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, everyone. It's wonderful to see old friends, elders, people I don't know yet, who I hope to know. And I'm always honored to be speaking in this room. It's a powerful experience. And I came from, we have our program on Saturday at Berkeley Zen Center, and I came after our oryoki breakfast and came over here, so I've got a foot on both sides of the bay. The talk that I want to give today The essential subject is right view, which is the first step on the Eightfold Path, which is the fourth noble truth that the Buddha taught soon after his awakening.

[01:15]

And I will unpack and we'll have a chance after the talk to discuss more what that view might consist of various views of right view, perhaps. But 71 years ago today, the Japanese city of Hiroshima was destroyed by US forces employing a nuclear weapon in war for the first time in history. almost immediately 70,000 people were incinerated. Within a year, radiation and injury raised the death toll to more than 160,000. And then three days later, on August 9th, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Nagasaki,

[02:28]

in Japan, killing something like 50,000 people outright. The overwhelming number of these victims were civilians. And a week later, the Japanese government surrendered to the United States. From our side, the U.S. side, U.S. government side, these bombings were framed as the only alternative to a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland, which the U.S. military imagined as a city-to-city, village-to-village, house-to-house fight. that would entail many thousands of US casualties.

[03:31]

This fact has been argued and debated by historians ever since. Whether there was, whether there were alternative approaches to ending the war, whether there were alternative approaches to dropping the bomb on large civilian cities or any cities. They will continue to be debated. A thing that I remember really vividly was, wow, it was 21 years ago. I was... part of working with an organization called the Nevada Desert Experience, and we were observing the 50th anniversary, this is 1995, of the U.S.

[04:41]

bombing of Japan. And it was a clergy gathering. And I remember the moral outrage in the room. and I'm certainly not immune from that. But person after person, clergy person after clergy person, were standing up and saying, how could they have done this? I would not have done this. And when it came to be my time, I had to confess, I don't know what I would have done. I cannot say, if I were a military leader, depending on what information was available to me, if I was a policymaker, what would I have done?

[05:54]

It depends on the information. It depends on your view. of reality. You turn that on its head, there were terrible things done by Japanese troops in various parts of Asia, particularly in China, but also other areas. And they were supported by the Buddhist establishment, including Soto School, the school that we are affiliated with. And this is a perplexing issue to me. One of my teachers is a Rinzai teacher, Shoto Harada Roshi, some of you may know him.

[06:57]

He has a temple in... Okayama, Japan, and also as a monastery on Whidbey Island. And I did an interview with him, and I asked him, I mean, what perplexed me was the proposition that there are slash were enlightened Zen masters, fully enlightened Zen masters. Zen masters, which means they see the nature of reality, they see the interconnectedness of reality. And I asked Hirata Roshi, if so, how could these Buddhist and Zen organizations have supported quite knowingly, the violence that was being perpetrated in places by Japanese troops, not by all of them.

[08:11]

And Harada Roshi said, well, first of all, he said, overcoming the concepts of self, being, life, and soul must be accompanied by a strong social sense, a consciousness of the true social situation in the world. Without this, one can inadvertently be swept along by circumstances. And then he said, during World War II, Buddhist leaders had a very limited understanding of the global situation. This, I believe, was one of the main reasons for their serious errors in judgment. Although on an individual level, they may have had great insight, yet they were poorly informed about the world outside their view. So what this says to me, it didn't relieve me of my problem, nor the world of its problem, but what it said to me is that

[09:24]

our view can always go more deeply, and it can always go more widely. Today there are still 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, enough to destroy the world many times over. This is an aside, but what I remember in the early 90s, Our teacher, Joanna Macy, was working in a project called the Nuclear Guardianship Project, which I think Tova may have been working in there, were you? And they were working for nuclear disarmament. They also had the understanding that these nuclear weapons were going to be potent and dangerous for for 10,000 years.

[10:29]

And if we look at human history, what language do we have that has survived 10,000 years? So in other words, people 10,000 years now, what the hell are they going to know about, they're not going to be able to read the operating manuals for these weapons. We've already gone through four generations of digital storage technology. So what are we going to do? So the Nuclear Guardianship Project was a way of seeing we have responsibility. And we have to take care of these weapons. And so I remember this, it didn't come to fruition, but some of us from Buddhist Peace Fellowship at that time were talking with leadership at Green Gulch Farm. And we were they were considering whether they were going to adopt a nuclear weapon. It did happen, right?

[11:35]

I don't think you got one there. But it's like we take the long view in our Zen practice. City Center, Tassajara, Green Gulch, Berkeley. And so to turn a nuclear weapon... into a locus of practice. So that's, whether it's practical or not, that's a way of transforming one's view. So we're talking about in a historical and macrocosmic level. On a more local level, or national level, again and again, we see the murder of particularly young black men.

