48]

And I tell them, in a bit. In a bit means how many onions do I have to chop and how much longer is the roast in the oven? But the irony is that when I first ask that question, the bit is forever. But afterwards, it's gone in a flash. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. I was very moved. I cried a lot. It was because you were bringing forward our very tormented history. And I also, I love when you said flipping back and forth between being a bodhisattva and receiving from a bodhisattva. I'd never heard anybody say that before.

[68:52]

And that was very powerful to me. But I'm wondering, I'm thinking about the role. What do we have some What as Buddhists is our obligation to the Rohingya who are being persecuted by our co-religionists? Do we have an obligation? If so, what is it? I am troubled and curious about this. Thank you for your question, Terry. And I think the reason I brought that example up in the first place is to make sure we're not analyzing or delimiting our thing to the United States. We have many different contexts in which that kind of thinking about supremacy and purity and protection of that and fear-based politics and so on, it happens in every context.

[70:05]

part of the world in every community, in every religious grouping, including our co-religionists in Burma or Myanmar. Because sometimes I worry, I come off as being anti-Christian. It happens within every community, including our own. And I think we have had some Buddhist organizers and people who have been pointing out to different lineage groups and so forth, the problem of this way of thinking that says that people who, you know, as you mentioned, like have been sometimes even multiple generations, not just recently arrived migrants, multiple generation people, part of that territory, but who aren't seen as worthy of belonging because of their so-called race and their religion being Muslim.

[71:16]

And so it's one where I think we have to advocate for a different vision and then also find channels to find people that can influence And, you know, the thing is, this is what I've noticed. There are so many issues and problems in our world. Scotland, what are we doing? The global climate change. We have these kind of racial ethnic conflicts. We have, you know, economic, there's so many different things and they're all interlinked, aren't they? Like all these issues are kind of, how could they not be? They're all interlinked. And so, Sometimes one of the things I worry about is we become overwhelmed with all the different hurt and suffering. And our job as Buddhists is to alleviate the suffering. And so that's pretty much our only job. And so it seems like, how can we attend to this, attend to that?

[72:20]

And what I've noticed is that my friends who are very, very active in these circles of international ecological or these kind of ethnic conflict issues or human rights abuses or other things, it can easily become like almost like overwhelmed or burnt out by trying to tackle everything. And so my suggestion is if you have some kind of karmic connection to what is happening in India, You know, for example, I believe like in your own, you know, kind of Zen Center type of family, Alan Sinaki from Berkeley Zen Center, they're very involved in issues around Myanmar and refugee issues and so on. So if you have, for example, a personal nice connection with him and his group or like, it's a great opportunity to, you know, have that connection. connection blossom into something to do something there.

[73:24]

And I think we can't do everything, but we can try to be in connection and so forth with everyone. But how do we find the things that we can make some kind of transformation because we have some, you know, I don't know, something that ties us. nicely to that. And so I'm not sure what you were thinking, Terry, how you came to the issue of Rohingya in Myanmar, but if you have a link to that issue, that's a very good one to work on because it's our very own Buddhist cousins who are in a different part of the world who are engaging in the type of thinking that itself is questionable as a Buddhist way of thinking and acting in a way that is also highly questionable. So you don't see Buddhism as a group.

[74:33]

I don't know, maybe Buddhism isn't a whole group. You know, trying to make a statement, you know, or But individuals who are just, you see it as individuals who are Buddhists, if they feel drawn to it, do it. But Buddhism as a whole, it's not a particular obligation of us as Buddhists as a whole. Right. Well, in the sense that we Buddhists, are of so many different lineages. And we don't, you know, for example, we don't, as Mahayana Sotos and Buddhists, belong to the same, you know, lineage or kind of style of Buddhism as people in Burma. And so it's hard.

[75:33]

We don't have like a, it's not like a Catholic church or the Orthodox church. Like there's no central administrative organization that, you know, oversees all Buddhists. And if... We issue some statement or edict or some policy or rule, then everybody will follow. It's not quite like that. And we live in a very multi-dimensional Buddhist world globally. And so it's hard in that sense to have like a singular kind of clear Buddhist voice or position that is organizationally put together. So it really is a matter of a different relationship individuals and collective sanghas and groups that hopefully in the aggregate can put some kind of perspective and pressure on our fellow Buddhist people in Myanmar who hold a view that is, I think, antithetical to our tradition.

