This podcast is offered by San Francisco's Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning, everybody. Or I should say good day, depending on where you are in the world. I hope you can all see me well. If you have any difficulty, please let me know or not know through the chat. It's a... Honor and joy to be with all of you again in this virtual practice field streaming live from McGinnis Mike Temple here in San Francisco. Before I dive into the subject of my talk this morning, I thought I'd just offer a brief update on Tassajara Zen Mountain Center, which is our Zen Center's monastery in the Ventana Wilderness. Some of you know that Tassajara has been threatened in the last week by a wildfire. The wildfire is called the Willow Fire, and it's less than a mile away from Tal Sahara, and it's burned close to 3,000 acres.

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And if you've been following the updates on our websites, you know that we evacuated most of the students over a week ago, and we only have a small fire crew of trained residents remaining there to help prepare to defend Tal Sahara if necessary. Fortunately, and with the tremendous help of around 500, I believe, professional fire crews and lots of equipment. The fire's progress towards the monastery has been largely halted, and the fire is now, I read this morning, over 30% contained. And the last four days, we've seen very favorable weather, which has significantly reduced the heat within the fire area, and it's enabled the firefighters to make progress on what we call direct line construction, where it's safe to do so. So the fire is currently staying within the existing perimeter, which is a great thing. And the fire crews all around, both at Tassajara and the larger, wider crews are feeling pretty helpful, given the progress that's been made in the last number of days.

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So I just want to express our... heartfelt and deep appreciation and gratitude for everyone who is helping to protect our beloved Tassajara. May everyone remain safe and good keeping. So in the vein of other reasons for us to feel appreciative and gratitude, this is Pride Month. which culminates here in the Bay Area with Pride Weekend. And here at Beginner's Mind Temple, we traditionally offer a pride-oriented Dharma talk the last Saturday in June to coincide with citywide celebrations. We've also frequently had a Zen Center contingent in the annual Pride Parade. And alas, due to the continued pandemic precautions, Parade is, once again, not being held this year, although there are many other ways that folks are encouraged to celebrate this year.

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Just so happens, as Matt noted earlier, it's due to probably a scheduling convergence, or you could say maybe another site. Zen Center has also calendared a day-long sitting for today. And the way I see it is that if we can't march in a parade, what better way to celebrate pride than to sit in steadfast stillness together, quietly, you could say, quietly enjoying our fabulous rainbow nature. And also, as Matt mentioned, we won't be holding our usual post-Q&A today in order to support the subtleness and and concentration of those sitting. So I'm sorry I won't have an opportunity to connect with you afterwards and hear what some of your thoughts and reflections are on today's talk. So you could say, regardless of our sexual orientation or identity, I think that Pride celebrations serve as a beneficial reminder of the importance of being in touch with and

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and honoring our personal and unique expression of being, while also appreciating our commonality. And the word pride, of course, speaks to the importance for those of us who are LGBTQIA, the alphabet, sangha, to have a sense of confidence and worth in our own dignity, importance, and innate goodness. regardless of how often we're told by others that we are somehow second-class citizens or sinful or less than human, which has, you know, people have told me directly to my face, including my family at times. And it's frustrating to recognize that LGBTQ people still lack equal protections under the law in the U.S. and many other countries around the world. And because of societal and family pressures, many people, especially young people, struggle with their sexual orientation and gender identity, leading to much higher rates of suicide among those who are queer.

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So visibility is important and can literally save lives. And it's important to tell, therefore, and celebrate our personal and shared stories. to understand the narratives of difference as they are lived and breathed by each of us. The theme of this year's San Francisco Pride happens to be all in this together, all in this together. And I think it's helpful to consider the meaning of pride that refers to a group or family, such as the Pride of Lions. Ours is a pride of belonging, of belonging to the family of being, or as Thich Nhat Hanh names it, interbeing. Acknowledging this is an initial step on the path of wisdom and compassion.

