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. Well, good morning, everyone. So nice to join you in IMB. 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 Koto 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 and usually you know sometimes i give i get the guidance of like everyone is right now studying like a couple weeks ago green gulch asked me to see and they were like everybody's studying sandokai so you should say something excited something like that but

[01:22]

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 it 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 racialized... 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.

[02:35]

So I don't know if... You know, I think some of you I've seen come to my temple in LA, in little Tokyo, a Zenshuji temple, a 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 8th, no, I'm sorry, 10th abbot of our temple. And next year, we're celebrating Centennial, so 100 years. And then he was the 10th one, Abbot. And then 8th, Kaikyo Fukyosoka, so the Bishop of North America, Soto Zen Buddhism. And so he served, some of the maybe older members of your temple will know him, and he served Zenshuji and served as Bishop Zenshuji. 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.

[03:48]

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 top there. 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. 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.

[04:53]

And he makes a slight mention of this in the memoir, but it's a memoir called Donguri Korokoro. It just means like a... 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 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 a photograph of him in 1939 or something like that, he... you know, was at the Zenishu 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. So he was an instructor in Japanese language and culture, as well as Buddhism. And... This is him with his white cross on the Taiomaru boat coming to the United States.

[05:56]

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 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. 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.

[07:09]

And then also she was pregnant. So he ripped up his wife's, the wife's warrant of arrest and took the 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 is now the head of our tea club. But this is a type of temple, you know, that I'm affiliated with. 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.

[08:16]

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. And so I wanted to... just introduce that as a way to say, you know, this is the current abbot of our temple, Kojima Sensei, I think many of you know. He drew this picture about my book about what happened 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 a moment when you lose your freedom or your life is disrupted.

[09:39]

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. 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,

[10:42]

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 Shingon Mission in Liliha Street in Honolulu. 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 in turn in the event of war. The Buddhist priest as a category of person was deemed like a threat

[11:43]

to 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, you know, recently we've had at our neighbor temple, a little Tokyo kind of vandalism. And we have been hearing about the kind of anti-Asian 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 in San Francisco, I think you'll find it kind of amusing.

[12:45]

But for example, this pamphlet from 1873, talking about the fear of establishing 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... people out because of their, not just racial difference, but the fact that they're heathen or not Christian. 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.

[13:49]

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. 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. 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 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 the kind of military attack, all kind of coming together.

[15:05]

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. And it's all kind of lumped together in these kind of large groupings of masses of people that are somehow very dangerous. 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 and 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, you know, there are political parties there, literally titled the party for the protection.

[16:08]

of race and religion, meaning the Burmese people and their Buddhism against the Rohingya people who are Muslim. And somehow the idea of like some kind of need to protect some monolithic, singular, not only race, but also peoples in this kind of supremacy, you know, 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 some people shouldn't be here because of their race and their religion. The slur word used was the heathen chinee, this kind of unreligiously 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

[17:34]

makeup of race, ethnicity, creed. And it's a different vision of America, one that is multi-ethnic in nature, and two, you know, religiously plural. In fact, being inspired by religious, you know, freedom requires plurality as opposed to singularity. And so, Douglass 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 you know he came known as a great orator and thinker but of course he had his own life as an enslaved person and and great abolitionist he he he gave a vision uh that uh I think is, to me, like a Buddhist vision.

[18:36]

And it's kind of reflected in, you know, Reverend Imamura Emio's comments about the hybrid and mixed race. Like, you know, today Japanese-Americans are about 50%, 1.3 million Japanese-Americans, about 50% are multiracial, Black and Japanese, Latino and Japanese, white 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 and about, but one about America as a nation of becoming a nation of plurality and composed of people of different backgrounds.

[19:50]

And so what I want to do today is talk a little bit about what I'm trying to do recently to 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, like a Buddhist project for 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.

[20:56]

when it comes to trying to reflect on and reckon with America's racial past and where we are in the present. And I think because, you know, this is not news, but we have, you know, two major, you know, 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.

[22:06]

So that's, from Nagarjuna on, very important line of thinking in our lineage. And then we also have, as you can see here in the quotation from Nagarjuna, Pratipana Samadhi, 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.

[23:09]

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. So on the emptiness side, this is something, and this is how I'm going to, eventually I'm going to connect it to why ancestors and whatnot. But in our own lineage, you know, in Soto Shu lineage, we have idea of emptiness or is so empty circle as the circle before, you know, 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...

[24:17]

our history and our lineage. Very, of course, famously, beyond is the 10-knock-sorting pictures, and we see the insult there, and very important, you know, kind of commentary about how ultimately we join the ancestors when we 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, in our 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.

[25:30]

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. we receive from those who have come uh before and and this is a photo well one is about this a in little tokyo a group of buddhist people got together uh uh in the in the period when when we were uh how should we say uh linking what Asian American people and also uh 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 last-hand side, I've got a certificate in my hand.

[26:36]

It's a naturalization certificate. And it was actually in the midst of all of the protests that was going on of all days, just a kind of go-in or karmic, I don't know, mysterious karmic causes and conditions. But on Juneteenth of 2020, I became a U.S. 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.

[27:44]

groups and communities, like, hey, Doug, 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. 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, 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.

[28:48]

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. about this term that was raised by Reverend Kyoshio Tokunaga of San Jose Buddhist Temple's Jodoshishi 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.

