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. So thank you so much for inviting me. And I want to just take a moment before I start and appreciate all of you for the hard work and the practice that you do here. I've just taught a course in a three-class series at East Bay Meditation Center on Zen for people who might not otherwise show up at a Zen center. And I tried to kind of make it clear that people in Zen centers work very hard, and they don't spend all their time sitting around drinking green tea and looking at sand gardens that have been artistically raked into various patterns.

[01:00]

So when I come here, having lived in Zen temples myself, I know that you're doing the cooking, the cleaning, you're getting up early, you're practicing, and I want you to know that it is seen. and it's very much appreciated. This evening I've been invited to give a talk that contains some parts of, it has the same title, and it has some of the same parts, but also some different parts on the theme of what is the difference, showing up and practicing across lines of difference. And there is an interfaith website now that some of you may have seen called patheos, P-A-T-H-E-O-S dot com. I haven't had time to read extensively on it.

[02:02]

But it seems to be a very good website, and it has a Buddhist portal. what they call the Buddhist portal, which is edited by Gary Gack, whom I think some of you know and who has practiced here. So right now they're running a series of short essays on the rather intimidating topic of the future of Buddhism. And I was asked to submit 750 to 1,000 words on that, and I thought, well, surely you must be joking. But then I realized, well, it was just my opinion, and so I did submit something, which I think speaks to tonight's theme. So I'm going to read a little bit from the brief essay I produced for this Future of Buddhism series of articles on patheos.com. And really, when I sat down and reflected on the work I've been doing at East Bay Meditation Center and elsewhere, which is what we call diversity and inclusion work in the corporate world or out in the business world, I knew that what I wanted to say was that the Buddhism I am seeing that is traveling forth into the 21st century in the communities in which I live and work is really...

[03:25]

results-oriented dharma. That sounds almost comical to me, and yet when I consider the populations with whom I work, which I'll talk a little bit about here, really it makes sense that these are folks who want to see the results of the practice, and really, why not? So I teach Buddhist meditation retreats for people of color, social justice activists, and women in various parts of the United States. And I'm based as a teacher in Oakland, California, which I hope that it being right across the bay, you've all come to see Oakland. Not that you can see all of Oakland, because it's such a diverse city, and it's one of the most diverse cities in the entire nation. I've lived there for 19 years, moved there from Green Galt, and I love Oakland. And I'm part of a leadership group for the East Bay Meditation Center, which I do hope that you all look at our website and that you come to visit us sometime.

[04:29]

We are a diversity and social justice-based mindfulness practice, mostly Vipassana-based meditation center, and we're only three years old. So as I wrote in this article for patheos.com, people I see in the Dharma Hall are by and large highly stressed people who are members of communities with long histories of trauma and oppression-related poverty and violence in the United States. They are interested in meditation as a tool for stress reduction, centering and grounding, health and well-being, an affirmation of self-worth within a society that sends them daily negative messages. So I'll just repeat that again, because I think it bears saying that in this tradition, particularly in Zen, where at least as I was being trained, I was trained originally in the Korean Zen lineage in the early 80s, and there was a great deal of talk of...

[05:42]

how we're dropping the self. And sometimes people use the terms of, you know, we're dropping the ego and so on. And the populations with whom I work, however, need to strengthen their sense of self. They need to practice self-love and self-care for their well-being because what they're looking for, as I wrote, is meditation as a tool for stress reduction and centering and grounding, health and well-being, an affirmation of self-worth within a society that sends them daily negative messages. So this experience has taken me rather far from my original Zen training and a lot of my beliefs and conditioning, and I've had to really learn flexibility. which, luckily for me, I must say, was included in my original training, which started in the Zen Buddhist temple of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1982.

