Good morning everyone and welcome to Beginner's Mind Temple. Today we're celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. His actual birthday is tomorrow. And you may have noticed earlier that Christina was scheduled to talk today, but Martin Luther King Jr. was an American hero. And she began to feel as she prepared very strongly that an American who understood the significance of his life and teaching and leadership should today and not someone from another country who didn't actually live through the time that this amazingly gifted young man was leading a civil rights struggle in this country.

[01:16]

Now the struggle for civil rights has been going on a long time. I remember my sister who taught women's studies at You see Santa Cruz saying that every class thought that their generation had invented the women's movement, but it's been going on for generations. My aunt was a suffragist, and I'm sure there were movements for women to try to change the oppression of women in a patriarchal society long before her. And so while Martin Luther King was a phenomenal leader of this movement at a very critical time in its history, this has been going on since Columbus came.

[02:23]

and differences between people in power and people out of power were struggled with. But this movement became very intense, particularly after the Second World War, when many people who had been sharecroppers and farms all over the South were recruited to come here to San Francisco, for example, and build ships for the war effort, were recruited to go to Detroit, were recruited to go everywhere where manufacturing for the war effort was happening. And so the things were ripe and ready for change, for significant change at that time in our history.

[03:35]

But, you know, I was born and raised in the Briar Patch. I was born in Birmingham, Alabama and spent most of my summers in Montgomery, the cradle of the Confederacy. I went to school in segregated schools. I rode on buses that were segregated. I drank from segregated drinking fountains and on and on and on. And already in my youth, there was a lot of ferment. Before the war, there was a lot going on. At this time, sort of the times and the leadership came together to really make a remarkable change. Now, it may not seem to you, those of you who are young, and you can still see racism and oppression and inequality going on around you.

[04:53]

Still, the change was dramatic. The Voting Rights Act went to Congress immediately after the march for voting rights in Alabama was broken up in a violent encounter in Selma, Alabama. And it passed. In 19... So it passed, and that was probably about 1950. No. Yeah. Anyhow, 1938, my father met with Franklin Roosevelt to try to convince him to end the poll tax. There was a tax on people to be able to vote. And in Alabama, it was a progressive tax.

[05:59]

You had to pay a tax for every, whatever age you tried to register to vote, you had to pay the tax from the time you were 21. Well, you know, poor people don't have cash money. Sharecroppers don't have cash money. So that effectively denied the possibility to vote, not just... to African-Americans but to all poor people throughout the South where these poll taxes were happening. But this movement which was really vitalized by Martin Luther King's leadership finally got a Voting Rights Act passed for one thing. Finally got segregation of buses ended. Segregation of most public accommodations throughout the South were segregated.

[07:09]

In 1938 there was a conference organized in Birmingham called the Southern Conference for Human Rights, the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and it was scheduled to meet in the Birmingham Civic Auditorium. And the organizers were not planning to segregate it. And there came an order from the police department that it must be segregated or they would arrest everybody there. So it was segregated, white on one side, colored pokes off the other side. And then, right at the end, in walked Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod Bethune, a leading African-American woman.

[08:14]

Arm in arm, they walked down and they sat on the colored side. And the police didn't know what to do. Were they going to arrest the First Lady of the United States? They did not. Eleanor Roosevelt and Mary McLeod and them sat together, and that was quite a milestone in Birmingham, Alabama. But still, all public facilities remained segregated until Rosa Parks decided she was not going to get up and give her seat to a white person. And the Montgomery bus boycott led and inspired by Martin Luther King. So to begin his career of really inspiring a whole movement

[09:22]

He was a preacher. He was a Baptist preacher. The son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of Baptist preachers. And he really knew how to preach. I wish I could teach the way a really good preacher preaches, you know, because it's rousing. It's personal. It's passionate and it inspires and gets to the heart of the whole congregation and brings people along in a very dramatic way, a really good preacher. And there's some of Martin Luther King's talks in this collection which Alan Sunaki put together, from the Buddhist Peace Fellowship.

[10:26]

But you can find on the internet, if you want to, some of the talks of Martin Luther King, Jr. And his biography is in here, and this will be for a while on the reference shelf in the reading room downstairs if you want to read some of these talks, because they're really inspiring talks. Martin Luther King, in spite of the fact that it was ripe and ready, he himself was a remarkable young man. He graduated from high school at 15 and graduated from college at 19 and was ordained a Baptist minister. Then he went on to Boston, well then he went on to theological school, He got his bachelor's in divinity at 20, and then he went to Boston University and got a PhD at 24.

