This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. The land on which I take my seat this morning is the unceded territory of the Awaswa-speaking Yupi tribe. The Amamutsun tribal band, comprised of the descendants of indigenous people taken to Mission Santa Cruz and San Juan Bautista during Spanish colonization of the Central Coast, is today working hard to restore traditional stewardship practices on these lands and to heal from historical trauma. I'd like to begin today with thanks by thanking my teachers, known and unknown, especially Daijaku Kinst and Leslie James, and by extending my gratitude to the San Francisco Zen Center, the Tonto and its abbots and teachers for inviting me to speak and for extending teachings, healing and refuge to me for almost 20 years.

[01:31]

I have to confess that I feel even more humbled than I would have otherwise under ordinary circumstances by this request to address you for the first time today. When I was asked to speak in late December, I knew the order would be a tall one. And then in quick succession, a number of things have happened. Armed white supremacist insurrectionists took over the nation's capital. and the seat of government in a violent attempt to overthrow the democratic process. The next day, Sojen Mel Weitzman, the teacher of many, many of my teachers and a greatly respected leader in this lineage, died. Not long afterwards, just this week, we witnessed what was surely one of the most consequential transfers of power in this nation's history, ushering in the most diverse administration in our history, one that took immediate steps to demonstrate its commitment to racial justice and repair, and which includes, as vice president, a woman, a woman of Black and Tamil ancestry.

[02:48]

And through it all, the pandemic raged on, now killing 15,000 people worldwide every day, very close to a third of them right here in the U.S. So I hope you won't blame me for feeling a little set up as well as a little hesitant about what to say and how to say it. I sincerely wish that someone more seasoned, experienced, senior, frankly, had the task of addressing you amidst all this momentousness. For encouragement over the past few days, I keep coming back to Kategori Roshi's exhortation, you have to say something, and drawing strength from that. And I draw courage, too, from a retired colleague and old friend from the university where I teach, who, hearing that I was giving this talk, wrote to me with the following blessing.

[03:53]

I wish you the best in finding and offering your heart. So that is what I have attempted and will attempt to do. Before the great unfolding of the events I've just named in early January, I was truly fortunate to spend a few weeks down at Tassajara, helping out with odd jobs and taking a much needed break from a busy nine months as the administrator charged with coordinating and supporting all of remote instruction at UC Santa Cruz. While I was there, Sojin Roshi died. And as I watched some of my dearest friends mourn and honor his life, I couldn't help but think how strange and frankly embarrassing it would be to give this talk when the teacher of so many of my teachers and long time Kalyanamitra Dharma friends had just died.

[04:57]

Those around me, people I respect and love, many of you are sitting with this great absence. How, I thought, can anyone in the sangha speak of anything else? Except I did not have the good fortune to know or practice with Sojin Roshi. I met him maybe one time. And so also, what could I possibly have to say about this lion of our lineage? And yet, given that he was the teacher of my teachers, there is this strange way in which whether I knew him or not, there is absolutely no way I would be sitting here today had it not been for him. Indeed, even though I heard him speak only one time and have read very few of his words, many or most of the things I say today will, in a very real sense, be owing to

[05:59]

to his Dharma teaching. They will, in some measure, be his. This is the curious but consequential thing about lineage, and also, as I hope to talk about today, about history itself. We are made up of that which we acknowledge, but also in practice. Excuse me. The speaker may be having some connectivity issues, so we can abide in a few minutes of zazen while we repair.

[07:00]

Hi, I'm back. I was concerned that that was going to happen, as many of you probably experienced. We had some big windstorms a week or so ago, and Santa Cruz is still getting itself back together, so please forgive me. So I was talking about Sojin Roshi and the fact that I don't know him and yet that I'm made of him. And that I really find my heart very taken up with this question of lineage. At this time, with the question, how do we understand, acknowledge, relate to, take responsibility for, and balance the gifts and the burdens of all that we inherit from the past? I was already thinking and reading about lineage when I got down to Tassajara over the winter break. I suppose in a way I have been turning the question of what we inherit and what we transmit. ever since I was the Chousseau there in the fall of 2019, which is not so long ago as it feels.

[09:06]

The question is kind of inevitable when you serve as Chousseau as a layperson. So I want to name that right up front. Because a layperson is someone who exists in a certain tension with the lineage in our school. Because a layperson is unable under our current way of organizing things to pass the lineage on. A layperson is a lineage receiver, but not a holder of the lineage in the fullest sense. One who has received the gift, but who cannot, in the most literal sense, pay it forward. What does this mean exactly? As Zen students, we are expected to honor and become intimate with the lineage of the teachers and ancestors stretching back to Shakyamuni Buddha. We chant the male and female lineages in the mornings and whether priests or lay people, when we are ordained, we receive what's called a kechimyaku or blood vein.