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The Dharma teachings of interbeing or interdependent arising illuminate for us how we are integrally connected. We say we are intimate beyond our knowing, unfathomably intimate. And our task as practitioners is to make the effort to free our minds oppressed by delusions of separation. But to free our minds, we need to go into the dark places, the places of confusion, of pain and sorrow, to see what they consist of, to bring the light of awareness to these places so that they don't have the same power over us. Courage to be who we are first requires the courage to see who we are. And then from this place of clear seeing, we can develop the capacity to meet each other as we really are

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Rather than being fooled by mere appearances and superficial labels and identities. Suzuki Roshi says in Zen Mind, McGinnis Mind, when you are you, Zen is Zen. When you are you, you see things as they are. Or as he said sometimes, sees things as it is. And you become one with your surroundings, your environment, your world. This is your true self, he reminds us. When you are you, Zen is Zen. When I first encountered Zen and Buddhism 30 years ago, it was important to me to understand how the Buddha Dharma can address my particular experiences of suffering, including that which came with being queer and the ways that others related to me. And then I related to myself as a result of this identification.

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As part of this exploration, when I first began Dharma practice, I greatly valued and benefited from engaging in several queer Dharma groups in the Bay Area, including one of the oldest, which I think is the Gay Buddhist Fellowship, which used to be down the street, used to meet in the hospice. I found it... affirming and healing to have a supportive and safe space in which to express and validate the truth of my suffering and my joy as both a queer-identified person as well as a Dharma practitioner in a predominantly Christian culture. Queer Dharma groups offer a practice space that welcomes those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, same-gender, loving, and two-spirited as we together explore the compassion and liberative teachings of Buddhism.

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And they provide a space where we can have access to the feeling of belonging when in a society that often tells us we don't belong. And while I I no longer have the same need for queer spaces as I did back then. I still actually participate in and help facilitate Zen Center's own monthly queer drama group because I feel it's important to continue to offer practice spaces for other LGBTQ plus folk who find them supportive and beneficial on their spiritual path, the same way that I did when I first started practice. I recently gave a talk at our Queer Dharma group. And for the talk, I had two possible titles. One was, The Dharma is So Queer. And the other was, What exactly is queer about queer dharma anyway?

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And I thought I would share with you this morning some of what I explored in that talk. So here it goes. The question, of course, is, What exactly is queer dharma? And of course, in the context of an affinity group, there will be people who are queer. People like me who identify someone with a sexual orientation outside culturally selfish norms that is not heterosexual. Or who don't want to put a label on their sexuality. Or someone who is questioning their sexual identity. And then there is dharma. And Dharma in its broadest context means truth. The universal truth common to all individuals at all times. And the Buddha experienced the truth, the reality under the Bodhi tree. He woke up to that reality. And then he taught about it for 45 years afterwards.

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So Dharma can also mean the Buddhist teachings that have been passed down over millennia. We can understand the path of practice and of meditation as a radical, yet compassionate way to make the journey from self-deception or delusion to truth. So we could say then that one understanding of queer Dharma is that it is the truth of being queer. It is the practice of sharing our truth. our life experiences, and our aspiration for liberation from suffering, all through a queer prison. And yet, there has lingered in the background for me a somewhat persistent question. What exactly is the praxis of queer Dharma? How does one practice the Buddha Dharma in a way that is essentially queer?

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I'm not satisfied with the idea that just because I'm someone who identifies on the rainbow spectrum, or who is practicing Zen, that therefore I'm engaging in queer Dharma. That somehow seems to limit or diminish both me as a complex individual, as well as the Dharma as a profoundly liberative practice. So I propose that we can go further. and ask ourselves, is the Dharma, the teaching of Buddhism, itself fundamentally queer in ways that isn't just about the sexual or gender orientation of a practitioner? Or to put it another way, is there something about Dharma principles and Dharma practice as a methodology for transformation and liberation that is queer in and of

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Now, I imagine that for some of you who identify as heterosexual, cisgender, this is going to be a somewhat provocative proposition, particularly if I suggest that practicing the Dharma is in any way a queer activity, and queerness is not something you're particularly comfortable with. So I invite you to have to keep an open, flexible mind. A beginner's mind. And to recognize any brief experience of discomfort you might have with this proposition, it's just a very small and momentary taste of the dis-ease that LGBTQ folk often experience in a majority heteronormative and cis-normative society. to start with an exploration of the word queer.