[12:40]

There was one killed in Chicago yesterday. Does anyone know his name? But we... remember Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge and Philando Castile in St. Paul and a whole range of other young men. And it's quite clear that this young man in Chicago, and some of the, they had footage from body cameras that went on. It was on TV last night, I saw some of it. And it's pretty clear, they're saying today, He was executed. He was shot in the back. And we see other violence around the world. So in Mahayana Buddhism, in the scriptures, it says that the bodhisattva resolves to take upon myself the burden of all suffering.

[13:51]

I am resolved to do so. I will endure it. And why? At all costs, I must bear the burden of all beings. The whole world of living beings I must rescue. We have various ways to develop our minds by ways and practices. to develop ourselves so that we have the capacity to do that. We have the paramitas, the six perfections, the seven factors of enlightenment, the eightfold path, and there's probably nine or ten or eleven. We've got lots of lists of practices, and we have the fundamental transformative practice But I'd like to start with this question of right view.

[15:02]

What does that mean? Traditionally and broadly, it means the view of liberation, that beings can be free from suffering. And looking into that a little more carefully, it means to see into the nature of all things, including ourselves, as impermanent and not having a fixed self. And that's a very broad Buddhist analysis. For me, in worldly terms, right view is a view of complete subjectivity.

[16:09]

That everyone and everything I see is part of me, part of my true nature. part of my consciousness. And so here in this room right now, there's the one being of this room and we will move out into the world and we're constantly making and remaking our world. And it's the world that we see through our senses and through our mind And the curious thing is that each of us is doing this. And so collectively, there is this being with an infinite number of aspects, all of which are connected.

[17:14]

In the vision, say, of Indra's net. Indra's net is a vision from... from YN Buddhism, from the Avatamsaka Sutra, in which there's a net of jewels, and each jewel has an infinite number of mirroring facets, and each jewel is connected to each other, and each jewel in each facet is reflected all of the other jewels. And this is the vision of our world. Walt Whitman writes, he was totally getting into this, if you think of, if you read, and I highly recommend it, Song of Myself.

[18:19]

It's a sort of a nativist investigation of of the self that springs right out of our American awareness, but also he was taking all kinds of other information. And anyway, he wrote, every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. My teacher, Sochin Weitzman Roshi, has said frequently, don't treat anyone or anything like an object. So this cup of water, I'm thirsty right now. I pick it up carefully with two hands.

[19:25]

you know, put it down without spilling. I've had a drink of water, and I think inarbuably we would recognize that that water is now part of me, at least temporarily. And then it will return to the great stream of life. To be purified, of course. So don't treat anyone or anything like an object. This view of things and people as objects as there for our manipulation or for our pleasure or for our fear to be gotten rid of, this is at the heart of what allowed people to contemplate the atomic bombing of Japan.

[20:32]

For them, it was, you know, I suspect, well, this is just a matter of scale. We've already been, actually, there were more lives lost in the firebombing of Tokyo, I believe. And there had been saturation bombing of every major city in Germany. And the enemy would have done the same thing. It's not like they were any better. It was total war. And in total war, there's nothing but objects. And we lose sight of the worth and value of a being. So this is the source of war, it's a source of the fear that generates, it's a source of racial and ethnic and religious fear, hatred and violence.

[21:45]

And it's patterned in us. This is why I think the notion of engaged Buddhism, which which I've been trying to live out for a long time, recognizes that suffering is a pattern, something that's endemic to each of us as individuals. But we're also simultaneously and deeply affected by historical patterns, habits of discrimination, habits of fear, and that creates a social nexus in which individuals can stake out their own identity as part of a dominant group or as part of a repressed group.

[22:53]

But we're caught in these patterns and they can't So we see a pattern of police murders, for example. And that comes down, that manifests as individual actions. But it's connected to a 300-year history of treating people literally like objects, of being able to buy and sell them. And that does not just go away. It can be healed. It can be transformed. But we have to make the conscious effort to do that. So lately I've been studying, I'm about to give a class on sort of early Buddhism. And so one thing I've been studying is the...

[23:57]

five hindrances. And these are hindrances, in one sense they're hindrances to our meditation practice, but they're also hindrances to our life. And so these hindrances, just so you know what they are, I won't point to them real deeply, one is sensory desire, which is seeking our happiness through the five senses. The second one is ill will. All the patterns of thought that reject what we don't like, that fear it, that are hostile to it. The third of these hindrances is sloth and torpor, which is just kind of this...

[25:00]

weariness and laziness that we get in our bones. The fourth is sometimes translated as worry and flurry, which is both the worry, anxiety, but also the restlessness. It's connected with the restlessness that we experience. And all of these, we see all of these as factors in our meditation if we have if we have a regular practice, but I think we also see them as factors in just our straightforward life. And the final factor is skeptical doubt, which is not a kind of creative doubt, which is absolutely necessary, but a kind of corrosive doubt that undermines what we know to be true. what we know to be a way of connecting.

[26:02]

And we doubt ourselves, we doubt our abilities, and we doubt other people's abilities. And it's a destructive force in our society. So the method that we have for working with our view, we work with these hindrances We work with them in our meditation directly. And the process of our meditation is one that that spreads through our entire life. So we begin with with silence or with quiet. It's not always silent. Sometimes there are trucks rumbling by. But the silence is within us.

