is rarely met with even an hundred thousand million galvas. Having it to see and even to remember and accept, I vow to taste the truth, the Tathagata's words. Well, what a joy to be with you here. I've never been in this sendo, and it's very beautiful, mostly because of the people, but also the very evident care for what we would think of as things that are here, our family of wooden things and metal things. Yeah, beautiful.

[01:01]

So my name is Ben Connolly, and I usually live in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where I'm the guiding teacher of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center. And I'm driving around the country talking about the teachings in this book I wrote called Inside the Flower Garland Sutra. And so I've been traveling for a little over two weeks in my little car, and and stopping and visiting people who practice Dharma and making and experiencing wonderful connections. And I will leave here tomorrow and keep doing that for a while. So I'm very, very grateful for all that opportunity and for this precious opportunity to see some old friends, dear friends, maybe meeting some new people. It's a real... You know, if you would have told me 15 years ago that someday I would be giving a talk at Berkeley Zen Center, I would have thought you were out of your mind. So life is strange and mysterious, and it's a real honor to be a part of your practice this evening.

[02:10]

Yeah, I think I'm going to just start talking about stuff. Sigh. Inside the Flower Garland Sutra. So I'm going to give a little bit of background, that's sort of like historical background, which will not be the bulk of the talk, but it seems like important to say so. The Avatamsaka Sutra is, in English we call it generally the Flower Garland Sutra, or the Huayin Jing is the Chinese name, is a 1,500-year-old Indian text. It's monumental. Mahayana Sutra. that was enormously influential on East Asian Buddhism. And it was translated into Chinese not long after it emerged in India and in China. As I said, it's called the Huayin Jing, and it gave birth to a whole school of Buddhism or a Buddhist movement called Huayin Buddhism, which just means flower garland Buddhism. And...

[03:15]

I think this is a really beautiful and powerful tradition. So that's why I was like, I want to understand this, I want to practice with it, I want to write about it, and I want to help people understand it. So here I am. So some themes of the tradition and the sutra that I will emphasize tonight that are why I think this are celebrating abundance and celebrating the sensual world. Anybody who's done a lot of study of early Buddhism and read Pali Canon texts will be aware that this is not the area of emphasis of early Buddhism. So this is a way in which the Flower Garden Sutra and the Hawaiian tradition took Buddhism to a new place, to new places. So celebrating abundance, celebrating sensual experience, celebrating interdependence, which most people would say is kind of the hallmark of Hawaiian, is the emphasis on interdependence. celebrating social engagement, celebrating the diversity of people, of their needs, and of their practices.

[04:22]

And I came to this tradition because through Thich Nhat Hanh, a very influential Vietnamese teacher, basically Thich Nhat Hanh wanted to sort of understand how to make a contemporary, modern, post-modern, engaged Buddhist movement. And he very clearly looked to two... main bodies of Buddhist tradition to base that movement on. One was Yogachara, about which I've written two books already, and Huayen. And anytime you've heard about looking at a piece of paper and realizing the sun and the moon and the stars entered in the earth and all the hands of the people who made it, that's just straight Huayen teaching that Thich Nhat Hanh is employing. So that's that interdependence lens. Essentially, I think... He laid out a pretty good path, and I'm happy to try and walk on it for a while while I'm alive. So the Flower Garden Sutra is very abundant.

[05:27]

It is abundant in words. As some of you may know, it's very good if you wanted to stop a Mack truck from moving or you wanted to work on your... muscles it's good so it's about 1400 pages small print large volume in English language and I was teaching a group and there was a Chinese Buddhist scholar there who said it's 1 million Chinese characters who counted those so anyway that's basically like a million words and just to give you a sense of scale this book that I wrote is 40,000 words so it's about 25 times longer so So as a person who wanted to write about this tradition, I was like, well, it's hopeless, so I don't have to thank God. And then something happened, which is I was at a talk by a great religion professor named Dr. Jen Park, who's at American University. She was visiting Minnesota to give a lecture, and afterwards it was a great talk.

