Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, [...] Thank you. Thank you. Even for 100,000 million helpers.

[01:03]

We need to listen to, to remember and accept. And allow the truth to that. Soon. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to the Zen Center on this lovely, beautiful Memorial Day. I think I want to start by telling you that I have a problem, a problem. which is some stuff arises for me around Memorial Day weekend.

[02:14]

I have some issues, some things come into my mind, and I know I was at Safeway yesterday, and I saw I'd never seen a triple tag team stocking chips before. in the afternoon and big stacks of beer. And I know in some way Memorial Day weekend kicks off the summer. It's a three-day weekend, time to be with family and friends. But there's a reason why it's called Memorial Day. And that's because this is a holiday that commemorates U.S. soldiers who have died in war. And it's not a holiday to celebrate. On the other side, it's a commemoration of our fallen heroes. When I was a youngster, I was a Cub Scout.

[03:19]

And in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, I marched in a Memorial Day parade along with my Cub Scout troop. It was a pretty small-scale affair. And... In the lead, there was a jeep that was towing a missile. The local army base was there, and they were towing this missile. And even though I was kind of a kid, I don't know how old you are when you're a Cub Scout, I sort of felt it was a little funny that this is about people who have died and there's this missile that is being paraded around. Anyway, so I have a problem about this. When the lectures are assigned, I didn't realize it was Memorial Day. It's the 27th of the month. And then when I realized it was, at first I thought, well, I don't have to talk about Memorial Day. It's kind of secularized. It's become just this barbecue event, movie releases.

[04:21]

And then I thought, well, I need to say something. One reason I need to say something is because this place here that we're all sitting in is a Buddhist temple. And a place like this is dedicated to not killing. Yet here's a holiday that actually was some relish I was anticipating. Three days, you know. Here's a holiday dedicated to honoring soldiers who died probably in a war. I know it's an oversimplification to say that soldiers are people whose profession is to kill. I know there's cooks and chaplains and auto mechanics and every probably range of job there is in the world in the soldiering realm. At the same time, the army is a military tool and witnessed this holiday. Soldiers get killed and maybe they get killed when they're trying to kill somebody else.

[05:26]

So I'm pretty sure that it's a good thing to remember to respect those who have gone before us, those who have died and passed. But also, here we are at the Zen Center, and I would like to think that a Buddhist temple is a sanctuary of nonviolence, and yet Anyway, here's an example of a problem I had this week around this holiday. We're going to be closed on Monday. And we put a notice up on the bulletin board saying the Zendo and offices and public activities will not happen. Memorial Day. And when this announcement poster first went up, it had a U.S. flag on it.

[06:38]

And the first time I came to the front door and I saw this announcement of Memorial Day with the U.S. flag, I had this complicated thought. I thought, oh, no, oh, God. And then I thought, well, why do I feel that? Actually, I'm proud to be an American, strangely enough. I think this country has a tremendous potential. I'm grateful that I was born here. I realize the advantages that follow from it. And yet I saw that flag on the front door of the Zen Center, on that piece of paper, and I just felt somehow it didn't feel right. To me, at least. But I have a job here that allows me to have an opinion. So I spoke to the office and asked if they could find another sign. Turns out, you know, if you have, I think, maybe a program like Microsoft Publisher, for all the holidays, they have like poster announcements. Thanksgiving is turkey or maybe an Indian or squash.

[07:42]

You can make your choice. And for Memorial Day, they had about 40 different possible sort of announcements that had flags in them. And the alternative was they had tombstones. So tombstones with either the U.S. flag or a tombstone. So if you click on Memorial Day. Um, and I thought, well, Tombstone works for me, you know. But it was kind of poorly rendered. And some of them had crosses on them. And, uh, so, so we went with the text-only version, man, you know. But, anyway, uh, It felt funny to see a flag on our front door. And I think partly one reason it felt funny was because I think of Zen Center as a sanctuary, as a place almost outside of the boundaries of the United States.

[08:49]

I know the planning department doesn't agree. I know we're here. But I think of this place as a sanctuary. And there is, you know, in... not just the Western tradition, the tradition of the world, a long history of churches being sanctuaries outside of the authority of the state. In Polynesia, there were such sanctuaries. In Greece, in Europe, in England, in England for 1,300 centuries, ending a few hundred years ago, churches were true sanctuaries, where if a criminal made his way into the confines of them, of the boundary of the church, they were free from arrest. A little more complicated than that, but many churches were sanctuaries. I read, when I read this, I read sort of... During various tumultuous times in England at one point, the king died and the queen and the kings, and it was a sort of change of power, and the queen fled to Westminster Abbey with her entourage and broke down the windows to throw the furniture in so they could dive into Westminster Abbey ahead of the pursuing soldiers.

[10:11]

And once they made it in there, they lived there for two years. It was a true sanctuary. So one of the problems I have with Memorial Day is that it is so that it doesn't honor the other side equally to my mind. It doesn't include the enemy. And a holiday like that is just half of the story. It seems incomplete to me. Again, it's not a bad thing to honor the dead and to respect people who have made an enormous sacrifice, but we shouldn't pick and choose who we're going to respect and honor.