[11:32]

And then he accepted the pastorship of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. And from that pulpit, he gave a talk, which, as he says, It is a teaching he often taught about, and the subject is love your enemies. She says, so I want to turn your attention to this subject, loving your enemies. It's so basic to me because it is part of my basic philosophical and theological orientation. The whole idea of love, the whole philosophy of love, In the fifth chapter of the gospel as recorded by St. Matthew, we read these very arresting words flowing from the lips of our Lord and Master. Ye have heard that it has been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy.

[12:38]

But I say unto you, love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you. that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven. Certainly these are great words, words lifted to cosmic proportions, and over the centuries many persons have argued that this is an extremely difficult command. Many would go so far as to say that it just isn't possible to move out into the actual practice of this glorious command. They would go on to say that this is just additional proof that Jesus was an impractical idealist who never quite came down to earth. So the arguments abound, but far from being an impractical idealist, Jesus has become the practical realist. The words of this text glitter in our eyes with a new urgency. Far from being the pious injunction of a utopian dreamer, this command is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization.

[13:47]

Yes, it is love that will save our world and our civilization, love even for enemies. And he goes on to develop this theme in some detail and quite beautifully. And he began the introduction of nonviolent civil disobedience in this country learning from the teaching of Gandhi and from the study of the Gospels. And he established a very clear teaching about non-violence, about non-violent resistance to oppression. And there are some yellow flyers out there that have sort of the details of of how he presented his case. But that teaching became the basis not just of the civil rights movement but also of the anti-war movement during the war in Vietnam.

[14:57]

People who were doing anti-war demonstrations would meet and people doing demonstrations in the civil rights movement would meet and prepare themselves to not respond violently to the kinds of things that we normally respond to violently. Insults, actual physical attacks, which happened again and again. The people who were demonstrating in these non-violent demonstrations were set upon by police with billy clubs, by dogs, by fire hoses, and their pledge and their effort and their training was to respond without violence. And this was a new thing in this country.

[15:59]

And it affects political movements and movements opposing oppression to this day in this country. So that, for example, when there's a peace demonstration, those of us who participate in the demonstration from the Buddhist community normally take our signs and we sit sazen. But in 1968, I had a personal epiphany around this when I realized that I was fighting for peace. And that was exactly not peace.

[17:02]

That fighting for peace meant another war. And this is exactly what he's teaching. in this sermon. That actually is what led me to practice. That discovery that all I had been doing in all of my political activism was counterproductive, was making enemies, was not making friends. It's very hard for someone to hear what you're saying if you're calling him obscene names, as happens often if you listen to some of the talks at some of the demonstrations one might go to. Pretty hard to change anybody's mind if you're reviling them.

[18:09]

Hate just makes hate. And guess what? You know, the Buddha said that too. And the Dhammapada. There is the teaching that hate is not overcome by hate. Only by love is hate overcome. This is the law eternal. So this teaching is not new to Christianity, but it... is very deeply embedded in Christianity. One of the reasons that Martin Luther King was so effective was because he was a preacher, because the heart and soul of the African-American community, everywhere but particularly in the South, is the church. So when he organized the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of many, many African-American ministers throughout the South, he was really energizing the heart and soul of the community.

[19:38]

want to read a little bit of what he has to say here. Because he's talking about how hard it is to follow this commandment. Then he goes on to say that Now, let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command. He wasn't playing. He realized that it's hard to love your enemies. He realized that it's difficult to love those people who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard, but he wasn't playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of hyperbole, yet just sort of an exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our master.

[20:46]

Because Jesus wasn't playing, because he was serious, we have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words and to discover how we can live out this command and why we should live by this command. So then he goes on to elaborate throughout this talk, which I recommend to you to read the whole thing. about why and how. And I'm reminded that of a passage that I read in Shantadeva's teaching, Guide to the Bodhisattva's Way of Life, in the practice on patience, I think it's chapter nine, where he said, we should be very grateful for our enemies. How can we possibly cultivate the practice of patience? perfect the practice of patience without a good enemy. A good enemy is hard to find. And I remember when I read this, he's got to be king.

