1998 to 2007. So, please, welcome Sarah. Good morning. You can't see from my vantage point, but you're a lovely assortment of human beings. Truly. This is the second time I've given a talk at City Center. The first time was when it was the Zenithon. So it was a little more intimate. So welcome to everyone who's here, and to me, returning to this place. I was never a resident at City Center, but it is the first place I practiced, and really it's my home. When I stand on the street in front, I just feel a lot of things. mostly pronominated by gratitude.

[01:04]

Thank you, Mary, my Dharma sister, Mary Stairs, for the invitation to be here today. Thank you, Abbots, David, and Ed, for being here. And thank you to everyone who's here. I'm going to figure this wire thing out and we'll be okay. Can you all hear me okay? Yeah, so I began practicing here, and San Francisco Zen Center gave me my life as it is today. So I have a tremendous feeling of gratitude, and it's a gift for me to ever be asked to come and help take care of the practice here. As Tova mentioned, my name is Sarah. I use the pronouns she and her just to, you know, your mind is probably already filling in lots of identifiers, my accent, my skin color. But just to save you the trouble, I'm a white American woman.

[02:11]

I was raised in the Northeast. I spent most of my adult life in California, and a lot of my adult life either living in or functioning in converts and Buddhist institutions, which is... a great gift I feel in this world that there are such places and that we can find them and we can make a life around them I want to thank all of you who are here both physically and as I understand it virtually it's such a cool thing you know people can be here unembodied I mean I know you're embodied somewhere but it's neat For those of us who didn't grow up with the internet, you can be in real time with people not in a body. It's cool. It's very traditional. The Buddha would have assemblies with retinues of celestial beings. And I want to thank you.

[03:16]

Part of a Dharma talk is... I think of Dharma talks always as offerings. They're offerings of practice. They're not... They're not definitive things. They're co-created events of human beings, or Buddhas and celestial beings, when the Buddhas are around. And one of the great elements of that is people coming, and you're all making the offering of your time and your attention. And that's often on my mind when I think about Dharma talks, when I'm privileged to give them... that people are making an offering of their attention. So I am making an offering of my words and thoughts. And then together we're making whatever we make of it. But thank you for your time and attention. I'd like to begin.

[04:17]

A nice thing about being in a Zen center is one assumption I think it's okay to make. It's probably not true of every person here, but... You're probably willing to hear something about Zen and you may be willing to, or maybe you have some level of interest in meditation. So I'd like to just begin with just a minute. And again, so what I mean in saying that what I'm bringing is an offering is the words that I'm offering are coming from the heart of my practice. They're intended to be a gift. They may cause some discomfort or And if they do, I ask you to let me know that somehow, truly. But the intention of them is to make an offering. Receive of them what you will. So I want to give the invitation. This might not be what you want to do right now, and if it isn't, don't do it. But if you would like to, to just come in and...

[05:20]

arrive in our embodied experience for a second to take the gift of your attention that you're bringing here today and close your eyes if it helps and turn it, gather up our attention if you'd like to and turn it inward to each of us in our embodied experience. Let's include our human bodies here this morning. And if when you do that, you find a bunch of thinking that really is drowning out sensation. That's fine. But you could also, you could invite the possibility to see where the thoughts are landing in the body. All of our thinking usually has a physical correlate, even if it's subtle. So just see, what did you bring here this morning? What's here, what's alive for you and your body? So thank you for checking.

[06:38]

And I want to make the invitation to do this throughout our time together this morning. And if it works for you throughout your whole life. Grounding in the physical body is a part of many wisdom traditions. We could go into kind of a a mind of thinking about nervous systems and stuff like that, like regulating by grounding in the body, is part of many wisdom traditions. And it gives us a possibility to be more open and receptive, and it also gives us a more possibility to be for freedom. When we show up in the body and we're really attending to what's there, we're much less likely to be reactive out of habit. And there's a chance that we could choose something new and liberating. And I, for myself, even wanted to ground in the body because I'd like to talk this morning about, in my notes it says the R word.

