This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Well, good morning, and so glad to join your sangha this morning once again. You know, in... our Japanese-American temples, we have a little bit of a strange practice for dharma messages. And we have to give some kind of a little bit of a corny joke to begin. And it can't be a good joke, but it can't be horrific either. And so I'm going to start with that. I was talking just a few minutes ago with Jiryu about this gathering.

[01:01]

And, well, he mentioned to me that many of you have been studying Sandokai, a text, a very important text for Soto Zen tradition. And I was originally going to say something about the kind of... matters of race in America and Buddhist approaches to racial reconciliation. And usually I get asked to talk about subjects of that kind, about anti-Asian animus and so on. But I thought I would try to mash it together. And in the last few seconds, I've been trying to think about this. Anyway, the joke is this, which is that among... I also teach at a university. And among university professors, there's a little... how should we say, joke that is circulating where some of my junior faculty, I'm the department chair, and junior faculty sent me this joke about how as assistant professors, they relate to this thing that's going around.

[02:03]

And it basically says, if you're a PhD student and you have a important presentation, conference talk or something, and it's seven days away from the talk, you start to get worried, panic a little bit, get ready and prepare. But if you're an assistant professor and you have a little bit more confidence, it can be even like seven hours before your talk, you start really preparing your talk. And then if you are a full professor, which I became just two years ago, it's like seven minutes before the talk, you start to get ready. And then I was like, well, if you're a Zen teacher, maybe you only have seven seconds to get ready. Yeah. to do the talk. And so my thought today was, you know, I'll give a talk, but I'm also happy to within seconds or whatever, you know, more like a Dharma exchange than just a straightforward Dharma talk. I will give a Dharma talk, you know, some message, but I hope we can also have some time for each other.

[03:07]

Just... encounter and within seven seconds, trying to understand what we are feeling, thinking. And what I will try to do, I've been trying to think about how to take a few things I wanted to say about the topics I've been thinking about recently, about is there a kind of fruitful Buddhist approach or a way to think about some of these questions about racial justice in America? today and of the past. And I sometimes talk about it as the karma of the nation, like what we inherit and what we have to face today and how can we, whatever background we are, try to approach it, but from a Buddhist vantage point. So that's one kind of talk I want to share with you. But also I respect to learn that you have been studying Sandokai, which is, you know, We chant all the time, and it's very, how should we say, on the one hand, very profound and ever-revealing text, and yet also sometimes very clear, straightforward teaching is there.

[04:25]

And so I thought maybe I'll try to find a way to say something about both. So this is something I think any of you who know me from before, have heard maybe that my interest in Buddhism and then Dogen and so forth, Soto Zen Buddhism began when I was a teenager, when I was living in Japan. And I was trying to struggle through my own understanding of, you know, having grown up in a family that was of mixed, both racial, religious, every kind of language background. My mom is, you know, very... traditional Japanese family from Yawanashi prefecture, my grandfather's Dankasodai, or like the head, you know, of the Buddhist temple. And I kind of received that lineage in my family. But my dad is from England. And so we, you know, spoke also some, tried to speak anyway. My English was not so good back then, but English.

[05:29]

And then we went to the... St. Alvin's Church in Roppongi area of Tokyo, which is an Anglican church because it's British, Church of England. And so we grew up kind of like Buddhist and Christian, sometimes English. My brother and I would speak sometimes English and then end the same sentence in Japanese or other way around. And so I began to question, you know, I have a phenotypically, I don't think I look as Japanese as, let's say, my younger brother. could almost pass as Japanese. He looked more genetically like my Japanese uncle, actually. And so I had this kind of face and a name like Duncan Williams. So I couldn't fit in so well in Japan as a Japanese person, even though that's kind of how I grew up. And when I went to the UK, I also found very quickly I couldn't

[06:30]

quite fit in there you know my father sent me to the UK to do a boarding school for two years because my I guess my English was so bad compared to my Japanese language abilities and so he thought if I did it intensively for a few years so then I realized just how I thought maybe that's where I'll fit in but of course that's you know I think myself and a kid from Pakistan a kid from Hong Kong we were the non people who didn't grow up in the UK. And so it was very, very difficult to try to fit into British society and all the norms I thought I knew from my father. Nothing was relevant to trying to adapt to life there. So all to say that my search for Buddhism always had to do with this question of who am I? And this is a very Buddhist question and Dogen asks it in... To study the Buddha way is to study the self.

