This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Special good morning to all of the young people who are here today. Can you all hear me? Yeah. Great. OK. My name is Tova, T-O-V-A, Tova. And I'm very happy to be here this morning. I live in San Francisco and it was beautiful coming over the bridge this morning in the fog and arriving here and hearing the birds and just appreciating the beauty of Green Gulch. So I have a story for you, and it's about this figure, this big statue behind me.

[01:07]

Does anybody know the name of this statue? Yes? Buddha. No, it's not Buddha, actually. That would be a really good guess, but anyone else? Kuan Yin. No, also it's not Kuan Yin. There's a statue of Quan Yin in the back, behind that other big statue. This, does anyone else want to take a guess? I'll tell you, this statue's name is Jizo. Jizo means, well, ji means earth, and zo is a storehouse. So this Jizo statue means earth storehouse, or sometimes it's also called earth womb, where we are before we're born. And Jizo has some very wonderful qualities. You can see, this has been my favorite statue for a very long time, and I feel kind of honored to be sitting in front of it.

[02:15]

But you'll notice that Jizo is carrying... two things. One is the staff that has six rings on it, and those rings jingle so that when Jizo's walking, Jizo won't step on any little creatures that might be on the ground. They will hear the rings jingling and move away. And the other hand carries a jewel which is meant to be a symbol of the jewel that's in every one of us. So we each have a treasure inside us, and we can find out what that is. So the story I'm going to tell about Jizo happens in winter. Sorry, I couldn't find a summer story about Jizo, but we can imagine that it's cold, and it's about an old couple who lived in a very small house in a town.

[03:19]

And they didn't have very much money. And at this time, it was winter. They also didn't have very much food. And it was New Year's Eve. New Year's Eve is a really special time. I forgot to say, this couple lived in Japan. And New Year's Eve is a really special time in Japan when people do some ceremonies we do here at Green Gulch, too, sometimes ringing that big bell 108 times. And there's a special kind of rice pounding that happens at New Year's Eve in Japan, which is also done by Japanese families here in the US. So the couple had no rice. So the day before New Year's, The man of the couple went to the market, and this couple made a living by making straw hats, where people, they were kind of like cone-shaped straw hats.

[04:23]

And they only had enough straw for five hats. So he took the five hats to the market, and nobody bought them. So he wasn't able to get any money to buy rice to take home to his wife. So he left the market feeling very sad, because they probably wouldn't have rice to make mochi. And then what happened was it started to snow, and the snow got thicker and thicker, and there was wind. And the man was really, he wasn't quite lost, but he saw at a crossroads near his house these six Jizo statues. So often Jizo isn't alone. The statue of Jizo may have a number, there may be a number of statues and often there are six. And the man saw the Jizo statues and he was very grateful because he knew that the path to his house was right there.

[05:28]

So he looked at the statues and he saw that they were all bareheaded and the snow was coming down. And he had five hats. So he put one hat on each of the statues, except the sixth one. He only had five. Then he took off his own hat and put it on the sixth jizo. So they all had hats. And then he went home, knocked on the door, and his wife was very happy to see him, and she was expecting this rice that they could have for New Year's Eve. And he said, well, I'm sorry. And he told her what had happened and he'd given all the hats away. And she said, oh, I'm so proud of you. You know, I really appreciate what a kind and generous man you are. And that's one of the reasons why I love you. So they had some tea and went to bed. They were hungry, but they were happy. And the next morning they woke up and opened the door and there were... There were big containers outside the door of rice and firewood and food.

[06:34]

And where did these come from, they wondered. And they looked outside and they could see little footsteps in the snow. And then they trapped these footsteps and they found the footsteps went to the six Jizo statues. Isn't that amazing? The statues. brought them the rice so they could have rice for New Year's and firewood and food. So I think that's a beautiful story about Jizo and how Jizo can do some really wonderful things for us. And Jizo is known as a protector of travelers, which is why they're often at crossroads. And they're also protectors of children. You can get little Jizo statues or make Jizo out of origami. I made a couple this morning. They're a little hard to see, but this is an origami Jizo statue.