[07:51]

I'd like to talk about race and racial inquiry and what that has to do with the Dharma. So racial inquiry in terms of the Dharma. Before I do that, I want to recognize a couple of things. Yeah, who knows? I might not even get there. I might just do a bunch of preparatory recognizing. Which, truthfully, I think if we're going to have good discussions about race in the United States, and I'm not even going to qualify that by saying like when we're in mixed race groups or like all the time, we need to go carefully and tenderly and yeah, so we'll see where we get. together. So the first thing I want to recognize is that for a lot of people, and especially if we're American, and especially if we identify as being white or we're socialized as being white, it can be really agitating. And maybe actually, maybe that's not even true. Maybe for everybody it's agitating to hear about race.

[08:53]

Or it can be somewhere between mildly irritating to like really agitating. It might be one of the reasons that historically hasn't come up a lot in American Dharma. Because people would like to calm down, which I appreciate. Another piece of that agitation can be that for all, each of us has a different, probably within ourselves, many, many identities and different levels of experience with encountering race, racial identity, racism. depending on so many factors. And so the variability of our comfort level is probably huge, you know, and that can be agitating. The other thing I want to recognize is, well, and that we have a huge variety of lived experience around the impact of race, particularly if we live in this country and we've been raised in this country, and that is agitating.

[09:59]

The other thing is that it can be irritating to listen to a white woman talk about race. It just can be. My racial identity is, in the way that it works in the United States, the way that race is kind of collectively configured in the United States, I'm white unambiguously. You know, like my ancestors that I know of, I don't know a bunch of them, but they're all like way northern European, from islands even, right? Like really isolated white people. There are lots of folks who are seen and are given the social assignation white whose racial identity is much more complicated than that, and I'm not even in that category, so I want to make that distinction. And because of that, because of the way race works in the United States, I'm on the receiving end of a lot of advantage. And I have very clearly never been on the receiving end of racial oppression. So for me, that's what I mean by being white.

[11:04]

That racial oppression has never hit me or disadvantaged me personally. It doesn't mean that there isn't pain that I experience about racial oppression, because there is. But it's never impacted me personally or disadvantaged me. And... especially for people who are white-identified and don't talk about race often, I want to be super clear that that does not mean that I've never been or you've never been on the receiving end of oppression of any kind. Because I think it's fair to say, as I was thinking about this over the past couple days, I was like, there's kind of a harshness to the United States and to many cultures. I think it's fair to say that probably all of us have been on the receiving end of discrimination. of some kind or another around our many, many identities. I think that's true. Human beings in the United States, there's a lot of prejudice and prejudging and assumptions, and we are misunderstood, and assumptions are made about us, and discrimination happens.

[12:14]

Because I've been in places where people, a number of times, where I've talked about race in terms of the Dharma, and people will come up to me later and be like, you don't know me. You don't know the things I've suffered. And I totally understand where that kind of defense comes from. I think, I'm trying to think if there's been an exception to this. I think, truthfully, the people that come up and say that to me afterwards are almost always white. And it's true. And I think also a lot of white people, I think this is fair to say, we are not used to having our racial identity called out. That can be uncomfortable and new or unfamiliar and feel reductive. So that's a lot of qualifying. The other last qualifier I want to offer is that the discomfort and the agitation in terms of talking about race and the dharma is not the point. Because sometimes people have wondered that too. They've come up to me later and they're like, I think you just want us to be uncomfortable.

[13:17]

The discomfort we may feel talking about race is an outflow of the history of the way racial oppression works in the United States. It's not the point in terms of the Dharma. In terms of the Dharma, we talk about race and racial oppression and racism for liberation. That's why. It's to liberate suffering. Yeah. And it might not, you know, if today, if it doesn't feel that way to you, if it's just like, all I feel is uncomfortable, I understand that. And so that's why I think it's good to recognize the potential agitations because if we're gonna talk about race, we need to welcome that possibility in and not let it eclipse the potential for us to talk and think about this together and illuminate racial identity and racial oppression in terms of, in the light of the Dharma.

