This podcast is offered by San Francisco Zen Center on the web at sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good day, dear ones. Larry Ward here. I am pronouns he, him, and his. I'm speaking to you today from the land of the Kumeyaay people. most recently known as San Diego. Celebrating Martin Luther King's birthday, I wrote a short paper based on some comments about him by Thich Nhat Hanh, and I want to begin by reading those.

[01:00]

to you, the title of the article in which this appeared in the mindfulness bell of Plum Village is They Call You a Bodhisattva. And Thich Nhat Hanh was so happy to be able and grateful to be able to say this to Martin before he was assassinated face to face in New York. In Thich Nhat Hanh's words, From the first moment, I knew I was in the presence of a holy person. Not just his good work, but his very being was a source of inspiration for me. When those who embody the essence of their tradition, just the way they walk, sit and speak and smile, speaks volumes. How you and I presence ourselves in the world really matters.

[02:07]

In Martin's words, an individual has not started living until they can rise above the narrow confines of individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. I received a gift. four or five years ago from some friends and students. It is three volumes of Martin Luther King's papers from 1929 to 1956. I have the honor of having those here in my library, which I continue to look at and study. And some of them are papers from his academic and study and religious studies. He has a beautiful little summary of Mahayana Buddhism. which he was very affirmative of and appreciate and understood probably more than some of us may know.

[03:10]

When asked in the late 60s about Buddhism, Thich Nhat Hanh's response was, well, it deals with suffering, doesn't it? And so any spiritual tradition that deals with suffering has authenticity. One of the verses in the third volume, the third volume as a whole is called The Birth of a New Age. And this is just a sentence in it written in 1956. Preparing for challenges and responsibilities. of a new world order that is replacing the old world order of colonialism and segregation and racism is at hand. We have to rise up in protests, in prayer, so that we can be healed and transformed.

[04:20]

when i think of a bodhisattva i've heard some great descriptions of bodhisattvas from many teachers the the one i appreciate the most a bodhisattva is an ordinary person who has grown up inside a true adult capable of being mindful of their own bodies and minds, capable of nurturing the mind of love and embodying the mind of love in ways that spills out into history. I wrote, the practice of equanimity is extremely important right now. as one of the Brahma Veras, the practice of love. But the practice of love includes equanimity, this quality of evenness of mind.

[05:33]

Another description of equanimity is letting go. Another description of equanimity, which I'm sure you're familiar, is to look over. And looking over where we are now, and by we, I mean in the USA, which I know is a small part of the world. But where we are now in the USA, we are once again challenged, our souls challenged by the slivering snake of white supremacy. Do not be confused. What happened last week was not about people who didn't make enough money to live. It was about power, raw, primitive power.

[06:39]

And that tendency, as we know as practitioners, that seed, that craving, That clinging, that grasping, and that attachment lives in all of us as seeds and impressions. So it's not like I'm trying to describe someone who has a problem that I don't have. But as practitioners, we have a great opportunity to learn how to recognize our seeds of unwholesomeness, care for our seeds of unwholesomeness, heal and transform our seeds of unwholesomeness. And for me, nothing is more important than that right now. The story of America is collapsing. I'm talking about the underground story as well as the upper ground story. Upper ground, the shining city on the hill,

[07:41]

Below the ground, a history of suffering and pain and privilege and advantage. And genocide and enslavement and incarceration. And then transporting that around the world to our own advantage as a nation, often disregarding completely the lives of others. So as I've been meditating on this, I've found the teachings in Yen Buddhism to be help me understand, help me see, help me practice in the Flower Garden Sutra, which you may be familiar also, but that the nature of reality is as interpenetrating, all-encompassing, inescapable. And we are now witnessing what happens in a society that has built itself on manas, on conceit, on the three poisons of greed, hatred, and ignorance.

[09:00]

This can never stand for long, wherever it occurs, because it is not the true nature of reality. I know all Buddhist groups around the world, especially in the West, in Europe and in the US and Canada, have been dealing with issues of inclusivity, quote unquote, which is extremely important. It's important also as we, I'll come back to this at the end, what the issues are we have to contend with here, but Please understand that the issues you're dealing with in your sangha, however small, from the YN perspective, in the small is the very large. That's the first part. In the issues in our sanghas of culture and inclusivity and diversity, writ large is the colonial mind.