[06:52]

And I also trained, we had a mother temple in Toronto. And my original Zen teacher, the Venerable Samu Sinem, who's a Korean Zen monk, said to us, the good Zen student is like a carp. you can go anywhere and eat anything. Of which he was not kidding at all. So my original Zen training in the early 80s had to do with learning the forms, of course, and learning the right way to do things. And that was all Well and good, until I found myself on a pilgrimage with my teacher. He really liked to travel to see the emergence of North American Buddhism. And we took a couple of trips with some other senior students to as many Buddhist groups as possible in North America.

[08:01]

And that's how I first came to City Center, to here. in January of 1985. So at that point, I remember meeting some of you, and I had a notebook I can write very quickly. I was a secretary for many years, and so one of my jobs on this trip was to write down everything that my teacher said to write down so that we would have a record of the trip. And when we got here, I was really busy because he told me to copy down all the signs in the building, including the ones in the bathroom. And so my fingers were totally ink-stained, and I had this notebook, and I was always furiously scribbling. And I remember one of the Zen students here finally sidled up to me and said, do you write everything down? And I said, yes, I do. So that was my job. And so my early Zen training, very fortunately for me, included among... Other things, the usual, up early, a lot of sitting, a lot of manual work, serving people in the Sangha.

[09:09]

These whirlwind journeys across cultural lines of vastly different Buddhist groups. Here in North America, we have the fortune, and actually in the San Francisco area, in the Chicago area, in the New York area, in these major urban areas, we have the good fortune of of having all of the major lineages, I believe, of the Dharma in various groups as well as new groups that are coming up with new forms. And it was really part of the practice in the way I was trained to go and pay one's respects and try to learn something about the story of that temple and that group and how they came into being, how they were doing. So when we were in San Francisco, this whirlwind journey encompassed going from, I remember there was this vast, cold, cavernous warehouse place that I think was at the time called Gold Mountain Monastery.

[10:13]

And I think they were related to what is now the City of 10,000 Buddhas up in Ukiya. And I just remember that it was really cold in there. And it was just huge and very dark. And there was this huge kind of altar. They just moved in there. And we went from there to, I remember, a cozy little Sunday school room filled with crayon children's drawings. at one of the local Buddhist churches of America, the Jodo Shinshu churches, they're called. And they really specialize in wonderful programs for children and teens. They're well known for basketball. And it was the first time that I'd seen a room that was so comfortable and that was filled with wonderful art supplies and toys for children. And it just, I don't know, it nourished me and heartened me. So these travels impressed upon me very early on that in this world of the Dharma, there are worlds within worlds within worlds.

[11:23]

And it's all very close. And it's all very available. And it is utterly diverse. Now the interesting thing to me that I still reflect on quite a bit is that that at every Buddhist center or temple that we went to, if we stayed for even really a couple of hours, and usually we were invited to tea and given some gifts, and we made some relationships, some places we stayed longer. But... Because I was the most junior of the group, so I think I was probably the most approachable, it would really only be a matter of time before someone would sidle up to me from the Sangha and say, in kind of a lowered voice, you know, we actually have the best teacher here. And we actually have the best teaching.

[12:26]

We actually have the best Dharma. So this was very interesting to me and encouraging to know that there were so many Buddhist temples and so many vastly different kinds of Buddhist practices and teachers, and they were all the best. We could say they were best practices. So having lived in Oakland for 19 years and volunteered in the public schools, which many of you know is a very spectacularly large and broken system. For 11 of those years, teaching literature, assisting teachers, being a literacy tutor, being a good friend and a mentor to the students with whom I came in contact. And my kid went through the Oakland Public Schools K through 12. I've been very carefully studying what it takes to show up and practice

[13:27]

across major lines of difference, particularly across lines of difference, because we are different in different ways, so particularly across lines of difference between dominant cultures and non-dominant cultures, between groups in which folks may live and work and go to school and in very close proximity and yet in which the cultures can remain quite distinct and quite separated from one another, even in a place as diverse and multicultural as the Bay Area. So this was something that was very interesting to me within the Oakland Public Schools, and that was really the ground in which I began my journey. I never thought of myself as an activist in any way.

