This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfzc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. Good morning. Very nice to be here. Thank you all. for the invitation. Thank you all for being here. Always marvel at how many people will get up on a Sunday morning. My name is Reverend Angel Kyoto Williams, and this is my first opportunity to be offering the Dharma Talk at Green Gulch, and so I'm very honored to be here. wanting to take a moment and just mark it in my own memory to see the people that I'm holding this space and sharing this occasion with.

[01:09]

As you can imagine, thought a lot about what would be a good topic for the talk this morning. I spend more of my time these days out in the world, if there's a difference, but in not specifically Zen and really not Buddhist spaces, many people coming from different directions to, I think, get an opportunity to draw from the wisdom of the Dharma, the wisdom that Buddhism has to offer. And more and more often people are wanting to understand and receive some window into that in Buddhism. in the embodiment of someone that has not typically been who they've heard it from or heard it shared from over the last 50 years, give or take.

[02:31]

So I feel very much the beneficiary of a kind of collision of the rise of mindfulness, the difficulty of these times. the confrontation with real division that is not new, but is new, newly in our purview for many of us. It is a kind of pristine sense of division that has unmuddied the murkiness of the division that has been here in our society for really quite some time since its inception. And so I really view this time as this beautiful opportunity to get clear and to get more distilled about coming to understand where that division lies in each of our own bodies, in each of our own beings.

[03:43]

And for me, that has always been the offering of this practice. It's always been the offering of the Dharma broadly, Buddhism more specifically, and I dare to say Zen very specifically. confrontations that existed for me is to understand how I fit in. And that's a question that all of us are bringing to many different spaces that we head into. Sometimes that question is overt and explicit and sometimes it is much more implicit. The social discourse would suggest that there are a few of us that have the privilege, if you will, to not actually entertain that question at all.

[04:51]

They have an assumption of their right to access pretty much anything. But I think that fundamentally we are actually all engaging the question of, do I belong here? if not in a particular social space or location or job or community, do I belong here on this planet? Do I belong here in this body, in this birth, in this place and time? And if we're going to understand something about our belonging and how we get to this notion of belonging, we have to figure out who is the I. Who is the I that is trying to belong? What is this I made of? So, like really all of the wisdom traditions, we're reckoning with a fundamental question of who am I?

[06:00]

We have the great privilege to be of at a certain age in our life to not have to reckon with that question. We're actually running around asserting, this is who I am. But invariably at some point in our lives, if we're aware at all of the variety of conditions and challenges that we are meeting in our life, we eventually come back to this place in which we're inquiring, who am I? It may be by way of do I belong here? It may be by way of am I worthy? It may be by way of how do I take care of my family in these conditions? Am I going to be able to accomplish that? But underneath that question,

[07:06]

is, who am I? And so, whatever question or koan we are grappling with, whatever challenge we are facing in our lives, if you peel back the layers, we are back at that question of, who am I? I thought that might be a good question because it really is the question that I had to wrap myself around with in order to make sense of my own location inside of this particular practice, the community I practiced in, and the world that I found myself engaging with and at times terribly conflicted with.

[08:08]

In order to unpack who am I in this society, in this time, I had to unpack all of the identities that I had associated myself with. We get lots of them. Some of them are superficial in passing, and some of them stick. And whether you are trying to not be that identity or not, whether you yourself... choose that identity, the world is choosing and imposing that identity upon you. Some of those more obvious ones are the identities that are associated with things that seem obvious. We're in great question now. Race, gender, you get a little bit under that sexual orientation, all of these different locations. What class am I in?

[09:13]

What is my ethnicity, my heritage? Where do my people come from? My specific exercise, because it was the one that felt like it created the most obstacle for me in my own community, was about race. That doesn't have to be the same question for you, but it was what it was for me. so that I found myself in the location of the way it is that we approach questions in Zen practice, which is we realize that our conflicts are the result of the boundaries that we have. And so if we begin to question the boundaries, the location of those boundaries, boundaries themselves, we notice that many of them start to disintegrate, that the boundaries that we place around ourselves in terms of our identity, in terms of saying, this is who I am, when we poke at them, they start to fall apart.

[10:31]

And when those boundaries disintegrate, so do our conflicts. when those boundaries disintegrate, so do the questions of who am I, because the who am I that's in here begins to blend with everything else that's out there. One of the primary things that many people understand or sort of hold an idea about this is what Buddhism is about, is that there is no self. And yet the Buddha never taught that there was no self. What the Buddha taught was that there wasn't an inherent self. There wasn't a self that existed somehow inside here. that was free of the arising and conditions that were out there.

[11:41]

So everything that I know about this idea of a self in here is in direct relationship to whatever it is that I believe I perceive out there. So that who I am is always arising and falling with everything that is coming and going without there. Awesome. Confusing. Because simultaneously I move around the world as we all do and I'm confronted with the projection of a self even when I'm trying to escape the idea of one. And I move through this practice with this sense of, oh, but I'm not being a self.

[12:42]

I don't want to be that self. And yet here you are projecting an idea and responding to that idea of who I am based on the body that I have, the color skin that I have, the way that I speak, the language that I speak, the way I'm dressed, the way I'm not dressed. the way I'm not colored or not gendered or everything in between. To respond to that, what the Buddha also taught is that we shouldn't get caught up in the idea, the conception of a self. And so... I could think of myself as, oh, not this race, not this gender. And whatever it is that people are responding to is something that is arising only in that moment.

