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. Oh, impermanence. I'm literally in the midst of it. And... The stand also feels very impermanent. And I'm going to adapt as best I can. It's good to see everyone. Happy 2024. Let's start out by just staying happy to each other. All right, do that. Just feel free to have a room around you. Alright.

[01:03]

My name is Reverend K. U. William Schutt. I want to thank the City Senator Abbott, Mako Rihar, and the Tonto, Tim, for an invitation to speak today, and of course to thank Senior Government Teacher Paul Haller and Central Abbott David Zimmerman, for being here. And sorry, this thing is a little hard for me. I'm going to focus now. And of course, to thank Vicki Austin, my teacher, and then Gail Fronstal also. And of course, though she's here, in spirit, in fact. When I was told I was going to sit in the studio seat, and it was In Cossie, I thought Blanche, because I'm used to Blanche being here.

[02:13]

And then to have this very high platform, I feel like in the Theravon tradition, you're not supposed to be in the high bed. And when I was told I was stepping up on here, I just feel like, wow, really? A little uncomfortable for me, so sorry. Let me adjust here in so many ways. All right. I really appreciate being the first one to give a talk here at City Center in 2024, and with this new layout and all. In some ways, then, it's about, I would say, right or skillful view. It's the first of April Path, of course. And I think it's kind of a New Year's thing, too, to kind of start going, oh, what is it that I want this year to be? How do I set my view, wouldn't you say, on how I'm going to do this year?

[03:18]

Do people still do resolutions and thinking about anyone? OK. Right. All right. going to be talking from my book, which came out in August. And thank you for the invitation to talk about it. It's called Home is Here, Practicing Anti-Racism with the Engaged Eightfold Path. So I'm going to start with the introduction here. I will say the book starts, and I'll say here also, with a content warning. I will be saying Slurs. This is not an invitation to use slurs yourself, even if it's referring to you, just because it tends to be activating for people. However, it goes with the folk, and so I will be saying it in this context.

[04:26]

So the introduction, the wholeness of life, location, location, Where are you from? No, no, really. Where are you from? Hey, chink, go home. People like you shouldn't live in this neighborhood. I was in your country and saved your people. Why do you act like a white girl? You're a twinkie. Aren't you? People know what a Twinkie is. Ready to end if you want me to explain? Okay, a Twinkie is a derogatory word for someone who is perceived to be Asian or yellow on the outside and white on the inside. A banana is another derogatory term. Buddhism came to America some 49 or 50 years ago.

[05:26]

Don't you know this is the women's restroom? fucking lesbian. In each moment we are located by lineage and ancestry, by others, by ourselves, by sight, by perception, by differentiation, by discrimination, by institutions, by policies, by governmental structures, by systems of oppressions, by homophobia, by sexism, by gender phobia, by white supremacy culture, by racism, by erasure, by invisibilization, by exclusion, by inclusion, by equity, by love.

[06:31]

with hatred, with fear, with anxiety, with love, with care, with tenderness, with joy. In isolation, in community, in belonging, in the world, in time, in space, in emptiness, in wholeness. As a Vietnamese-American adoptee, 1.5 generation, immigrant, cisgender female, gender non-conforming, lesbian , in the late mid-years of a chronological life, I'm often located by others, as I don't always present or behave in ways people believe my social locations to be. For instance,

[07:35]

I'm often asked as I enter a washroom, don't you know this is the women's restroom? Perhaps it could be because of my shaved head due to being a priest, but likely it's also because I have been non-conforming in the ways I have carried myself for most of my life, in gender and other socially prescribed manners. When I was in Vietnam, In 2002, when traveling with Vietnamese and Vietnamese-American friends, they would often ask me to stay in the van as they went in to negotiate the lodging price. This was due to the unofficial, but commonly used, tiered pricing scheme. Lowest for current Vietnamese nationals, next level for Vietnamese and diaspora, and most expensive for foreigners. According to my friends, When my ethnic identity was visually apparent, the way I felt myself was American.

[08:39]

They felt that I exuded too much confidence and took up too much space compared to a typical Vietnamese female. For most of my life, I have had to be hyper-aware of my social locations wherever I am. especially of locations imputed on me by systems of oppression. By location, I mean a framing for how an individual is designated a position in specific systems and with it the assumptions and privileges, for a lack of them, that come with it. This framing of locationality allows for an understanding but that identity always comes with embedded social power that can change depending on which system is operating in each moment of interaction with another, interpersonally and in structures.

