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. So my name is Tova Green. I'm a resident and practice leader here at Zen Center, and I'd like to welcome all of you. And particularly, I'd like to welcome anyone who is here for the first time. It can be a bit daunting to come to Zen Center for the first time. So if you have, I'm glad you have. I want to thank a few people before I begin my talk. First of all, Jordan Thorne, our head of practice, for inviting me to give this talk. And I'd like to thank my teacher, Agent Linda Cutts, for all the support she's given me over the years.

[01:05]

And I'd also like to thank the head of practice at Berkeley Zen Center, Alan Sinaki, who has studied Martin Luther King for many years. He's a friend and has been a mentor to me and was very generous in sharing his knowledge of Martin Luther King as I was preparing for my talk today. So the title of my talk this morning is The Radical Power of Love. And it's a talk honoring Martin Luther King's birthday, which is today. He only lived 39 years. He was assassinated in 1968. And if he had lived on until today, he would have been 82 years old. and perhaps our world would be in a different place. So we honor his life by remembering him and his teachings.

[02:09]

And there's so many things one could say about Martin Luther King and how his life and teachings have influenced our country, our world, and also the connections between our practice here at Zen Center, but I'm going to speak in particular about his teachings on love. But before I do that, I'd like to acknowledge that many of us in this room today are experiencing grief. Recently, Zen Center has lost two of our beloved members. About five weeks ago, Jerome Peterson died. He was in his 80s. He'd come to Zen Center in 1961. So he was a student when Suzuki Roshi, the founder of Zen Center, was here.

[03:16]

And he stayed on. He became head student later at Tassahara and lived in this building many years. And one thing that he continued to do until the week he died was on Tuesday morning he would put on his robes and meet with some people and read aloud from the Avatamsaka Sutra. It was a very steady practice of his. I'd also like to acknowledge the recent death of Darlene Cohn, who was a teacher for many of us here at Zen Center. Darlene used to live in the city but then moved to Gurneville and founded the Russian River Zendo with her husband, Tony. And Darlene had amazing capacity to practice joyfully in the midst of physical pain. She had rheumatoid arthritis for many years and then developed cancer.

[04:17]

And she had a great sense of humor and compassion and... Her picture is on the altar today. And last, I'd also like to mention Lou Hartman, who is now in hospice. Lou is in his 90s. He's a Zen priest who has practiced wholeheartedly so many years and took care of so many things at Zen Center. When I first came, he taught me how to trim the candles. He was head cheating, which meant he was in charge of keeping all the altars looking really beautiful. So, Lou is the husband of Blanche Hartman, our beloved senior Dharma teacher, and he's very weak, and so many of us are quite affected by not seeing him

[05:21]

in the Buddha Hall every morning and in the dining room for meals. So in addition, our country is grieving this week after the shootings in Tucson, Arizona. So it seems to me there's no better time to remember Martin Luther King, Jr. I'll just say a few words about him, just in case there might be someone here who doesn't know who he was. He was a minister, a very inspiring speaker, and became a leader of the civil rights movement. He practiced nonviolence and was arrested many times. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and was the author of several books, including Stride Toward Freedom, Why We Can't Wait, And where do we go from here?

[06:21]

And he was not only concerned about racism in our country, but he was also a leader in the early days of the anti-Vietnam War movement and was very concerned about the whole economic inequities in our country and around the world. So he was a visionary as well. So I want to speak of my own connection with Martin Luther King first, and then I'll talk about Martin Luther King's teachings about love. So when I was 17, coming home to New York for my first quarter at Antioch College, my father met me at the Greyhound bus station, and we were walking across town to the subway on the east side. And we passed the office for SANE, which was a peace organization then.

[07:28]

This was 1957. And SANE stood for SANE Nuclear Policy. I'd heard about it at Antioch, where I was in school. And I wanted to go into the office and get some literature. And my father kind of froze, and he would not let me go in. He didn't want to go in. And he said, what difference can one person make anyway? So I didn't understand his fear at the time. I think in retrospect, it probably had to do with living in the McCarthy era and just not feeling that he could take any risks in that era. well, the area of politics. So anyway, those words of my father stuck with me, and it's been something I've been curious about and interested in, what difference can one person make?