[10:08]

embodied and embedded and that has conditioned our nervous systems, has created our language. It's like a window, a box has been created the last 500 years. And whatever we see and whatever we think and whatever we feel is mediated through that lens, mediated through the walls of that box. The power of our practice is we can recognize boxes. We can recognize frameworks. and make conscious choices as to where to stand in terms of right view and the whole path so that we are not caught in our conditioning, in our perceptions of one another, in the structural design for us not to be together, which played itself out again last week. What we're doing in sanghas is instrumental in terms of learning how we can be together as people who are unique, which is absolutely wonderful.

[11:24]

One of my professors, when I was finishing my doctorate work, opened a class by asking each student to respond to, how many different types of Buddhism are there? And he said, well, just so you know, he was responsible for digitizing the entire Korean canon of Buddhism in Korea. So Dr. Lancaster is no lightweight. He says, well, you know, I've been to New York, and the Buddhism in Brooklyn is not quite the same as the Buddhism in L.A. And then Korea is not quite the same as Japan. Japan is now, if you understand, not quite the same as the Buddhism in Kenya, which you should know, is there. Or in Botswana, which you should know, the practice is there. And each one of us is our own Buddhism.

[12:29]

What I mean is, each one of us has the opportunity and the charge to practice our own awakening. But that awakening is not for our own comfort. That awakening is so we can love ourselves and extend that love to everyone, to all beings. And that love includes witnessing to the truth. That love includes ensuring that justice is a part of that truth. That love includes watering and creating and planting seeds of harmony and connection without emotional bypass, meaning pretending something didn't happen. Last week, the insurrection, I found myself re-traumatized, triggered, activated.

[13:34]

So pay attention to what happened in your body when this happened. So in a part of my book, I mentioned a story of being shot at by the police when I was quite young, along with some other young people. And yes, I was shot at. That's one level. The next level of practice is what happened to me because that happened to me? What happened to you because of what happened last Thursday? What happened to your nervous system? What happened to your mental formations? What happened to your feelings, your body, your perceptions? your consciousness. Understand the five skandhas are living realities that interact and are interpenetrating constantly with the whole world, with the whole planet. The good news in this is also because the very large is in the very small, anything we do, if it's done with mindful,

[14:40]

Compassionate, wise attention can impact the very large. I had a moment on Thursday last week when I felt the energy of powerlessness come over in my body. I could feel myself go limp. I could feel my turtle ancestors calling me back into the shell for my high hyperactivation. my constant scanning where I live and where I walk and where I drive, which I've been doing my whole life, consciously. So part of the issue in healing our sanghas, for me, is understanding that America is in a crisis of meaning. And there's a beautiful TED talk by a young woman who's a PhD also that grew up in the Sufi tradition.

[15:51]

But anyway, her talk is just beautiful and it's on. What she discovered was that being happy wasn't enough. She did everything she could in her life professionally and personally to be happy and discovered it wasn't sustaining enough. And that led her into going to deeper practice and study, et cetera. And her outline of meaning includes four things. And each one of these areas, I think, is a key point of practice for each of us individually and collectively. The first criteria, the first human experience of having meaning is belonging. And boy, do we have a... crisis in belonging in this country, and we always have had a crisis of belonging. And I'm talking about everybody except the people who were here for 5,000 and 10,000 years before any of us arrived.

[16:58]

Who do we belong to? Where do we belong to? On the most superficial but still a tragic level. We talk about this as identity politics in a political context, but don't get caught in that box. That's still the colonial box. We are so conditioned to think we know how to think about things. And the very way we have been trained to think about things is how we got this mess. Okay. Some people have said that you can't dismantle the master's house with the master's tools. I don't think that's quite correct. I think you can't dismantle the master's house at the same level of consciousness as the master. A quote attributed to Einstein in this way, you can't solve a problem at the same level of energy that created it. And this is why hate cannot conquer hate.

