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 by people like you. Good morning, bodhisattvas. Is there anyone here who's here for the first time? Okay, then you probably don't know enough Sanskrit maybe to know what bodhisattva means. It means awakening being. And awakening being is who we all are. The purpose of this whole place is to help us realize this and act it through completely in everyday life. so that other people can help us and we can help them.

[01:05]

So in that vein, I want to bring up something I heard this morning. And there are people here who know more about this than I do. Please feel free to correct me if I get part of the story wrong. So. After the chanting service in the morning on Saturday morning, there's a circle meeting in which everybody gets a chance to give an announcement if they want to. There were a couple of announcements that particularly caught my attention this morning. And the first one of those was from Li Ping, who had just returned from Tassajara, where she was teaching workshops one with Zenke Roshi and one with Mark Lancaster. And she said that she wanted to express her appreciation to those people for leading the retreat with her and particularly wanted to express thanks to the people in the Tassajara reservations office for all of their hard work to get the retreat in shape.

[02:25]

So this might seem like a very ordinary announcement. And in fact, it's kind of a miraculous announcement because gratitude and appreciation for people and their contributions to express that is a miraculous act. And it's actually hard to express that in everyday life if we're thinking about anything else but the present moment. The second announcement that really impressed me was from Marsha, who's the head of the development office, fundraising and development. And she was referring an incident which was a pile up of misunderstandings. So what happened was that San Francisco Zen Center has new stationery.

[03:31]

And Marcia heard from the president that he wanted to use the new stationery. And there were things that they could do with the pieces of paper, which could be made into memo pads and so on. But the envelopes were a different story. And suddenly Marcia had an idea that there was just a collection of envelopes and that they should be recycled. Over the course of time, people started protesting this. And finally it came out that there were thousands and thousands of envelopes that had been dumped into the recycling bin. And somebody committed a revolutionary act, took them out and emailed the, I don't know, the development office and some other people. The pieces that impressed me of Marsh's announcement, besides the bravery of acknowledging her mistake to the whole community, were twofold.

[04:36]

One is that she said that all later to me, she said that all along she had ignored her misgivings about what she was doing out of a notion that we should just move forward. So she had heard in her heart some misgivings and had decided to overrule them. And the second thing was that the speed with which an idea about the envelopes that was different from the reality of the envelopes developed and made her act in ways that she would not have otherwise acted. And this brings us to today's subject, which is who are we in relation to each other and how can we help instead of hurt?

[05:39]

So this is a topic, although it seems like an easy topic. We know who we are in relation to each other and we know how to help each other. And that's what I'm arguing gets in the way. Because when we know, we tend to ignore our misgivings and our ideas and act according to our knowledge instead of what's in front of us. And there are Zen teachings about this. So. Could you put this someplace where people could see it? At the altar would be good. Yeah. So I'd like to call your attention to two cases from the Blue Cliff record.

[06:50]

the Hekigan Roku, which is one of the koan collections of Soto Zen. Soto Zen is our style of Zen that was transmitted to us by Suzuki Roshi. And the Hekigan Roku is a case of koans. The name of koan, the word koan means public case. And so what this means is a story about Zen teachers or about life that somebody heard and thought it reflected something really important about the practice and about the path. Case 14 of the Blue Cliff Record is called Yunmen's Appropriate Statement. A monk asked Yunmen, Japanese Unmon, what are the teachings of a whole lifetime? Yunmen responded an appropriate statement.

[07:58]

Actually, the Chinese of the response is dui. So it has that character in it, which means to meet. So the meaning of the response was more like each meets each. Each meets each. So it means now the person who's sitting next to you, your body is meeting the body of that person in sitting. I'm doing my best to meet you and to meet your needs in this talk. That's an ordinary activity that we try to do that gets that things get in the way of that really easily. The 15th case of the Blue Cliff Record goes with the 14th case. Another monk asked Yunmen, when it's not the present intellect and it's not the present phenomena, what is it?