[07:39]

And it's just easy to make out of a square of paper. So I hope you'll learn more about Jizo and that you will enjoy the rest of your day. So thank you for coming this morning. you. A lot of seats up front, so if anybody would like to come closer, please do so.

[09:02]

Have a good day. Good morning again, everyone.

[10:04]

So I'll just start with just a little more introduction about myself. My name is Tova Green, and I live and work at City Center. Currently, my work practice is being the assistant to the central abbess, Linda Cutts, who I think many of you know since she lives at Green Gulch. And I lived at Green Gulch for two years. was 2006 and 2007. And during that time, for one year, I was helping with the children's program. So I was really happy when I found out that I was coming on the first Sunday of the month. And I'd like to thank our tanto, Mioe, and it was the previous tanto, Anna Thorne, who invited me to talk today. I'd also like to thank my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, for her support over many years. So today is, as some of you probably know, it's Hiroshima Day, August 6, and it's the 72nd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

[11:20]

So I wanted to talk about Jizo in my talk today because 12 years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing, I was able to participate in a Jizos for Peace pilgrimage to Japan. It was led by two Zen teachers from Oregon, Chosen and Hogen Base. And I thought I would talk a little bit about what led up to my going and what some of the experiences of that pilgrimage were, and tell you a little more about Jizo Bodhisattva, For me, Jizos and peace are kind of intertwined because of that experience of going to Japan. So I'm calling my talk Jizos for Peace today. And so in my talk, I'll tell a few stories about my own path and talk about two Buddhist teachers who

[12:30]

influenced my understanding about peace and jizou. One is named Joanna Macy and the other is Chozen Baez. And I'll end with some reflections about the relevance of jizou to our lives today. So to start, I'd like to share a koan, a teaching story that might frame some of my comments about the Jesus for Peace pilgrimage and about some of the things that have happened in my own life. It's a story about two Dharma friends, Dijong and Fayan, who lived in China. This was about ninth century China. And they were talking one day and... Fayan was dressed probably not that differently from Jizou. He was going on pilgrimage, and I think he had one of those hats, one of those conical hats and a staff.

[13:35]

And Dijang asked him, what is the purpose of your pilgrimage? And Fayan said, I don't know. And Dijang said, not knowing is most intimate. So that phrase, not knowing is most intimate, is a wonderful phrase. I think it really opens things up. So often in our lives, we want to know things. We think we do know things. We might even think what we know about things is right and what other people disagree, that they're wrong. And this idea of not knowing can really help us be a little more spacious and curious, you know, not knowing is most intimate. If I think I know exactly where I'm going, I might not take the time to see if, well, maybe something's different today, even if I'm going to the same place I've gone yesterday.

[14:39]

Or if I'm going someplace where I've never been before, I might want to read about it in advance or learn as much as I can. And it's still helpful if I go with the idea, well, I don't really know what that place is like. So going on pilgrimage, which is a journey, and there are many different kinds of pilgrimages, with that idea of, I don't know, I really don't know where I'm going, can be very helpful to And if we think about our lives as pilgrimage, too, do we really know where we're going? We know when and where we were born and some of the things that happened along the way. We may think we know where we're going. We know we're all going to die at some point, but a lot can happen between now and then, no matter how old we are. So that not knowing is most intimate, it's one of those phrases that I don't know that I actually think about it, but when I hear it or when I'm starting out, sometimes even the beginning of the day, just to say not knowing is most intimate, it's very refreshing rather than thinking, I know what's going to happen today.