[06:31]

And I was like, geez, I'm just, you know, I would really like to share Hawaiian and the flower garland tradition, but it's just too massive. The texts are too expansive. The Hawaiian texts themselves, aside from the sutra, are like really long and sort of convoluted. And I just, I can't, I don't know how to do that. And she said, oh, well, I know what you should do. You should just go find Wee Song's Ocean Seal Chart from Korea. It's 30 lines of verse, and it's a compact summation of the whole tradition. And she was correct. So my advice is talk to people if you want to practice. So anyway, I found this text, which has various names, but I'll refer to it as the Ocean Seal Chart, which is very influential in Korea. And as I said, it's 30 lines, seven Chinese characters in each line. So I was like, I think I could write a book based on 210 Chinese characters. A million sounds hard. but I can manage with 210. So this book is a new translation and commentary, one chapter per line of this 30-line text.

[07:37]

And as I said, the idea of the text is to be like a daily devotional chanting text which enables one to access the breadth of the whole Hawaiian flower garland tradition. So it's like they made it really small and then I made it a little bigger. Like that. Okay, so that's a little background. So now let's talk about some themes. Abundance, first theme. In the ocean seal chart, we encounter these lines. The abundant manifestations of wish fulfillment are inconceivable. This rain of jewels benefits all life, filling all space. All beings benefit according to their capacities. So I'd just like to invite people to recall that I believe you have seen rain. So you can picture rain. The Flower Ground Sutra is very visual. The teaching is done visually.

[08:39]

So this is rain. Now just imagine every raindrop is a jewel. Like a diamond or a sapphire or a ruby or a... I don't know much about jewels. Emerald! Just the entire... feel the vision and all the air filled with glittering, unbelievably incomprehensible amounts of preciousness and beauty. And this tradition is saying that's how the world is. Or, maybe more accurately, it might be useful for you to view the world in this way. So this theme of abundance that runs throughout the tradition is a medicine in two particular ways. The first one is that the idea is to see the world as so abundant that we wouldn't have any interest or impulse to try and hold on to anything because it's so abundant, why bother? It's fine. And then, instead of trying to hold on to things, our energy can be expended providing for the actual material needs of the people we are with.

[09:46]

So, this is the... one of the two main ways this abundance is a medicine. The second one is that Korean commentators generally, the ones I encountered, they all said, what do the rain of jewels represent? It says the jewels represent skillful means. So skillful means, what does that mean? Skillful means means the capacity of a sentient being to do something that is effective for liberation from suffering for everyone right now. That's what skillful means, ultimately means. The basic idea of Buddhism, the central premise, is that if there's consciousness, there's the capacity to engage in liberation. That's the four noble truths that you're suffering, and there's a path. And it's not like, well, you can't do mindfulness right now, or you can't do right speech right now. It's always possible to practice.

[10:50]

everyone, every sentient being always has the capacity to engage in liberation right now. So that means if we're just going to be super limited about it and just be like, really, we're going to limit, only human beings are going to count. That means right now, something like seven or eight billion people have the capacity to do something conducive to liberation for everyone and everything right now. And that's always true. That's been true since before you were born. It will be true after you die. It's going to be true your whole life. That, in my opinion, absolutely dwarfs the image of a reign of jewels. The reign of jewels is completely insufficient to convey how amazing it is that I get to live in a world where billions and billions of people always can do something conducive to liberation for everyone and everything. So these are the two main frames of or types of medicine this abundance thing provides.

[11:51]

So I'm going to read a little bit from this book. This teaching is to evoke a sense of abundance. It is to cut through anxiety, alienation, and clinging. Early Buddhist texts focus on giving things up so we can be free of our clinging. Hawaiian emphasizes seeing a world so replete with riches that we feel none. Hawaiian teachers understand that these abundant manifestations require our actual giving. In his commentary on this line, Pa Byung writes, it may be compared to the wish-fulfilling gem possessed by a wheel-turning king. If it is kept in the royal treasury, it does not rain down all manner of treasures. In a polycanon text, a king gets wise counsel on how to deal with bandits overrunning the realm.