[09:04]

Yunmen responded, a topsy-turvy statement. So it means, OK. One is this, each meets each, and the other one is what we more normally do, which is that. So how, when we have the capacity to do this and awaken each other in life, do we end up doing this 99% of the time? I think the answer is given in the commentary to the 15th case, where a great master, Dongshan, Japanese name Tozan, comments. If you would judge whether one going beyond is genuine or false, there are three kinds of leakage.

[10:13]

Emotional leakage. leakage of views and verbal leakage. If there is leakage of views, the intellect does not stir from its fixed position and falls into the poisonous sea. If feelings leak, knowing always turns towards and against, and one's view is biased. Verbal leakage embodies the marvel but loses the fundamental. The intellect confuses beginning and end. You should know these three leaks for yourself. Okay, if you want to find this, it's right in the middle of the commentary on the case on an upside-down statement, a topsy-turvy statement. And remember, the original question was when it's not the present intellect and it's not the present phenomena, what is it?

[11:22]

It means if it's not what's really going on inside and it's not what's really going on outside, what is it? And Yunman's teaching on that was it's upside down. And so you can take that in two ways. Either he's saying that's a upside down question. That's a weird question because it's always about. what's going on really inside or what's going on really outside. So that's one way to take this answer. And another way to take this answer is if you're not in the present, you're totally upside down. OK, then don't even try to proceed further until you get into the present. So I'd like to. point to some contemporary examples of this of this case from modern art and from and from life.

[12:25]

So I'll say more about this three leakage when when we start to try to understand the examples. In yesterday's paper, there was a, in the San Francisco Chronicle, there was an article that said, Muslims mourn slaying of mosque leader's son. I don't know if you saw it, but the motive uncertain in the brutal killing near 49ers Stadium. The 18-year-old son of the leader of a mosque in San Francisco was shot and killed after driving to Monster Park. Possibly to meet someone, authorities said Thursday. Ali Syed Ahmed Shaheen, 18, of San Francisco, was shot several times in the head about 9.30 p.m. Tuesday at Giants Drive and Ingersoll Avenue.

[13:28]

His car was left at the scene. We don't know if it's a robbery, an attempted carjacking, or something else, said San Francisco Police Lieutenant John Murphy. Murphy said that investigators have no evidence that Shaheen was the victim of a hate crime. He said family members have no idea why anyone would target or attack the teenager. However, based on the brutality of the attack, it appeared to be a targeted act, officials said. Shaheen's father, Saeed Shaheen, Imam at the Masjid Darussalam Mosque on Jones Street, led worship there on Wednesday. So this statement by a reporter, it's clear from the way the article is written. I don't know if you agree with me, and we can talk about this later, but to me, when I read this article, my mind goes to the reporter was asking whether this was a hate crime, and there was no evidence of it, but that's where his mind immediately went.

[14:41]

And that it's quite possible, although we don't know that that's what it was. And that and that it was the brutality of the attack itself that led people to think that it wasn't just a drive by shooting or something, but that it was actually targeted. So this is the extreme example of kind of violence that happens with objectification if it's true. And it's an example of the public public inference about hate that is actually, you know, it's a real mixed blessing in a newspaper because if it isn't a hate crime, then there's this reporter in the Chronicle that's who said that it was possibly loudly enough for us to think, yes, this was another hate crime. And if it is a hate crime, then it's helpful that we know about it. So it's a mixed blessing.

[15:42]

We don't know. We really don't know. And we, in this case where we don't know, we tend to think something. We tend to think one way or another. Yes, it was. Or no, it wasn't. That's karmic consciousness. What we tend to think and why we tend to think it is an example of karmic consciousness. So here's a kind of horrifying but funny example of karmic consciousness. This is from Coco Fosco's book, English is Broken Here. And I'm going to have to paraphrase because the whole chapter is so, the whole chapter talks about what I'm talking about. But it's called The Other History of Intercultural Performance. this chapter is, and it's it's kind of a bitingly funny, extremely sarcastic look at how human beings in minorities, no matter what the minority, have been exhibited as curiosities by the majority culture, no matter what that was, for hundreds of years for entertainment purposes.