[08:32]

And particularly, what difference can one person make together with others? Because I think one person together with others is... much more effective than one person working alone. So I transferred from Antioch to the University of California at Berkeley, and the summer before my senior year, I participated in a voter registration project in Greensboro, North Carolina, and that was the summer of 1963. So I stayed in the basement of... a black church along with about 20 other college students, black and white, from different parts of the country. And every day we would go out and try to register African Americans to vote because many of them were not registered to vote. Greensboro was also the city where there was

[09:41]

sit-ins at Woolworth's because there was a black part of the lunch counter and a white part of the lunch counter and black people decided together that this was one of the many inequities they were no longer willing to put up with. So at the end of our three weeks registering people to vote, all of us got on a bus at night And we had police escort out of town because it wasn't really safe for black and white people to be riding on a bus together. And then we went, we arrived in the morning in Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington. And my first, one of my first impressions as we got out of the bus was all these busloads of young people, older people, white people, African Americans, but in particular there were busloads of children from freedom schools in Prince Edward County, and they got out of their buses and they were singing and dancing, and there was a lot of joy in the air, an incredible feeling of solidarity as we walked towards the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflection Pool.

[11:08]

So I was very fortunate to hear Martin Luther King speak that day. And I just want to bring some of his words into the room. So I say to you, my friends, that even though we must face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day, on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

[12:18]

I have a dream my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. So King went on to speak of his faith that we would be able to work together toward achieving this dream, black and white together, and to realize the dream to reach what he called the promised land. And clearly there's still plenty of work for us to do. But his words inspired me to continue to work for peace and justice. Later, I took part in nonviolent civil disobedience against the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 80s. And I then became involved in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in the 90s.

[13:24]

And when I joined the board of Zen Center, I also... joined the Diversity and Multiculturalism Committee, which I've been part of for the last eight years. So I think King's dedication and vision of a world that was more just is something that has really stayed with me my whole life. And I'm very grateful to him, as well as many other leaders. who have inspired us, and often at the cost of their lives, to have our country be a place where people can live in ease, which many people cannot do nowadays. So, in thinking about Martin Luther King's teaching about love,

[14:29]

This is not romantic love or love between friends, but a kind of fierce love that applies to everyone. And I've called my talk this morning the radical power of love because this is the kind of love that can change us and change our institutions, our society, and our world. And I see this love this kind of love is so akin to our practice of the bodhisattva vow to save all beings. For those of you who might not know what that means, bodhisattvas are awakened beings. There are bodhisattvas that, including the Buddha, Buddha was considered to be a bodhisattva who lived his life to benefit others and help others wake up.

[15:30]

And that's basically what a bodhisattva does. A bodhisattva lives their lives for the benefit of other beings. And at Zen Center, we will be chanting this at the end of the talk today, the bodhisattva vow, which kind of reminds us that we're living our lives not only for ourselves, but to benefit others. And this is one of the teachings of Martin Luther King. And interestingly, I found out that when he was in divinity school, Martin Luther King wrote a paper on Mahayana Buddhism, and he talked about the bodhisattva vow. And so it was something that he knew about. Although I think in many world religions, there is a common understanding of the need to serve others and to do it from love. So I'll talk about that in a little more detail.

[16:37]

So Martin Luther King delivered a sermon called Loving Your Enemies in 1957 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, where he was the minister. So he started his sermon by quoting St. Matthew. Ye have heard that it has been said, thou shall love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you, that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. And this, like the bodhisattva vow, may be an impossible request, but still we do whatever we can.

[17:38]

So King went on to say the words of this text of St. Matthew's glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, This command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization. So, love thine enemy. How do we do that? He goes on to explain three ways that we can go about loving our enemies. And then he talks about why. Why should we love our enemies? So the three teachings about how to love our enemies are First, begin with yourself. So that may be the hardest one. The second one is discover the element of good in your enemy. And then the third, when the opportunity presents itself for you to destroy your enemy, don't do it.

[18:48]

So I'll say a little bit more about each of those, and I'm going to use some of Martin Luther King's words, but also try to relate each of these to our practice of meditation and our practice of kindness and compassion to others and ourselves. So when he talks about beginning with yourself, it's really looking at what actions, what thoughts, words, and actions that we have done could have triggered someone else's hatred or dislike. And he says, someone may dislike you for something about you. They may not like you because others like you and you're popular, or because your skin is brighter or darker than theirs. Maybe someone doesn't like you because they think your voice is too loud or too soft.