[16:07]

So I'll start with a couple of stories about my own life, although I feel this talk isn't really about me. It's about I'd like it to focus on Jesus for peace. But I think to give you an idea of how I got to go on that pilgrimage, why I wanted to go on that pilgrimage might be helpful. So I grew up in New York City, and I went to college when I was... I turned 17 the fall that I went to college. I went to college in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at Antioch College, which in those days was a place where there was a lot of political activity, questioning. It was sometimes thought to be a liberal hotbed in the middle of southern Ohio. After my first quarter at Antioch, I took a Greyhound bus back to New York City.

[17:08]

And my father met me at the bus station. And we were walking across town to catch the subway on the east side. And I saw the Office of SANE for SANE Nuclear Policy. And I got very excited because I'd heard about SANE at Antioch. I wanted to go in and pick up some literature. And my father kind of froze and he wouldn't let me go in. And he said, what difference can one person make anyway? And that's another phrase that stayed with me most of my life. And I've been very interested in finding out how people can make a difference about things that seem really impossible to change or enormous. And I've also come to see that we meet each other, one person can't do it alone. But that was an important question for me.

[18:09]

And I later had some understanding that my father was, he grew up in the days of McCarthy, and I think he was very frightened about things that seemed risky to him. And he So I can understand where he was coming from. But at the time, I didn't appreciate not being able to go in. I was obedient. I didn't go in. But I didn't forget that moment either. So that was, let's see, that was 1957. I was born in 1940. And before my last year in college, I participated in a voter registration in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1963 and went on the march on Washington.

[19:17]

And then in the 60s, I protested the Vietnam War. In the 70s, I was involved in the women's movement. These were all things that were happening as I was... growing up, and I don't think my participation was very unusual, but all of those things shaped my life. And then, so I want to tell you then about meeting Joanna Macy in 1982. At that time, I was working as a social worker in Boston, and I had put my activism somewhat on hold and thought that I think I was very influenced by the assassinations of Martin Luther King and then President Kennedy. And I really didn't know what I could do to make a difference in the world at that point, except to help people individually, which I thought

[20:26]

I could do as a social worker. And then I went to a workshop with Joanna Macy. That was a whole weekend. Joanna Macy, some of you might, does anyone here know her? Some of you do. She lives in Berkeley. She's in her late 80s now. And she's a Buddhist scholar, activist. She was very involved in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And she's been doing work. She still does. weekend workshops, week-long workshops, and trains people to lead workshops to help us wake up to some of the situations in the world that are painful and that we might avoid because if we pay too much attention, it can be overwhelming. So in those days, in the 80s, Joanna's workshops were called Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age. And the weekend workshop I went to was near Boston, there were about 40 participants.

[21:29]

One of my neighbors went with me. And there was an exercise right at the beginning. It was called the milling, where we milled around and then stopped and looked at someone in the eye. And there were a series of questions Joanna asked. And the last one was, I was standing in front of a person I didn't know. And she said, what if this were the person you were with when a nuclear bomb exploded and he or she was the last person you were with? Which was a terrifying thought. And I found myself face to face with this older man, who's older than me, quite a bit. And I looked into his eyes and I just thought, I'd be all right if this was the person I was with. And later we got to talk and I found out he was a professor at Brandeis University and a really wonderful man.

[22:30]

But it could have been anybody, I realized. And that was a way in which that workshop helped us all open both to the pain of thinking about some of the really difficult situations that we're living in on our planet, and also the power of connecting with others who are concerned. And by the end of the weekend, we were all thinking about our vision for the world as we'd like it to be and what we could each individually do to bring the world closer to that place. and the sense of our interconnectedness, which is, Joanna studied systems theory, and as well as Buddhism, and this idea that we are so deeply interconnected that the pain and the joys of people we don't even know have an impact on our lives, and whatever we think and

[23:46]

say and do has an impact on other people's lives as well. So what I decided to do at the end of that workshop was to learn how to lead workshops like that, because as a social worker, I had already been working with groups, and I'd been doing some teaching. And I was so inspired by what had happened in that workshop. So I learned how to lead those retreats. and workshops, and one time a few years later, I was at another one of Joanna's workshops, and at the end, we did the same goal-setting exercise of thinking about something we cared about in the world, something we might, some action we might take to help us move towards whatever it was we needed I thought we might want to explore or whatever change we hoped we might be able to be part of.