[07:32]

So this is to investigate who we are deeply. This is a very important gateway for our practice. And so when I met my first Zen teacher, he's my Zen teacher today too, but my ordination teacher, when I was a teenager, he... came from a very rural Japanese temple, but my family also had a house in this area called Nagano Prefecture. And he would tell me, for you, you need to not become attached to either extreme. Don't think that you are English or Japanese, or don't think that you are just... Buddhist or Christian or any kind of dual kind of binary or, you know, two things don't stick because the freedom will come when you don't, when you're not stuck in one thing.

[08:41]

And that was, I was probably like 16 or 17 when he said something like this. And it kind of stuck in my mind as a kind of nice hint about where is freedom and liberation. And also, where can you find your true self? And so what was interesting was, I think probably along the way, I found another person who grew up in Japan, and she is of multiracial heritage, and she ended up being a scholar of cultural economics or something like that, at one of the big... universities in Paris. And she started to study this question of people who are of mixed background and multilingual background and so forth. And it was framed in terms of do companies benefit from people who can...

[09:43]

have multiple languages or have multiple cultural backgrounds? Is there any benefit to that? Or is that a detriment to hiring such individuals? And in the process, she came up with four kind of categories of how to understand identity for people of multi, you know, ethnic or racial or whatever background. And it, so I just want to mention what these are. And because it, I promise it'll relate to Sandoka in a moment. But she said, you know, the first title, she studied like 5,000 people. And she said, when people grow up that way, some people really don't like it that they have to deal with multiplicity. And they want to find a more kind of simple way to... figure out who they are and their identity. And they like to say like, what is my essence or my foundation? Or if I have parents of two different backgrounds, which of them is kind of more foundational? And then you kind of like pick one, choose one, that kind of way.

[10:48]

So she calls that foundational identity formation. And I thought about that one and I can understand the appeal of it. It's much easier sometimes just to say I'm this or I'm that. So I can understand that. But I was like, that's a kind of little bit non-Buddhistic way of formulating oneself. But I can understand how some people will think like that. And then she said other people, second one is called situational identity formation. She said, you know, sometimes based on your situation, you shift your understanding of who you are and how you are in the world. I was like, oh, that one I can understand very well. You know, when I'm in the UK with my British grandparents or something, I'll probably act a little more British way. And when I'm in Japanese way, you know, my wife likes to make fun of me. I make phone calls to Japan all the time. And, of course, it's time different now. But I will start speaking Japanese. And then apparently my voice modulation changes.

[11:51]

And I start bowing on the phone. And she's like, they can't even see. She's Korean-American. So I say... They can't even see you, and why are you doing that, and that's so stupid. But I think in the situation, it feels somehow like, I know they know I am bowing, or something like this. So somehow we, how should we say, code switch, or shift up, and based on our karmic situation, we shift our identity. So that's a different kind of style, right, of how we... think about ourselves and how we exist in a world, situational identity. But then she said, some people say, I don't like doing that. I like to have a kind of integrated, unified identity that I present the same in whatever situation I'm in. And she said, people who lean that way, they call it integrationalist identity, but like the idea that I may be multiple things, but inside myself, I've kind of found a way to...