[18:06]

Only love can. You know this somewhere. All of us know this in our bones. From the tears and pains and joys and teachings of our ancestors. Belonging. So we are in a spiritual crisis in this country of. Who is we? Read the concept. Who is my grandmother used to tell me that we are not included in that way. And we are still dealing with that now. Do not be confused about what's going on here. The election that just happened was not about COVID. Even though it should have been. It was about race. The second crisis in our meaning right now. Is purpose. Individually and collectively. And as different groups, what is our purpose?

[19:10]

And for many caught in the paradigm and poisons of white supremacy, their purpose is to not to be replaced by non-white people. And it's called the replication theory. So I researched just about everything. And when I read it, I started chuckling. And my chuckle was... We are born to be replaced. We're going to all get replaced. It's like, get over yourself. What makes you think you're not supposed to die? Pass away. Vanish. Into no coming and no going. What arrogance is that? What conceit is that? And now when you recognize that level of conceit, you can see how people are totally confused about what is real and what is true, but also confused about what is beautiful and wholesome.

[20:24]

The third area is storytelling of meaning. Our stories create meaning for us. the images and the sounds. And so as practitioners, we must start telling our stories with the eyes and heart of a bodhisattva. Instead of getting the mind of colonial conditioning constantly broadcast to us, we need to do some of our own broadcasting. I think what you're doing now and my previous opportunities to be with Zen Center practitioners has been really healing and nourishing and encouraging for me. But I've been saying for people, the story of Buddhism also has to change. As it has for centuries over and over again.

[21:24]

There are so many kinds of Buddhism. Uh... And I spent time practicing in Japan and teaching in Japan and Korea and India and Botswana and France and all over the U.S. and in Mexico, et cetera. And what is so amazing about the tradition is it holds together at the bottom of this understanding of practice. And then there's many ways of practice. But as one of my other professors said, The question is, does it have the taste of freedom? Does it have the taste of liberation? I would say, does it have the fragrance of healing and the energy of transformation? This is how I know. Anywhere in the world I go that I've touched into the Dharma, the Buddha Dharma in practice.

[22:28]

Actually, I had an experience last two days ago with one of your Zen centers. Then one of the people on the board is a Baptist minister. And he started in his questions by saying he didn't think he was very Buddhist. After he's finished talking, I was like, Reverend, you're plenty Buddhist. You just haven't known it. So we have to somehow communicate what we mean. And this is to me under the ground of inclusivity is teaching ourselves to understand what Buddha nature really means. And then we begin to understand equality. At a real, real deep level. Because we begin to understand, embody our contemplative life every day. In every condition. So I've been practicing what the old teachers used to call the causal ground practice.

[23:37]

Every condition is an opportunity for practice. Whether I'm up, whether I'm down, whether I'm afraid, whether I'm happy, whether I'm disappointed, all are opportunities for practice. But not just that. A hummingbird came in our house this morning. They're surrounding us, and we've been trying to get it back outside. And so also, all beings, every encounter is an opportunity to behold the wonder of life, not just as suffering, but as beauty, as miraculous nature. And the fourth quality of meaning, is transcendence. This is probably the thing I appreciate the most about the Buddhist tradition captured in the Heart Sutra. As I summarize, understanding the difference between the vehicle and the destination.

[24:39]

Understand when you have arrived. Understand clinging to the teachings instead of practicing the teachings. This is the only tradition I know that that understands itself and what it's asking us to do in our bodies and with our minds. This is the great challenge before us, how to transcend our legacy of 500 years. For me, that cannot be transcended unless we view it with the eyes of a bodhisattva with the eyes of wisdom which for me means the eyes of emptiness interdependence and connectedness not just socially but we are we are our nervous systems are connected

[25:46]

And it's not about whether we like each other or not. This is not high school, which I think American society is fundamentally a large version of. But anyway, that's another talk. But we cannot escape each other's energy communications. Our ancestors knew all this. And so one of the issues with the conversations, and I've had many with people who want to start... People of color sanghas or sanghas focused on different groups. My first response is, any vehicle of practicing is wonderful. The more people we can get to practice, the better off we are if the practice goes deep and not superficial and doesn't bypass our emotional life, doesn't bypass the spiritual reality of the teachings itself. I think the last thing I want to mention is the work I'm doing now, the study and practice I'm doing now, besides what I'm always doing, is I've been focusing on, since my doctoral work was on neuroplasticity and meditation, how meditation changes the structure and functionality of our brains.