[14:28]

By nature, I was trained as a poet, and I spent a lot of years in Zen centers doing long retreats and being extraordinarily quiet. So I never thought of myself as being a person. But, you know, for those of you who are parents and who have small children in your lives, that is really... That's an experience that takes us out of ourselves. That brings us into the public life, particularly if we're in the public schools. And that brings us into very close contact around a common concern with people from a wide variety of backgrounds. And because our concern in the schools is exactly the same, we want our children to be safe. We want our children to get as good an education as possible. We want our children to be prepared as much as possible for this extraordinarily challenging world and society that we live in.

[15:38]

I don't think that it's a delusion to feel as I have that The world that I was sending my child and his classmates into was, it actually was a lot more complex than the world that I grew up in in Ohio in the 1960s. I remember when I went to college, if I wanted money from the bank, I had to go to the bank during bank hours. I had to stand in line, and then I had to withdraw or deposit money. There was no such thing as an ATM. No one had a personal computer. Computers were big and would take up whole rooms, and people punched cards and put them in. Everything was extremely different. And these days, children are expected to do so much and to know so much. So as we come into the world, into public life, and we see how precious these next generations are, how much they need from us,

[16:47]

in order to be safe, in order to be happy, in order to be healthy, in order to have some spiritual and inner resource to face the challenges. We don't know exactly what they'll be, but we know they'll face challenges. That is what offered, at least to me, the extraordinary opportunity to become involved very closely with people from backgrounds, from countries, with points of view and ways of looking at the world that were quite different from my own. And I began to connect that in my mind with the pilgrimages I had done with my Zen teacher and the feeling that I always had that it is a very precious thing. to be invited, to come into contact with, and to learn how to enter a world that is very different from my own.

[17:57]

So it was a very good thing that my Zen training, which was originally in the Korean line, and that's considered to be more similar to the Rinzai, Japanese Zen tradition than the soto. So we never called it koan work, but definitely it was koan work of some sort. And I've also practiced with Kyozan Sasaki Roshi, who bless his heart is now, I think 103, still teaching, and he definitely does koan work. So it was a very good thing for me that that Zen training had so much to do with being pretty constantly confused and not knowing what was going on and making undignified mistakes quite a bit. Because I was raised to be a perfectionist. Like most people, I like to do well. I like to look cool. I like to look like I kind of know what I'm about.

[19:01]

And this particular form of Zen training is... It's, you know, sad to say for me, it just, it really took that apart. And in fact, when I was thinking about just how humiliating it was, one of the worst moments of my Zen career was when I was doing this Rohatsu session with Sasaki Roshi, who has his own kind of koan system, because he doesn't speak English very well, so it's rather simple. But you have to go see the old man. During session, it used to be like five times a day, so it was really arduous. They call it sanzen, and you go racing in, and you have to answer your koan, which, of course, I never could. I never really knew what I was doing. You have to state it, and then he would usually pick up the bell and say, more zazen, ding-a-ling-a-ling. And then you run out. So happy to be back on my zafu.

[20:04]

and dreading when the next one comes. So it passed in that manner. So one time I went in, and it was kind of nice because I got one that I really got into because I liked it, and it was very beautiful. It was, how do you manifest your true nature as a flower? Now that's rather lovely and poetic, isn't it? So I was doing this flower con. I really got into it. I had this very beautiful, rather mystical experience, and everything was going really pretty well for me. And then I went in to the next encounter with Roshi, and I can't believe it, he switched my koan. And he said, okay, he said, now, how do you manifest true nature as a jit? And I said, jit? And he said, oh, my English is not good. I said, no, it isn't. And so I said, jit? Jet airplane? He said, mm-hmm, jet airplane.

[21:07]

I thought, no, no, you're not going to make me do jet airplane. And he's, yep, that's your con. So I did jet airplane, and he chuckled and said, rather weak. And rang the bell, and I ran away. So all of this experience helps me a lot in the work I do now, which is teaching meditation retreats. for people of color and social justice activists, teaching at the East Bay Meditation Center, where we're trying to find new pathways for the Dharma to enter new communities. And as an example of the ways in which I've been asked to stretch from the ways I was originally trained, As I wrote in again in this article in patheos.com, when communities who have not had a collective voice are welcome to the table, their concerns may not be easily addressed by established Buddhist groups in the United States.