[29:48]

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. Yeah. But because of his conversation with Black poor, he went to the Black section. 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 New Earth 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, Dogen's Senzo Kyokun way, cook it into something worthy? And so when, you know, as you know, I mentioned earlier...

[30:54]

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. Some people put Jesus on the back of one of the statues. You know, people in your neighborhood in San Francisco, many people saw that security camera footage from earlier in the year about the and being kind of attacked senselessly, Thai community coming, you know, Buddhist community coming around to help the family and the Atlantis. 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 that wall, 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, but, and so there's a whole history at least with Japanese Americans and Asian American, you know, of like during the camp days, you just a number, you get a tag with a number on it.

[32:18]

The other things are called bongo. There's these, You know, the first Japanese that came to America and settled in Hawaiian Islands, they worked on the sugar plantation. Nobody cared about their names. They just, you know, it just was a number, 405-7369, like that. And so I started thinking these days, you know, about, say their name, like a lot of importance about names in one of the most important books on black reparations by Christian Mullin 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. This is so-called national, you know, formerly the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, but informally and more commonly known as the lynching memorial in

[33:20]

in uh in alabama uh where you know the names from each of these different counties uh in the american south where lynching happened there they did the research to find out the names and honor the uh individuals you know not just a mass of people individuals who experience uh this kind of thing 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 Catholic tradition, reparations for the mass of Christ in the French late medieval period. There are lots of these things to atone for original sin.

[34:20]

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 and a meal, but that check and bounce. So there's many things that refer back to that kind of idea, 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 American you know that's earlier than say you know translated slave trade like it's not like what is one 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.

[35:29]

And so I've been thinking about names in terms of, you know, Buddhist practice of nenbutsu. Of course, in Sotoshu, we don't... chant in quite the same way as my colleagues in Jodo Shu or Jodo Shin Shu or whatever. But, you know, in their lineage, it's so important. And we do it too, where we chant the names of the Buddhas. We also chant every morning. They'll name all the ancestors in our lineage. And, you know, originally, the idea of the originally Nen meant to visualize, to make appear by your imagination, the Buddha, who is no longer there. Because the Buddha, you know, was there, and then left teachings but died. And so we sometimes take refuge in the teaching, you know, Dharma.

[36:31]

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 come to actualize it uh when we when we when we utter things uh so this is a power you know you know also our social tradition so we have very strong influence from from uh mantra mantra mantra yana and and historic 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. 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.

[37:39]

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 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 Indoro 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.

[38:53]

This is a picture of Reverend Shinjo Nagatomi. He's the father of my mentor and teacher in Buddhist studies at Harvard University when I was a graduate student. He... his father i started that american sutures project because i found this man's world war ii diaries from manzanar in my professor's uh 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 a 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 and remembering, especially called Nibom, the first Obom of people who've passed away that previous year.

[40:01]

He wanted to build a monument, and it's called the Iretō. Tō means tower, I means to console, and V means the spirits. The spirits, you know, of the recently deceased as well as the ancestors. 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, we have our on the right-hand side of the altar. It's a book of names of the temple members who, you know, we do like a monthly memorial service.

[41:09]

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. And so we have a tradition of putting names and books as a kind of sacred act of 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 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 Daitetsu, another Buddhist priest at the 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

[42:23]

approximately individuals, to kind of recall this history. And we are going to make it in a ceramic form and build it like the Edito 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 uh heritage and so i think many of you know you know in the pottery world or uh ceramics world uh that we have a repair tradition called kintsugi uh tsugi comes from the verb tsugu uh to join uh or in this case rejoin um 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 a favorite plate or anything, it doesn't have, but it's something that you, it seems wrong to throw away.

[43:35]

We try to repair it and we use the lacquer to do the rejoining. And then on top of the rejoined cracks, put the, put the, line it with gold. And to me, this is a metaphor for a Buddhist way of thinking about reparations because it's a way of saying reparations must start with a reckoning with hurt and breakage and fissures and that we're not going to hide away or look away from it. But in fact, we're going to fix 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. And so, you know, one of the chapter fascicles, I think they have studied.

[44:46]

he has an important comment about his own understanding of what we receive from ancestors. And in this quote, he's talking about meeting 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. And it kind of raises the question of, who is doing the teaching and who is doing the receiving and who is, and as you say, you know, we do recitation of names at memorial services.

[45:59]

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. So it might be seventh year anniversary or 13th year or something. And, and the, 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 Dogen 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 people of the past. That's true. We do some things. By doing some things now, we can actually change not the future, not only the future, but the past. But also the past can come to assist us. Ancestors can come to help descendants.

[47:01]

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? How do we take that and transmit what's useful and transform what's not helpful? That's nonsense or problematic.

[48:06]

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 is into me, sometimes, yes, we assist, and we become, we figure out how many hands we have, a thousand arms, like how many eyes and hands, 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,

[49:11]

And sometimes we take that role and we slip 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. I think this formula I use for my youth classes, we have a young people, high schoolers. And we're like, I would say Buddhism is a wisdom times a 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, but if you say freedom, nobody would be against it. So let's say that, that that's the goal of our lineage and our Buddhist faith, but that we have two big, you know, 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

[50:40]

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. 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.

[51:31]

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