[19:52]

Or at Sun Center, someone may not like you because of maybe you're wearing robes or you're not wearing robes. There's so many reasons why people could. Some of these are very small. Some of them were of consequence. But Martin Luther King says, after looking at things someone might not like about us, we must face the fact that an individual might not like us because of something we've done deep down in the past and we've forgotten about it. But it was that something that aroused the hate response within that individual. So... In our practice, when we think about beginning with ourselves, we have to be willing to reflect on our interactions with other people, on our words and actions.

[20:55]

So I had very recently, I had the opportunity to reflect on something I said and the way I said it. I work as a hospice social worker, and I was visiting a new patient with the hospice nurse. And this was in a facility. And the nurse in the facility came in while we were just starting to get to know this new patient. We had a lot of things to talk about with this patient. And she came in and she wanted to ask this patient something. And I said, and I realized later my voice was a little harsh, do you mind waiting until we've finished what we're doing, you know, kind of implying that what we were doing was more important than what she needed to do. And so she left. And I noticed after we finished, and I said goodbye to her, that she didn't look at me. And I thought about it, and I thought, you know, I was really very brusque and not appreciating whatever it was that she had to do, which was probably also important.

[22:02]

So the next time I went back to that facility, I saw her, and again, she didn't look at me, and I said, you know, I thought about what happened the other day when you came into the room with this new patient, and I thought maybe I was rude to you and spoke to you in a kind of harsh way. And she said, oh, no, I understood. You were trying to get done what you had to do. And I went to see my patient, and afterwards, when I looked at her, she looked at me and she smiled. And I thought, oh, well, she did have a reaction to what I had done. And it was hard for her to acknowledge it, but it made a difference. I could immediately feel that we were allies in a way we would be able to work together on behalf of that patient. So it wasn't a big thing, but enough that that nurse might have thought, gee, that social worker is...

[23:05]

not very caring or, you know, thinks whatever it was she might have thought about me, there would have been no opportunity to shift it. And I think sometimes it's those small things, if we don't take care of them, that can grow and fester and lead to real misunderstandings and separation, and sometimes anger and hurt feelings, but then, you know, somebody then having a dislike of, in this case, would have been a me, and I might never have known why. And I think I'm particularly sensitive to this now because this has happened in my family. Maybe it's happened in some of your families. There were some years when a particular member of my family wouldn't speak to me.

[24:09]

I found it very painful. And eventually we got to talk and I asked her why. And she said that on one occasion I had visited her and she thought I was rude to her husband. And she just... It was very hard for her to accept, and she just stopped talking to me. So, you know, these things... Again, it may seem like a small thing, but it was not a small thing in her mind. So when we have opportunities to have what I call... I didn't invent this term, but... I think it's a very helpful term, a learning conversation with someone, and the opportunity to reflect on an interaction, to try to see it from their perspective as well as our own, there can be a great deal of healing. I think that's what King means when he says, begin with yourself.

[25:14]

He takes this discussion, however, from the individual level. to the national level, and said that we have to look, for example, he wrote this talk during the Cold War, so we have to look at our own democracy clearly before we criticize other countries. He said, democracy is the greatest form of government to my mind that man has ever conceived, but the weakness is that we have never practiced it. Isn't it true that we have often taken necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes? Isn't it true that we have often in our democracy trampled over individuals and races with the iron feet of oppression?

[26:17]

Isn't it true that through our Western powers we have perpetuated colonialism and imperialism? And all of these things must be taken under consideration as we look at Russia. So we begin to love our enemies and love those persons that hate us, whether in collective life or individual life, by looking at ourselves. So those were very strong words. And I think Martin Luther King really did have... concern, not only about what was happening in this country, but what was happening around the globe. And later, as I mentioned, spoke out against the Vietnam War. So the second, I'm going to move on to the second element of this kind of love that Martin Luther King was talking about when he wrote about love thine enemies, and that's discover the element of good in the enemy.

[27:24]

So he advises us when we begin to hate someone, or if you think of someone as an enemy, often there's some hatred, or just to find fault with someone, to realize there is some good in that person and to look at those good points. And again, looking at ourselves, we sometimes are our own worst critics and may find it at times difficult to see the good in ourselves. But I think that's an important part, being able to see the good in ourselves and seeing how hard we're struggling sometimes to be kind or to be thoughtful, Martin Luther King put it in beautiful words, we're split up and divided against ourselves. There is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives. There is a recalcitrant south of our soul revolting against the north of our soul.