[12:54]

unify or merge or integrate or something like this, and that I can take that self wherever I go. And it's not foundational in the sense that it recognizes the multiplicity, but it's unified in a certain way. So she says that's called integration with identity. Some people really lean in that direction. And then finally, she said there's a fourth type of way called transcendentalist identity. That is to say, You know, if you are, you know, it is true, British and Japanese or Buddhist, like, you know, this identity that it is a humanly constructed thing. And so in that sense, it's not, you know, it's not, it's artificial and we use it for convenience purpose. But so she says, some people are like, I refuse to identify with this identity. identity formation, this one or this one, and I want to have an identity that's beyond that, transcends that.

[14:00]

Like, I'm a human, or I'm a sentient being, or you know what I mean? So to get away from some things that are artificially created. And so I was like, you know what? I think now that I'm in my 50s, probably I would have answered this differently if I was... back when I was 16 years old and first trying to investigate these matters. But now that I'm 50-something, I'm like, I've been through all four. I've leaned onto one style or another of those identity styles and cycled through all four of them probably multiple times by this point. And I think something about, and this is where I'm going to get to Sandokai in a moment, there's something about Buddhist vantage point. that actually allows us to actually have some freedom to take various kinds of vantage points, position points, et cetera.

[15:04]

And that to understand something like sandokai, we should at least get a little bit of sense of, in the longer Buddhist history and teachings, where does a text like sandokai lie? and what kind of ideas is it based on, the kind of vantage points. So, you know, if you've already been studying this, this may sound very basic and repetitional, but, you know, Sandokai is such an important key text for Soto Zen lineage, and yet it predates, you know, Dungshan or Tozan, the founder of, you know, We call us a soto for a reason, right? Sozan and tozan. And the founders, the latter character, soto, the to is in Chinese way pronounced dungshan, but in Japanese way we say tozan.

[16:05]

And so tozan is, you know, 807 to 869. And Sekito Kisen, who writes Sandokai, is one generation earlier. And it's... a text that is very much in the lineage of what follows with Tozan and his five ranks, and I'll come back to that later, but his ideas about absolute and relative, but also comes after like Jiu, Yi, and the Tiantai commentaries on the three truths, and the Ji and Bi and Chu in Japanese ways of talking, like ultimate reality, phenomenal or relative reality, and then Chu, the kind of middle idea. So that's a very important Chinese philosophy developed, not in our school of Buddhism, but precedes us as a Tiantai commentaries. or Tendai Buddhist philosophy.

[17:07]

But Sekitokisen is very much leaning on or drawing from that lineage. And of course, that is also, goes all the way back to India, to Jury's, of course, is relying on Nagarjuna and Chandrakirti and Dharmakirti, all the kind of Manjyamaka thinkers, Jogacharya thinkers of India who put forth this idea that the world as we perceive it should be understood as having two kind of registers or two perspectival vantage points, one called Paramata Satya and one called Samvirti Satya, ultimate or absolute reality and the phenomenal or relative reality. So when we study something like Sandokai, there's teachings before it, and then right after Sandokai, there's our founder, Tozan, or Dongshan, who has his teaching of five ranks.

[18:09]

And so it lies kind of in the middle of this long lineage of teaching about how to see the world. And my argument today is that it's a little bit related to mixed race theory about positionality and how we situate ourselves in how and why we might want to look at reality in a given moment in a certain kind of vantage point. So, you know, we have, I wanted to say one more word about the, well, Sandokai, the word, the title of the, you know, the text itself, and then a few of the lines, just to remind ourselves, what is that text? And of course, Sandokai-san, you know, in the Chinese characters, it has this connection to the idea of things that are differentiated, things that are, therefore, of the phenomenal reality or relative reality.

[19:22]

And in the Tendai thought, it would be connected with the character Ji for the relative reality. And Dou is a flip. It's an idea of kind of a unified reality, a common reality, emptiness, the things that are not subject to differentiation. And so, san-do, the do, it just means like, normally in Japanese... language in the vernacular even, not even in Buddhist language, we use it to mean like something that is equal or same or unified or something like that. So that's the, from Tendai thought, the character Di or the absolute reality, ultimate reality, unified reality, that kind of idea is in the title of the text itself, San Do, then Kai, Tai usually in the Japanese language, in the vernacular, we use it to mean like a contract, an agreement.