[24:57]

And at that workshop, I thought I wanted, my idea was to go to Japan and connect with peace activists in Japan and see if I could offer some of those despair and personal power workshops in Japan. And I didn't know anyone in Japan at that point. But I was part of a support group by then, other people who had done work with Joanna. And I brought my question to my support group. And they helped me think about how I could connect to peace activists in Japan. And a friend of mine knew Kaos Tanahashi, who lives in the Bay Area also. He's been a Zen center. teacher as well as a visual artist who makes these beautiful big Enzo's. And Kaz knew many peace activists in Japan and he gave me some names and I wrote letters and had them translated into Japanese and gradually did get connections to peace activists in Japan and

[26:11]

I raised money by sending a letter to all my friends and some family members about what I wanted to do. So I raised the money I needed from my plane ticket. And I had a friend in Kyoto. So it all kind of fell into place. And I went to Kyoto, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki. And going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki was very impactful for me. This was 1996 when I went. And I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima. Hiroshima now is totally rebuilt and a very big modern city. But I'm sure many of you have seen the photographs of the atomic bomb dome. And there's a peace park all around it and a museum where I learned more than I really wanted to know about what had happened and the effects of the bombing.

[27:13]

I say more than I wanted to know. I did want to know. I was curious, but it was very painful to see and hear some of the stories of what had happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But I think that experience then came with me when I moved to the Bay Area in 1990. And that's when I first encountered Zen practice. I had been going to meditation retreats on the East Coast. But it wasn't until I moved here. And I came to Green Gulch one Sunday. And perhaps some of you were here for the first time. And you never know. Again, this is not knowing is most intimate. I had no idea when I came to Green Gulch that I would keep coming back and then practicing. I lived in the East Bay practicing at Berkeley Zen Center during weekdays.

[28:18]

And eventually I came for part of a practice period here and then for some January intensives. And then I visited City Center and I was there one morning and I thought, oh, I could really live here. And within a few months I was living there. And I'm still living at Zen Center 18 years later. So when I moved to the Bay Area, the other thing that happened was I got involved with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And I was on the board and then I worked for the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. until I went to Tassajara in 2000 to be a student there. So when I heard about the Jizos for Peace pilgrimage, this is a long story, but in 2004 I was living at Tassajara, and the news came that there were these two Zen teachers in Oregon who were planning a Jizos for Peace pilgrimage to Japan.

[29:30]

It was a group of Zen students who was going with them. And at that time, they had the idea of bringing as many Jizo images as there were people who had died during the first year after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was 270,000 people who had died. So they wanted to bring 270,000 images of Jizo. So clearly, there wouldn't be jizos like the beautiful statue behind us. But that's where I learned how to fold origami jizos, because they made chains of jizos. And they also made prayer plagues on cloth with some people at the monastery in Ardhen, where Chosen Bayes and Hogan Bayes practice. It's called Great Vow Monastery. And the students there sent out kits with stamps of jizos and pieces of cloth and instructions on how you could make jizo prayer flags.

[30:38]

And you could stamp a number of jizo images on them and put a message for peace and your name and age. And these would be taken to Japan by people going on the jizos for peace pilgrimage. And I... I realized how much I wanted to go on that pilgrimage. And then there was also, so these kits went out all around the country and actually around the world, and people were making jizō prayer flags in sanghas around the country, in peace groups around the country. There was a Zen priest who was working in a prison who had some of the prisoners she was working with make these Jizo prayer flags. And we made them at Tassajara. And there was a group that made these prayer flags here at Green Gulch as well.