[16:57]

So so So Coco Fosco and her collaborator, Yermo Gomez-Pena, were intrigued by the legacy of performing the identity of the other, okay? What is self and what is other? And for a white audience, and they sense its implications as art, in America becomes more diverse and multicultural, they wanted to explore some topics that were somewhat charged. So they decided to look at the topic of the other. And they knew what they had read the historical accounts in which people from minority cultures, no matter what the culture, were seen as curiosities. And they wondered, had things changed?

[17:59]

How would we know if not by unleashing those ghosts from a history that could be said to be ours? And she talks about Kafka is the story that begins honored members of the Academy. You have done me the honor of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape. So she's really charging us on the subject of intolerance and of, uh, She's trying to outrage us. She's seeking to shock and outrageous. And this is an outrageous statement and an outrageous quote with which to begin an article. And as a white person reading this, I was shocked. I was shocked that a performance artist would say this in print. And I had to look at my own responses to this, like did, to what extent have I seen, well, I grew up Jewish, so to what extent have I seen non-Jews as the other?

[19:13]

I grew up being seen as white in the U.S. and a person of color in Europe. So what extent in those cultures have I, seeing the other as the other and thus become unable to actually see the other as a person and deal with them as themselves. And so this was a shocking chapter for me to read. So I just want to say that so that you know. So. what she did was what, what the two of them did was cook up a scheme where they would perform the role of a noble savage behind the bars of a golden cage. And she said, our original intent was to create a satirical commentary on Western cons concepts of the exotic primitive other. Yet we had to confront two unexpected realities in the course of developing this piece. One,

[20:13]

a substantial portion of the public ended up believing that our fictional realities, identities were real. And two, a substantial number of intellectuals, artists, and cultural bureaucrats sought to deflect attention from the substance of our experiment to the, quote, moral implications of our dissimulation, which means the kind of, performance art premise of the piece was seen as deceitful by the people who ended up being shocked at the reality that it was a performance. Anyway, to paraphrase, what happened was the two artists put themselves into a cage with people that they had hired to play the role of anthropologists and guards surrounding them. And they wore kind of mismatched goodwill clothes and and carried a laptop and a cell phone and they wore shades.

[21:15]

So basically anyone who really understands conceptual art would know this is a performance piece that's meant to shock and the shock would have produced laughter. And that's what they expected. OK, so. So what they said was they. They took a symbolic vow of silence during the course of this experiment so that they could listen to what people said and how they responded. They were seeking a strategically effective way to examine the limits of the, quote, happy multiculturalism, end quote, that reigned in cultural institutions. Um, as well as, um, to respond to the formalists and cultural relativists who reject the proposition that racial difference is absolutely fundamental to aesthetic interpretation. And they looked to the examples of Latin America where this is the subject of art really often.

[22:21]

And they found many examples of satire being used to address topics like this. So they planned to live in a golden cage for three days, presenting themselves as undiscovered Amerindians from a fictional island in the Gulf of Mexico that had somehow been overlooked by Europeans for five centuries. And they had a name for this, and I highly recommend this chapter. talk about the history of these things. Anyway, this is part of their commentary. Our Cage performances forced these contradictions out into the open. The Cage became a blank screen onto which audiences projected their fantasies of who and what we are.

[23:27]

As we assumed the stereotypical role of the domesticated savage, many audience members felt entitled to assume the role of the colonizer, only to find themselves uncomfortable with the implications of the game. Unpleasant but important associations emerged between the displays of old and the multicultural festivals and ethnographic dioramas of the present. The central position of the white spectator, the objective of these events as a confirmation of their position as global consumers of exotic cultures, and the stress on authenticity as an aesthetic value, all remained fundamental to the spectacle of otherness many continue to enjoy. OK, and then basically what they found was that children were the only people who said the emperor has no clothes, mom.

[24:29]

Why are these so-called undiscovered people wearing sunglasses and carrying laptops? And the guards, the hired white people were explaining and the anthropologists were explaining this away. Well, you know, once they became exposed to it, they became really enthusiastic about it. This curiosity is a cultural value, you know, they said. Anyway, I just wanted to, to, if you want to read about otherness and the extreme of otherness as shown through cultural performance, please read this article. But the teaching is that this takes three, the establishment of karmic consciousness, the establishment of otherness and acting on otherness has three main steps. to divide the world into self and other, this and that, good and bad, right and wrong, human and inhuman, art and lie.