[21:50]

He can't be serious. But here we have Martin Luther King being entirely serious and basing the whole movement of nonviolent response to aggression on this loving your enemies. And this is the whole teaching of the Buddha on metta, on loving kindness. During the memorial service, during the service this morning, poor Martin Luther King, we chanted the Buddha's teaching on loving kindness. It says, let one do nothing that is mean or that the wise would approve. Let one not despise any being in any state. Let one not by hatred wish harm to another. Let no one by hatred wish harm to another.

[22:53]

So this is the teaching of the Buddha on loving-kindness. But further than that, in the actual meditation, when you're doing metta meditation, meditation on loving-kindness, You begin here with yourself. Following your breath carefully, looking inward and wishing to yourself, may I be happy. May I be at peace. May I be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May I have ease of well-being. In other words, you wish yourself well. You wish yourself to be happy. But then the next step is to move out to those near and dear to you and wish for their happiness and meditate on their happiness. Then you move out further in a concentric circle to those that you don't know so well, you're so indifferent about, and you wish for their happiness and you meditate on their happiness.

[24:03]

And then you move out to those for whom it's very difficult for you to wish happiness, ease, peace, freedom from suffering. Those people that you really have a hard time wanting to wish well. And you practice loving kindness for them as well. Until you get to this teaching in in the Metta Sutta of all living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, near or far, born or to be born, all beings, including your enemies. So this is also the Buddha's teaching. This is the teaching of any religion that truly looks into the human heart and human life and tries to figure out how we should live in the world.

[25:14]

How do we really want to live in the world? We want to live in a world where everyone is included, where we feel and realize and express our connection with everyone. No one is left out of that. And until we actually can include everyone, we are still in the realm of suffering. When we can include all being, this is the Bodhisattva vow, the free all being. This is what we aspire to. But we're human. It's difficult. It's very difficult. And yet it's the only way to go. We just face in that direction of loving everyone and keep walking step by step.

[26:23]

And this is what, this was the message that Martin Luther King had for all of us. For all of us. the day before he was assassinated. Do you know that he was 39 years old when he died? He had led a successful movement that made a huge change in the actual way people lived together in the South. He had received the Nobel Prize He had received 20 or more honorary doctorates from universities all over the world. He had, by the way, also nominated the Vietnamese Mon Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Prize, the Peace Prize.

[27:30]

He had been I think he was maybe 33 or something when he was Time Magazine's Man of the Year. Again, I think you want to look at his biographical information, which is out there and also in the back of this book, to see what a remarkable accomplishment for someone. I have grandchildren almost as old as he was when he was too long. remarkable accomplishments for anyone at any age. We are extremely lucky in this country to have had a leader of his stature to embrace the teaching of non-violent resistance to oppression. And we still have much to do in the realm of oppression, both racial oppression and economic oppression.

[28:46]

And if we can't do it non-violently, there will be untold suffering. We can't actually end hate with hate. Not possible. Hate just makes more hate. he says here. Oh shoot, I can't find a specific Okay. He talks about driving on the highway with his brother and nobody listened to him in their lights and his brother got annoyed and said, damn it, I'm going to do the same thing every time a car comes along here.

[30:06]

I'm just going to put him up on bright. And Martin Luther King said to him, don't do that. It's just on me. And he says, somebody must have sense enough to dim the lights. And that's the trouble, isn't it? And as all of the civilizations of the world move up the highway of history, So many civilizations having looked at other civilizations that refused to dim the lights, and they decided to refuse to dim the lights. And Toynbee tells us that out of the 22 civilizations that have risen up, all but about seven have found themselves in the junk heap of destruction. It is because civilizations fail to have sense enough to dim the lights. And if somebody doesn't have sense enough to turn on the dim and beautiful and power lights, powerful lights of love in this world, the whole of our civilization will be plunged into the abyss of destruction, and we will all end up destroyed because nobody had any sense on the highway of history.

[31:12]

Somewhere, somebody must have some sense. People must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness, and it's all a descending spiral ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love. So he's talking about there's a power and love that our world has not discovered yet. Jesus discovered it centuries ago. Mahatma Gandhi of India discovered it a few years ago.