[12:56]

His advisor tells him that punishment and violence will not end the epidemic of crime. But, and here I quote the polycanon, quote, with this plan, you can completely eliminate the plague of crime. To those in the kingdom who are engaged in cultivating crops and raising cattle, Let your majesty distribute grain and fodder. To those in trade, give capital. To those in government service, assign proper living wages. Then those people, being intent on their occupations, will not harm the kingdom. Your majesty's revenues will be great. The land will be tranquil and not be beset by thieves. And the people, with joy in their hearts, playing with their children, will dwell in open houses." So you may have encountered the idea in contemporary discourse that it is ineffective to try and end crime using state violence. And that actually the effective means to end crime will be to provide people the material needs that they need to thrive.

[14:01]

And then this is the point where I say, am I talking about politics or am I just quoting the polycanon? So anyway... This idea has a utility, I think. And this theme of abundance, I've been around it quite a bit when I was very involved in a movement led by indigenous women to oppose the construction of a pipeline underneath the Mississippi River and through Anishinaabe land in northern Minnesota. One of the themes that was constantly evoked was abundance. To see that the world is abundant so we don't need to extract so much from it out of our desperate need to try and hold on. To trust its abundance. And likewise, one of my... Candidate for mayor who I really love in Minneapolis who lost. In his... Last time I saw him speak, he ended his speech by just saying, this is a city with enormous abundance.

[15:06]

We clearly have the material resources we need to house everyone and to feed everyone, and everyone knows it. And we also have an enormous abundance of social networks and care and creativity that are here. So let's celebrate it and enjoy it and acknowledge it and work from that position instead of from this place of scarcity. And... This was all very vivid to me already because I've been around these kind of thoughts for a long time, and the Flower Garland Sutra really rings true to me. But nothing could possibly have made this more clear to me than living in Minneapolis in the last several months. So I will talk about various things, but I'm just going to give a very narrow example of one small thing that I happen to be a part of, of many other things people did recently. So in early December, a friend of mine said... Well, I want to start a new mutual aid network because I know that ICE was pretty brutal in LA and Chicago and they're planning to come here.

[16:08]

So we know that there'll be people who are immigrants who are, it's not safe for them to leave home. So we're just going to provide a very simple thing, a Google form so people can sign up if they want people to deliver groceries to their home and a Google form so people can sign up to deliver the groceries. And so that's called Neighbors Helping Neighbors. It was nice and like... like a week or two later, we were sitting at a meeting and one of the people involved was like, well, we have like 40 or 50 people. I can't even manage this. We need to get someone just to manage the requests and start a little database to run this. Well, a couple months later, we had like 3,000 or 4,000 people and hundreds of requests. And it wasn't just delivering food. It was driving people to work. It was accompanying people to court. It was doing translation services. And we also realized people were struggling to pay their rent. So we started a rent release fund, and we raised $5.7 million. And that all happened in a span of like three months. And that's not Minneapolis. That's my neighborhood. So what happens?

[17:12]

When people just say, we have what we need to take care of each other. Amazing things that I never would have imagined. Okay, so I'm going to move on to another topic here. Interdependence. So most people would say this is the hallmark of Hawaiian and the flower garland tradition. It's like every possible way you could try and help someone see how things depend on each other, every permutation of those dependencies, vast, expansive webs of dependencies. It's quite wonderful. Anyway, I will quote you a little bit from the Ocean Seal Chart, which is the text this book is a commentary on. It says, Within one is all, within many is one, One is all, the many are one. Within one mote of dust is contained the ten directions, and within each phenomena it is also thus. Immeasurable distant eons are one moment of mind, and one moment of mind is immeasurable eons.

[18:17]

So here the emphasis is on saying because the web of dependency is so complete, that means the entire universe and everything in it is contained within each particular thing because it can't be separated from the dependencies that makes it. And likewise, the entire universe can only possible exist as it is expressed in each particular exact thing. So that means every possible thing is utterly precious. And this particular emphasis has had a huge impact on Soto's end, certainly, where there's so much emphasis on taking care of particular things. I was not that interested in taking care of individual stitches before I came to Soto Zen, but I got a lot of instruction about how to care about every single stitch. And it changed my life. Or how to ring a bell just so. Someone was telling me about, like, Mel Weitzman spending 45 minutes teaching them how to ring a bell.