[20:25]

And in this case, probably we mean like when two parties come together to, you know, mutually come together in agreement, something like this. And so this text itself is saying, the title is just proclaiming. This is a text about... the coming together or merging together of relative reality with ultimate reality, with a differentiation with the unity or something like that. And the rest of the text is a kind of large poem giving us that different vantage points of how to understand when we embrace both. This is like me, like not rejecting either my father or mother, you know, right? When we embrace both our parents, when we embrace everything, about who we are, our Buddha nature, as well as all of our nonsense, we embrace everything, then what happens? Right? Then what happens?

[21:28]

And how can we see things? And I feel that all of Sandoppa is kind of a different lines are giving us some hints about how to see things. And so, I didn't want to go so, so much into line by line, you know, that's not the purpose, but the As you're doing the Sandokai study, if we can understand that and understand also in our lineage, the founding teacher, Tozan's way, he also has this theory about the, he calls it five ranks or in Japanese way, we say goi. Ranks is maybe not the right word. Usually that's the way it's translated, but it's like five, ii means like positions. Five, I like to translate more like vantage points. And there's five of them. And they also use the language of the Tendai philosophy that I mentioned, GED and Chu, Chu meaning the middle.

[22:28]

And all of the five ranks of Tozan Ryokai, the founder of our lineage of Chinese, you know, founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, Shochukai, Henshuchou, all those teachings, the five positions where he says the... the language is a little, the character is a little bit different, but it's basically the same thing. He's saying the straight and the crooked are in the middle, or you can see the crooked and the straight, or the straight and the crooked, or you can see that when they merge together, all these things, it's the same thing as saying GD Chu, the Tendai Wei, like what comes up in Sandokai. Yeah. that the absolute and relative and coming together, merging together in the middle somewhere and embracing everything sometimes and seeing each as its own sometimes. All those positionalities are represented in our founder's, Tozan's teachings. And then later, our Japanese founder, Dogen Zenji, also many of his texts are just explications of...

[23:34]

the same thing over in a slightly different way. So you read something like Sanseugyo, right? Mountains and Waters Sutra. And you imagine yourself, if you're a dragon, the water looks like, you know, because dragons in East Asian mythology live in the, you know, underwater in the oceans. It's like a palace. And if you're a hungry ghost, the water is like a burning flame. If you're, you know, so... It's all about vantage points and positionalities and the freedom to be able to move between the positionalities. And this is what I was trying to get at with the mixed race transcendentalist situation. When you can move freely, comes a certain liberation. And yet it's not like you land on one and that's it. And I think Sandokai says something like that, right? That you come to absolute, and if you think that's it, that's not quite right.

[24:39]

You have to keep on being able to move freely. And there's another Sekitoki, and I'm going to end with another to relate to Sekitoki-san, and I'll try to wrap up my thoughts about Sandokai, but... You know, the author of it, Sekitoki Seng, has a beautiful poem called Song of the Grass Hut. And in that poem, which, again, resonates very well with Sandokai, he says, again, I hope my English translation is not so off, but he says something along the lines of, let us let go of myriad years and completely settle. And that's when we can open our hand and walk carefree. And he says, thousands of words, myriads of interpretations are only there for you to free yourself from your obstructions.

[25:39]

So those are the verses in his important poem called Song of Grass Hut in the English rendition. But the idea of like, we let go of... generations of habits and generations of fixed way of thinking human society has given us about who we are, what we... He said, when we open our... Because that's about grasping onto something, even like we grasp. But opening the hand, letting go, is actually a key aspect of getting to a... position of being able to see things clearly and see things in multiplicity, see things in a way of interlinkedness, where all of the words on the teachings, they can actually be a trap or kind of like an obstruction. But if we understand that they can also be hints of guidance and teachings that if we take it right, we can free.