[10:17]

I'm a great dog lover and I think of it as my pedigree papers. It's a visual representation of a single sequence of names, the names of the, until recently, all male teachers, stretching from Shakyamuni Buddha to the teacher by whom we are ordained, in my case, Catherine Thanis, with our own name, our Dharma name, appearing as the last name on the list, written at this time by hand. We know where we come from when we look at this list of names. and we begin to understand the immensity of what we have inherited. Some of those who receive this document, those who are priests and go on to receive Dharma transmission, will one day pass this lineage document on to another generation of students. Those of us who choose to remain as laypeople will not. It is not a decision at a certain point in one's practice

[11:22]

that one takes lightly, and I know I have not. While I was at Tassajara, it had been recommended to me by my teacher in Santa Cruz, Dijaku Kinst, to read a book precisely about this lineage, Keizan's Denkoroku, or Record of Transmitting the Light, which dates from a series of talks he gave in early 1300. This is basically a kind of pop-up version of this blood vein, with a little story about the awakening of each of the ancestors from whom we are descended, and then some reflections by Kezon about this particular figure in the lineage. So I think of it as a kind of hypertext version of my blood vein. So I was reading the version of this book translated and edited, by Francis Dojun Cook.

[12:25]

And in the introduction, he says something that really got my attention. Cook relates that the Japanese dengaroku is actually a kind of adaptation of an earlier genre from China, the Chuandang Lu, which is confusingly called in Japanese the den-toruku instead of the den-koruku, but don't worry about that. Whereas the Japanese lineage is represented as this single line, the Chinese one looks a little bit different. In the Chinese one, there is a single line from Shakyamuni Buddha to Bodhidharma to our sixth Chinese ancestor, Wei Neng. But then something else happens. The line branches and becomes plural. Wei Neng had five successors. two of whom had their own lineages. Each of the branches in Cook's words starts proliferating and producing more proliferations.

[13:33]

So you can see the difference. Kezon's record, the Japanese one, in Cook's words, not mine, treats the ancestors as a single line of descent from a spiritual father, to a spiritual son as if there were no other children, or as if, if others existed, only one son got the rights to the family name and inheritance. In the Chinese version, by contrast, he writes, the light of the Buddha is inherited by many in each succeeding generation. There is not just a transmission, but what he calls a proliferation of the light. And this proliferation reaches far and wide. Cook tells us, in the Chinese work, we find records of lay people who were confirmed as enlightened by their teachers, but who had no successors and were themselves the end of their line.

[14:42]

They were not links in an unbroken line of succession. but their accomplishments were nonetheless recorded as significant. So this is a really stark and generative contrast, the single line of transmission in Kazon compared to the branching streams of proliferating light in China before. The line that extends neatly from authorized successor to authorized successor versus the stream that branches, some of these branches dead-ending, ostensibly, while others flow and flow. So this contrast between lines and branches, as well as that between living and dead streams, complicates and even troubles our standard notions of lineage, of property, of inheritance, gift, and debt.

[15:45]

For me, this is a great example of what Representative John Lewis calls good trouble, necessary trouble. And I want to trouble things a little more, because even in Cook's expansive language, I can't help but notice that there is still a very strong sense of line overlaid on the branching stream. These lay people, he says, had no successors and were themselves the end of their line. In what sense, my heart asks, is that necessarily so? These lay people were not links in an unbroken line of authorized succession. That's Cook's words. But that does not necessarily mean that there was no succession or that anything was broken. They were confirmed by their teachers. How could they not have shared the light?

[16:49]

passed it on to others, passed it on in a way that changed those around them in some profound way. And even the authorized ancestors, what about all those they taught who never show up on a lineage chart because they were not the one or two or five who were recognized? Are they not also successors in some way? To ask this in a different way, what if we told the story, the story of these Dharma ancestors, but the story of history in general, in a way that did not depend upon the fragility of a single unbroken line? In his wonderful essay about our obligations to act on behalf of what he calls the ancestors of the future, Teigen Dan Leighton gives us a definition of history that I think can help us to begin to grapple a bit with the mystery of lineage, acknowledged and unacknowledged, known and unknown.

[18:03]

History is the changing process of defining the past for the present, and the stories we tell about the past in the present, change the meaning of past events. I'm going to read it again because it's a pretty big claim. First part, a little easier to digest. History is the changing process of defining the past for the present, and the stories we tell about the past in the present change the meaning of past events. The figure we use to tell the story of lineage line, branch, or beacon of light, like any other historical narrative, makes a difference. It has consequences. It redefines and transforms not only the present in which the story is being told, but the past and the future along with it.