[28:29]

And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life. So when we can see the struggle within ourselves and see that at times we have trouble, with love and respect, we can take a different attitude towards others and have some empathy for the struggle they may be going through. He says, and see deep down within them what religion calls the image of God, you begin to love that person. No matter what he or she does, you see God's image there, and there is an element of goodness that they can never slough off.

[29:30]

Discover the element of good in your enemy, and as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there, and you will take a new attitude. So can we do that? Can we find an element of goodness in someone who we see as having very different views from ours, or someone who we see as hurting us in some way? Sometimes it may be a stretch, but I also think of... some of the people like the Dalai Lama, who is able to encourage everyone not to hate the Chinese people. It's the Chinese government that's oppressing the Tibetans.

[30:32]

But the Dalai Lama is one of the great teachers of compassion. And, you know, in some ways, hating someone who hurts us It may seem easier, but it really isn't because something else that Martin Luther King says about love is that hatred really hurts the person who hates. And one of the precepts that we work with is called not harboring resentment. So when we hold on to resentment, it can make us really tight and unable to appreciate another person's point of view. And it closes us to dialogue rather than opening us up to the possibility of understanding someone else.

[31:39]

So... To find that place of goodness in each person is something really worth working on, working with, stretching yourself if it's a stretch. There was a Jewish theologian who was very much an appreciator colleague of Martin Luther King named Abraham Heschel. And his social consciousness led him to participate in the civil rights movement. And he said, when one understands the spark of love that exists within each person, he or she cannot harbor hatred for fellow human beings. So the spark of love that exists within each person. And

[32:41]

And we might call that Buddha nature that all of us have within us, this Buddha nature, the ability to wake up, the ability to understand how we're connected to each other and to every living thing. And if we can feel that and understand that, there's no separation between us and anyone else, then we can't hang on to hatred. So I'm just going to check the time. Okay, it's getting close. So the last of the three teachings about loving thine enemy is when you have the opportunity to defeat your enemy, do not do it. And I'd like to bring in one of the teachings of the Buddha.

[33:45]

This is from the Dhammapada, which is one of the collections of some of the Buddha's sayings. And it starts with this. All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a corrupted mind and suffering follows as the wagon wheel follows the hoof of the ox. All experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, made by mind. Speak or act with a peaceful mind and happiness follows like a never-departing shadow. He abused me, attacked me, defeated me, robbed me. For those carrying on like this, hatred does not end. She abused me, attacked me, defeated me, robbed me. For those not carrying on like this, hatred ends.

[34:47]

Hatred never ends through hatred. By non-hate alone does it end. This is an ancient truth. So those words could have been spoken by Martin Luther King. I think it's very beautiful today to see the picture of Martin Luther King on the altar together with the statue of the Buddha, to see how much their teaching has in common. So I would like to come close to the end of my talk, by coming back to the loved ones we've lost at Zen Center and to Lou, who's hovering, and to some of the words of President Obama's talk this week in Tucson.

[35:53]

I was very impressed when I heard his talk that he told the stories of each of the six people who died in that shooting. brought them really alive again. And I think some of his words are relevant to this theme of love thine enemy. So he said, at a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized, at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do, It's important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that hurts. And we can start with ourselves. In meditation, one of the things that I think is so helpful about our practice is that we can sit and really notice the tone of voice with which we speak to ourselves.

[37:00]

can we speak to ourselves in a way that heals rather than a way that hurts? Because if we can do that, we can speak to others in a way that heals. So Obama said, when we lose loved ones, we recognize our own mortality and we're reminded that in the fleeting time we have on this earth, what matters is not wealth or status or power. or fame, but rather how well we have loved and what small part we have played in bettering the lives of others. So you might think, well, I couldn't do anything like Martin Luther King, but all of us can do something like Martin Luther King just by the way we love. And so I want to remember Martin Luther King

[38:01]

and treasure his legacy, the writings and teachings he left us which inspire us to this day. And we remember Jerome Peterson and Darlene Cohn and send our loving thoughts to Lou Hartman. May they be peaceful and free from suffering. May they and we and all beings be wrapped in love. Thank you very much.

[38:59]

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