[22:20]

Questions I have heard from my students include, as a transgender person, I cannot safely do walking meditation in my neighborhood park because several transgender people have been attacked there recently. So how can I practice? And I'm an African-American parent of a teenage son. My main concern is how to keep my son safe from gang violence and police brutality. Did the Buddha teach something that can help me directly? So I'd like to propose that showing up to practice across lines of difference is a very wonderful practice of learning and growing. And here's what I've learned that it takes. Step one, forming an intention. All of our practice starts with forming an intention and taking that bodhisattva vow to cross a line of difference.

[23:28]

But the difference here is not to vow. to try to save anyone. Because just to be with others and experience something of their lives as they experience their lives is what I found is most needed, to actually drop one's agenda to help and instead show up in order to understand. Step two, the ability to tolerate feeling at a loss, being uncertain and unmoored for long periods of time. And I'm hoping that this will be familiar to those of us who practice Zen. I remember being in a very dark Zendo one morning in Santa Fe, and the monk, Robert, bless his heart, came over to me and gave me a little card, and then he whispered, the good news is you get a chanting card. The bad news is it's too dark.

[24:30]

to read it. Fine. So I think those of us who do this practice would do... Okay, but it might actually be... I've shown up to volunteer in the public schools where it is such a broken system, there has been such chaos, that even though I've been there to tutor or to help, the fact was that the system... was too disorganized on certain days for me to do much of anything except just be there. And I decided that I was going to just keep showing up, and if they could use my services, that would be fine, and if not, at least I would be there just in case they did. This made me somewhat agitated, and yet it seemed to be what the system was calling for because the system itself was not well organized enough to always have something for me to do.

[25:33]

I spent a lot of time, sort of from my point of view, doing nothing. And then sometimes I did do things. So step two is that ability to tolerate, we show up, and then maybe there actually isn't something for us to do immediately, and that's okay. Step three, deep listening. I believe that Katagiri Roshi said that Zazen is deep communication. I believe from my experience, and I've talked a lot, I like to talk with children, I like to talk with lots of people, that to communicate deeply with another human being, we need to listen for what is important to that person, whether we agree with them or not. So we listen to to what they're saying that is important to them. So it's useful to think, I think, who can I learn the most from?

[26:33]

Someone who thinks exactly like me, with whom I agree, or someone who has a well-thought-out viewpoint that I judge to be wrong or alien or very different from my own. Where will the most learning be? take place? We can ask ourselves that question. And this is useful in the interfaith work that I do to go in with this mindset of deep listening for what it is that someone of a very different faith than my own, who has a different viewpoint, who has a different experience. And I've tried to learn how to listen for the joy the life, the vitality in their own faith viewpoint, no matter how different it is from my own, and to really rejoice in the nourishment they are getting from their faith.

[27:35]

In fact, let's see if I have it here. Gandhi has said that in his latter years that he had a good friend who was an atheist. And so in 1945 and 46, he told his friend Gora during their discussions of social work, I can neither say my theism is right nor your atheism is wrong. We are seekers after truth. Whether you are in the right or I am in the right, results will prove. So go ahead with your work. I will help you, though your method is against mine. And I think this is marvelous. I will help you, though your method is against mine. In step four, we can then practice active listening.

[28:49]

And I'm sure some of you have done that. We do a lot of that in diversity work and in work where people come together and have a commitment to respect one another's experience. So active listening to me is very much like the mirror mind in Zen that I learned about today. during my own Zen practice and Zen training where we just show up and we try not to be hanging on to all of our own ideas and opinions so much. I'll make it me. I show up and I try to not be hanging on to my own judgments and opinions so strongly and instead just try to mirror back without adding anything on and without taking anything away what it is that is placed in front of me. in order to more deeply understand, to achieve that deep communication that was spoken about, in order to reflect.