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One of the things about the word queer that I find interesting is how many meanings it has. It can be used as an adjective, a pejorative, a noun, an identity, a sexual orientation, and as a gender identity, as in genderqueer. But there's also one use that we don't hear as much anymore. Queer is also a verb. What does it mean to queer something? There was a time when that phrase meant to spoil or ruin or jeopardize something, to mess it up, as in queering a business deal. And while I'm glad that use has gone out of fashion, I kind of like the idea of using queer as a verb. There's something about that. Turning to the great source of wisdom we call the internets, I Googled the use of queer as a verb and came across an article by Charlie Glickman, who is a university professor, a writer, a sexuality educator, who I understand lives in Oakland, California.

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And Glickman has the following to say about using queer as a verb. He says, to queer something, whether it's a text or story or identity, is to take a look at its foundations. and question them. We can explore its limits, its biases, and its boundaries. We can look for places where there's elasticity or discover ways we can transform it into something new. To queer is to examine our assumptions and decide which of them we want to keep, change, discard, or play with. This becomes a practice in transcending the habit of settling for the predefined categories and creating new ones. And even when we leave something unchanged, we have changed our relationship to it. When we learn to practice defining, examining, and when appropriate, shedding our assumptions, we discover new freedom and flexibility.

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Glickman says, in my experience, queering is one way to do that. Fundamentally, queering is an act of ongoing transformation, both within ourselves and in relation to the world around us. I like thinking of queer as a verb because it becomes something we can choose to do in the same way that Bell Hooks suggests making love is an action and a choice. rather than only thinking of it as a noun. Each time we discover a new word or identity or category, we can queer it. And when we create new words or identities, we can queer them. It's a practice rather than a goal or a finished product. And I found Littmann's description of the use of queer as a verb or query very interesting, in part because I think it one of three mirrors or parallels several aspects and principles of Zen practice.

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So Glickman's framing of what it means to queer something, so using Glickman's framing of what it means to queer something as a springboard, I'll offer a few parallels that I think we can draw between derma practice and that of queer practice. First, both queerness and the Buddhadharma posit the absence of an inherent, fixed, and separate self. Now, I assume it's fairly apparent how queer dharma addresses the mental and conceptual prisons by which we classify sexual orientation and gender identity. I recently came across another interesting definition of queer by David Halperin. And Halperin is an American theorist in the fields of gender studies and queer theory. And just an aside, for those of you who have a more academic bent, you may already be aware that there are clear links between queer theory and Buddhist spirituality.

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It might be something you're interested in exploring further. And Halperin defines queer as an identity without an essence. Queer is an identity without an essence. So queer is an identity without essence strongly resonates, you probably can recognize, with the Buddhist concepts of anatta. Anatta is a Pali word for non-self or substance-less. As well as, in the other concept, shunyata, emptiness. So Hopin also poses that queerness as a way of being, needs to keep undoing itself, deconstructing itself, to avoid falling into the tendency to become a fixed category or identity. And I see this as echoing the Buddhist teachings around the ways that the untrained conditioned mind assigns an essence, a savava or own being, to our mental constructions.

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including our identities. But when we illuminate these mental constructs, right, including our identities, when we were able to illuminate these mental constructs through regular meditation and insight practices, they are found to be illusory and empty. So queer dharma... challenges us to recognize that our identity, even as LGBTQIA folk, is a fabricated, conditional, and temporal assignation. And we can acknowledge it as such while at the same time being careful not to concretize or reify or make it into an essence. There are innumerable Buddhist teachings reminding us that our self is conditional and not fixed.

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It's a flowing and a temporary process of what's known in Buddhism as the five skandans, or aggregates, that of body, perception, conception, volition, and consciousness. Moment to moment, always changing. They form and reform who we are and what we call the self. And if we integrate this understanding, then our sense of ourselves, how we think of ourselves and our identity does not imprison or oppress us, but actually frees us. This is so important to remember these days when fixed sexual, gender, and racial categories are being challenged. There is a marvelous teaching in the Vimalakirti Sutra on this matter.

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The Vimalakirti Sutra is an Indian Mahayana work that is some 2,000 years old. And just as an aside, Linda Ruth Cutts, who is a senior drama teacher at Green College Farm, will be offering a four-week online class on this sutra during the month of July. as part of our summer study series, exploring what's called the three turnings of the wheel of the Dharma. Sometimes I think of it as the three querings of the wheel of the Dharma. So Vimla Kirti is a layman. And he's one who is so well known and so astute in the Dharma that he bests all the Buddha's other senior disciples. as to their understanding of non-duality and emptiness. And the setting of the sutra is in Vilma Kirti's sick room. He's ill at the time.