[19:06]

Teigen reminds us of the 15th chapter of the Lotus Sutra, probably its best known. the chapter on the hidden lineage of bodhisattvas. In this story, I'm sure known to at least some of you, the Buddha is teaching to a great collection of bodhisattvas, he's preaching the Lotus Sutra, to a great collection of bodhisattvas who have assembled from other worlds and other dimensions. They ask Shakyamuni at one point, can we... Can you help to keep your teachings alive by returning in the future, in the Kali Yuga, the dark age to come? Can we come back from our other realms to this Saha world, this stubborn world where you have elected to make your appearance? Shakyamuni's response is basically, I'm good. I've got it covered. And at this moment, the earth opens.

[20:13]

Countless numbers of bodhisattvas who have been living underneath the earth pour forth out of the earth in which they've been hiding. These bodhisattvas, we're told, have been diligently practicing for uncountable eons on the earth, waiting for the time when they will be needed. The Lotus Sutra says, rejecting the fret and confusion of the great assembly, taking no delight in much talk, they wait for the time when they are needed in the space under the earth, where they constantly delight in profound wisdom. So these countless figures of future teachers, I like to think, include the ancestors left out of the Denkoroku, but included in the Chinese version, as well as our lay Zen ancestors who broke the line of succession.

[21:17]

But they also include countless beings from other wisdom traditions and from no tradition at all. To include these bodhisattvas of the future is to recognize a kind of infinite lineage. one that recognizes everything that doesn't make it into the history books, the pedigree papers, but does pass on wisdom and does transmit the light. Gary Snyder puts it beautifully when he writes, there have always been countless unacknowledged bodhisattvas who did not go through any formal spiritual training or philosophical quest. They were seasoned and shaped in the confusion, suffering, injustice, promise, and contradictions of life. So this story represents a critical way of thinking lineage and telling history, an infinitely expanded notion of what it means to be a bodhisattva, of what it means to pass the Dharma on, of all the places from which we receive the gifts,

[22:35]

of inheritance. This is the version that includes the ancestors known and unknown and recognizes the ways in which our debt to unknown and unrecorded ancestors, whether we acknowledge it or not, obligates us to the future as well as to the past. As Taiga notes, those hidden bodhisattvas of the future the ones that have been waiting in silence under the earth for the time when they are needed, are also waiting for us to act. In the Lotus Sutra, the hidden bodhisattvas choose to keep themselves out of sight, out of the history books, preferring, as the text says, a quiet place, taking no delight in much talk. But we know full well that so many of our unacknowledged ancestors and unknown teachers never had the luxury of such preferences in the first place.

[23:39]

They were hidden by design and silenced by decree. They do, in a not entirely different way, wait under the earth to emerge and ensure that wisdom is carried forward, that justice is done, but their waiting is the effect not of withdrawal, but of exclusion. This moment of national racial reckoning is a moment of carefully uncovering the voices, experiences, and contributions of those whose accounts of their lives and struggles have been consistently ignored by dominant linear patriarchal narratives. But it is also and I think even more importantly, a moment of taking up the impossible task of listening to and making space for those who were never allowed to speak or write themselves into history in the first place.

[24:42]

I'm speaking in particular of Black, Brown, and Indigenous ancestors, especially those who were not men. To listen for these voices to receive the wisdom they carry would demand a different notion of history altogether, even as it would liberate us into a very different kind of future. As Alice Walker says, and so our mothers and grandmothers have, more often than not anonymously, handed on the creative spark, the seed of the flower, they themselves never hoped to see, or like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. Like a sealed letter they could not plainly read. These grandmothers were planting seeds for the ancestors of the future so that when those seeds were needed,

[25:49]

And if the soil of the present made such a thing possible, if we made such a thing possible, they might sprout at last. They were crafting letters they could not plainly read because they were not allowed the privilege of literacy, but which also we could not plainly read because of our blindnesses. These ancestors nonetheless did us, their future ancestors, the great service of sealing up an as yet unreadable writing towards a future in which their experience might become legible at last. Walker's words allow me to imagine my blood vein, my Zen ancestry, but also the chart that holds my personal familial karmic history as though it were such a sealed letter from the past.

[26:54]

I imagine it populated, as though I could open that paper, I imagine it populated with everything and everyone that has gifted to me, with all the debts I owe to the past and all the obligations I have to the present and the future, all the karmic wounds that remain to be healed, as well as all the wisdom that remains to be unsealed. What would it mean to take responsibility for one's place in a lineage in this way? And isn't grappling with the totality of one's inheritance, acknowledged and unacknowledged, known and unknown, named and unnamed, avowed and unavowed, an indispensable part of the training of a bodhisattva and a necessary expression of the bodhisattva vow.