[09:42]

For instance, as an able-bodied Vietnamese American, I'm located in the down-power position or location of less privilege within the system of white supremacy. yet I am in the hot power or more privileged location in ableism. Understanding one's location is important, because depending on the embedded lack of or privilege of power, one's responsibility changes. I've tried to grasp solidly onto some of these locations at times, trying hard to be American or Vietnamese, for others, and for myself. At other times, I've tried rejecting locations, especially those computed on me by others and by systems. I've done both in many ways, individually and with others, through academic studies, art, therapy, volunteerism, activism, and work as a social worker.

[10:51]

Then finally, When my suffering couldn't be processed thoroughly through those needs, I leaned into my Buddhist practice. At first, it was out of utter confusion. After my graduate studies, I went back to Vietnam for the first time after 28 years. I thought I was going home. But after five months, I realized that the home I envisioned was simply that. A vision. carried on my past and my childhood. This threw me for a loop, and I came back to the United States utterly shaken. Who am I? Where do I belong? I had been practicing languageism for almost six years by then. With this shattering of old ideas about myself, I then decided to go to a monastery in Northern California

[11:53]

to do some intensive meditation, chanting, and other Buddhist practices. Initially, my eating was a three-month intensive retreat, and I ended up staying there for three and a half years and was aiming as a priest in the Soto Zen tradition. Fast forward to more than two decades later, and with the years of practice and being a Buddhist and meditation teacher, I've developed a more complete sense of how to hold my experiences of social locations in ways that are more grounding yet responsive. Fostering healing and restoration. So that's the beginning of the book, and I wanted to really talk about location. I think when I find out from this view, I'm obviously in the literal up-power position, very up-power right now, and you all are lollies.

[12:58]

Online, maybe you're more directly, I don't know. But everything's just, right? Depending on how we interact, even though I'm literally higher than Paul, obviously being a senior Dharma teacher, Paul has more power in the temple. and also in social locations in the United States. So how we're located depends not just on our literal space, but who we turn to interact with. Now, yes, I did ask you to say hi to everyone, and that was also on purpose. So I'll actually close your eyes for a minute. when I ask you to say hi to people. Think about what was some of the drive or the motivation or the impetus for who you turn to, how you address people.

[14:11]

What is the energetic sense or the motivation even think about what might have been some unconscious sense. All right. Go ahead and open your eyes when you're ready. Anybody want to say, share anything that came up for them about how you chose who to say hi to or didn't say hi to? Sure. Tell us your name. Hey, Ko. I chose to say hi to everybody I could see. And would you say being in the Zen form, in the Zen no, literally, you didn't get up to go say hi to NW? No, I did not. Yeah, so that's kind of like a form here. Most people would think to get up.

[15:14]

I almost said, feel free to get up, but then I thought that might be more chaos here. Anyone else want to share? Yes, what's your name? Bouchon. Bouchon, yes. For me, I think it was just proximity. Proximity. Okay, now think back. Who did we decide to sit next to, or where did we want to sit? And by that, I don't mean just who, right? But also, perhaps, like, I'm actually a little bit hard of hearing, so I sit close. But then, also, as a Vietnamese-American, often I don't like to sit up front. Right? And so I sit back. even though I have a sense of I need to move forward to be more visible, but I have to fight these kind of conditions. And so we're taught how to locate ourselves all the time. And we're doing it all the time. And certain of us, depending on how much instruction you were given explicitly or implicitly, depending on the various social locations that you've grown up to, have more and more messages about how we should comport ourselves, right?

[16:30]

And that's part of what we're taught, our conditioning. And then, you know, some of it's perfectly fine. The issue is, are we aware of that? from that, how do we want to respond? How much of it is old and unconscious? And are we willing to examine that and then bring more consciousness to? Now, one way to also talk about saying hi, really, or the exercise of saying hi, is that there's a For the Zen people in the room, you already probably know that there's a teaching from the Bhavakamsaka Sutra on the Indra's net. So it's described often as the universe is a net, and at each section in which the strands cross, there's a jewel.

[17:34]

So at the nodes, there are jewels. And because of the nature of jewels, the way they're cut, they're faceted, they reflect. And so at each note, there's a jewel, and so each jewel reflects all the other jewels. Sounds lovely, right? And it is about our interconnectedness, how we reflect each other, impact each other. And it's a lovely image. Now, sometimes that's used, I think, to have the sense that, oh, all the jewels should be the same. That equality is that we all should somehow be the same. Wouldn't you say? Maybe it's just me. Now, I want to really bring in that the oneness, when we want to talk about oneness of practice, that it's the strands, it's the net itself that's where we need to pay more attention. not just on the individual jewels.