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And this room, it has been miraculously expanded to accommodate innumerable beings who are there to visit the esteemed lay practitioner. And Vilma Kirti and Manjushri, who's the Bodhisattva of Wisdom, are discussing the nature of the self. how it is impermanent and it lacks solid solidity. And yet at the same time gives and receives compassion. And during the course of the proceedings, a goddess appears and begins to debate Shariputra. Shariputra is there and Shariputra is one of the other top disciples of the Buddha. And she debates him about the nature of language and identity. And at a certain point, Shari Bhutra becomes agitated with the goddess's skill in debate. In other words, he's on the losing end of it, right? And as an indirect assertion of his male privilege and patriarchal views, he says in an exasperated voice to her, well, why don't you change out of that female body?

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And the goddess replies, for the past 12 years, I've been trying to take on the female form, but in the end, with no success, What is there to change? She says, if a magician were to conjure up a phantom woman, would it be reasonable to ask her why she didn't change out of her female body? No, Charcutter says, phantoms have no fixed form. So what would there be to change? And the goddess replies, all things are just the same. They have no fixed form. So why then ask why I don't change out of my female form? And at that point, the goddess employs her supernatural powers to change Shariputra into a goddess like herself while she takes Shariputra's male form. And having done so, she asks, why don't you, Shariputra, change out of that female body?

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And Shariputra, surprised to find himself now in the form of a goddess, says, I don't know why I have suddenly changed and taken this female body. And the goddess replies, Shariputra, if you can change out of this female body, then all women can change likewise. Shariputra, who is not a woman, appears in a woman's body. And the same is true of all women. No, they appear in women's bodies. They are not women. Therefore, the Buddha teaches that all phenomena are neither male nor female. And then she returns Shariputra to his male form and herself back to her female form. Now, that's what I call a rather radical, queer, and liberating teaching, right? And I really appreciate... that the goddess, she embraces lovingly and compassionately her own identity.

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She doesn't give into the patriarchy or the heteronormative thinking and erase her uniqueness or the pain of her being or of her particular body with all its specifics, which include gender and sex and sexual orientation and race. in culture and age and language and experience. That if she joyfully and persistently insists on inhabiting her particular body as a vehicle of enlightenment. The same enlightenment that, according to her teaching here, also transcends all categories of bodies, genders, and identities. as the queer and black Zen teacher, Zen Jew, Earthen Emmanuel says, we need this particular body with its unique color, shape, and sex for liberation to unfold.

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There is no experience of emptiness without interrelationship. There is no experience of emptiness without interrelationship. Well, Buddhism certainly isn't free of certain cultural and historical biases around sex and gender, given how enmeshed it is with patriarchy. Queer dharma also reminds us that moral dualism is alien to Buddhist spirituality. The Buddhist teaching is an ethical system, but it lacks the moral categories of right and wrong. good and evil, or good and bad that we find so often in other faith traditions. The Buddha said he was only concerned about suffering and the end of suffering. And he would talk about what is skillful and unskillful, kusala and akusala, not about what is good and bad, per se.

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Skillful and unskillful are both tools by which to gauge whether an act or a way of behaving supports our ultimate liberation, or whether it keeps us trapped in a samsaric karmic consciousness. So morality and ethics in Buddhism isn't a matter of a set of beliefs, but rather a process, a compassionate inquiry, and rational discernment. As I think of it, compassionate querying. The Bhimala Kirti Sutra also offers an illustration at this point. In a moment of delight, the goddess showers beautiful heavenly blossoms on all the bodhisattvas and great disciples that are present in Bhimala Kirti's room.

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And some of the blossoms also fall onto Shariputra's robes where they stick. And as Shariputra unsuccessfully tries to shake and brush off the flowers, he complains that wearing flowers or other ornaments is improper for monks. Because monks are in the tradition of monastic rules forbidden from decorating themselves. even with flowers. And the goddess at that point reminds Shariputra, you know, she reprimands him, saying that flowers are free of conceptualizations and discriminations and are thus proper. Whereas the disciples, like himself, are full of all kinds of improper conceptualizations, such as right and wrong. The flowers in the sutra do not stick to the bodhisattvas because they've dispel such fabricated discriminations.