[76:35]

I still think we could come together. I think this would be a good time for people to come. It would be great if everybody could just, you know, I mean, just like people did with, you know, boycotting South Africa. Everybody had all different, came from all different points, but said this is wrong and we need to take a position. Anyhow, but, you know, of course I'm talking and I'm not doing anything at all myself right now, but I, I'm troubled that other Buddhists aren't doing more. Perhaps. Okay. Thank you, Dari. Thank you. Maybe time for one more exchange. I see Chloe. Hi, Duncan. Thank you so much for joining us today. And I love this, the idea of a monument of... of commemoration and transformation.

[77:41]

And I was wondering if I, or we as a Sangha, if there are things that we can do to get involved to help actualize this vision of unity in multiplicity. Chloe, thank you and good to see you. Well, now that you mentioned it, I realized I completely forgot to mention something about that monument, which is that it is going to come into form, both in the form of a book of names, like the Buddhist Kakocho, but also as that, like that Manzanar Tower in the form of an art installation with those cracks and so forth. But what we're going to do is open up at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, a... an exhibit. It's called Sutra and Bible. It's about Buddhism and Christianity in the World War II, Japanese American internment and incarceration camps.

[78:43]

And that's opening February 5th and will run to October of 2022 in little Tokyo in Los Angeles. We have a museum called the Japanese American National Museum or JANM. And so I'm the, you know, lead curator for this show and the names monument is going to be a part of it. And the, The ritual action that I'm hoping people, the ceremony, the remembrance is I'm sequencing, you know, like how Maya Lin for the Vietnam War Memorial, she at that time was kind of controversial because she didn't, it was just a black wall of names where she sequenced it by not even alphabetic, like families are having trouble finding the name. Like she sequenced it by order of combat death. And it was purposeful. Because she wanted people not just to find uncle so-and-so, but like, and of course people did and rubbing and they engaged with the monument. But she wanted people to have to acknowledge that there are other people that were part of this history.

[79:52]

And so I'm doing something similar, but first of all, not everybody's dead. I mentioned Hiromi, who, you know, our tea ceremony instructor at our temple, who was born in camp, is still alive and so forth. And so, but I'm sequencing, I guess it's a little bit, you know, Japanese traditional Confucian way, but like by the oldest person, 90-some-year-old person, all the way down to the babies born in camp towards the end of the war. And what we want to do is, in the name of books, those gorinto, those five-tier structure that was the basis of... traditional Buddhist memorialization in Japan, but also when they built that Iretto or Irehi in the two camps I mentioned, I showed the pictures of. It's based on those five tiers. So we're getting these five lines where we're going to ask people to draw some gold lines next to the names from the oldest person all the way down. the youngest person there's 125 000 people so that's a lot of people to honor and whatever and it can't be just descendants and family members of people who were japanese american because it's the number is too big and also you know many people who died in camp or batch like they didn't have descendants or whatever we want to honor everyone not leave anybody out so we need as great a participation as possible to kind of just come to recognize that history draw one gold line to

[81:20]

to kind of heal this history. And as the book lines change, we're going to change, the lines on the monument will change so that over this exhibit period, that kind of monument is kind of healed, that kind of idea. And so it involves a lot of people. And so if you ever have a chance to come down to Los Angeles to Little Tokyo between February 5 and October of next year, please visit the museum. you know, draw one line and maybe be part of the present day, you know, community that can be involved in this kind of symbolic way of participation in the healing of this history. Duncan Ryuken Williams, beautiful place to close, an invitation and marking our calendars to come down to Little Tokyo. Thank you to the assembly. Thank you very much.

[82:22]

Ryukin-san, would you like to offer a closing word or shall we all say good morning? Let's just say good morning. So good to see all of you. And I hope not too long in the future we can meet in person. This is one way of doing sangha, but as I think, was it Hoi Suzuki Roshi in your lineage? He has that thing about sangha. When you put the you know, unclean potatoes in a water bucket and you rub up against each other. That's one way to get the potatoes clean. It's a way of doing Sangha. We have friction, have connection, have contact with each other. And so I hope that kind of Sangha way of meeting can also be possible in the future. And I wish all of you well and a good morning as well. Thank you so much. Please take care.

[83:23]

Thank you so much. So much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Duncan. Thank you. Take care, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Thank you. Y'all take care. Have a beautiful Saturday. We'll see you in little Tokyo, Duncan. Thank you so much, and I love your book.

[83:53]

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