[26:48]

And anything can be a, you know, Tozang, the founder of our lineage in China, it says he was walking and saw a stream and saw his own reflection in the stream, and he woke up. He saw something very deep about the nature of reality himself and his reflection, the stream. So anything, any moment can be opening. Anything can be Dharma gate. Any words can be the same myriad of words and teachings, but they can be a trap. They can be the things we hold on to, like my teacher was saying when I was 16 years old. You can think you're X or Y, but don't get stuck there. That's a type of very nice teaching of Buddhism. We are given many, many hints and many, many guidances, and yet we can walk freely if we don't... get stuck in just one perspective. So that's why Tozan gives us five. That's why Jury gives us three.

[27:49]

That's why Sandokai gives us three and a half or something. You know what I mean? It's a very complex text in a certain way. And so we can freely move and study these texts and study these teachings. And if they're helpful, then we... can use them to free up. And then we can also get a little bit stuck. So if we, if we get too locked in to something. So I think that's why also Sandoka Tech says things like, you know, in the lightness, you can see the darkness, but don't kind of get stuck trying to understand, you know, that darkness is not about that same thing, you know, flip side. It's, it's about how we're interlinked and how we are interconnected and how, you know, all Buddha nature is interconnected with our nonsense. All the kind of regular personality quirks and et cetera we may have in our karmic composition is beautifully interpenetrating with Buddha nature.

[28:54]

And yet each thing is kind of, you know, we can also take it on its own and it's on its own has a kind of integrity and purpose and so forth. And So I'm going to try to end with going back to what I was originally going to talk about, which was America's racial karma and the topics like that. But it occurs to me that we have some very powerful teachings within our Buddhist texts and language and so forth that allow us to not get stuck in either difference or sameness. And that's, I think, like teaching of Sandokai, not to get stuck in difference, but also recognize fully everything. And somehow freedom from suffering, freedom from racial suffering, freedom from suffering of... things around race that have been done in the past and sometimes even continue and endure in the present because that's the way racial karma works as as does collective karma in general is it's not sometimes we don't it's not our doing but our we inherit many things and and and how we deal with what we inherit how we deal with you know

[30:15]

what our parents tell us, what our grandparents tell us, what our ancestors have gone through in body and mind, if they experienced racial hurt, if they perpetrated racial hurt. All these things are kind of transmitted. And whether we like it or not, we inherit all of it. And so we inherit a lot of nonsense. We inherit a lot of goodness. We inherit a lot of virtue. We inherit a lot of hurt. We inherit all this. And yet we are also... Buddhas and free, and we have to deal with it in the middle. And so this is, I think, the beautiful thing about something like, you know, let's just end with like Jool-Nadavindra, that we are like, you know, beautiful, we live in a universe that is of multitude, of infinite multitude. that's the difference aside, right? That all of us are kind of unique jewels in a vast and infinite net.

[31:21]

It's like that, like a tennis court net with the knots in it. We're like a knot in, you know, each one of us are distinct, beautiful, differentiated things. We hold a multitude within ourselves. And yet we are like a jewel and a mirror that you know, cut in such a way that in each of us we can see each other and we can see each other's pain and we can see each other's hopes and aspirations. And because each of the jewels are mirrors, when we see each other, we see so much if we care to look. and we see our cell, inside our cell, our mirror, our kitchen, you know, Dogen's Tenzo Kyokun metaphor of we are our kitchen and we have to understand our ingredients, we have to look deeply, that question I raised at the beginning, who am I? That's a good one. But Dogen's teaching doesn't stop there because he says when we look at that, we look and see that we are actualized by 10,000 things.

