Good morning. Can you hear me okay in here? Can you hear me out there in Radioland? Good. So welcome to this first week of summer. Definitely the first day of winter. There's been a lot going on. Two weeks ago, after a year and a half, we had a funeral of Sojin Roshi to mourn his death and to celebrate his life and celebrate his teaching. We had one here in the Zendo and another more elaborate at Green Gulch.

[01:53]

And I think that both of those videos, if you weren't able to see them, both of those videos are available or are going to be available on our website probably in the near future, if they're not already up. I could spend the rest of his talk reflecting on the wonderful spirit of cooperation that we experienced among our Sangha members and the Green Gulch staff and our good friends at the Soto Zen International Center who Most of you and most of the people of Greencoach don't have a lot of experience working with. So this was a great opportunity to work with them and for them to express their real love for Sojin.

[03:01]

But among our various communities, we just worked so smoothly together. to honor our late teacher, and to do that by entering deeply the forms and the sustaining rituals of our Zen tradition, particularly of our Soto Zen tradition. So that was just, it just was quite uplifting. Tonight, Joanne Friedricha Boisevein and Nansan Harold Schopp, friends from the Wind and Clouds Sangha, BCC's affiliate in northern Germany. They're arriving in Berkeley and we will begin a week-long ceremony of

[04:11]

This process, which has been twice postponed because of the pandemic, is sort of the culmination of our relationship and our work together over the last 12 years, which included from their side and from my side, transatlantic journeys to our respective sanghas, Jukai ceremony, priest ordination and shuso empowerment that I did with them at Wind and Clouds with their community. Again, the subject of Dharma transmission and all of the deep and transformative rituals merit an entire talk, which I'm not going to give today.

[05:24]

But just to say, I will say that in the Soto tradition, Dharma transmission is not an end state. It's actually just, Essentially, it's an empowerment that empowers you to, as a full priest, to be able to transmit the precepts and transmit the lineage. And of course, to come back later in this talk, we're all transmitting the precepts all the time. This is just normal. that is offered to people who are seen as sort of holding the practice in a formal way.

[06:30]

And like all rituals, it's simply stepping over another threshold into a new roles, but it's one among countless thresholds that again, all of us are always stepping over. So I'm honored to be able to work with them to do this. So, okay. What do I want to talk about today? I have been struggling over the last week or two to reckon with all of the tangles in my head.

[07:36]

So I wanna start with a short passage from the Jata, Sutta, which is a relatively concise Pali from the Samyutta Nikaya. And I've spoken about this before. It seems to be something I've come back to as a touchstone, particularly in early Buddhism. So in this sutra, the Brahmanjana, Bharavaja, came to Shavasti, where the Buddha was in residence for that, at that point in time, and he asked the Buddha this question. The inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled in a tangle. I ask you, Gautama, who can untangle this tangle?

[08:44]

the inner tangle and the outer tangle. This generation is entangled. I ask you, Gautama, who can untangle this tangle? When I first heard this verse, it just was kind of, it was just sort of stunning to me because it sounded like modern poetry. and yet it's you know it's 2500 years old so it's really from the moment i heard it it's just stuck with me aside from the along with the jata sutta it's also it's the it's the epigraph that began buddha gosa's encyclopedic manual of meditation called the path of pure the path of purification or the Vasudhi Maga. And it's like the entire next thousand are the answer or an attempted answer to this question or multiple answers for how you might, multiple strategies for how you might approach the question.

[10:06]

The Buddha, this sutra and he said a man or woman established in virtue wise developing the mind a person who is ardent and discreet one like this can untangle so we all live as well we know with our inner tangles, our sorrows and our desires, unavoidable gravitational pull of old age, sickness and death. These tangles are just part of our life. It's part of our life in the Saha world, the world to be endured.