[31:40]

Was anyone here at that time who made... Did you participate? I know Linda Ruth was very involved in that. And those prayer flags got put together in... a big quilt. Someone did the quilting in the back. It was huge, and it hung in Cloud Hall for a while until we went on the pilgrimage. And actually, I took it in my suitcase. So it went with me. And that was in 2005. And the impetus for that trip came from Chosen Bays. So I'll just tell you a little bit about her. Chosen Bays was born the day the U.S. bombed Nagasaki. So her birthday was August 9th. And her family, her parents were pacifists, so she grew up knowing about, they talked about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki every August.

[32:44]

And at some point they went to Japan. And so Chozen became a pediatrician and took care of children. And she learned about Jizo when she went to Japan and found out there were some temples where there were many statues of Jizos. And she learned more and more about Jizo Bodhisattva. And eventually she became a Zen priest and then later founded this monastery with her husband, who's also a priest. Chozen wanted to go to Japan on her 60th birthday, which was the 60th anniversary of the bombing, and bring something to give Japanese people as a way of not really atoning. There was no way she could personally atone for what had happened, but to let people know that there were Americans who deeply cared about what had happened.

[33:51]

and wanted to offer something to people in Japan. And then I think it was Kaz Tanahashi, who was a friend of hers, who said, well, she was going to bring 60 jizos. And he said, why not bring 270,000 jizos? So that's how that plan started. And the idea for the pilgrimage arose. And Chosen went to Japan a year before the pilgrimage to see if there was interest in a group of Americans coming, especially going to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And she was just greeted with a lot of appreciation and people thinking that would be a wonderful idea. So the pilgrimage happened. There were about 30 Zen students and a film crew and came as a translator.

[34:53]

There were a couple of other people who were very fluent in Japanese. And we went first to Kyoto and visited some temples and got to see how people in Japan loved Jizo Bodhisattva. There's one temple where Jizo was thought to have healing properties and you could go in and there was a large statue of Jizo, and people would pick up something like the kind of stick that we have for sounding the Mokugyo that has a padded top, and they would touch the statue of Jizo and then touch some part of their body that needed healing. that people sewed and made red. They looked like bibs, but they were the inspiration for the prayer flags that we met.

[35:55]

And would hang them on the Jizo statues in the various temples we visited. And then also, we'd just be walking and find an altar on a corner with a Jizo statue. in the way that Jizo is a protector of travelers and shows up at crossroads. And many of these Jizo statues had these red bibs that people made for the statues. They were treated very lovingly like the statues in that story of the old couple. And then when we went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, we gave away all the prayer flags. And in Hiroshima, we stayed at a Zen temple. It was a family temple. There were three generations of family living there. The priest was in his 60s.

[36:57]

And his wife had been a five-year-old child when the bombing happened in Hiroshima. Her family also lived at a temple. They welcomed us, and it was just, it was early August, so we were there for the 60th anniversary on the 6th. And they celebrate a holiday around the same time called Obon, which is a time when people remembered their loved ones who died. And so I gave that quilt that we made at Green Gulch to the priest at the temple, and he hung it up so that it was there during that whole obong period. And we left it there at the temple.

[37:59]

But many of the other Jizo prayer flags, and some of them were sewn into quilts, we took to Nagasaki as well. I think I'm running out of time, so I will tell just one story about the way jizos were appreciated. When we went to Nagasaki, we were met at the train station by an 82-year-old man named Hirose-san. And he was a survivor of the bombing. And I was one of a number of people we met. They're called Hibakusha. And he was a retired school teacher and was devoting his life to speaking to school groups and other groups, sometimes groups who came to the museum in Nagasaki. There's also a museum there about what had happened to him and how he

[39:06]

deeply wanted peace in the world. And he arranged for us to visit a few nursing homes where there were other survivors of the bombing. And we would bring with us origami jizos, a little clay jizos. And there's a mantra, a jizo mantra, that we learned and chanted. So we went to the nursing homes and would chant the mantra and then talk to people individually and give them the jizos, and they were so happy to receive them. It felt like something that we could offer that connected us with people there. And we had many experiences on streetcars. We were all wearing our robes, and we had shaved our heads for this pilgrimage so that we were very visible. People were often surprised to see Americans with shaved heads and Buddhist robes.

