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. Just by way of introduction, for those of you who don't know me, many of you do, I'm Linda Cutts, and I serve... as the central abbess of the San Francisco Zen Center. And I am very happy to be here today giving a talk at City Center in the Buddha Hall in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King. I was invited to give this talk while I was at Tassajara leading the practice period this fall, and I've been turning it and thinking about what it is I want to bring up in honor of Dr. King, and that will encourage our practice, that illuminates our practice, and where we can step forward perhaps in a way that we haven't yet in our practice.

[01:20]

So, it's a beautiful picture that we have on our altar. In all three of our temples, we have ceremonies that honor Martin Luther King, and there's offerings that are made and chanting, and then a dedication. The dedication that we use at Green Gulch is particularly... Beautiful, I think, which I wanted to share parts of it with you. It starts out in the Dharma world, birth and death stand not apart. There is no self or other. Not seeing the Dharma world, living beings appear as separate selves and suffer in a stream of dreams.

[02:30]

Out of great compassion, awakened ones appear within duality to help all beings awaken and return to the peaceful vision of mutual interdependence. Today, honoring the birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., we gratefully remember celebrate, and dedicate all merit to the dreams and goals of his life and to the lives of his sisters and brothers who stood upright, joined hands, and walked together to demonstrate and encourage the spirit of nonviolence, justice, and reverence for all life. May the spirit of selfless devotion be realized everywhere by all beings. So this was... part of the dedication for at least at Green Gulch. So these tributes for Martin Luther King are wonderful, and in some ways, what can I add to the beautiful words and actions throughout this country, throughout the world?

[03:48]

So I feel very humble in giving this talk, in making this effort to acknowledge this person and the force and consequences of the actions of this person in our lives. I realize that the real tribute, the only real way to requite this kind of teaching, this kind of life, is to change our own lives and to study our own lives and to live in accordance with those teachings. Really, that's the only tribute that really matters. Words can be, words are powerful, and I'm gonna be talking about words and how they can change us. But these truths that were fought and died for, we, the real way to requite and show our gratitude is to live our lives in accordance, in alignment with this.

[04:53]

So the more I study Dr. Martin Luther King's life, the more I appreciate and understand how it has affected me. The I Have a Dream speech is so... important and beautiful, and I'm thrilled to it every time I hear it. But there's many other speeches, and a letter from Birmingham jail, and a speech given to Dartmouth College in 62 that I found very helpful, which I want to quote from a little bit later. So as you know, last week, right here, right outside our window, right on the corner, we had a violent action where four young men were murdered.

[05:54]

I'm sure many of you heard about it. And many of us participated in a march and vigil last week at the African American Arts and Culture Center, several blocks down Laguna on Fulton Street. And many, many people came from the neighborhood and Zen Center connected people. And the experience of sitting together with mourning people who were expressing everything. They were expressing anger. They were expressing grief at a level that... I haven't really experienced, haven't really seen that level of expressed grief. And, you know, often in our practice we hear that anger is prohibited or, you know, we should, one moment of anger destroys our whole practice.

[07:00]

You can find things like this in the scripture. But there's also a kind of anger problem that is necessary, that is called for, that animates action to change and shows people where we need to change. And all that was expressed there as well, both anger at family and friends who may not be doing enough, anger at the causes and conditions, anger at... perpetrators, but mostly I feel it was stemming from deep, deep, unnameable, unspeakable grief and suffering. And one of the things that people said at this meeting was, I grew up in this neighborhood. A number of people said, I grew up here, this is my neighborhood, and these

[08:05]

Terrible things have happened many, many times. And I realized in some ways, having been at Zen Center since 1970, 71, I could say maybe I grew up in this neighborhood too. I came as a young adult, but my adult years completely were here. But what the people were speaking about Their experience of these blocks, these neighborhoods, and my experience I felt was worlds, there were different worlds. The pain and loss and grief from violence and cruelty was at a level that I haven't experienced, even though I've walked these blocks for 45 years, 40 years. So this was very vivid to me.

[09:10]

I grew up in this neighborhood. Dr. Martin Luther King spoke about cruelty, violence, unkind actions. and set out to engage with that in a way that, to me, was not only intelligent, creative, but courageous at a level that is hard to understand. Nonviolent civil disobedience is almost like out of a Jataka tale or something where you hear someone in the tales of you know, the past lives of the Buddha, when the Buddha was bodhisattva, doing things for the benefit of others at risk, or even his own life being sacrificed.