[19:21]

And that... That is an expression of the sense that everything and each particular thing matters because of its complete beingness of the world. So I think I'll read a little bit on this subject. When Wiesong is the Korean monk who is the author of the ocean seal chart, so it was about 1,500 years ago, when Wiesong traveled to China for the Dharma, he met a woman named Sonmyo who fell in love with him. He told her that his vow of celibacy meant he could not requite her love, and her order to protect him on his path transformed her into a dragon. After years of caring for him on his travels, she became a great stone hovering over invaders outside one of the first temples he founded.

[20:25]

She is perched there now, still, a great stone guardian overlooking the temple of the floating stone, Bukseoksa, near Yongju City in Korea. The times of myth, of history, and of the present can collapse in a good story. Trauma, too, can make the interpenetration of times vivid. Yesterday, someone described being overwhelmed by emotions during an argument with a friend. Suddenly, they had the jarring experience of being a three-year-old child feeling the same rage, the same need to hold someone at bay that was showing up in their present life. This collapsing of time and identity rang true to my own experience when I was receiving treatment for post-traumatic stress. Somehow, I could totally be aware of my own bodily sensations, my own present moment sensory environment, my own agency and adulthood, and also absolutely be the terrified child consumed by shame, terror, and rage, who in linear time had grown up 30 years ago.

[21:33]

Teachings on karma have much in common with contemporary theories of trauma. So does the Hawaiian emphasis on the interpenetration of past, present, and future. Scientific data show the deep relationship between a child struggling to find food and safety in an impoverished neighborhood and an adult being pushed into a prison cell. Understanding karma can help us know the importance of our actions. Knowing interdependence opens up space for compassion and shows that we can create conditions for freedom for everyone. And, you know, Hawaiian has so many, it's just replete with different ways of trying to help us see interdependence, analytical meditations and all kinds of metaphors, Indra's net, many things.

[22:36]

But my favorite is Soto Zen Shikantasa practice. It's so dead simple, you know. If your mind is dividing the world up and making it appear like it's a bunch of separate things, you can just stop and just let your mind not do that for a minute. And it's very nice to take a break from dividing the world up. And the capacity to see what is here as whole and dependent and relational is not something we have to make happen. It's just here for us. Okay, so now I'm going to move on to another theme, particularity and activity. Yeah, so this is pretty much a segue. So we have this emphasis in Huayin on what you're doing, how you're doing it, and the thing you're working with.

[23:38]

So like a great Huayin koan is, I can't remember who the teacher is. So the student asks the teacher, what is Buddha? And the teacher says three pounds of flax. It's this immediate thing. Oftentimes I'll talk, the term they use for things, if we translate it from the Chinese to English, you could also call it like affairs. So it's like how things are in this relational context is the subject of interest. And that might seem like obvious, but if you look at early... Buddhism, it's not the area of emphasis. There's an enormous emphasis in early Buddhism on investigating the processes of consciousness that produce the way we perceive the world. Looking, is there desire present? Is there aversion present? Is there a concentrated mind present? Is there an unconcentrated mind present? These kind of things. So this Hawaiian turns the lens outward at what we would normally think of the material, although ultimately it's seamless, I think. So I think I'll read a little bit on this subject.

[24:43]

Yes. So each chapter of this book is a commentary on one line. So this is a commentary on the line, within one is all, within many is one. If you want to sum up Huayan teachings in a single line, this is as good as it gets. The idea that each thing contains everything and everything is holding each thing pervades the tradition. The implications are vast. When I interviewed folks for an article about Tomoe Katagiri, who was central in transmitting the practice of hand-sewing Zen religious garments to North America, her student Andrea Martin said, Tomoisan continually showed that everything matters. If the whole world is here in this cup of tea, this stitch, or this bao, don't you want to care for it? The Huayan master Jian wrote, Because in the Huayan teaching, phenomena are the teaching, whatever phenomena are brought up, inexhaustible teachings are included.