[14:20]

Is there anyone that's here at the Zen Center for the first time today? Yes, you're welcome. Just one person, ah, hi. Am I missing anybody? Oh, thank you. Sorry, I haven't turned all the way. Hello, friends in the corner. Oh, welcome. And it's good to know. But just for all of us, even if we've been practicing for many years, I have to work within the confines of a 40-minute talk, so I'm going to make these big generalizations. One of them is to say that... San Francisco Zen Center is a Soto Zen Buddhist-based place. And Zen Buddhist practice is the practice of committed and ongoing engagement with the suffering of the world. That's the shorthand for today.

[15:25]

Sometimes this is like a vigorous engagement, sometimes it's a gentle engagement, but... Zen is a bodhisattva school of Buddhism, which means it's rooted in the bodhisattva vow. I'll give you a big generalization about that too. Rooted in the bodhisattva vow, which means we are, the bodhisattva vow is to align with wisdom beings of the past and present and future and devote ourselves to returning to this realm of suffering over and over again until all beings are liberated. Did everybody know that? I think it's really important. And that can sound ridiculous and overwhelming if we are coming from the vantage point of a dualistic or separate sense of ourselves and people. So another thing that Zen is rooted in is in, one of the terms we use is emptiness and non-duality.

[16:29]

I think it would be just as well served to use the words intricately interconnected with all things. The doctrines of emptiness are pointing actually not to a negation or a void of something. They're pointing to full of something, full of everything. The way that we, people, and rocks, and trees, and all things are all actually completely interconnected. And in terms of talking about a socially constructed thing like race, I think it's really important that we at least open to the possibility that we as human beings are connected to all people, all human beings, but really to everything. We do, in Zen, look at ourselves. And I think that has led to some misconceptions sometimes. I've been thinking about actually in the wider public that like bath product is zen.

[17:34]

Do you know? I was actually like, I don't think I've ever seen an array of aromatherapies where one of them isn't called zen. You know, like an aromatherapy blend. There's always a zen one. And I think that furthers this idea that zen is about relaxation and like a warm bath. Yeah. that you would have, and like getting away from the world, actually, truly. A lot of these images are like getting away from the world. Have a break, go to a Zen spa. And I think we as Zen practitioners should challenge this idea. Zen is actually about being in the world, vigorously or gently sometimes, but in the world. returning to the world, returning to the human realm, where one of the foundational noble, the four noble truths, the foundational principles that the Buddha taught, number one, there is suffering. Where there are human beings, there is suffering, because there's delusion.

[18:38]

And the fundamental delusion is this idea that we're separate from one another. It's very natural, but also very destructive in terms of karma, that we imagine ourselves to be separate from one another. So we do inquire into the self to uproot that kind of fundamental delusion. But we do that so that then we can move into the world and have a capacity, a possibility for bringing wisdom, for acting skillfully. So the inquiry into the self is not the end. It's just the beginning, actually. And also, the more intimate we get with the particulars of each of ourselves, it's not that we get to grasp and with our mind totally understand the way we're connected to all things, but that reality shows itself up over and over again.

[19:42]

The things that we think of as super personal, like my opinions, for example, the more intimate we are with them, the more we see that these come from all over the place. my thoughts, my language, my DNA. I don't know, like what's the most intimate thing you get? Like my liver. It's really mine. It's totally not really mine. It's impacted by the world. It's handed down through lots of influences. So we engage the possibility of the dynamic, which isn't to say that we're not particular beings. We're super unique. That's what I can see sitting here. It's like, this is like amazing bouquet of humanity, like the possibility of what human is, you know, in all of you and in me. We are way beyond a small identity. Maybe it's this part of us that's actually really, you know, that knows this without a small kind of knowing, but like knows it in our body that reacts when somebody says like, well, I can see that you're white, for example.