[32:30]

So... And then we have to keep going. And we do not only see that, but we pursue a way of freedom that shows that there is no, how should we say, beginning or end. And there's no up and down. I think Sandokai likes to also say, you know, there's no north and southern patriarchy. You know, we find a world beyond that doesn't leave any traces. This is very, very beautiful teaching. And so we have different positionalities and different karmic situations. And I think this is the wonderful teaching of something like sandokai or five ranks or three truths of jirui or whatever, is depending on what we need and what we each other need, we can change our positions a little bit and be free and help each other to release suffering, including... I was going to say about racial suffering or things like that, the hurts that continue and linger.

[33:33]

And sometimes we deal with it by directly going to the hurt. And other times we let go of that and we reframe. And that helps. Or sometimes there's so many techniques of how to handle difficulty that the Buddha taught us. And so we are the inheritors of so much teaching and so much perspective and so much compassion. And so that's what we, I think, need is to handle many of the things in our American society or global society. We have a lot as Buddhists to bring to the table of how to do it with each other. as Buddhists, but also with people who are not Buddhists or who don't share our point of view. How do we deal with that difference as well? And so with that, maybe I'll stop speaking and then be glad to do more like a Dharma exchange.

[34:44]

So thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. As Duncan said, if anybody has a question or comment, please feel free to raise your hand. You can be able to find maybe on the reactions button on your menu, a hand raise option. You can also send something in the chat. And if anyone from the practice period wants to offer something, also welcome to. Yes, please. First of all, I just wanted to thank you for coming and speaking to our community. I've heard you several times, and I'm so grateful for your teaching.

[35:47]

So welcome. I don't know if you know who I am. Yes, of course. Again, welcome. My question really was, when you mentioned techniques, we have so many techniques for dealing with these challenges, particularly racial challenges. challenges of racial discrimination in our culture. I'm wondering if you could just mention a few of those that you found either yourself that are helpful or that you've heard of. I think we're looking for those in our community as well. Thank you so much for that question. You know, so one thing is I mentioned the idea of karma of a nation. It comes from Reverend Kyoshiro Tokunaga. He was a person who served the San Jose Buddhist temple for many years. And back in World War II, he was right after Pearl Harbor, taken by a train and taken to one of these internment camps and spent his war years there.

[36:50]

And he was physically quite ill. And on the train going to these internment camps, he met an African-American like a train porter who helped, you know, his physical condition so he could survive, but also talk to him about the, oh, you know, what you're going through with the targeting of, you know, Japanese Americans or Buddhist people or whatever is something, you know, African-American people went through before. And based on that conversation, psychologically, it helped him to feel like, oh, you know, I'm not alone. And this is something I think number one is very important, is I think a Buddhist way to approach matters of racial questions around hurt both present and past, how to repair kind of racial, not only trauma that continues...

[37:54]

for many people, if they experience that kind of thing, you know, it's not only in the mind, but in the body. So how do we kind of attend to kind of repairing that? I think, and there's some techniques we can talk about just on that. But more broadly, the first point I wanted to make was he recognized that a lot of these things, that he wasn't the first person. He wasn't... the only person who experienced racial discrimination. And there are many other people who experienced things and who, you know, persisted, survived, overcame some difficulty, and that we can learn from each other. And that to become freer and more capable and more resilient and more, when we're faced with things that are how should we say, quite big, some people even call it a structural part of our society and our history, to know that you don't have to solve it just by yourself, that in itself is already a great teaching of Buddhism.

[39:07]

You know, we say, our first line of bodhisattva vow is, sentient beings are innumerable, yet we vow to liberate all. So we can only become free, you know, together. This is very, very powerful teaching for how we can come together to solve things like racial problems of the past. And I mentioned the idea of racial karma because it's also the solution is not done alone, but also the problem is not an alone problem. When I was growing up... I felt like I was the only one who didn't know how to belong in this world or something like that. Once you know there are other people who have been able to figure out a way to see things, move forward, and so forth, that's powerful. I'm going to share something very private, but my brother, unfortunately, he committed suicide when he was 24 years old. He couldn't fit in either Japan or he went to the UK.