[11:13]

which we've been talking about a lot over the last couple of months. And we also live within the outer tangle of the world, which I don't need to . The first repentance verse, We need to return to doing the bodhisattva ceremony soon. But the first repentance verse in that ceremony says it very clearly. It's talking about the same saying, lo and behold, all my ancient tangles, karma, from beginningless greed, hate, and delusion, I now fully avow. so all my which is the uh the the interpenetration of the inner tango and the outer tango and it's beginningless uh it goes back way before one can even imagine

[12:31]

So this inner tangle and this outer tangle is part of the karmic web that we are in. So as we have often heard, we don't own anything. All the things that we have are subject to. going away disappearing and in the in the tradition what it says is that all that we own is our karma that's the only thing you know in in this life and if you If you're engaged with an understanding that the things set in motion in this life continue into other lives, that's karma.

[13:58]

Within this life, there is karma, cause and effect. That's all we own. That's all that goes with us. throughout this life and from one we also hear so we own it at the same time we're taught that it's not exactly mine it's not my karma particularly maybe it's like this sticky Effects and causes that. So called I identify with. As I'm in the. Somewhat endless process. Visional self. So to give a context for some of the tangle that perhaps I should give you a trigger warning that I'm going to bring up some things that some may see as overtly and out of the context of

[15:37]

what some might understand as properly the realm of the dharma. To my way of thinking, the particulars of our lives and our world, the inner tangle and the outer tangle together are the heart of our practice. So like many of you, many of us in our country, all sides. My mind has been entangled in a series of horrific public events and legal rulings that have by the US Supreme Court that have overturned more than 100 years of evolving and seemingly settled cultural norms and laws regarding women's fundamental right to determine their reproductive wishes.

[17:04]

the separation of church and state, on the public carrying of guns. And only this Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to restrict power plant emissions, which cuts the EPA of any authority to address systemic climate change, which is already wreaking havoc in the world. So are we moving step by step towards autocracy? Are we moving towards fascism? Are we moving to see a country that oddly emulates Viktor Orban's Hungary?

[18:08]

Are we moving towards a kind of unholy theocracy that we see in Narendra Modi's violent Hindu fundamentalism or in Burma, the conflict of Buddhist nationalism? frightening notion and military dictatorship. And here we have it in the United States with what seems to be a merging of the evangelical church and political movements attempting and succeeding at the destruction of democratic institutions. And I have said this before, my strong feeling is that when religion and the modern joint forces, the result is often violence, repression, and nothing good comes with this.

[19:23]

And there's a sense in which we're lucky to be practicing Buddhism, which I think it's... I'm never going to wield state power here. So looking at the widespread suffering in the Saha world, I feel angry and frightened and grieving. It's true. As everyone knows, as Sojourner often talked about, That the losses and abuses we experience today are really a pattern of history. This is beginningless greed, hatred, and delusion. One could argue that this moment is the worst, but how many times have any

[20:31]

this is the worst. I'm looking back through, you know, through the last 50 years of occasions of thinking that. But we do have an accelerating and rapidly potential for self-destruction. You know, in the 60s and the 70s, the imminent threat was nuclear annihilation that's still there but the idea of environmental destruction was not even on the radar so it's not good whatever And I understand the seductive power of greed, hatred, and delusion.

[21:41]

How easily we're drawn into that by the difficult circumstances that we experience. And it's true. And again, throughout history, humans have come to the brink of apocalypse and cataclysm. So I want to return to this pivotal question of karma. Restating the point I made from the... Earlier, I just want to give you a source for it. In the Upajatthana Sutta, the Buddha offers... And the fifth is, as I had said, I am the owner of my actions, heir to my actions, born of my actions, related through my actions, and have my actions as my arbitrator.

[22:51]

Whatever I do, good or evil, to that I will be heir. So in the... difficulty that i'm experiencing that i'm sure i share with some of you i am really grateful to be by the voices of our tradition and also particularly by the voices of and actions of many in our community and of uh fellow buddhist teachers speaking clearly about how they see things and what they are doing. So what is to be done? Well, many things. There's much that we can still do as individuals. There's much that we can do the legal and electoral framework.