[25:35]

That has three main steps. And the first one is leakage of view, which means that when we lose sight of the fact that we're all fundamentally one, united, When we lose sight of that and our views start ballooning out. When we start thinking, oh, these are just, these must be just a small collection of mismatched envelopes. Or this person is this way or that way. When we start, at the very beginning of the process of seeing otherness, there is leakage of view. It means that the intellect does not stir from its fixed position and falls into the poisonous sea. So you're already in the poisonous sea as soon as you started on the slippery slope towards self and other.

[26:40]

If feelings leak and then... So what happens is when views, when you don't notice the suffering inherent in this, when you don't notice that you're already in the poisonous sea, when we don't notice this, because it happens to everybody every moment, every moment there is leakage of view in normal life. And when we don't notice that there's suffering involved in that, that we actually feel split off from how things are, when that occurs, then very soon there's a bodily reaction to that of either yes, attraction, or no, aversion. And that's called leakage of emotions. And they turn into feelings pretty fast. And if that happens, then not only do you know something, not only do you have a fixed view of it, but you have feelings for and against it.

[27:51]

And you start getting invested in those feelings. We better move forward. We better dump the envelopes. It's better to move forward into, oh, if we don't move forward, this situation is going to get really complicated. We're going to have to talk to a million people and it'll never get done. Plus the president wants us to change the envelopes. OK, that's a good thing. So let's move towards this. I want to I want to go with what he said. I want to support him. That would be a good thing. That's leakage of feelings. Not only have you leaked the views, but you've also developed an emotional predilection to one side or another. And that that means a bias in terms of the performance art. Leakage of view meant losing track of the fact that there were two human beings standing in a golden cage in the middle of the, you know, in the beginning of the 21st century.

[28:52]

And that there's an actual history of that. So that's leakage of view. And then you start having emotions about that, like this is disgusting, which is negative, or oh, noble savage. which thinks it's positive but actually is totally diluted. And so pretty soon, if you don't know that there's suffering involved in that, then there's verbal leakage or action leakage in which you say or do something that goes with your completely mistaken view, like people wanting to snap pictures of the noble savage or like the envelopes getting dumped in the recycling bin. OK. And harm happens. It can either be minor harm like. We. We don't recycle the envelopes and could have recycled the envelopes. Or it could be major harm like a major false view about a whole other group of people is perpetuated and acted on.

[30:02]

So. Blanche tells the story. Blanche tells the ex-Abbots and Kay Blanche Hartman, sitting over here to my right, tells the story of how she became involved in intensive practice. And the triggering incident was one day at a protest. Correct me if I'm wrong. She looked into the eyes of a policeman who was one of a line of policemen trying to contain the situation. And saw herself. Oh. You know. So that's a knowledge that's beyond. That's the beginning of the appropriate response. Even after we have this knowledge. It could take a lifetime to act on the knowledge. Even if we know that someone else is ourself.

[31:05]

It could take a lifetime to act on it. So for instance, here at Zen Center, as an institution, we develop various ideas about which way we want to go. We are interested in diversity and multiculturalism. We are interested in outreach. We are interested in widening the circle of practice. So we've developed a vision about where we want to go. And yet what happens as we try to move forward into that vision? Do we recycle the envelopes really quickly? Do we fall into our fixed views about self and others? What happens? What happens? You know, when here who we are a temple, a practice place dedicated towards, um, uh, practicing with the unity of, of sameness and difference.

[32:10]

But as we, as you may or may not know, uh, monasteries throughout history have been rife with political machinations with people in and people out and, uh, people held up and people dumped. And these things happen. in monasteries as they do in any human endeavor. And so what do we do about that? How do we how do we actually live our lives with each other and allow ourselves to be awakened? How do we live in a in a in a world in which we don't know if an 18 year old was killed because of hate crime? So This picture is a picture of Maria Marta Herrera, a friend of mine who died about four years ago. And she was the nutritionist. She was a traveling nutritionist and she was a nutritionist for the Calderons, who were a family that San Francisco Zen Center took in for refuge from El Salvador.