[25:56]

End quote. Because everything is precious, discernment about how to care for things is precious. Once Tomoe-san was carefully making us a cup of tea. Apropos of something we've been talking about a moment before, I began to quote a line from the Metta Sutra. She put down the tea things and faced me with her whole being relaxed, poised, and alert. When the sutra quote was over, she returned to making tea. In Wiesang's commentary on the poem, he repeatedly refers to the teaching of the ten coins. This is a common Huayan metaphor. If you have ten coins, any one of them completely contains all ten. For if you remove that one, there is no ten. Within the ten coins, each one is completely contained in the ten, for if the ten were gone, so too would be the one. More subtly, if part of the ten were gone... the one would no longer be the exact same one it was. It wouldn't be the one that is thus, in this particular relational context.

[27:03]

If a bowl of soup costs ten coins, the one as part of ten coins is sufficient. As part of nine, it is not. It is practical for people to agree that one coin always has the same value as one coin, but this is a limited view. A $50 parking ticket means something very different to someone who is hungry and poor than it does to somebody with thousands, millions, or billions of dollars in the bank. The power of one coin to buy a cup of tea or ten coins to buy a bowl of soup contains the entire universe, which shows up in the form of mutual agreement between people about the value of a piece of metal. Let us practice looking at money not just in terms of what we have and what we can get, but how this money impacts the whole and hence particular individuals within that whole. Our shared agreements about money often hide the fact that within the whole of our economy, many individual people work all day for just enough money to live beneath a freeway overpass.

[28:08]

These shared agreements can make it seem that someone who doesn't have a job deserves to live under a freeway overpass. Seeing that one is all, we can do better. So Hannah Arndt is a philosopher. She was a Jewish woman who escaped Germany in the late 30s and emigrated, or Europe in the late 30s and emigrated to the United States in order to avoid the horrors of the Holocaust. And she spent a lot of, she did many things, but one of the things she did is she wrote quite a bit about how authoritarianism comes to be and how it can be opposed or countered. And I find this topic really interesting lately. So she once wrote, even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness.

[29:11]

Even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness. And if you would have just quoted that line to me and said it was from the Flower Garland Sutra or a Hawaiian text, I would say, oh yeah, certainly, I knew that. But it is not. It's Hannah Arndt. And she's saying many things, but one of the main reasons she wants to point out that when it comes to authoritarianism, there's a tendency to be like, oh, there's this authoritarian and their little group, and they're evil and terrible, and we need to get rid of them, and that will be great. But her point is that authoritarianism exists based on millions and millions of acts of active support of the authoritarian or silent complicity with what the authoritarian is doing. And this is basically just deeply akin to the whole idea of how karma works. We're part of a massive collective situation that produces suffering that's patterned and we can either go against the stream or we can go along with it. Are we going to live by vow or are we going to live out of conditioning?

[30:15]

So I found this very interesting because for the last six months I've been part of a crew providing non-cooperation trainings. My wife... says, I don't need to go to the training, I'm already an expert in not cooperating. If only she were here. She'd probably be yelling from the back. So, anyway, the idea is how to not cooperate with authoritarianism, because the claim of this training is that we are existing in a time that social scientists call authoritarian breakthrough, where people with an authoritarian impulse are making a substantial change to the way the country works in order to bring in their new system. Anyway, an interesting thing about this training is it's designed by social scientists who have studied, I was talking to other people about this earlier, they've studied movements that successfully opposed authoritarianism in the last hundred years and they've determined like these are things that consistently have been effective.

[31:19]

And one of the main points they have is Don't focus on just going and getting this person at the top. You need to dismantle all the things that support the authoritarian. It's the exact same language that Hannah Art uses, and it's also the same language that Hawaiian gives us about how the universe works and how systems of suffering work. We are always part of the thing, and no one can be left out of having agency in the possibility of liberation, back to the original point about abundance. So... We can do something. Wonderful. So one beautiful thing that I've seen done that has to do with taking care of things that comes to mind is after George Floyd was murdered, which happened pretty near the way, about a couple miles from where I live, which is also less than two miles from where Alex Breddy and Renee Good were killed. So they were all killed within about a mile and a half of each other. And after George Floyd was murdered, there was...