[23:55]

And there's much we can do in all of these, all of these aspects of our lives to and roll back the hatred and violence that's in the air. And if you want to know more about what I think, just drop me a line or come by for and we can talk about it. But I want to say that if we are the owners of our actions or karma, we're also the owners of the Buddha's way becomes our way.

[25:01]

Along with the breath, the one activity that we can do until our last moment is to practice. And we recognize that not only does our actions, our practice, not only does that bear on our own existence, but it also affects others, all those around us. So in that same sutra, the next paragraph, it says, a disciple of the noble ones considers this. I am not the only one who is the owner of my actions, heir to my actions. born of my actions, related through my actions.

[26:11]

That means to the extent that there are other beings, past, present and future, these beings are also affected and are interdependent on the actions of others like. And so, even in our personal or social despair, we can or we must return to practice. We've listened to some of our elders who have been exploring the same territory. This has been the message of Joanna Macy for many years. to one of her earlier formulations was to work in the field of despair and empowerment, to find that our despair shines a light on our actual...

[27:31]

So with that in mind, we turn to our practice. We rely on our practice. We take refuge in our practice. So I actually almost gave the same talk. So I was rewriting it and then I realized, wait, I talked about this. That's how good my memory is these days. Month ago, I spoke about radical hope as distinct from optimism. And I referenced a really amazing book, Radical Hope, Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation by Jonathan Lear. Social Thought and Philosophy at the University of Chicago. Here's some of what I said last month and I think it bears repeating as the storms of reaction and repression bear down on us.

[28:51]

So at the center of this book is a story that just ripped his attention. It's a story about the last great tribal leader of the pro-Indian tribe. who 1855 to 1932. His name was Plenty Koo. Koo as in strike, C-O-U-P-S. And late in life, he told his story to an Anglo friend, in Montana, an ethnographer and writer named Frank Linderman. And at one point in the story, he tells about the destruction of traditional way of life, which was based on hunting.

[29:57]

It was a nomadic way of life based on hunting and with a warrior ethos. And what Plenty Koo says, when the way, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. Maybe that's the kind of future that we're facing. And he said, after this, nothing happened. This is a really startling expression. After this, nothing happened means that the end of an ancient way of life that defined the culture of this tribe, every value and virtue that had been built into their people's identity as pro, it lost its meaning in the confrontation with

[31:08]

settler colonialism in the West, Buffalo left. There was no ability to be nomadic. There was no warrior culture, no traditional way to express honor or courage or excellence. Andy Koo's story raises this pivotal question. How should one face the possibility that one's way of life and one's culture might collapse? So in his life, when he was 10 years old, Plenty Koo had a dream. And perhaps it was dreams in some cultures, they see them as prophetic.

[32:18]

They see them as for telling something or a message from outside. And we can also see them as a deep sense that one couldn't articulate in any other way for how intuitive sense about what's going on and that might point the way towards the future so he had this dream when he was 10 years old before any of the terrible devastation had happened and in the course of that dream all the buffalo disappeared and all the trees were cut down it was one solitary tree Standing. And underneath that. There sat. A very old man.

[33:20]

And that old man was. Plenty coup. The 10 year old boy. Although. In his dream. And up in the branches. There was a solitary chickadee. this may actually be our world, the world we're coming to. And it will surely, by extension, it will surely be our life, because inevitably, we see as our way of life, will go away. That is part of the message that the Buddha left for us, but it's also we see it all around us.

[34:27]

And some of us, we are now, we are experiencing it. All these things that we valued about ourselves and those we love, we see them ebbing. So up in the tree is . The chickadee person is small bird. You know, it doesn't have the grandeur or strength of an eagle or a hawk or an owl. It seems quite vulnerable. But what it has in the legend and in the dream is a very flexible mind.

[35:34]

The chickadee's strength is in listening. Listening very closely. and never missing an opportunity to learn from others and to learn from the circumstances it inhabits, to learn about its survival, to learn about the continuation of its family. And I think this is what the Buddha means when he says to the Brahman Chatha that only one established in virtue, wide and discreet can untangle this dangle.