[32:14]

But most men and most women never discover it. For they believe in hitting for hitting. They believe in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. They believe in hating for hating. But Jesus comes to us and says, this isn't the way. And on this morning, as I think of the fact that our world is in transition now, our whole world is facing a revolution. Actually, this was after the war and all of the former colonial countries were kicking out the colonial powers and all over Asia, all over Africa. not just India. There was huge change happening. Our nation is facing a revolution. Our nation. One of the things that concerns me most is that in the midst of the revolution of the world, in the midst of the revolution of this nation, that we discover the meaning of Jesus' words.

[33:23]

History unfortunately leaves some people oppressed and some people oppressors. And there are three ways that individuals who are oppressed can deal with their oppression. One of them is to rise up against their oppressors with physical violence and corroding hatred. But oh, this isn't the way. For the danger and the weakness of this method is its futility. Violence creates many more social problems than it solves. And I've said in so many instances, That as the Negro in particular and colored peoples all over the world struggle for freedom, if they succumb to the temptation of using violence in their struggle, unborn generations will be the recipients of a long and desolate night of bitterness. And our chief legacy to the future will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence isn't the way. Another way is to acquiesce and give in, to resign yourself to the oppression.

[34:24]

Some people do that. They discover the difficulties of the wilderness moving into the promised land. And they would rather go back to the despots of Egypt because it's difficult to get into the promised land. And so they resign themselves to the fate of oppression. They somehow acquiesce to this thing. But that too isn't the way because non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good. But there is another way, and that is to organize mass nonviolent resistance based on the principles of love. It seems to me that this is the only way. As our eyes look to the future, as we look out across the years and across the generations, let us develop and move right here. We must discover the power of love, the power, the redemptive power of love. And when we discover that, we will be able to make of this old world a new world.

[35:29]

We will be able to make people better. Love is the only way. Jesus discovered that. You see what I mean about his power of words? So he spoke and he taught that way up and down the South and throughout the country. The March to Washington, 200,000 people went on that March to Washington when he gave the I Have a Dream speech. 200,000 people there. But there's something I want to share with you in the foreword to a book of his.

[36:33]

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4th, 1968. Ten days earlier, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel... author of the classic study, The Prophets, introduced him to an assembly of rabbis. Where in America today do we hear a voice like the voice of the prophets of Israel? Martin Luther King is a sign that God has not forsaken the United States of America. God has sent him to us. His presence is the hope of America. His mission is sacred. His leadership of supreme importance to every one of us. Martin Luther King Jr. is a voice, a vision, and a way. I call upon every Jew to hearken to his voice, to share his vision, to follow in his way. The whole future of America will depend on the impact and influence of Dr. King. And then scholar activist Vincent Harding writes, if there's even a chance that Rabbi Heschel was correct,

[37:44]

that the untranquil king and his peace-disturbing vision, words, and deeds hold the key to the future of America. For scholars, citizens, or celebrants, to forget the real man and his deepest implications would not be only faithless, but also suicidal. As we ask God's blessing on this nation, we should consider whether Dr. King was a prophet. In doing so, we might ponder some of the details of his life. He had a short ministry. He met with a violent death. He died for the sake of humanity and the struggle against the evils of racism, poverty, war, and materialism. If King was a prophet, we should then ask, what was God trying to tell us? King's message was, in short, to redeem the soul of America. This was the mission of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. and enjoy the beloved community as God intended.

[38:47]

So to redeem the soul of America and enjoy the beloved community as God intended, we must transcend tribe, race, class, and nation, and embrace the vision of a world house. Second, we must eradicate globally the triple evils of war, poverty, and racism. And third, we must curb excessive materialism, moving from a thing-oriented society to a people-oriented society, thereby restoring community. And four, resist injustice, seek change, and resolve conflicts in the spirit of love embodied in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence. Our very existence is at stake. Those words are to me as real and prophetic as they were when they were written.

[39:50]

We still have a lot to do, but we have to do it with love and without meeting violence with violence. And this is the legacy that Martin Luther King has given us and for which I am deeply grateful. And if you haven't, you know, for those of you who were young and were not here in those days and you don't know much about it, I really recommend that you read some of his writing. There are some handouts out here, but it's liberally available on the Internet. Most of you probably know how to use the Internet better than I do. And, you know, he wrote many books. And he was a great, great teacher for all of us, not just for the African American.

[40:59]

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