[30:00]

And I think that active listening, in which we listen for what is important to what the other person is saying, and then we repeat it back in a summary form. This is really what I heard you say. Did I get it right? And we might repeat three or four points. And the other person might say, yes, you have heard me. Or no, that's not what I said. And then we patiently repeat back what we've heard until we do get it right. I think this is a fabulous practice. It's one that I do quite a bit, and I've learned how poorly I sometimes listen. and how grateful I am when people help me until I have heard them in the way that they wish to be heard. So active listening takes a certain giving up of the self, at least for that period of time, and a loosening up from being goal-directed, especially for those of us who've spent a lot of time listening to people whose experience is different from ours,

[31:05]

talking to young children who might have a very different worldview and different ways of expressing themselves, it just sometimes takes kind of hanging with them for long periods of time and rather regularly, I might add, until I have begun to understand kind of what they mean and how they look at the world. And in order to do this, it leads to the last step. and what I feel it takes to show up and practice across major lines of difference, and that is our very familiar patience paramita. Patience, and by this I mean, like the word peace, not something that is passive, not something that is retiring. It's really showing up with a very active, dynamic patience. It's a patience that contains all our vitality.

[32:05]

It's a patience that contains our alertness, our attention, our care, and our dedication and devotion to a more peaceful world, a world where we can see face to face, where we can understand one another more deeply. Patience, Paramita, is so needed. in this process of being able to keep showing up until, at some point, someone will say, or maybe they don't say, but they indicate, you know what? I've seen you show up in this community for so long, I've decided that I can trust you. And then that is when the story is heard that we have not heard before. That is when the door opens to a space we've never been invited into before. That is when we're able to see someone else's culture and someone else's experience more in the way that they have experienced it.

[33:08]

So this patience to show up and keep showing up, dropping one's own agenda, listening and learning, and saying or conveying in some way, I am here to know you as you know yourself. I'm here to understand you as you understand yourself. So in my experience, to know and understand someone as they wish to be known, understood, as they wish to be heard, as they wish to be seen, we could, if we're being spiritual, call it oneness. And I think that it's also experienced in everyday terms as love. We have a few moments, and I would be happy to hear your insights or receive your questions.

[34:15]

Yes? I think you said, You're teaching at East Bay and sharing about Zen, that people were hearing about Zen who otherwise might not ever explore it or come to a Zen Center. I have two questions. Why do you think that is? And why did you come and why did you stay? Why did I come to what? Oh, okay. Yeah, that's two different questions. Thank you. Which one should I do first? Oh, I'll do why I came and why I stayed. Probably in common, I would guess, with many of us. But it may not be with all of us, since I don't know. There is diversity in the room. But as an American who grew up during the 60s, I came to Zen when I did not know where else to turn.

[35:24]

I was at the point where I needed to practice. I needed to drastically change the way of life I was living. And I was trained to teach poetry. I have a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. And I actually was doing, ironically, rather well in my field. I'd published, and I remember Donald Justice, one of our great American poets, looked at my master's thesis, which was... collection of poems and said, well, you'll have no trouble getting these published. I thought, okay. So in a way, certainly things were being handed to me. I could have gotten a job teaching literature. It would have been good. But for whatever reason, there was a convergence of things that happened in my life or just actually of my inner life in which I knew instinctually, it wasn't intellectually, that I had to go inward and I had to seek a practice where there could be an extreme withdrawal from the way I had lived the rest of my life.

[36:29]

So that's really why I came to practice, and that's why I stayed, because I liked to practice. And I also liked living in the temple. I immediately became a staff person as soon as I moved in. And I like being with people. I'm a writer. I love hearing stories. And the best place to hear stories is in a Buddhist temple. You never need a TV. So your first question is, Why would many people come to the East Bay Meditation Center? Why might they not come to a Zen center? So, of course, I can't speak for them, but my understanding would be that a lot of these folks are people who don't necessarily feel comfortable and safe in a lot of the environments in which they go. They're under tremendous stress, as I said. And so in order to go into an American Zen center where there can be such a strong emphasis on forms, where people do dress in a very different way, there's a lot of fiddling with cloth and things like that.