[32:21]

you know, a lot of rage, and the third precinct where the officers were based who killed him, there was just a site of a massive encountment of enraged people. It was a really stressful environment, and eventually the third precinct was burned down four or five days later. So it was really intense. And then at George Floyd's, what we now call George Floyd Square, 38th and Chicago, where he was killed, it was immediately within hours a site of spirituality, vigil, community building, and care and it still is so they started there's a morning meeting at 38th in Chicago at George Floyd Square that started every day and it still happens every day so you cruise by there's like five degrees below zero and you're driving a car and you look over at nine o'clock in the morning there's a bunch of people sitting outside talking about how to do community and real public safety and One element, so many elements of amazing community building happened there, but one is that a group of people, and I'll particularly cite one person who took a lot of leadership named Janelle Austin.

[33:27]

She realized that immediately after the murder, people started bringing things to the site. So flowers, religious icons, teddy bears, poems, works of art. I don't even know, just stuff. Just, you know... mountains of stuff filling the space. And she was just like, everyone who brought something here did it for a reason and it all matters. And we're going to treat every single thing that's brought to the square as if it matters. And we're going to, as a community, get people together and we're going to curate this space. We're going to take care of them. We're going to arrange them in a way that's beautiful. When we get rid of them, we're going to get rid of them in a way that's respectful or we're going to archive them. And she's been doing that for a long time and like received honors at the Smithsonian for it, stuff like that, or I don't know, maybe the National Library. Really amazing person. But the point being, everything matters.

[34:29]

And it was a particular thing. You can only make everything matter with a particular thing. None of us has the capacity as a body or a mind to go and do everything. She found something and she said, all of these things matter and they will all be cared for. And it's really beautiful. I'll be like leading meditation over there or something and someone will just drive up with a truck and unload beautiful fresh plants and bring them and lay them out. The city doesn't do diddly except for getting our face. It's people. Just people doing beautiful things together. So, my last theme I want to talk about here is, it's all sort of like flowing into each other, in case you haven't picked up on that. Social engagement, diversity of people, needs, and practices. And here, I will tell you that the Flower Garden Sutra, in all its massive, effulgent, beautiful, psychedelic, mind-boggling imagery, was originally compiled from many other texts. So, lots of other... texts were brought together into this one.

[35:32]

And three of those were already very influential before they were in the Avatamsaka, and sometimes are viewed as their own standalone texts. Those are the Purifying Practices Sutra, which actually, if you do the morning service and you say, I take refuge in Buddha, may all living beings embody the great way resolving to awaken, something like that, maybe a slightly different translation. Those refuge vows are actually from the Purifying Practices Sutra of the Avatamsaka Sutra. So, Zen centers. There are many pieces of liturgical texts that are directly from the sutra that are in the liturgy in standard Soto Zen. But I'm not dwelling on that. One is all. Anyway, so Purifying Praxis Sutra, 10 Stages Sutra, which is super influential, but I don't like stages, so I never talk about it. And then the Gandapiva, and that's the one I'm going to talk about now. The Gandhav Yuha Sutra, or Entry into the Realm of Reality Sutra, is the third of the key standalone sutras that were incorporated into the Avatamsaka. It constitutes the final and longest chapter of the sutra.

[36:34]

It tells the story of a young man, Sudhana, who commits his life to liberation from suffering for everyone and everything, and of his long and wondrous pilgrimage on the path. He meets with 53 teachers. each of whom shows him a staggering level of spiritual attainment and then ends their meeting by saying they can't possibly know the way to liberation, and each one sends him on to visit another teacher to keep practicing. Eggers, queens, nuns, rich men, mathematicians, sailors, perfumers... Doctors, musicians, goddesses, bark-clad outcasts, folks who change genders, people dressed in rags, those bedecked in jewels, a prince who almost loses his life working to free all the prisoners in his land, and great bodhisattvas, including Avalokiteshvara, Majushri, and Samanta Bhadra. They teach in myriad ways, all different. Sound went out.