[11:15]

And we can't honor just our own sons and daughters or parents and grandparents and ignore their sons and daughters and parents and great-grandparents. And finally, or maybe not finally, but finally, the focus of Zen Center ought to be to help the living. Help the living, which means us, find a way of life that stands out against the madness of war. It doesn't honor war. It doesn't even honor war by silence. We need to speak out. Without righteousness we need to speak out and say that war is a horrible thing. It's a catastrophe. And war especially is not some event that should fill us with patriotic fervor.

[12:15]

And perhaps that's the root of my discomfort with the flag on the front door because Showing the flag has come to be, I feel like, it's not just a new code, it is an old standing code for patriotism. And I think in the world we live in today, that we, that patriotism is an unnecessary extravagance. It comes with cost that's too high to support. And somehow, forming my words so far has been a feeling about what an awkward place we've come to in America right now. Our government has enmeshed itself in a

[13:21]

in a fight that perhaps some well-meaning people, I'll give them credit, well-meaning people thought was in the best interests of the country. But it seems clear to me, and I'm just one person, but it seems clear to me that what we're doing is planting the seeds of more terrorism and more war. We're not just killing the enemy insurgents, which is a title I'm sure that George Washington would have had by the British some hundred years ago, hundreds of years ago. We're not just killing enemy insurgents. We're killing civilians and bombing wedding parties and planting so many seeds of future karma that, frankly, I get discouraged. And every day, it seems like more people are becoming candidates for future Memorial Day Honor.

[14:33]

So the Zen Center is, as I said, and know and feel, the Zen Center is a Buddhist temple, a place where everyone should feel safe, should feel free and safe to come to. And what does it mean to make a safe place? How do we do this? How do we make an environment where everyone feels like they're included? Well, actually, it probably isn't possible to do this. Because we're not a closed container. We wouldn't want to be. We can't be. Forget about things happening over in the Middle East. Right here in front of us, on the sidewalk in front of us and in our own homes and in our own hearts and minds, I think that we're also busy creating karma and maybe even living in a way that doesn't answer our deepest human yearning, desire, need for peace and love and waking up.

[15:55]

Here's a story of separation. Earlier this week, a couple days ago, I was walking out of the building and I stopped to say hello to one of the residents who was standing on the front steps. And he had on a nice suit because he was going to a job interview that afternoon. We talked a little bit and I wished him well. And I complimented him on how he looked in this nice suit. And I walked away. And then, the next afternoon, I ran into him again. And he told me that right after I walked away, a bicyclist came up Page Street. And as the bicyclist passed by, he called out, you look really stupid in that suit. He looked really stupid in that synth, he said, and then pedaled up the hill.

[17:12]

And, you know, I think it's possible that the person that bicyclist who said that might have on some other occasion pedaled that bicycle to a demonstration against the war. Maybe. And I wonder if he knows the way I felt then that You look stupid in that suit. There are many variations of that refrain. I don't mention suits, but many variations. It's one of the ways that war begins. And I thought, what a mean thing to say to a stranger, somebody just passing by. And then I remembered something about myself. I remembered something that I had done not too long ago. And my righteous indignation was immediately complicated by the awareness that I too had done such things.

[18:20]

Here's another story of separation. A year ago, I was in my car in the mission district. My daughter was besides me. It was an afternoon. Day like this, clear sky, beautiful day. Windows are down in my car. The light turns red. A car pulls up beside me. It was one of the full-scale hummers. You know, when I say hummer, what I mean, these enormous sort of tanks. And both of our windows were open in the afternoon air. I heard music coming from his car. I glanced over. I saw this. handsome, well-dressed, nice haircut, young man. Young means younger than me. And the confidence is emanating from the car and from herself and the music. And the light stayed red, you know. And I looked at this thing and the car was kind of rumbling.

[19:25]

And I don't know what made me do this, but I said, hey, And he looked over. And I said, you know that car of yours? That's a really stupid car. And then the light turned red. I mean, it turned green. And we accelerated away. We went off. I've never seen him again, but I still feel ashamed somehow. Or something. You know, it's one of those things, the moment I opened my mouth and said it, I thought, oh, God, what did I say? Was that helpful? And so, my actions, you know, were how war begins. My actions were the sort of seed that can ripen into discord.

[20:30]

And... Multiplied around the world is a problem. In fact, actually, the type of thing I did right there is why we have a Memorial Day, actually, I think. You know, it's a small scale, but multiply it out. So, stepping out into the path of waking up, which is the path we teach at the Zen Center, stepping out into the path of waking up, making a resolve to live a life that does not harm others, requires the commitment that we not harm others in the process. Not to say, hey, that suit or that car or that idea is stupid.