[27:13]

Since then, I've been focusing in on, at a deeper level, how our nervous systems respond to the practice and to society. So what I've been learning recently is that to understand mindfulness of the body, and you know, we have a tradition in Buddhism, mindfulness of the body. We have many practices in sutras from the breath, the core foundational practice, Mindfulness of breathing, but then there's mindfulness of walking and sitting and lying down. There's mindfulness of our organs, our whole body. There's mindfulness of our skeletons. There's some great meditations on your bones. The eternal ground meditations on death. I think it's very important that we go deeper in terms of our nervous system and learn to meditate. on our autonomic nervous system, which is where our reactivity lies.

[28:19]

This system is before the brain gets involved. This is the system of reactivity that kills and harms without even knowing that's what it's doing because this nervous system has been conditioned to behave that way. And in this land, we live in fear. No question about it. And so when non-white people, for example, or white people come to the door, because I've lived around the world and worked with many cultures and places, when somebody who is not identified with you comes to your door, the first and lasting issue is cues of welcome. I've had friends, I was trying to think of where in the world I want to tell a story from. I have so many choices.

[29:22]

But one of the things I've learned in working with indigenous people around the world is to be invited and to invite. To get to reach out. And if you're uncomfortable reaching out, make that a part of your consciousness in your reaching out. not in a frivolous way, in a sincere. But we've been conditioned in this society not to even learn each other's cues of welcome, except at work. We all know what to do when we go to our jobs. You know how to say good morning. We know how to be polite. Performance, which is a great thing we can do as people. We can do our jobs. We can create. Performance is wonderful. But performance, Martin Luther King would remind us it's not the same thing as beloved community. Not the same thing as the noble sangha. And I just don't mean a monastic framework for the noble sangha.

[30:29]

I mean the sangha of bodhisattvas. In your presence, around your presence, in this world, most of whom don't know their bodhisattvas. That's okay. They don't have to. They just have to continue to not burn out, not give up. They just have to continue to be nourished and loved. And so our practice with our own nerves, learning how to love your nervous system. Last week, the first thing I thought on Thursday, an immediate list came into my mind of all the other places in the world I could be living right now. And I was like, oh, no. Why didn't I go to Mexico when I thought so? Why did I move to Kyoto when my friends found me a place there? Now I'm here with all these crazy people. And I said that to my wife.

[31:30]

And after I said, I remembered, oh, yeah, you made the commitment to causal ground practice. Whatever the conditions are, they are conditions of practice. My fear is a condition of practice. My discomfort with what's happening right now. The uncertainty that's going on and will be going on and your nervous system is on hypervigilance whether you know it or not. And so learning how to make and create safety inside of ourselves is a practice of skillfulness. Because we cannot create safety for others without creating safety inside of ourselves. It's like what we are told when we get on an airplane. If there's a problem, put your mask on first before you try to help somebody else.

[32:32]

So many of us have feelings of unsafety in ourselves. We don't even know we carry. It's not personal in that sense. And so through our mindfulness practice, we can learn to be skillful to recognize when our nervous systems are triggered. The energy of fight, the energy of running away, or the energy of collapse, becoming immobilized in the face of what's going on in our own lives and in our situation right now. What I've been practicing with is resting and digesting. that part of my nervous system. Spending enough time to take care of myself, to walk outside, to sit with birds, to be in touch with my friends and beloveds, to find joy in the midst of this chaos is how we will be sustained.

[33:42]

And joy, too, you know, is one of the Brahmaveris, along with equanimity, compassion, and loving kindness. There's a quote from Martin Luther King I want to end with. It's simple, kind of. Our life begins to end when we are silent about love. And that means for each of us, we have to decide what matters to us. Bodhisattvas meditate with purpose, practice with purpose, engage with purpose without becoming entangled. And this is why a contemplative life... At the same time, you might be engaged in social and institutional and historic change.