[40:11]

I experienced a lot of discrimination there too but um he had much worse experience uh people would not only like verbal things is like i was very used to normal but he they put feces on his door and uh just a kind of him being part asian was a very uh and as i said he looked more asian than i did so he really had difficulty for two years living there and and ultimately he just couldn't and he also came out as So he just couldn't find his place in the world. And I think I've always been a little bit, how to say, motivated around these questions because not just me alone, but like my brother and many other people I know who have had difficult thing and not knowing, I think if he had, I was too young, you know, he's 24, I was 25. Like we can only share insight or Buddhist teaching or some perspective that might be helpful, you know, when the comics are presented, right?

[41:18]

And he wasn't quite right then. And I couldn't share anything that was going to be helpful for him. But I've been intent on like, how can we do that for other people, maybe in a similar situation around race or, you know, any other thing. And I think one of the key things I figured out was to know that you're not alone. That's a really, And I think Sangha is that for us Buddhist people. Why the Buddha said that's an important refuge or treasure. So that's number one. Maybe it's not a technique, but it's a treasure from our Buddhist heritage is something called Sangha. That means that we practice together and not alone. Sometimes we have to... be alone, but we're doing it together, at least with other people. There's something powerful about the Sangha. So that's number one for me. There's more specific things like, you know, and that you're, what we inherit as things that are difficult, that our parents may have experienced racial discrimination or difficult or may have perpetrated.

[42:34]

You know, I always think about like There's a book by Isabel Wilkerson called Cast, and it's one image of this lynching that's happening in the American South. And we immediately think of what were the family members of the person who was lynched, how they're trying to process and go through when they lost their loved one like that. But I think a Buddhist way to think about this is there was this photograph of the lynching that she describes in words. And there's an 11-year-old white girl who is attending the lynching as if it were a picnic. They're having a picnic. And I'm like, what is the racial karma inherited by that 11-year-old girl to think that this is a normal thing to have a picnic around? And what does that 11-year-old girl's children and grandchildren, like what is inherited?

[43:35]

there as well and to solve the issues around race in america we have to all come together whatever our racial background because we inherit many things in our bodies and minds through all this whether we like it or not you know we just inherit so how can we how can we uh uh take things and depersonalize and not make it about guilt or your responsibility or this and that not like that type of way, you know, but a Buddhist way, which is about, these are just the, we inherit nonsense, whether we like it or not, of our ancestors, and we inherit the teachings and wisdom of our ancestors, and it's, you know, our life, we can do something to have some discernment and understanding, and when we inherit the nonsense, how do we transform it? This is the powerful message of, especially... are more like Vajrayana teachings, is how do we take the most difficult things and not look away from it, not try to throw it away, not hide away from it or something, but take it and actually transform.

[44:49]

There's a power that we have in our lineages about transformation of even the most difficult things. So... I don't know, the broad picture is something like that. And then there's specifics, I think, for each individual case or particular issues in a, I don't know, particular sangha, like there's different things. But broadly, we have many, many teachings and tools. But to me, the big one is like, we're not doing it alone and we're sangha and we're going to do it together. This is a powerful way to see how we can resolve these questions. And do it with a sense of wisdom, but also great sense of compassion that this is our life in the middle. Finding our freedom is going to require a lot of encounter with things that when we look at ourselves, when we look at our entirety, there is hurt.

[45:53]

And that's the beauty of Buddhism is that we are the religion that says, we're going to tackle the suffering, you know, head on. And sometimes we will have different, many, many techniques of directly tackling, transforming, but also sometimes like you need to let it be and do something else and then it transforms itself. Or, you know, there's so many ways to take our teachings and in each circumstance do something. Sorry, I'm talking too much. So, but, but, I believe we have many teachings we can draw on and many rituals, ceremony, and not just philosophical ideas that we can use. And then most importantly, the compassion that comes from being together and practicing together in community. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive.

[46:57]

please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfzc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[47:18]

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