[21:42]

And acting with personal integrity, acting in this way of trying to cause no harm, is not like a certain state of mind that you kind of hold and keep, but it's a flexible, responsive, humble place. And the question that we need to carry for us in us when we try to act with that integrity is not what's the right thing to do, but what's the compassionate thing to do? So, okay, backing up a little. Starting with something simple, maybe simple. We are born and then we'll die. I think this is a fact no one here denies. We just haven't gotten to the second half of that equation personally. And what the business, if you want to say, business of this Zen Center is to help people who have been born and will certainly die, help them, help us.

[23:01]

the predicament we're in, in between those two places. One of the delusions, and there's a few that I could pick, but one of the delusions of our life is that we have a lot of time to figure things out. We look around and see most of the people we know live to a certain ripe old age, we think that maybe that'll be our time, but we can't know. We really don't know. And what I think we can know is that the time to make our lives right and the time to make this effort to wake up He's right now.

[24:11]

So, wake up. This thing, this thing called Buddhist practice, is not just about waking up integrity in the privacy of our own mind, in the privacy of our own lives. That's a part of it. But this waking up practice is really embodied when it's made real in friendships with other people, in relationship to other people. And if you want to practice and wake up, This effort is made real by being challenged and sustained by contact with others who seek to realize the Dharma as well. It's really important not to try to do this all on your own. One deep truth of the bodhisattva path is not exactly that we need to wake up others, but that we need others to wake up ourselves.

[25:23]

And in Zen, the practice of Zen has survived through a long, long, what we hope and believe is unbroken series of personal friendships that stretch back through history, ultimately, to Gautama, Shakyamuni Buddha. And this thread, this delicate, continuous thread of friendship is a line that joins the past with our future and one which we need, which it is our responsibility to sustain. Dharma practice blossoms when friendships blossom and flourish. And the most effective way for the Dharma to be correctly transmitted is in face-to-face relationships.

[26:31]

And I think I'm going to say it is a fault, okay? I'm going to say it's a fault. And it's always tricky to find fault. But it is a fault to want to be understood by others before we understand ourselves. It's a fault. to want to be understood by others before we understand ourselves. We know, but also we don't really understand, that this world is a closed door. It's a barrier. And at the same time, it's the way through to waking up. You know, I don't know.

[27:43]

I wanted to give a personal talk this Memorial Day about the hummers and flags in my life. And one of the things I also want to say, you know, as I dig for these things, these encouraging words, I realize that my own practice is incomplete. I'm still struggling to make this real. And sometimes I get mad or I say stupid things. And my effort is to notice this and sometimes I do. Sometimes I do. Back to Memorial Day. I made, I kind of sketched, I sort of sketched out and made notes for this talk before breakfast this morning.

[28:55]

And at breakfast, I opened up the newspaper and I read an article. It was on the front page. And I'm sorry, it's a little bit heavy, but maybe some of you saw this. It said, chilling claims of Iraq massacre. Witnesses say Marines killed 24 men, women, and children. And it says, witnesses to the slaying of 24 Iraqi civilians by US Marines say the Americans shot men, women, and children at close range in retaliation for the death of a Marine soldier. He goes on to say, I won't read it, but in one household, the girls killed for ages 14, 10, 5, 3, and 1. And finally, this is my problem, that we are a nation that is at war and the enemy is ourself.

[30:11]

Martin Luther King once said, the stages of history are replete with the chants and choruses of conquerors who came killing in pursuit of peace. The stages of history are replete with the chants and choruses of conquerors who came killing in pursuit of peace. And I worry that That's what we're doing. What's good and wonderful about Buddhist practice is that you don't have to believe it on faith. As a matter of fact, You should not take the instructions of practice as some sort of received wisdom, a container that, you know, we have to be careful not to break.

[31:17]

Because if you believe it in this way, then your belief will be kind of wobbly. As soon as someone attacked you, a difficult situation arises. Your buddy in the platoon is killed. And Hummer drives by. You might forget the beautiful truth of waking up and then get ready to fight with words or actions of your own. And what's strong about practice is that you discover on your cushion at first, on your cushion in the zendo at first, and then later on also in the events of your daily life, what's really true. And you find this out because you feel it for yourself. And it's not so much a matter of some tremendous insight or single moment of inspiration, though that might happen. It's more simply a process of over time of loosening your grip on old thinking.

[32:24]

Old thinking and feeling and allowing your heart and thoughts to find their own true course, like a stream that naturally flows out to the ocean. I would like to honor this Memorial Day weekend, this holiday, by remembering not just everyone who's gone before us, victims of violence and more common mortality, but also by remembering in our hearts the people we live with and work with and know and express a commitment to make our lives something realistic. a little bit kinder, a little bit more helpful.

[33:26]

And then to keep on doing this and making this modest possible effort without end. There is a chant, a text that we recite at the Zen Center sometimes called the Loving Kindness Meditation. And on this Memorial Day weekend, I would like us to end this lecture by chanting it together. Loving Kindness Meditation This is what should be published by one of his wives who seeks the good and has obtained the peace Thank you. Thank you.

[34:29]

Thank you. Thank you.

[34:30]

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