[20:51]

And that's like, oh, that's too small. So I want to be clear about that too. To talk about race is to talk about socially constructed identity and any identity, even the ones we give ourselves, any words, any series of identities, any series of words cannot capture the fullness of what each of us is or any person has ever been. And I think that's really important too. And also though, we do talk about socially constructed things, we do look at the self because that's what we are. And these socially constructed things are hugely impactful and are the source of a whole bunch of suffering and ignorance. And also, because they're socially constructed, we can work with them. We can reconstruct and liberate I heard about the service that happened this morning to honor Dr. Martin Luther King.

[22:03]

I've been spending time with different words of Dr. King over the past month or so and been thinking about how there's this tradition in the United States around Martin Luther King Day where white people talk about Martin Luther King. And I've heard from a number of people of color like it's really uncomfortable. And so I'm going to participate briefly in that because I'm white and I'd like to include some of Dr. King's words. What I do not want to participate in is the, I would say, another kind of tradition or thing that has evolved in the United States of being overly reductive about Dr. King and his teachings and taking his super subtle and complicated teachings and trying to make them into something that make us in the dominant culture feel comfortable. He was... I'm going to do the thing. I can't help it. But I'm going to do the thing where I'm going to offer my opinion, which is that he was a tremendously radical, spiritually-based human being who was challenging our social collective constructs that I benefit from, and many people do.

[23:18]

And it was not simple. And he was cut off. He was so challenging, he was killed and cut off from continuing to evolve. And his words and his teachings were evolving, right? Because he was a human being. So it's not, yeah, it's not something, his words are not something we can oversimplify. But I did want to offer, I was in the vein of like, okay, I do feel like people are like, why do you want to talk about race in terms of Dharma? Why? And I read this sentence in Rhonda McGee's book, and then I read the wider speech around it. These are Dr. King's words. What we need is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.

[24:26]

And justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. Just that. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. This was from a speech that he gave... called Where Do We Go From Here to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1967. And he's talking about how in dominant culture, we make a duality between love and power. And we need to correct that. So love, even though it doesn't get brought up a lot in Zen, I think you could... It's not a stretch to say that to root ourselves... in the non-duality of how we're connected to all things, is love. And that a vow that could convince beings, suffering beings, like human beings, to keep coming back to a realm of suffering over and over again until everyone is liberated, this is that kind of love, transformative love, power, the power of that.

[25:40]

So I do want to invite that in. Another part of the why, or why we might inquire into race in the Dharma, is that race is, and the distinctions made around race, and the valuing and devaluing of people around race is foundational to the founding of the United States, this country where we are right now. The United States is, I know, again, like, so, to give a talk, we have to oversimplify, you know, it's a complicated place with a complicated history. I'm aware of that. And I also think it's fair to say the founding of this country, and, you know, that means, like, this does not include the many nations that were here preceding colonial Europeans.

[26:44]

But the founding of the country that was founded by colonial Europeans that we now are all moving around in, depended on people, some people, thinking that they and the people that look like them and the people that talk like them were more valuable than other people in that very beginning encounter between Europeans and people indigenous to the United States. And that what they wanted, the Europeans coming, was... and their interests and what they wanted to get out of the situation was more important than a true meeting of the other human beings that were already in the land that they wanted to take. How are people doing? People with me? I mean, you don't have to agree with me, but are you still in the room and in the body?

[27:46]

So I think this is fair to say. The founding of this country has racism in it. Slavery was not in the country from the beginning, but slavery did evolve even in colonial times before the country itself was founded. And the economy that rotated around slavery was essential to the founding of this country. And the racism that... There are many scholars saying that the racism as it is today that we have and the racial inequities that we have based on those really developed to try to justify the dehumanizing practice of slavery. That people... I was talking with my partner Charlie about this last night. I'll just offer my... I don't know. I wasn't around. But I'm going to guess, based on my lived experience and the many human beings I've encountered in my lifetime, I'm going to guess that there's never been a human in human history that hasn't met another human and been like, oh, I see you, other human.