[40:11]

And we had a booklet that told the story of the pilgrimage that was translated into Japanese so we could give those to people and explain why we were there. And we would always travel with these prayer flags. We had so many who really wanted to leave them in Japan and give them to people. So that was a bridge. And the last story I will tell is the day we were in Hiroshima on the 6th and went to the commemorations. I was wandering around the children's memorial. There's a memorial that's shaped like an origami crane. It's very beautiful. And around it are strands of origami cranes that school children fold and bring to Hiroshima. There are a lot of school tours that come.

[41:14]

And there were a few teenage girls who saw me. And I was feeling quite sad at that point, just remembering what had happened. And these school girls spoke English. they asked me if I knew the story of Sadako and the Thousand Cranes. And I did know the story, but I said I didn't know it because I knew I could tell they wanted to tell me the story. And they did tell me the story. Perhaps some of you know the story. Sadako was a schoolgirl when, I think she was, when the bombing happened, she was only two. But then she grew up in Hiroshima and was an athlete and a really good student and had a lot of friends. And when she was 10, she developed leukemia, which they call Adam Baum disease. And so she started feeling weaker and was not able to run so fast.

[42:18]

And gradually, the disease progressed. And someone told her that if she folded 1,000 cranes, she might survive. So she started folding cranes. folded 700-something cranes and then was too sick to fold anymore, and her friends folded the remaining number of cranes. She did die, but I think that started a tradition of children folding cranes, and that's why last year at City Center we folded 1,000 cranes. And we have these cranes hanging in the dining room. If you ever come to San Francisco's Zen Center, you'll see them. They're really beautiful. So they told me the story of sandako and the thousand cranes. And it was really wonderful. They were part of a group of young Japanese students who wanted to keep those stories alive.

[43:22]

wanted people to know what had happened in Hiroshima so that they would never use atomic weapons again. So I think coming to the end of my talk, and that pilgrimage was 17 years ago, and the world still isn't safe from nuclear weapons. Every year there's a group of mayors that gets together. They're called Mayors for Peace. And I found out there are now 7,417 mayors around the world who are part of this organization. And they're meeting this year right at this time in Nagasaki. They come from 162 countries. And they write letters to The nine countries that have nuclear weapons begging the leaders of these countries to reduce the stockpiles, do away with nuclear weapons.

[44:31]

And fortunately, that's not what's happening in our country now. So I think that there are ways in which we can all do what we can to work for peace. to remember those who are working around the world for peace and be encouraged by knowing that those people are connected to us because we're all interconnected. And to do what we can in our own small ways and know that together we can make a difference So I just wanted to end with some words of the priest at the temple in Hiroshima, whose name was Reverend Yokoyama.

[45:34]

And he gave a talk while we were there, quoting some words of the Dhammapada, which are the words of the Buddha. A winner invites resentment. The losers lie suffering. Those who throw away both winning and losing and whose minds are tranquil are happy in any situation. He says, when we give up the opposition between winning and losing and awaken to the reality in which all things are allowed to live, we will be able to see the suggestion of how to live our own lives. So that may be helpful in these days when things can often seem very polarized. Can we give up the idea of winning and losing? Can we have that mind of not knowing that can be very intimate?

[46:38]

And can we support one another in our efforts to create a more peaceful world. I thank you all for coming and listening, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here today. And if you want to come I didn't, there's something I didn't talk about. It's another aspect of Jizo that happens here at Green Gulch. There's a ceremony for children who've died that's offered twice a year. It's very beautiful. And Jizo is a key part of that ceremony. So I will talk about that at the Q&A if anybody wants to come back and find out about that. Thank you so much for being here.

[47:40]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

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