[36:42]

Only one who is embedded in this practice, only one who is able to listen closely and watch closely, watch and listen to the inner tangle and the outer tangle is gonna have any chance of untangling the tangle. So it happens that the Crow tribe actually survived and survives. to this day, but it did so with the guidance of Plenty Koo's dream. And it did so in having to make compromises, in having to deal with the loss and devastation

[37:47]

And at the same time, asking, how can we live? How can we continue? Even in the face of this, these terrible circumstances. They depended on the chickadees, or we can depend on the wisdom of our practice. One commentator on this book writes, the dream and the chickadee become a way of redefining virtue of courage. A courage that is rooted in listening instead of war. Wisdom instead of self-certain action. I...

[38:51]

feel often pulled towards self-certain action. This perspective and the perspective of practice invites me to wait and really observe. I like to think that we will survive by virtue of our practice, which has everything to do with listening. Or maybe we will not survive. We may not survive either a rapidly approaching cataclysm and ultimately we surely won't survive the steady loss of aging. But this practice itself can survive so that it may be available to generations to come, just as it actually has been passed along to us by almost a hundred generations of practitioners from the time of Shakyamuni Buddha to today.

[40:23]

to the idea of Dharma transmission, if you will, which is all of our responsibility. We are transmitting the Dharma simply by sitting here on a Saturday morning. 42 of you online. It looks like there's maybe 20, 25 of you in the Zendo. This is our responsibility to listen. Listen to the bird right now. Listen to your inner voices. Listen to the cries of the world. And simply by the act of listening, we enable ourselves which is all that our teachers ever wanted or expected from us so i'm going to stop there and take questions or comments and uh i'll try to look at the

[41:56]

Let me put the participants there, look at your, if you can raise your hand online, if you want to ask a question, and you can raise your line, your hand in here, if you want to. Question or comment. Yes, Ellen. If you could talk a little bit more about how you see the interface between the inner and outer angle. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think The way I understand it is that I don't see a separation. I see, it seems to be there's sort of like a, these are general territories of existence, but there's a place in which they are all enmeshed in each other. What I take, if you want to take it in psychological terms, what I see as my psychology is also determined by what is more widely the reality of the world, you know?

[43:07]

So, you know, probably you, like, grew up at a time when these kind of existential nuclear fears were planted in us. They're there. That's... part of my inner tangle, and it's also part of the outer tangle, which hasn't gone away. So in the sense, that's partly how I see it. And also the other side, and I think this is some of the work that I really draw clarity from the writing of David Lloyd. who's Buddhist philosopher, a Zen teacher as well, who talks about his central concept is the kind of driving force of this sense of lack that we have in ourselves.

[44:10]

And he wrote a wonderful book, the history of Western civilization as a sort of collective and wild effort to somehow fill the sense of lack that we perceive within ourselves and that lack is just you know fundamentally the question is like am i real you know because we dig down to keep trying to find what the core is and you know buddhism tells us well there's not a core interaction So civilization can be seen as a kind of lack project. So that's the two sides. Can I ask a follow up? Sure, sure. So theoretically, if you could untangle the inner tangle, would there be an outer tangle? I think that for me, actually, something I've said for, you know, about our practice, my understanding anyway, is

[45:22]

uh we work from the inside out and the outside in and since they are both completely in uh working on the inner tangle carries with it the responsibility to work on the outer tangle and working on the outer tangle without working on the inner tangle is just kind of spinning your wheels i think And we see this in, you know, all of us have encountered this in realms of social action we've had. You know, it's like I had to get to the, I had to get to a place where I just felt like I was hitting the wall before I realized that there was internal work in order to find some productive way to work on social change. Yeah. I can't see who that is.