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And they're not afraid of worldly sensations and forms and beauty. The phenomenal world isn't inherently good or bad. It's our limited views that make it so. So in other words, wear what you want to wear. Enjoy it. The lack of essence or inheritance of itself and moral dualism leads to a third principle that both practices of queering and Buddhism share, which is that of non-duality. And Kurdharma posits the non-dual nature of the Orican mind. According to Buddhism, our true mind or nature, our Buddha nature, we often say, is neither male nor female, neither heterosexual nor gay, neither cisgender or transgender.

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And actually in Buddhism, it's often said to reach the higher meditation states, you need to let go of binaries, including those of gender. The binary of gender is so entrenched in our minds that it keeps us from settling into the unconditioned, the unconditioned mind. wide-open, vast, luminous mind. The tendency to split reality into subject and object is a fundamental mistake made by our conditioned consciousness, which then leads to a misunderstanding of reality. Queer Dharma challenges dualistic thinking and replaces it with non-dual consciousness. It has us to overturn or invert and turn inside out our socially constructed notions and perceptions of reality.

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And this brings us to the fourth aspect of kurdharma, which is that it calls on us to go against the stream of normative, conventional thinking and habits. The Buddha described his teaching as going against the street. And he said that practicing mindful awareness reveals the extent to which we are tossed along in the stream of past conditioning and habit. Going against the stream also means going against the social, cultural, and mental conditionings and habits that are, in Buddhist words, unwholesome. biased, and harmful, such as structural racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia. Just because we've inherited homophobic and racist thinking due to the family and social systems we grew up in doesn't mean we can't resist or undo our conditioning.

[35:42]

All of Zen practices is a practice of undoing And for many of us who are LGBTQI, coming out, coming out of the closet, if you will, entails a very deliberate attempt to undo adopted mental contracts about who and how we're supposed to be. And furthermore, dividing society into rigid and binary categories, including good and evil, right and wrong, straight and gay, and using these for moral judgments to evaluate the worthiness or the fundamental goodness of others. These are also tendencies or characteristics of the reactive, limited, untrained mind. So our practice is to retrain the mind, to let go of these binaries,

[36:46]

dualities that create harm for ourselves and for others. To practice queer dharma is to essentially liberate ourselves and each other from conditioned, narrow, fixed views. Queering, you could say, is a deliberate act of deconstruction, of transgression and transcendence. to transcend perceived limits, limitations, dualities, and boundaries by upending our traditional ways of seeing and engaging ourselves in our experience. In clearing consciousness through Buddhist practice, our ordinary delivered views about reality are viewed as upside down. In fact, there's a a school of Mahayana Buddhism called Yogachara, which by way, for those who are participating in the summer study series, is part of the third turning of the wheel that we're going to be studying in August.

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And the Yogachara teaches that wisdom is obtained when consciousness is reversed, literally turned around or turned inside out. Perfect wisdom appears when the deepest level of consciousness is reversed. This process of querying or questioning, upending, and deconstructing our conditioned beliefs and views in turn brings with it a transformation. A fundamental transformation of our understanding of who we are and how we are in relationship to others and to our experiences, and then of how we can act in the world. Our transformed view through the practice of queer dharma thus frees us to better see the world and ourselves as fundamentally as we are, interconnected, boundless, perfect, and free.

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So one final point, one final point of affinity that I'd like to share is that both the practices of queering and Buddhadharma are meant to be continuous processes without end. They are meant to be continuous practices. In the practice of queering and Buddhadharma, there is no ultimate endpoint. No place to get to where you can take a final stand. So any dharma, including queer dharma, needs to keep undoing itself, deconstructing itself, to avoid falling into the tendency to become a fixed category or identity or concept or belief. We are continually turning and being turned by practice. And we can equally say that we are continually queering and being queered by practice.

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And this is part of what I think we are celebrating when we celebrate Queer Pride. And this is what we are doing when we sit Zazen. taking up the invitation and possibility to explore who we really are and how it is that we can refresh, transform, and liberate ourselves and our lives together, all together, and on a continuous basis. Freedom in this way is endless. There's more that could be said on this topic, but I will end there. And I want to thank you for your kind patience and attention. And once again, happy Pride, everyone. And for those of you who are continuing with our one day sitting today, happy query. Okay, dear friends, thank you.

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Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

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