[18:37]

The jewels are part of the net. So yes, we want to pay attention to the jewels. And depending on if your part of the net has more torn or have not historically been taking care of the strands so that they're broken or that they're weak, then perhaps more attention needs to be put on attending to the jewels in that area. How do we build the net again? How do we fix, you know, when you look at cobwebs, especially those that seem like they are not attended to, or sections of it, you know, you see a spider, right, when there's a, decides going to get the bug that they're going to eat, they're repairing the nets. And so we want to think about, hmm, where is it that I don't pay enough attention? the net. If we're talking about oneness, am I just interested in the net around me, or where I can go?

[19:42]

And yet, the net, if we think of, if we turn our view to not just be on the jewels, then we become stewards of the net. But the net becomes the thing that is more important. One way to talk about the net is, what is the connection between us? How are those connections made? So as I was writing this book, and really this book arose out of a call from students. I like to say this book did not start out as a book. It started out as a response. So in 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, a lot of Asian American students called me up and said, hey, I need help. All this cannabis and violence against Asian Americans is really distressing.

[20:48]

I'm afraid I leave my home. How can you support me? And so I actually have been developing these since 2017. I was at a Generation X teacher conference that several other people were at. And it was right after yet another round of sexual misconduct in convert centers. And so the right use of power was brought in as a restoration model. And I hope the right use of power, and we've done it here. And then I thought, well, I've been to a lot of trainings in my priest career. and some other models always being brought in, nonviolent communication. And I love them all. Really, I do. And yet, there must be something in the teachings themselves. That's where I go when I have trouble. So I thought about it, and with the support of the Nira Foundation, the Buddhist Foundation, I've been developing the four normal truths to be what I call the engaged version, as a restorative model.

[21:56]

So in that restorative model, We start out by saying, harm and harming has happened. Not just that there's suffering in life. Because to restore anything, we have to acknowledge that there's been brokenness, that the values that we say, that we uphold, the view that we say, oh, there's equality, there's equity. that we hold these views and values on the Brooklyn, we have to agree on that. So much of the conflict in the world arises out of disagreement about what is it that needs attending to, or is broken and needs to be fixed, wouldn't you say? And so it is really important that the beginning of Restoration is to acknowledge what is. So, As I was doing these, I would say there are three, what I call, essential aspects to restoration.

[23:00]

One is this, acknowledging what is, which, by the way, echoes the personal truth, right? Harming, harming has happened, we have to acknowledge it, and then knowing what shifts are especially needed and learning how to put those shifts into practice. And then the last of those two and three, I will go to chapter one, I'll just read you briefly. Okay, in age one of the church, we are complete and whole. By the way, Tim, I have no thought, so can you, someone can give me a time check? 1040. Enjoy. Thank you. The ring of a bell signaled it was my turn for Doku-san, an interview to discuss my practice with the Soto Zen master at this 500-year-old training monastery in Japan.

[24:12]

I picked up a small mallet and struck the cast iron bell in front of me, one time letting it ring, then a second time and hurried down a long hall of the tommy mats, the woven straw flooring in traditional Japanese living spaces, passing through the ihaiyo, a narrow room lined on both sides with robes of individual altars for deceased Sanda community members. They silently witnessed the squish of cloth as my long black priest robes rub back and forth around my ankles with each fixed up. At the end of the hall, three steps rose up. I stop at the bottom and perform a short gush-up, bowing with palms touching and elbows out. Then in one swift motion, I grab the end of my zaku, or priest's bowing cloth, laid it down on a tatami, and folded it into a square.

[25:18]

I dropped down and started my full frustrations as quickly as possible, body crouched in child's clothes, both hands outstretched and palms placed on the floor. Then, with symmetrical precision, hands raised past the ears and down again before rising to stand. I did this three times quickly, as is the custom, after which I refolded and slid the zoggle back over my left wrist. One more quick got showed, and then I headed up those three stairs to my dokusan with Sekei Harada Roshi, the abbot of Kōshinji Monastery in Obama, Japan. I entered the room ready to ask the central question of my life. I had come to Japan after leaving the predominantly white-concured Sochosen Buddhist Monastery in central California, where I thought I would spend the rest of my life.