[27:06]

And the silence is what Dogen said in Fukan Zazengi. He said, take the backward step and shine the light inward. So this is what we do when we sit in Zazen. And as we're shining that light inward, at the same time, our The nature of our mind in that action is one of complete receptivity, which is part of this being fully subjective. It's an open awareness. So when we shine the light inward, what we see is there's a universe in there. And some things in that may be scary. And some things in that may be wondrous, but everything is in there.

[28:08]

However, it's not all just in there. It's also out here. So we return to silence. I often use this example. one of our teachers, a teacher that I met actually in this building, Dainian Katagiri Roshi. There are several books by his name, and mostly they were edited by his students from his talks. They're wonderful books. And the first two have great titles. and I don't know if he made the titles, but the first title, the first book was Returning to Silence. So that's taking the backward step. And being able, we must, in order to work with these hindrances, in order to work with view, we must be able to sit down quietly and deal with ourselves.

[29:21]

And then his second book was titled, You Have to Say Something. It's not enough to reside in that silence. In that the silence itself, the fact of complete subjectivity is, what arises from that is responsibility. what arises from our zazen is the ability to respond appropriately. The ability to recognize the complete humanity of everyone that we encounter and that includes Donald Trump. Everyone. This is what Dr. Martin Luther King wrote

[30:28]

He wrote in 1956 in a sermon called Love Your Enemies where he said, basically what we owe people is unconditional love because they are no different than ourselves in essence. And then he said, but you don't have to like or support or accept what they do. So it's not a love that just kind of caves in. So all of our practice, to me, the practice that we were brought by Suzuki Roshi and his teachers and his students is the practice of one being. which means accepting everyone as a being of worth.

[31:34]

And it means we do this practically. Our practice is we sit side by side. Everyone is facing the wall. Everyone is facing himself or herself. But we're doing it in this configuration in which... the people on either side of us and the people around us in the room are making the same effort and they're supporting me. And that's an expression, whether they think it or not, of unconditional love and trust. You have to trust, if you're sitting facing the wall, you have to trust that you're feeling safe. You have to trust the people who are sitting next to you and around you. So we sit like this. When we do walking meditation, we create one sort of millipede-like creature.

[32:41]

We walk together, not in lockstep, but as one being, as one human chain. We chant this way, we eat in this way, and we work this way as one being. Accepting everyone who is around us as part of our true environment. So for me, this question of right view, I don't... I don't, for practical purposes, do not limit it to... Just the view of impermanence and non-self, that's part of it. Really important in working with myself. The notion of impermanence has been, is a critical factor to me.

[33:45]

I experience, again, experience it in Sazen in the sense that there's just one thought after another and one mistake after another. One return. one time after another, returning to my breath and posture. But the same thing is true in my emotional life and in my political life, where I recognize in any given moment I may be feeling pain, I may be feeling anger, I may be feeling grief, I may be feeling joy. And when I'm caught in these afflictive emotions, the the question that I ask myself is one that flows from the idea of impermanence, which is, okay, how's this going to feel in an hour? How is this going to feel in the morning? This urgency that I feel so strongly right now, it's like, I have to do something.

[34:48]

Where's that going to be in a short while? And that has been incredibly instructive. The other aspect that I want to emphasize is that the nature of our minds, the nature is fluid and flexible. And you could think of it like a camera with, say, a zoom lens. So sometimes right view is looking at what is immediately within oneself or immediately in front of one. It might be looking at the tightness that I feel on my shoulders or

[35:57]

a pain in my chest or in my belly. I'm looking at that very minutely. To examine that and ask, what is this? How is this unfolding? That is the application of right view. To look where you're walking so that you don't trip and fall down. which becomes, I'll say, the older I get, the more a great goal in my life is not to fall down. You know, that's also right view. But sometimes it's also right view to, you know, to have a lens that goes wide angle, that's taking in the large picture and focuses on vast panorama. or to use the telephoto function and zoom in on something distant.

[37:08]

That's all right view. And this is the miraculous capacity that we have as humans to be able, moment by moment, to shift that perspective. And I'm grateful for that flexibility. And this is what I wish for our military planners, our police, our whole society. But it begins with us. I don't have immediate access those levels of civil society. Some of you may. If you do, please work there. Which means being as strong and kind and open as you can.

[38:12]

But it also means adhering to principles by which every human, every hillside, every stream is alive and demands or calls for our respect. You know, I said this in a piece a number of years ago. It's a title of a piece I wrote about, with some thoughts about Israel and Palestine. to think that, this is my view, that all lands are holy and all people are chosen, all beings are chosen. So if you hold that as a value, then in each interaction, particularly in the difficult ones, you can stop and ask yourself, how do I want to be

[39:26]

What does my training say about how to live? Well, maybe, I'm not gonna ask who that bell told for. I think it told for me. I so much appreciate being able to be here with you today with all that happens and has happened in this room and in this space. I'm grateful that it just continues. This is just a very precious thing in our world. So, thank you. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving.

[40:45]

May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[40:48]

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