[37:43]

And, you know, the lack of hair... And again, the forms, that can add actually more stress, I think, to people who are coming to the practice to look for a path of peace, to look for a place where they can relax enough to do the practice. So they're looking for psychological and physical safety. They're looking for relaxation. And they're looking for a place where they can come as they are in their street clothes. They can sit on a folding chair if they are not limber enough to sit on the meditation mats and cushions, and where the environment is just familiar enough that it eases that transition into being able to go within. Thank you. Yes? As a parent, how do you find the balance between validating your child's diversity and differences from you and molding your child into some of you

[38:47]

How's the morals and ethics associated with your family and with the community? I've never been able to mold my particular child. And I have tried. So my experience as a parent has been that I could do a lot to injure my child to hurt my child, and to destroy my child's natural love and curiosity and affection. I could do a lot if I'm heedless, if I'm angry, if I'm not careful. And of course I have made mistakes, and I'm deeply sorry about that. But what I learned in my experience is that actually I couldn't mold this particular human being.

[39:51]

He's come in with his own clarity, his own questions, very definitely his own way of being. And so my job as a parent is to look for the strengths that he has to treasure them. encourage them and open the way for him to become even stronger along the lines of his strength and his interests, and also to point out that there may be other things that he also needs in order to become a well-rounded individual. But I will also tell you I point out a lot of those things, which he has not chosen to follow up on at this time, and I'm okay with that. My practice as a parent has been really to accept him as he is and of course then I do insist on certain good manners and I do insist on respectful behavior.

[40:54]

I think those are bottom lines. Thank you. Yes, one more and then we'll be at the end of our time. Thank you. That is a very vital point. And I actually did write about it. It's so vital, and you picked up on it. So the whole... use of the word acceptance in the practice that we do.

[41:54]

And I was certainly trained in, and the word acceptance was used. It's a word that I don't, I have learned to not use in the communities and the populations where I teach. Because it is heard, and I think justifiably so, as acceptance of the status quo. Which when one is in a group that's targeted for oppression, is absolutely not okay. It has never been okay, and it never will be okay. We might have to recognize it, that that's where we start to work to dismantle racism, to work to dismantle homophobia, to work with all of the isms, but accept? No, we don't want to accept. So I feel that where the intersection is is that... is to begin to find other wording with the understanding of the situation as I put it out, which is my understanding that we're not accepting things that aren't okay.

[43:08]

We're going to work to try to change. We're going to work to try to improve. And we're starting with things as they are from where we are. And we're also communicating with people where they are and from where they're starting. We can wish as much as we like that someone had a different consciousness, that someone had a different experience, but wishing will not make it so. So how is it that we, with our practice, with our commitment, with our wisest intelligence and our most sensitivity, enter into conversations that can be difficult, show up in situations where we don't see immediate results, where we don't control, where things don't go exactly our way, and still keep that flame within us, which burning very, very brightly, which treasures our Buddha nature, which treasures the Buddha nature in every person that we meet,

[44:17]

and which really holds fast to the vision that something better is possible for all of us. There is a way of peace. It might not be the ultimate way, but we can take a few steps along it together. So thank you very much. I've appreciated the questions, the dialogue, and I hope that as a community, You go on to have these conversations to, I hope, alone or in groups, maybe make some field trips to some of the other Buddhist groups in the San Francisco and Bay Area. Buddhist temples are very much known in Asia for their hospitality. One is usually received with friendship, with kindness, and with the deepest hospitality. There are wonderful worlds within worlds within a few miles of where we are right now, as well as the many cultures that we have in the Bay Area.

[45:26]

The learning is there, and it is available to us. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen 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.

[45:54]

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