[46:28]

Greg. Greg, hi. Hi, thank you. Everything you're talking about, how do we stay connected to joy? Ah, okay, there's another talk. Carol just gave that talk. What I find is a joy arises. You know, that's, and partly I trust it I think I have a kind of anhedonic gene that I carry. So joy is not always so easy for me. But all of the wonderful teachers that I've met online, they're asking, given what I said, how do we call forth joy? Is that a fair? Okay. So anyway, what I've seen is that the practice, it's joy.

[47:33]

I feel joy being with you. I feel grateful and happy and in relationship. And, you know, you meet, you listen to the tapes of Suzuki Roshi. He's laughing. Listen to tapes of... Sochin, he's laughing hard. And to imagine they're laughing. It seems like in maybe inappropriate places, but not really. It's just joy that's bubbling up. And I've seen this in so many of the, so many wonderful teachers that I've had. So I trust that as an artifact of the practice. And I just, I think you can, you just, you need to tune to it. when it's, you know, to see when it's happening in you. But I do trust that as something that is somehow a way of celebrating our life.

[48:38]

The practice is a celebration of life. Yeah. So maybe we can both feel joy and feel disappointment and feel joy and feel fear. right so what what uh greg was saying is so maybe we can feel both joy and sorrow joy and dissatisfaction together you know i think so uh and you know i'm not sure uh the traditional understanding traditional understanding of this is like well there's the joy dharma and there's the grief dharma and there's the despair dharma and somehow they're they are distinct and i just just my i don't feel it that uh i i feel things coming up together uh so

[49:43]

I don't want to give a categorical answer. I can just tell you how it feels to me. There's sadness that comes up with joy. And that can be very rich. And there's joy that comes up with sadness and grief. John. There's a time-honored way, which is your head. So get into your body, become active with your body and engage with your body in a really vigorous way. And that also brings up joy. Yeah. Did you hear that? John was saying there's a time of getting out of your head to engage with your body and engaging with your body has this great potential for joy.

[50:47]

There's a potential for your sense of empowerment in a sense. And it's also true that there are times and places where you may not be able to do that. And what's available to you then is a question I would ask, you know, open question. Is there anyone out there? That's a question. Not seeing any raised hands, but I'm inviting you. I see, okay, now I see Joel. Hi, thank you. This was perfect. I want to raise the question of despair and how we can practice within despair, it seems to me that that is possible.

[51:51]

It's just another condition in which we're practicing that we, okay, I don't have hope and I'm going to practice. And somehow within that, there's some kind of joy. Anyway, so from that perspective, how do you work with this? That perspective, let's say we're in despair. And we're practicing. And that's what we're going to be doing. I mean, how does that work for you, if that makes any sense? I think that I try to remember when there's two approaches. One is what John said. which is actually to do something physical. Yeah. To actually change my mind. But the other thing is also to not isolate.

[52:57]

Really important not to isolate, not to give despair, not to give over to despair, this sense that despair is all. To be with people that one loves. And just to be with somebody that one loves is already to call forth another state. And I wanna, you know, I would broaden that sense of love It's like, be with your sangha. And we have learned enough. I've seen it here to be able to hold ourselves in each other through joy and sorrow.

[54:05]

And I can't tell you how wonderful, how important that is in my life. I feel like it's life-saving. So, thank you. Exactly. Thank you. I think that the despair I'm talking about of just no hope somehow includes, well, I think of it as our nation. I don't think of it at all in terms of our practice. So maybe it's not as complete despair as you're imagining. I mean, so in a sense, that's a beautiful answer, that despair, there's no hope in me right now for my nation. And I have great hope in my friends in the Sangha and in music and learning Dharma.

[55:09]

Well, I want to take other questions, but I want to answer this very briefly, which there's so much that I love in this country. There's much that I revile and that's. But there's so much that I love that I've seen expressed over my lifetime. I never write off these problems with the idea of nation, but I never write off your body that we're a part of. It's just, I work at expanding that body to include other bodies, but there's something, there's a lot that's wonderful. There's a lot that's wonderful right in this room. And this room is not separate from the nation.