[28:57]

And so that something like the institution of slavery would have required creating and then recreating and recreating over and over again a justification for itself, because actually in reality it doesn't make sense. Like, I think there are parts of our human... I mean, I don't know. I guess some people could really convince themselves it was all right. But I don't believe that, really. I believe there were many people who were like, this really isn't all right. But then they would lay in, and the social constructs would lay in over and over again, and that idea that it was all right would get recreated over and over again. Does that seem resonant for anyone? Like... The self that we have, the sense of ourselves that we have, is like that. It's not really based in reality. There is no ground to it. We create it over and over again. So looking at... Yeah, and we're not working with racism around slavery, but we are looking at the outflows of that really strong effort to create a justification that some people were more valuable than other people based on race.

[30:06]

And that the needs and lives and children and hopes and dreams of some people were not as valuable. And institutionally that has played out in the United States. This idea that I could gain something at someone else's loss, my gain is your loss, is a diluted idea in terms of the Dharma. It doesn't really work. And also in terms of karma. It's pretty bad karma. It happens all the time. We all do gain things at other people's losses, but to do that intentionally has a cost to the person even, quote, gaining. Does that make sense? Every time we dehumanize another person, there's a cost to the person doing the dehumanizing. And I really think we are living... currently in the outflows of that being, a trajectory, a collective trajectory that somehow became okay.

[31:13]

And a writer and scholar I appreciate tremendously is Dr. Ibram Kendi. He talks about how racism as it is today was really founded in self-interest. And as a Dharma teacher, I was like, whoa, right. Right. There's a framing of that. It's founded in self-interest, not founded in hatred or difference. It's founded in self-interest. And actually that's what keeps it going. But the self he's talking about is the self we talk about challenging in terms of Zen. It's a self that thinks it's separate from other people and other things. It's a self that thinks I can get stuff even if it hurts you and that won't hurt me somehow. It's a delusion. And so Dr. Henry wrote a book called Stand From the Beginning, which is, I think the subtitle is something like A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.

[32:20]

He wanted to write a book about, he's a scholar and historian about the history of racism, like how did it happen. And that book is an awesome book, but really dense and historical. He more recently wrote a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist. I wanted to bring it up a little bit, because to me, it's a Dharma book. I don't want to leave out Rhonda McGee, though, so I'm going to read you a quote from her. Rhonda McGee is a Buddhist practitioner. I think Norman Fisher, does anyone here know Rhonda McGee? Yeah, she's spoken here. And I think Norman Fisher is someone who has been a teacher for, does that sound right? And also in the insight tradition. Sorry, I'm not. John Kempson. And Spirit Rock, I know she's giving a workshop at Spirit Rock in February.

[33:26]

And she wrote a book called The Inner Work of Racial Justice. So in that she says... What we call the self is shaped by cultures in which we live. Right. Sorry, I'm digressing from the quote for a second. But I think when I've heard people say, within the San Francisco Zen Center, I've heard people be like, you know, talking about social justice stuff and racial justice has nothing to do with Zen. But you have a self. And I have a self. And we have a self. And the self... exists within cultures and it's created by culture and it's created by social forces. So we look at them. What we call the self is shaped by the cultures in which we live and because race is a cultural feature of societies built on racism, notions of self include notions of race. The racialized self is produced by and helps reproduce racism in our cultures.

[34:30]

So she talks about mindfulness, but I think... To me, it's very akin to practice mindfulness or practice. Helps us understand and expand our notions of the self. Practice helps us understand and expand our notions of the self. And liberate, I would say. And yet, talking about race and racism and examining these through a lens of mindfulness is uncommon. That's not to say it's not being done at all. But many practitioners of mindfulness have been taught, whether explicitly or implicitly, that looking at race and racism and exploring efforts to address it or otherwise engage talk of justice, quote, or politics, quote, go against the core commitments of mindfulness. And then she goes on to consider why this is so, especially in convert Buddhist sanghas like San Francisco Zen Center in the United States. I live in a predominantly white community, and my home sangha, Stone Creek Zen Center, is predominantly white.