[26:24]

When I had asked to be ordained after more than eight years of meditative Buddhist practice, I felt a deep calling to live as a Buddhist monastic. But this did not come to me. I left the California monastery after three and a half years there, heartbroken and confused about the racism I had experienced on both a personal and structural level. The persistent white supremacy culture of the monastery made it unsafe and did not support me as a Vietnamese-American practitioner. This was true for many other people of color staying there as well. The experience was a huge shock to my understanding of Buddhism, Buddhist practice, and my sense of place in the world. As I make plans to leave that California monastery, and figure out how to practice as a newly ordained priest, I was contacted by someone who studied under Sakeharada Roshi in Japan.

[27:33]

They urged me to study with him as he was acknowledged as an enlightened Zen master. I had only practiced Socio Zen in predominantly white convert settings in the United States, and I felt drawn to the practice, in Japan, the birthplace of this sect, Buddhism. I'd been at Hoshinji for three weeks, trying to process my despair from having to leave California. There was another American at the monastery, a white woman. Instead of being someone I could connect with, she had harassed me, saying things like, you're good for nothing, you're trash. By the way, I thought about it, and I didn't put it, but I'll tell her she also said you should die. and hissed whispers as we moved about the various ceremonies and tasks of the temple. I couldn't get away from her either. We were housed in the same nun's quarter together.

[28:36]

We had come to Hushinji around the same time, so we had similar seniority, and we were the same height, so we were often paired together for ceremonies. Her hateful whispers seemed to follow me all over the temple. The racism I had experienced in California had followed me all the way to Japan. Entering the room for Noka-san with Sekei Harada, I barely sat down before blurting out the quintessential question of my existence up to that moment. Why does hatred seem to follow me wherever I go? I asked. Sekei Harada didn't. hesitate. No hatred completely. K-N-O-W, by the way. No hatred completely, he answered. Then he grabbed the handbell to his right and rang it vigorously, signaling the end of my enemy.

[29:42]

I scrambled out of the room, doing the frustrations and vows in reverse order. My mind raced to make meaning of what had just happened. Nothing came. My mind had stopped. A koan in Zen practice is a story assigned by a teacher for you to work with. Various traditions have different ways of practicing the koans, but giving an answer to the teacher as part of the process is a commonality across sects. Now, how the teacher accepts or rejects the answer is part of the mythology of this practice. Well-known hoon is, at this very moment, what is your original face before your parents were born? Many people think hoons are paradoxes, but really they're stories to stop your mind, to bump it off its group of incessant

[30:50]

and well-worn patterns of thinking, planning, and processing. Koans open us to an understanding that's beyond habitual thinking. Life also gives us koans. For me, racism has been a koan I've turned over and over. Studying race theory was one of my answers to this koan. Other answers from my life have included activism, and various work as a social worker focused on addressing the harmful results of racism. All these were good answers. In Zen, we like to say, the question is more important than the answer. Why? Because questions often come up at uncomfortable moments questions arise when we're faced with circumstances in which our coping mechanisms aren't working anymore.

[31:57]

At such moments, transformational change is possible when we stay open to all answers, especially unexpected ones. The system of white supremacy centers whiteness, fragmenting us all. into the delusion of separateness. Aware of this dynamic and its harm to people of color, I have to be careful not to simply search outside of myself for answers. Like many Asian Americans and other people of color, at some point I have to learn to value myself, reclaiming the validity of my own experience in any moment and in any condition. Buddhist practice over many years has supported me to return to knowing and trusting my wholeness. No hatred completely. That moment with Roshi stopped my mind from its habitual looping to try to understand racism.

[33:08]

All my intellectual theories and years of anti-racist work didn't address my suffering in a useful way at this crucial point of my life. That moment stopped my frantic search to find some reason why hatred kept following me. We already know, right? Systems of oppression set it up. I already knew that from all my race theory and studies. What I needed was to attend to the hurt and harm from being the target of racism. In Buddhism, we practice to be able to find subtleness and clarity that's not dependent on the conditions of the world. To find such subtleness and clarity, we have to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind. The koan of racism It's not just something I wanted to understand.