[34:45]

The contemplative practice and ground is fundamental. Otherwise, what I've seen occur around the world is we will end up repeating the colonial pattern predictably. We're on the verge of imagining something that people have been praying for, writing about. for hundreds and thousands of years. But we took a big detour through the colonial enterprise. I heard a quote from a professor recently that said, well, you know, the Enlightenment period of Europe was great, but it only benefited about 3,000 people. And that... That is how we keep repeating unwholesome patterns in society. We don't really have a way to measure how we benefit being together, not just in economics or in politics or in culture, but in well-being, in nourishment, in care, and in love.

[36:03]

What a time to practice. What a time to be alive. I think this is our moment. When I was studying theology, which I did and taught for many years, the founder of my religious community at the time said, you know, think of what's going on now as a wave. And at the... There's the crest of the wave that is rising and the trough of the wave that is going down. I would suggest to you to focus your precious mindfulness energy on the crest. On what is emerging. What is this collapse hiding underneath it that is true and good and beautiful? how communities are learning to care for each other when care is not coming, to hold each other up, to raise each other up in whatever small ways we can.

[37:19]

Maybe when I grew up in Cleveland, smiling wasn't a practice. And the hardest thing for me in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition was learning to smile. Everything else was easy. I've been meditating for 30 years, 40 years before I met him. But this smiling thing is extreme. I was in the bathroom the other day, and I have this picture that I used to do business consulting in. My client took me to an Orlando basketball game with Shaq. And I ended up with this photo of my head somehow in Shaq's body. And my wife kept it. I thought I'd thrown it out. And she put it in our bathroom. And I says, I don't like that picture. Why is it here? And she said, it's one of the few pictures I have of you smiling. And I remember, oh, welcome cues.

[38:24]

Cues of openness, of receptivity. but also boundaries. So we must learn in ourselves and amongst ourselves as a sangha, sit down and talk about your welcoming cues to people who are not familiar. And I know that's already begun. And that's wonderful. And talk about what might be the next step. How do you, and then what might be cues? Cause you know, cues that welcome me may not welcome you. So to really understand what cues of safety we've been conditioned with from our childhood on. And then ask yourself as a Sangha, what are the cues of welcoming and at ease we have in our Sangha? All of our bells, all of our turns, knowing what to do when, our bowing. Those may be wonderful cues, which I like and enjoy.

[39:32]

But are those cues transmissible to generations to come? And the challenge in spiritual and religious life is always how you transmit what is true and beautiful and wholesome and healing and transformational without getting caught in the vehicle of transmission. This is part of what we're dealing with in... Clearly, in Buddhism in the West, we used to call it in academia, it's Buddhism all over the world. It's changing in the sense of how it communicates the transmission of the Buddha Dharma without being confused about the transmission itself. And that's why our practice must continue and go deeper into both our spiritual ancestry in Buddhism, our spiritual teachers of many traditions that we may have our ancestral traditions uh i've been i had the good fortune of learning a lot and continue to learn a lot from people around the world who are gracious enough to teach me and uh

[41:02]

Shamans in Africa. Sweat lodges in North America. Events in the mountains in Mexico. Pujas in India. And all of the last story went. I was working in villages and I lived in India a couple of years working in rural development, village development. And I was at a tiny remote village. And the head of the village, Panjai, the community organizing, invited me to a puja, a worship event in the village. And so we were in this little, little tiny room in this house and chanting and the organs and in the Hindu tradition. And at the end, you know, we all got sweets and which is wonderful. And at the end, he asked me, had you ever had an experience like this? And I said, well, actually, what came up for me was when I grew up, my adoptive grandparents attended a Baptist church in Cleveland, Ohio.

[42:17]

And every Sunday morning, there was four o'clock prayer meeting at four in the morning. And whenever I stayed with my grandparents, I had to go. And that was what that reminded the energy of that, the sounds of Jack. penetrated me beyond language, which is the whole point of Zen. Thank you. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our Dharma Talks are offered free of charge, and this is made possible by the donations we receive. Your financial support helps us to continue to offer the Dharma. For more information, please visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we all fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:15]

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