[10:15]

And I feel that this was the level that those participating, and today as well, in nonviolent civil disobedience, are at a level of engagement where selflessness and... a deep love of humankind is expressed with such courage that it's hard to put into words, and it so inspires me. When I was growing up in St. Paul, Minnesota, I had a very good friend actually who just died a couple years ago, African-American young man, we were high school friends, and in a group called SURE, Student Union for Racial Equality. This is in 62, 63, 64. And when we were in college, we went to a dance together at Macalester College.

[11:21]

He came to pick me up and came into the house and... I won't say names, but a family member, when greeted by my friend, refused to speak. This family member turned their back and was silent. And I was... This is mild. This is mild compared to the unkindness and violence and cruelty. But this... I was not taught to be unkind to guests in our home, or to anyone, and then to see this enacted to a friend of mine, it broke some kind of trust with this family member. This was, I couldn't support that kind of behavior and hypocritical action.

[12:23]

And, you know, this was tiny, and the effect on me was And for my friend, I don't know what it felt like to him. I think he handled it with dignity. But I was so ashamed. I was so ashamed at that inhumanity and action right in my own house. And that was kind of a break with this family member. So this mild action and other very mild actions I've been weighing and looking at in contrast to the horrific and terrifying experiences that during the civil rights times of the 60s and now during these new civil rights times as we face the problems of our time

[13:28]

which are different than in the 60s, but are embedded in consciousness, ways of thinking. So this is why I'm studying this, trying to look at how it is that one acts the way one acts, or that I act the way I act. And I come to consciousness, karmic consciousness, So I want to spend a little time with karmic consciousness, how we think, what affects how we think, and then how we transform consciousness and our karmic actions of body, speech, and mind. Before I do that, the anger that I saw expressed at this meeting and that I've heard expressed in these weeks as we face the events of Ferguson and Staten Island and really our own neighborhood, our own, wherever we look we see these sufferings and we are part of this suffering.

[14:49]

This is not happening to someone else or over there. What appears in consciousness is our consciousness, is our life. What appears in consciousness is our life. So we may have strong reactions of anger, and rightly so. But we have to look at what is the anger made up of. And there are proscribed anger. There is proscribed anger in Buddhism, which is the anger of wanting to harm, basically, the intent to harm or do ill, and aggressive actions with the intent to harm. This kind of anger is the anger that's talked about as something that's extremely harmful for self and others, and is one of the poisons. But there are other kinds of anger in English, We use the word in lots of different ways.

[15:51]

There's, aside from outright intention to harm, there's the anger that's just a very strong reaction to something happens we don't like and don't want to happen. And we have this, and we can find out, is that frustrated greed or is that true anger? But we don't like it. We don't want to harm anybody. We don't want to... break precepts or take something, but we don't like it. That's another kind of anger. A third kind of anger is asserting boundaries and differences and making that clear. And the energy that comes from that kind of anger is necessary to be a full adult person in this world, to be able to say no, to set boundaries, stop. And that anger is not proscribed. In fact, it's part of being a fully functioning, mature being.

[16:55]

And the fourth kind of anger is protesting injustice. And this anger arises, you know, as... It arises from early, early on. As small children, we see things that are not fair, or things aren't being shared, or there's injustice. We have a feel for this. And recently, just the other day, I heard an interview about... from Terry Gross on Fresh Air with a young man who became a radicalized Islamist in England and joined at 16 and has since recanted and is now working to work with the causes of why young people become violent jihadists and so forth.

[18:05]

And the primary thing that turned him in this direction as a 16-year-old was injustice, seeing injustice in the Bosnia war, seeing Muslims killed en masse, and this injustice was felt at such a strong level that, and he was recruited using this, manipulating this feeling of injustice and turning it, which he has since understood how that works. protesting injustice, when this arises in our body-mind, this is in alignment, really, with who we are as human beings in a shared life in this world. So the teaching focuses on abstaining from the kind of anger that wants to retaliate and do harm. Seize injustice, maybe, but...