[34:12]

What I really want, even now, is to heal from the hurt and pain I carry. So the reason that I really developed the Engage Formula Truth, In Zen, we don't talk about the Four Noble Treats. I know the purpose is implicit in all Buddhist teaching, but we don't specifically talk about it. And technically, the Eightfold Path is considered a Theravani teaching on how to be a Narabhata, right? A person who is enlightened develops that Eightfold Path. In Zen, we focus much more on the Six Farmitas as the behavior of a Bodhisattva. And so that's partly why we don't hear the specificity of sound. However, to me, the Eightfold Path, just the fourth of the Four No-Truth, by the way, the engaged water of truth is hurt and harm has happened.

[35:21]

Understanding, the second is, how do we fully understand the causes and conditions for the arising of harm and harming, hurt and honor? And it's so similar to the classic However, we focus much more on the systemic. We're still doing personal work to overcome racialization, but we focus on how it's not like a self thing only. It's not only for me to overcome what are the impacts of racism or other oppressions that have been on me. It's to understand that whole systems are responsible for how I condition. And therefore, systems need to shift so that the healing is not just an individual healing, but a societal healing. And those are important. And then the third is, I like to say, the good news of prism. Is that there's agency.

[36:23]

Where's the possibility to know that we have agency in the midst of hurting our hearts? Possibly, of course, is the alleviation or the end of suffering. And then the last is the Eightfold Path. Now, knowing those shifts, I think, the really, I think, elegantness of the Eightfold Path is that it really lays out for us what it is that we can work on And so, as I said, I've laid it out as acknowledging what is, which is to, as the book is laid out in these three ways, the first part is seeing the world as it is. So how do we have a view of the world? And then also, how concentration, the practice, the meditative practice of concentration really helps us to settle.

[37:26]

The Eightfold Path, well, there are eight of them are broken into three sections. One is called the wisdom section, which is skillful view, which is to understand the four numbers, which is the karma. Recently I was thinking karma... Karma, of course, broadly, is cause and effect, and it's very complicated all in all. But one way to think about karma is that it's habitual tendency, or habitual motivation, or unconscious energy, the way in which things are... we are conditioned, and we act in certain ways, and we behave in certain ways, and we speak in certain ways. We are conditioned. And non-conditioning is bad, by the way. So much of the form in the zendo, you think it's just like bowing to the seat, and then we all turn right. We're being conditioned, but it's in a way to help us all move together as one body.

[38:32]

You know, then you don't bump into somebody, and then you have to say, oh, sorry, sorry, and then you break the silence of the Zendo, right? And so you break everyone else's concentration. So just because things are conditioned and we're taught forms doesn't make it bad. The idea is, are we conscious of how we're conditioned, and are they useful now? They might not have been used for them. In fact, in racism, so many of our parents taught us ways of dealing with the impact of racism. You've heard about how, in particular, black children, black male children, really are set down by their parents to talk about how they have to be very careful, how they hold themselves, how they talk to certain people, especially cops. in certain areas, very specifically, of course, the white people. You know, when I was in Vietnam, my mother would teach me how to move out of the way when a GI was coming our way, right?

[39:40]

So we're taught these things, and the idea is that it's for our safety. Our parents often taught us things for our safety. And of course, that can go the other way around, you know, if you're taught that certain people are of color unsafe, and so you shouldn't interact with them. And so the issue is how do we examine how we've been conditioned and are they useful for us anymore? Is there safety issues in the moment that we have to be attended to? At times it certainly is true. And for some of us, you know, more than others. So it's not in itself a bad thing. But the key is, is it useful now? Is it true in this moment, in each moment that you are at? So we want to work on that. And then the second is, when we shift to learning what shifts are needed, we want to go to what the world needs now, or to this book.

[40:48]

Skillful motivation, which is actually thinking. So-called thinking. And in Buddhism, thinking is not passive. This is why the more popular translation of Sankapa these days is intention you've heard of probably. I like motivation. And motivation, because to me, motivation does give you the sense that you think it, and then you're motivated to move, to do, to speak. And so it goes actually into the second third, which is what's usually called the ethical conduct section. I like to call the compassionate conduct section, which is skillful speech, skillful action, and skillful livelihood. This is the interactive part, right? How we speak. Skillful action is essentially the five precepts. And then skillful life. How do we use the energy of our life? Not just for work, but it is about work and the teachings. What kind of jobs are, you know,

[41:49]

more wholesome than others. In the book, we bring in the meditative factors of skillful effort and skillful mindfulness into that. And then realizing the wholeness of the world. This is where we get to learning how to put these shifts into practice, which is really part two and part three. So we want to realize the wholeness of the world by living by the precepts. Skillful action, which I I've reframed as skillful enactment. Because to me, enactment gives us the sense that it's not just the precepts I have to memorize and decide whether I'm doing it right or wrong, good or bad, or other people. But it really is, to me, echelous a sense of vow. I'm vowing to enact what I hold true. The values that I hold. The precepts. How do I bring those into my life?