[56:16]

So I can leave it there. Thank you. Dear Peter. Thank you, Hozon. You've talked movingly several times in recent memory. And most recently, a little while ago, you talked about it as... In a way, turning your attention to the soundscape that we all exist in and really paying attention to that and exploring it. And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about listening or turning your attention to other fields of awareness. Like I realize it could be a really different way of experiencing your body or your vision and so on. Well, I think it applies to just listening is really easy. You know, tasting, you know, but we're not tasting much as we're sitting here in Zazen, you know, and we have our eyes yet closed, so we're not, you know, but...

[57:35]

we can always open our ears in here, but it's applicable to all the sense fields. That's great. Yeah. Thank you. Ajayan? Thank you very much, Hosan, for a nice talk, and it's very, very effective. So I would like to ask you a few things from your talk. You told that in the talk that we are the owner of our karma and the owner of our practice. And if we are owner of our karma, we are the owner of our practice. So at the same time, we have the karma and the result of the karma sooner or later. So the result of the karma falls upon... whether I am not part of that karma.

[58:36]

So how do we respond to that if I am owner of the karma? If the karma result falls upon me, which doesn't relate to my karma, how should I be part of that karma? Well, I think, first of all, I just want to say something that I heard Sotiroshi say over and over again, that zazen is... non-karmic activity. And that's a whole other discussion. In our life, though, we're always acted upon. And I think that, to me, the virtue of a Buddhist understanding of karma is that it's not something that determines It's something that allows us, whatever we're experiencing, we have a choice about how we want to go forward from that moment and that experience.

[59:44]

And that determines the direction, the next karmic step that we take. And that can be deeper into the swamp or it can be stepping forward into the high ground. So there are things that accrue to us. You know, we should study about karma sometime because there's a lot of stuff that happens that we experience that is not necessarily karmic. That is, there are other causes for it. But how we respond to whatever we experience is... and so what the buddhist idea of karma gives us choice uh and so we should take that up i think thank you uh eji and you may be the last one very much and i appreciate your talk and the topic that you brought up um yeah thank you

[61:02]

One of the things that I've been studying over the past year is American history and the Civil War. And there were, of course, as everyone know, everything's basically broke down between the north and the south, which is the slave states and the free states, as they call them. And I see that same challenge between, you know, the two party system. It's still that same. So the comment of despair was an interesting one because I thought to myself, what would my ancestors, how did my ancestors handle despair being enslaved for hundreds of years? How did they handle despair? And I thought about the way African-American, you know, Pentecostal people worship. You know, you talked about being in the body.

[62:04]

And in those environments, people were very much in their body. I know that I remember hearing talk about that, that whole idea of being inspirited. So, yeah, I just wanted to throw that out and see if you have any comments about any of that. Thank you so much. Thank you. I wish I... understood more deeply how people encountered the kinds of devastation the various kinds of devastation that we've seen historically and to recognize I think that a lot of the roots of what you know to me there's some of the roots of the Roots to the Civil War are also, there's still, there's like a Civil War that's still happening.

[63:08]

The terms may... There was various kinds of progress that we made, but there's some states of mind that just are continuing. And how people, how African-Americans survive uh what the role of spirit is for them is very interesting to me um you know i have a more visceral sense of it in terms of uh lost judaism um and you know i think that you know actually this this book radical hope is talking about it for a particular indigenous community.

[64:13]

And maybe the common thing is to do whatever we goddamn well can do to preserve our fundamental humanity. To remember that we're To remember that we can love even when we're feeling despair. To pay attention to even the small sprouts of joy that can through the sidewalk. And sometimes it's the best we can do even in a terrible circumstance. but it seems to me available. And, you know, I've been in some, I've been privileged to witness some communities in devastation and even there to see these threads of love and even of joy

[65:31]

is is powerful you know and one can ask could i do that i don't i don't know always but uh i think we have to we have to listen real carefully and watch so i think that's where it's late and that's where we need to end and we'll end with the Bodhisattva vows. Mings are numbered.

[66:09]

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