[35:42]

And we talk about how it's predominantly white. And it's predominantly people who are older, actually, would be identified as baby boomers. The majority of people in that sangha. So I can say, talking about race is uncommon, generally speaking, or if you go along with the predominant vibe. and to not talk about race is, well, it's an outflow, especially for those of us socialized as white, of the teaching that to even notice race, let alone to talk about it, is, quote, racist. This was definitely my training as a young person growing up in my predominantly white neighborhood, that to notice race was racist, so certainly to name it was racist, And to talk about it was like, you're being racist. Like for me to call a white person white would be racist, in a lot of people's views, and in our training. I include myself on purpose in that, in my training.

[36:44]

But I think in the life of the Dharma it becomes clear, stuff that... social created stuff that makes us act in ways that... pull us away from what we truly value, is the stuff to bring into the light of our conscious awareness. To not talk about race is to continue to perpetuate its impact, its negative impacts, especially in the way it works in the United States. To not give it the possibility to be illuminated with Dharma inquiry. is to allow it to continue in the way it's been going. There's many measures there. If you look at the United States, across institutions, in many different fields, economic, job opportunities, educational, health outcomes, life expectancy, maternal...

[38:00]

mortality, many different areas. If you look between white people and people of color, there's inequities. So you can see that functioning in the culture. If you look at it particularly between people who socialize as white and people who socialize as black, there's big inequities. One of them that's really struck me, and many people recently, is the wealth disparity. White American families have a median wealth So meaning wealth here is measured as the amount of money of your assets that exceeds your debts. The median wealth in an American white person or family is 86% more than that of a person who's black or African American. And the projection is that if things continue the way it's going, these disparities are getting bigger. And that... Median wealth for African Americans is projected somewhere, I've heard it said, both between 2030 and 2053, to be zero. Like, you know, I want, sorry, I know we're sitting in a design center.

[39:08]

We don't have to talk about economics. But wealth accumulates over time, you know, through generations. And we're seeing this outflow, this disparity. And to not talk about it, how that happens, and race isn't the only factor, but it's a big one. When you look at that disparity, it's huge, is to perpetuate that inequity getting bigger and bigger. And that's the suffering, this is why we're interested as bodhisattvas, the suffering that those inequities create getting bigger and bigger, unless we bring it into the light of our collective capacity to talk about and to address. So I'll get back to Dr. Kennedy briefly. He wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times in 2018 called The Heartbeat of Racism is Denial. And it's not very long, if you want to read it. The last sentence of it, though, is... So he talks about how denial functions in the United States and how it kind of perpetuates racial inequity.

[40:15]

The last sentence he writes is... The anti-racist lives by the opposite heartbeat, one that rarely and irregularly sounds in America, the heartbeat of confession. And I know I've said a lot already, so if you're done, you can just tune me out. But I do want to say a little bit about confession and the way it happens in Zen. When I read that sentence, I was like, oh, it's so Zen, it's really Zen. I was raised Catholic, so confession in that tradition is is something quite distinct, and I think maybe the Catholic version has kind of had a big hold on our collective understanding of confession. We do have a tradition of confession and Zen. In fact, if you live here, you do it every morning. There's a chant that said, every morning here, almost every morning, all my ancient twisted karma from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion...

[41:18]

Born through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. When I lived at the different parts of San Francisco Zen Center, and I would say that every day because it's part of our service, I never actually wondered about the word avow, and I just made up a definition for it, which was forsake or let go of or something. Eventually I looked into what the word avow means, and what it means is to bring into the light, So our practice of confession is not to self-flagellate, and it's not to bring something so someone can give us a punishment for it. In Zen, our practice of confession is to illuminate what we have within us, particularly stuff that we don't like or that doesn't align with our true values. Dogen Zenji even talks about... So Dogen Zenji is the founder of Soto Zen. in Japan.