[33:20]

And they lived in the house that's now Paul's house. in the first floor of that house. Maria Marta, because of her job as a nutritionist, particularly as a prenatal nutritionist, would visit people and work with them one on one. And we would often have conversations about this. And she would say, you know, it's fine that you want to help people, but and it's fine that you want to be ordained. But if you get overly involved in some plan for ordination or some thing that you think expresses ordination, you're losing the essence. You have to continue to meet people face to face as they are. She would even sometimes say it more strongly. I remember one time when...

[34:23]

We've been trying to get together for about a month and I and it was practice period and I had a lot of practice period activities. And she said, well, how about Saturday? And I said, I can't on Saturday. I have a lecture to go to on Saturday. And then she said, well, how about in the afternoon? And I said, I can't because we have a small group. And then she got angry and she said. Zen practice. takes people away from awakening. And so I really appreciate Maria Marta. And I think that she would have appreciated my trying to grapple with these issues, no matter how inexpert my grappling is. This, these, Books and stories about other people are safe.

[35:28]

But in actual life, to study this question is not safe. Because if we study this question, we have to face our own fears about the lack of control, about intimacy and about death. Death, meaning that the ego, the fixed ideas about how things are, have a real reaction if you try to investigate them too thoroughly or even to act contradicting those ideas. Anyway, I bring up these these ideas and these stories as things to think about in actual life. In actual life, people get hurt every day because of this. This week, I've talked with three people at San Francisco Zen Center in practice discussion who have been hurt by other people's ideas of them.

[36:37]

One of those people was me. You know, I talked to myself a lot this week. But I talked with other people for whom two other people who were who had really. major difficult and possibly quite destructive things happened to them because of other people's ideas about them. Because other people's ideas were developed into third party conversations and people developed fixed views of those person and the situation ballooned. And this kind of activity can actually hurt people or ruin their lives. It can make them sick. It can in extreme cases, kill them. So what we're doing at Zen Center, what we're trying to do to wake up to our lives is completely radical. It's completely counterintuitive in normal karmic consciousness.

[37:43]

And it is completely who we really are. But To really be able to do it, to really be able to do what the Buddha did and to wake up. You know, when it comes time to say a third party story about someone, to not say it and instead do the kind thing and bring people together. To be an ally to somebody. There was another story in yesterday's paper about a principal who told his school that he would get a mohawk. if the teacher in Mira Loma who told his school that he would get a Mohawk if, if the academic performance index of the school got raised by 55 points. Okay, so here's what happened. Ron Machado,

[38:44]

stood in the center of the Mira Loma Elementary School playground Thursday, surrounded by 300 students chanting, Mohawk, Mohawk, Mohawk. A few minutes later, the 33-year-old principal sported a Mohawk, spray-painted pink, as tufts of his brown hair blew across the black asphalt. The students had been waiting all summer for this day. They earned it. This is an example of non-objectification and effectively being an ally. And it involves an appropriate response. It involves... Understanding that it's always about present intellect and present phenomena.

[39:49]

It involves meeting each person in each moment as they are. So in closing, I'd like to offer a poem that was written by an 18 year old. Ask me to describe you for them. We'd quarreled. I laughed. A golden boy, I said. Invited, you entered. Closing the door behind. Carefully, as always. I've not recalled those trappings. Sandals, not shoes. Silver hat and staff. I'd recognize you anywhere and always.

[40:50]

You're wrong, you interrupted. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Who are you to say? And vanished to our old haunt, the Cafe Milan. Ariel. And all his qualities. In what respect, they said. Okay, you want to hear it again? I thought this was an extraordinary poem by an 18-year-old. It's about Ariel. So they asked me to describe you for them. We'd quarreled. I laughed. A golden boy, I said. Invited, you entered, closing the door behind. Carefully, as always.

[41:53]

I'd not recalled those trappings. Sandals, not shoes. Silver hat and staff. I'd recognize you anywhere and always. You're wrong, you interrupted. Wrong, wrong, [...] wrong. Who are you to say? And vanished to our old haunt, the Café Milan. In what respect, they said. for your attention. 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.

[43:02]

For more information, visit sfcc.org and click giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[43:10]

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