[19:09]

rather than working with it in a way that promotes justice for all, turns that into wanting to harm others. And this is what's strongly talked about, and also the transformation of that is talked about, which I'll say something about a little later. So, Dr. King, in seeing injustice, social injustice, injustice of all kinds, I would say anger arose at this injustice, but an anger that was used in a creative way, and as I say, a courageous way, and turned and studied

[20:11]

in order to act in an upright, just way. And one of the etymological words for justice is upright. Upright is just. So these actions at that time of the sit-ins and so forth, people were trained over long periods of time to be able to withstand retaliation bodily harm, and not retaliate back. This kind of training of restraint, self-purification, patience at a level that I can barely imagine, even though I've seen video, you know, and I've seen reenactments. But it's very similar to the Buddhist teacher and monk Shantideva talking about working with anger. The antidote to anger is patience, and by patiently accepting circumstances, situations, without harming and reactivity, one becomes transformed over time.

[21:34]

And not only are we ourselves transformed by this, but as Dr. King so eloquently tells us when he talks about nonviolent action, the people that are doing the violence and cruelty and unkindness are transformed in the process. Because to do these kinds of actions, because we have a shared humanity and a shared life, when we hurt one another and the person does not come back at you and meet violence with violence, this is hard to understand. We expect to be, you know, an eye for an eye. And so I wanted to read from this Dartmouth talk in Dartmouth what Dr. Martin Luther King says about what happens to a person. And maybe those of you who've studied this understand this, but... This kind of nonviolence comes from a love or metta, loving kindness and compassion for the other person that isn't about liking them or liking the actions, but a deep knowledge and grounding in loving kindness, agape in Greek, a kind of love that's selfless

[23:05]

and doesn't depend on whether the person is doing things you like or not. It's a redemptive love, and Christianity talks about this kind of love for one another. But it's very close to metta, very close to loving kindness, which is divine. It's a brahma-vihara, it's a heavenly realm, this kind of loving kindness that seeks to be in relationship no matter what. So it's a level of love that we can aspire to. So out of this love and understanding and goodwill comes this, Dr. King says, this is what nonviolence says. It says that love, the love ethic is a possibility in the struggle for freedom and human dignity.

[24:05]

And then he brings up Gandhi. And these young people who all over the South were trained for a long time to be ready to meet what was going to happen to them. And basically, he says, in substance, they stood up against the unjust system. And in quotes, we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with the good. And then he describes what can happen. You can throw us in jail and we will love you. You can bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we will still love you.

[25:09]

Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at midnight hours and drag us out on some wayside road and beat us and leave us half dead. And as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your propaganda to say that we are not fit morally, culturally, and so forth, and we will still love you. Be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory. So I've found that to be very powerful, very powerful for me personally. That level is, really, it's, I aspire to this.

[26:15]

I'm inspired by it. And what does it take for a regular human being? You know, Martin Luther King is not a saint. He's a regular human being who listened just like the Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion listened to people, saw and observed the cries of the world. This is the meaning of Avalokiteshvara's name. The Bodhisattva of Infinite Compassion is one who hears the cries of the world. And I think he had a choice. He could have, those of you who saw Selma at the beginning, he could have gotten a great job on a university campus and had a nice life with his family. And it shows You know, he chose. He couldn't help it. He had to listen. And that listening transformed karmic consciousness. And this is what I want to say.

[27:18]

You know, we have karmic consciousness, you might say, is the thought that we have that I am here, I am me, and I am separate from everybody else, and I have to look at this to make sure I'm okay. And it is, our own karmic consciousness is shaped through everything we've seen and heard, our education, what we read, who talks to us. This shapes the way we think, the way we act, the way we speak. And with karmic consciousness, that's not the end of the story. There's also an unconscious cognitive process that is inconceivable, just like our life is inconceivably vast. And this is also shaping and the causes and conditions are being changed moment by moment through each thing we encounter, each thing we hear, how we think.