[42:20]

He says in the Ehekoso Hutsugonmon, quietly explore the farthest reaches of these causes and conditions. So inquire deeply into the self. Quietly explore the farthest reaches of the causes and conditions of what you are. And then he goes on to say, as this practice is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha, this practice of inquiry, looking deeply, is the exact transmission of a verified Buddha. Confessing and repenting in this way, one never fails to receive profound help from all Buddhas and ancestors. In his book, How to Be an Antiracist, Dr. Kendi, who's an African-American man, I think he's in his 30s, uses himself as an example of kind of how to uproot race, how to look at, examine, inquire into, and uproot racism.

[43:20]

He uses stories of his own racism. And I was telling somebody about that yesterday, like, wait, no, black people can't be racist. Like, there's a teaching, black people can't be racist. He challenges that idea. And he talks about how racism is not an identity, it's thoughts and actions. To be racist is not an identity. It's an activity. And how people can be, we can be enacting racism, not be, sorry. We can enact racism one moment and enact anti-racism the next moment. It's actually the activity, not the person. And he does, it's just this beautiful offering in his book. It's very vulnerable. I got to see him talk at a, a library in Sonoma County, the Rohnert Park Library in Sonoma County. And it deepened this feeling I had that he's a very generous human being.

[44:22]

And the person interviewing him said, like, well, how was that for you to use yourself as an example of being racist? And he said, you know, so mostly he writes scholastically. He's like, I would much rather be talking about history and, like, other things and academic things. But I felt if I was really going to convey what I'm talking about, I needed to... like walk the talk, use myself as an example and confess and illuminate, not confess like I'm so bad. So I think it's really important if we're going to inquire into the racial training we carry, the racial identities we carry, so that we could take this great treasure of this tradition of confession and utilize it. with some neutrality. The stuff that we have inherited, we didn't ask for. There's a kind of neutralness that we carry racism in it. Our culture gave it to everybody.

[45:25]

It's all right. We all got it in different measures. But to illuminate it is our responsibility. So the last thing I want to say is simply that... One of the why we do racial inquiry in Zen is because the tradition offers us some, not because, but with these amazing treasures that the tradition offers us. Confession is one of them. Zazen practice is one of them. So Zen practice, as I said, is like a commitment to the suffering of the world. Our embodied practice is rooted in meditation. We call it Zazen practice in Zen, which has been sitting meditation. That practice is a... We train ourselves to show up for what's here, including the stuff we don't like. We train ourselves to sit still in discomfort.

[46:29]

That's a really good tool if we're going to look at race. We train ourselves to be patient. Another really good one. We have the Bodhisattva vow. We have Dogen saying that, you know, if we can just really look in the farthest reaches, illuminate it, we will have the support of all the Buddhas and ancestors. We will not be alone in this activity. Which brings me to, I think, maybe the most essential treasure of this tradition that we have, which is the jewel of the Sangha, that we don't practice alone. We don't inquire alone. We don't confess alone. We do that with Sangha. Sangha is community, but it's also the great gift of a bunch of people that have somewhat shared intention. Not perfect, not precisely aligned, but there is shared intention to live in the light of the Dharma.

[47:36]

If only that. That's a lot. It's a huge support. Maybe the last thing I want to offer is just to ask everyone to check and see how you're doing. If you could take a second and look again into the human body. Each of us has been gifted. How's it doing? What's stirring? Is there any kind of sensation that would like some attention? Can we gently bring it? Can we feel our breath? We feel the fullness of our complexity.

[48:42]

Can we not take it too personally? And can we welcome it together, all of what each of us carries, and not be afraid to bring it into the light of the Dharma? Thank you very much.

[49:11]

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