[42:51]

How do I act on those? Recently, I just finished a whole series of the precept studies for eight months. And someone I talked to in the practice discussion said to me, we just finished. And so they get to write their own at the end version. So that's in their own words. By the way, I got that from Vicky Austin, my teacher. So I passed it on to my students. And then I do a little sample here when I was working it out. I print it out for them, or I lay it out, and then I send it to them these days, of course. And so I say, other people put them up. So you can look at the precepts all the time. And so this person said they were so bad about something. So, so bad. And then they looked at their precept, and their wording was, I'm paraphrasing, like, I vow that when I'm angry to really examine my anger and find where is their compassion.

[43:58]

And so when they looked at that, they just thought, oh, okay, where can I have compassion here for myself and for the person I'm at? And they said that made everything. They gave him a moment. It's kind of like stopping the mind. It's another version of stopping the mind from this habitual loop of Whose fault is it? Why am I like anyone I need? Whatever your thing is that makes you angry. It stops you and then it says, oh, re-centers. This is my value here. This is where my enactment is. I'm going to enact this by pausing, thinking it through, and recalibrating how I want to be in the world and with another. And they said, wow. That was amazing, and I didn't think that it would be such a thing, right? Here we go. And permanent strikes again.

[44:59]

So, I'm a little frustrated here, but that's okay. All right. So, and then skillful living. What is the end stuff, so I'm just going to end it. Here we go. I'm going to end, actually, with a chapter with Dr. Roshi there, and then we'll take some questions. The day after the mind-stopping meeting in Japan, Sekigarada Roshi offered me another chance for a dokusan. I rang the bell, did my bows, and went into the practice discussion, ready to share my insights about how this answer had affected me.

[46:06]

Before I could open my mouth, Roshi launched into a lengthy story of Shakyamuni Buddha's life. and enlightenment, along with the histories of other early Buddhist ancestors. Thirty minutes. Then, once again, he'd write me out of the room. We never spoke about my question again. This event impacted me deeply, and I continued to turn it over for many years afterward. When I remember my Doka songs with Sakehara Roshi, This last part has always puzzled me. I often wondered, what was his point about it all? In writing this now, I have an understanding of what he was teaching me. The Buddha and ancestors were searching for the same things as you and me.

[47:07]

The end to suffering. I think Roshi was saying that there can't be spiritual bypass. He realized, and after that initial exchange, I too realized, that I was looking for a way to explain away the hurt and pain by wanting to discuss it. Discussion isn't wrong. Theory isn't wrong. Activism isn't wrong. But we can't use these things for spiritual bypass We can't use Buddhist practice or any methods, such as race theory or activism for javan, as a way to skip over the human condition inherent in the First Noble Truth, experiencing the hurts and pains of our lives. Trying to get away from them via any method

[48:11]

to try and skip over or bypass fully experiencing our life as it is. Our practice is to get closer and closer to know it completely. Because in doing so, we can actually then have more clarity on how we can heal. In Pali, the first recorded language of Buddhism, the term, yamiso wana sakkara, is usually translated as wise attention. It can also be translated as attention that takes the whole into account. This is what Sekei Harada Roshi was pointing toward. The practice of investigating dukkha, which sees it in context, in totality, in the whole net, right now, just the jewels. and not just the hurt and pain of the moment. Then, the rest of the Engaged Four Noble Truths offers us descriptions and practices for how to connect or reconnect to the wholeness of life, that our existence is seen, relevant, healable, and valued.

[49:31]

When we remember and access the context to validate us and support us to thrive, not just survive, but to thrive. Additionally, we need to remember that all beings want the same thing, to be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. This is what connects us all. Denying that systems of oppression exist is to deny reality as it is. Learning to negotiate these systems with self and collective determined agency is the practice of engaged liberation. In practicing collective liberation, this is what I wish for us. That we may come home to a sense of wholeness, grounded in what is safe and of value to all. May we then aspire to spread that out, to work together to strengthen safety and care for each other.

[50:36]

This is the work and the liberation of understanding, practicing and developing the engaged minorities. Thank you for your attention. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Center. Our Dharma talks are offered at no cost and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[51:16]

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