[28:29]

But it's not set in stone. It's an inconceivable, vastly interconnected process. So this nonviolence that was described, and we will change in the process, you will be changed too, and it will be a double victory because what we see and what we hear cannot help but change us. And our own words that we speak changes the unconscious, cognitive process which then conditions the conscious process and this is flowing. So how do we change and transform the unconscious which is fueling so much of our set views and our stereotypes and our biases and our, I would say this is

[29:36]

where the term, you know, the underpinnings of the term white privilege, we have been taught and lived, and our circumstances and experiences are such, and we believe things are like that. That's how our consciousness is. But this is a delusion, you know, that we deserve, as a white person, anything different than any other person. But because of our karmic consciousness, that may be unexamined or haven't looked at this, we think of it as normal. So these are karmic formations born of uncountable, unfathomable moments of time. And that can be transformed. How do we transform it? You can't transform the unconscious by saying, okay, unconscious, change, you know, please.

[30:40]

Because these processes are imperceptible or outside of consciousness. However, in karmic consciousness, we can study. We can study our actions. We can change. We can substitute words of hate and bigotry and misunderstanding, and make efforts to change our own language. This, in consciousness, working with our karmic consciousness, will then change the unconscious. And because the unconscious changes, then our consciousness will change again. It's a circle, it's a process that we can connect with in a very positive way. The power of words and our language, this is how the teaching is delivered. It's delivered in words. Even when we see actions of kindness, we transform it into words so we can think about it and talk about it.

[31:47]

So a couple people have been talking with me recently about how they don't like service. You know, chanting, why are we chanting? But our actual saying those teachings, loving kindness meditation, harmony of difference and equality, the Heart Sutra, these words that we maybe don't even understand. By saying those in consciousness, that transforms our unconscious until the unconscious is permeated with teachings and the conscious mind is permeated where we become the teachings, consciously and unconsciously. That's the way we think. That's the way we speak. and that's the way we live. So we can't just rest and say, well, this is how I am, this is the way I think. That is a kind of acceptance of the situation that I don't feel is tenable.

[32:51]

But also, where do I begin? The problems that we face on this meeting, this vigil in March, we were asked, yes, you all come out for a vigil in March. How about coming Monday night at six o'clock when we work on some of these problems, the consequences of which are violence and cruelty and misunderstanding and longing for inclusion and care and finding it wherever you can. How about help, what can we do in this neighborhood, the neighborhood people have grown up in? So they say, come on Monday night, six o'clock, to this African American Arts and Culture Center on Fulton Street for another meeting, not just a candlelight vigil. Let's work together. So much of these things happen because we don't know one another well, and we have ideas. We have stories in our karmic consciousness about ourselves and others that we hold to because we're not familiar with one another.

[34:05]

This is a chance, I think, in this neighborhood to break that. And the chance to change our unconscious... that we can't even get, we don't even know what they are, but comes forth in our attitudes and words and actions. We can listen to one another, listen to the cries of the world, and make strong intentions, vows, and promises in consciousness. Those vows have enormous power to change the unconscious cognitive process. which will change consciousness. This is something we can actively take up together. And Dr. King mentions karmic consciousness. He doesn't use those words exactly in the letter from Birmingham. He says, in a letter to these people,

[35:13]

group of white ministers from the South are saying, you're moving too fast, you're going too fast, moderation, it's not good or something. And he speaks to that saying, you know, moderation and restraint is fine, but not if it means just letting the status quo be. Then he says, what do I say to my daughter, my little daughter, when she sees on TV that Fun Town has opened and wants to go, and I have to say to her that people of color are not allowed to go to Fun Town. And then he says, I can see the sky of her mental life. I can see it become clouded with inferiority and this is directly connected with this is how we create consciousness, our karmic consciousness that thinks that we're not okay or we're not good enough because we hear these messages.

[36:26]

And he saw it and spoke about it in a letter from Birmingham. He saw it cross. the sad face of his daughter. She doesn't understand why she can't go to fun town, and then how that affects what kind of karmic formation happens there. So we have all the tools we need to change our own life and to help change the world, but we have to listen to ourselves, listen to one another, hearing the cries of the world, And in doing so, when we look upon the world with eyes of compassion, listen with ears of compassion, this is transformative. This creates, as it says in the Lotus Sutra, an ocean of blessings. So I admit that this offering is inadequate to truly, truly express my gratitude and awe, really, for the work of Dr. Martin Luther King and so many others, so many unnamed heroes and heroines, heroes all over the world who continue to

[38:03]

live in truth for the benefit of all beings. Thank you very much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the dormant.

[38:37]

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