[13:51]

I'm female. I am angel. I am this race, mixed race, black race, whatever it is, in this moment. And then it goes away. I walk away from a male body, and I'm not so female anymore. I walk away from a white body, and I'm not so much a black body anymore. In the privacy of our own mind, we're just us, trying to figure out how we live in relationship to the projections both internal and external that we relate to as I. So the escape hatch we use is, well, I won't be that self.

[14:57]

If that self is creating a boundary, I won't be that self. And then there we are with the confrontation of, oh, but you are that self in this moment. Oh, but you are who I think you are in this moment. And so what many of us do is then we escape further into an idea and say, oh, but I'm going to be a good Buddhist and I'm going to be a good Zen practitioner. And so when you say that I'm the self, I'm just going to ignore that. And I'm going to hang out here and I'm going to be better than you. Because you're busy thinking I'm a self and I'm not a self at all. I'm just a good Buddhist and a good Zen practitioner. And I'm even a little awake.

[15:59]

because I know there's not a self and you don't. So the Buddha cautioned against that too. I got a question, which was, what will I call this talk? And I had so many things going on that I never responded, but I decided that I would call it, who am I? on shortcuts. So really what we're doing is we are working with shortcuts. When we say I, what we really mean is a flow of the momentum of past experiences colliding with present experiences, pitching into future as of yet unknown experiences, held still for one fleeting moment during which I reflect on this and try to get you to accept it as it is.

[17:24]

Except the next moment comes And that I falls away and arises again in relationship to whoever and whatever and all of the conditions that are present. So in my own life, I often talk about liberation. And in fact, we offer chance and we talk about liberation for self and others. But if there is no self, who is being liberated and what is all this practice about? And if there is not a self, who is it that is suffering that we commit ourselves

[18:31]

to be in service to the ending of that suffering. This is a bit of a conundrum. And it's one that I work out on Twitter almost every week. So the Buddha actually responded to this question of who in a maybe little-known sutra called the Faguna Sutra. And in this sutra, The monk is asking about how the body and mind and feelings and sensations work.

[19:41]

And wanted to understand, what is this idea or sense of who that we are working with? So Faguna asks, who, O Lord, has a sense impression? The question is not correct, said the Exalted One. I do not say he has a sense impression. The correct way to ask the question will be, what is the condition of sense impression? And to that, the correct reply is, the six-fold sense base is a condition of sense impression. And sense impression is the condition of feeling. In other words, we have sense impression because we have feeling. Who, O Lord, feels? The question is not correct, said the exultant one.

[20:47]

I do not say that he feels. The correct way to ask the question will be, what is the condition of feeling? And to that, the correct reply is... Sense impression is the condition of feeling, and feeling is the condition of craving. Who, O Lord, craves? The question is not correct, said the Exalted One. I do not say that He craves. The correct way to ask the question will be, what is the condition of craving? And to that, the correct reply is, feeling is the condition of craving, and craving is the condition of clinging. Who, O Lord, clings? You get where this is going.

[21:49]

The question is not correct, said the exalted one. I do not say that he clings. the correct way to ask the question will be, what is the condition of clinging? And to that, the correct reply is, craving is the condition of clinging. And clinging is the condition of the process of becoming. Such is the origin of this entire mass of suffering. So we suffer. because we are becoming. And yet here we are becoming every moment that unfolds. How then do we meet this condition of suffering if we cannot cease becoming? This, for me, is the most critical question that we navigate when we try to bring together our understanding of the spiritual life, you know, with the quotes around it, and the everyday life that we meet.

[23:20]

That we are both seeking in the spiritual life to bring about an end to suffering. And yet our lives are made up of becoming and becoming and becoming again. That if we're lucky at all, we are becoming. And so that the very fact of our choosing to live and to thrive, of choosing to become, and to allow ourselves to unfold and to become and to not simply end this life, confronts us with suffering. And if that is true, as we all know it is, how is it possible that we can end or cease

[24:24]

seek to bring about an end to suffering while we are becoming. So the shortcut has been that we say that what we're liberating or who we're liberating are those that are suffering. And we think of those that are suffering, we think about that he that that has sense conditioning, he that has feeling, he that has clinging, craving, he that is becoming, or she, or they. So when we speak about liberation and we try to get to this idea of liberating a self, we find ourselves in trouble.

[25:28]

because he, she, they, we are always becoming. And it turns out this whole business of liberating the self and others has been a shortcut. That actually the idea was never to liberate self or others, but rather to liberate the mind. It is the mind that generates the suffering. The self effectively can't be liberated. Only can the mind. So the Buddha never taught even though I try to sneak it in every now and again, that there should be liberation of the self.

[26:36]

The Buddha taught that there is liberation of the mind. That when we look at those boundaries that we create, that those boundaries are created by the mind. And when the mind softens those boundaries, those distinctions between this self and that self, this race and that race, this gender and that gender, that the suffering softens with those boundaries. There's a sutra called the Shorter Heartwood Simile. And it ends with the unshakable freedom of mind. That is the purpose of this holy life.

[27:41]

That is its heartwood. That is its final combination. So though we talk about liberation of the self, and we dive into the question of who am I, we're really talking about a shortcut. And the question is really, how do I liberate this mind that creates divisions so that my becoming is experienced as suffering rather than experienced as freedom. The shortcut for who am I is who? The answer is no.

[28:49]

Thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this podcast offered by the San Francisco Zen Center. Our programs are made possible by the donations we receive. Please help us to continue to realize and actualize the practice of giving by offering your financial support. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[29:23]

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