[27:57]

When I think of those bodhisattvas under the earth waiting to emerge into a dark age when their help is really needed, I can't stop thinking about a line from Amanda Gorman's breathtaking poem, The Hill We Climb, at the inauguration this week. Gorman writes there, we've learned that quiet isn't always peace. Some of those bodhisattvas who are diligently waiting to emerge to help us wake up are not going to make a quiet entrance in silence or in silenced. nor should they, because quiet isn't always peace and silence isn't always noble. Gorman's poem is, among all the other things it is, and it is so very many, a call, a challenge, a demand to both reimagine and to take responsibility for our lineage and our history, chock full of the language of the mystery

[29:15]

I have been exploring of ancestry, inheritance, and obligation in its most expansive and least linear and patriarchal form. She writes, for instance, that we are the successors to a nation that isn't broken, but simply unfinished. What happens to our notion of time of agency, of history, when we insist on the present, the country, the line, as not broken, but simply unfinished. We should be both encouraged and daunted in the face of her admonishment to see this country not as broken, but as unfinished, because that then confers on us an obligation. A recognition that we are not just inheritance of this history, but agents of it.

[30:20]

We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour, she writes. We did not feel prepared to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour. An hour in which it turns out that it's not just peaceful... introvert bodhisattvas who have been hiding under the earth waiting to emerge, but armed, unabashed, anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-indigenous, anti-anything-but-whiteness, terrorist bodhisattva ancestors. And even they come bearing, if not a gift exactly, at least a sealed letter for us from the past. Special delivery. An invitation to finally step into responsibility to vow to the ancestors of the future. Because she writes, we know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation.

[31:27]

We know our inaction and inertia will be the inheritance of the next generation. Do we know that? Do we really know that yet? What these white supremacists appearing from underground remind me is that I have a choice, a choice between action and inaction, between meeting this terrifying hour and doing nothing, between speaking to it and saying nothing. But her words wake us up into a reckoning with the fact that what we do not do is also something we pass on. What we do not say is also a legacy that speaks. To put this another way, our choice, our freedom as free beings is not between being part of the legacy of white supremacy or not being part of it.

[32:28]

Our choice is what we choose to do from within that legacy, the lineage of which we are a part. In my favorite line of the poem, Gorman writes, being American is more than the pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. Being American is more than the pride we inherit. It's the past we step into and how we repair it. I have not been able to get this line out of my head this week with its delicate step into. Its forcing of the question, what exactly does it mean to step into the past? To step into something I was never not in. It's like the lineage of bodhisattvas and ancestors.

[33:29]

What does it mean to step into, to take my place in something to which I already, according to the teachings of this school, belong? But above all, what's been on my heart is that little phrase and how we repair it. A clear, if sly nod, to the need for reparations for slavery and for settler colonialism, among other things, it makes the obligation to participate in repairing history, not just a matter for the legislature, but a koan for every single one of us. This koan is not so different from the bodhisattva vow, the vow to save all beings. We are left asking, How can I save all beings? How can I repair history? In a recent article in Lion's Roar, Daijaku Kinst refers to our path as a path of fierce questioning.

[34:46]

She writes, if Zen has any one quality, It is fierce, dedicated, deep questioning. Nothing is off the table. Fierce paths of questioning are needed now more than ever. They are needed now more than ever, I think, because we are waking up to the fact that we have not only been working with the wrong answers, we have been asking the wrong questions. Gorman's poem starts with a question. When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never ending shade? When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never ending shade? This is not a rhetorical question. or Gorman any more than for the rest of us.

[35:52]

To ask where can we find light is the question that brings most of us to the Buddhas and ancestors in the first place. It's what leads us to step into this lineage. And what we find or what I have found is the need to fully acknowledge that I receive light from all those whose names are imprinted on my blood vein and also from those innumerable others whose names are not and will never be there, those anonymous ancestors, grandmothers, and wisdom beings who were seasoned and shaped in the confusion, suffering, injustice, promise, and contradictions of life. I believe that we take our place in this lineage, whatever that means for each of us, by stepping right into the middle of what is unfinished, into the never-ending shade, and that we do so asking how each of us can live in such a way that we not only receive but transmit the light in our way, hoping, praying, insisting, as Gorman says,

[37:17]

that no matter what else we do or do not leave behind, love becomes our legacy. May we fully enjoy the Dorma.

[37:50]

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