[37:43]

Rolling. That's like back in the musician days. Rolling. They teach in myriad ways, all different and appropriate to themselves and those they meet. They teach by feeding people through physical touch, by making beautiful scents and palaces, by writing. by teaching meditation, by expounding the Dharma, by revealing suffering, and by guiding people through storms. This sutra provides inspiration for those of us looking to create multicultural, engaged... So, Sudhana's trip is all about relationships. I mean, arguably... Even the Buddha's most philosophical discourse in the Pali canon is contained in a dialogue. So dialogue is so central to the whole idea of how practice and dharma occurs that you can almost miss it because it's so pervasive.

[38:52]

It's like water. But it's really emphasized in the Gandabuha to a high level. There's so much of this sense of the deep encounter between distinct and particular people. And this, it just rings true to how I experience practice and what I've found to be most liberative about practice. So, you know, about 10 years ago, when Jamar Clark was killed in Minneapolis by police officers, we had our first Black Lives Matter occupation at the 4th Precinct. And I'd been interested in the movement, was kind of tracking what was going on. I'd been thinking about whether I would show up and how. And then the police started brutalizing the people at the encampment. And so I got my Oquesa and I went there. And I just said, I'm going to now be there and I will be nonviolent because there is violence. And that basic gesture of looking to where there is violence and meeting with nonviolence, I think is central to the whole idea of what practice is.

[39:59]

Sometimes it's a little more subtle. Like I'm just sitting here and I'm like, why are you so, why is your mind so busy? And I'm like, okay, that's violent. Can we just back off a little bit? But this was a little bit more heated. But the other thing that happened was I realized, I got there, it's like, this is just about being with people. What this is, now that I am here, what this is about is being with people and hearing from them, understanding what's going on from them, listening, bearing witness. And so, yeah, I did that sort of thing. I have many similar things to that. over the years. And then it's like, oh, someone's like, I see you at these things. You want to come to a meeting? Lucky me. Meetings. We all dream of more. So then I go to meetings. I'm like, now I got invited to the meeting with the clergy who do all that cool justice stuff. We're really going to get stuff done. And I found out we just sit around and talk. What is going on?

[41:00]

I couldn't believe it. I was like, I'm pretty sure we came to an hour and a half long meeting and the first hour was the check-ins. What are we even doing? We're doing practice. It's about relationships. It's about loving and caring and trusting each other. Because without that, when things get really hot, you're in trouble. There are situations where it's dangerous. And if you know people you can trust... You feel like you can trust them and invite your friends to show up in those places. So anyway, that has been really ongoing work. And this is kind of my pivot to January. Minnesota, I just want to, now I'm talking about more like diversity. of people, needs, and practices. I already had a pretty vivid sense of this. I've just seen people do amazing and beautiful things all different.

[42:00]

I know people who live in monasteries, and it's like, wonderful. Thank you. And I know people who are scholars of Buddhism, and they never meditate. I don't know if they must talk to somebody, but they can cite these unbounded amounts of text. And it's like, thank you. The only reason I can possibly write this book is people doing that. And then there are people who are just like, I just take care of my grandchildren. Thank you. Grandchildren need to be, I know this looks so vivid to me. I can go on and on, but even more so just recently. So as you probably know, like in Minneapolis, what you might not know is like when they went to LA and Chicago and then they came to Minneapolis, the ratio of ice agents they brought was like 20 to one higher when they came to Minneapolis. I don't think most people know that. It was enormously higher. We're a small city, and they brought way more people, and their strategy was made more violent and brutal. And so people really quickly saw this was happening, and we had relationships with people in Chicago, and the people in Chicago were like, hey, we set up these networks so people could go and document what was happening.

[43:12]

And so we got some help through relationships, and within like days of the first... onslaught of the violence that they brought. People were, hundreds and then thousands of people were out available on a moment's notice to show up when violence was occurring to document it with their phones. And you had to be really fast because the strategy they were employing was to get in and out in like five or six minutes. So I know people who witnessed, I swarm in, jump out, take someone out of a car and drive away. And the car that the person was in was still rolling down the street. And bystanders had to come in and put it in park. Other times people saw, take people out of a car and run away within just three or four minutes and there were children in the car. So like, people had to be so committed to being available and bearing witness in that way. And if you know anything about this, it's only because of that enormous amount of spontaneous willingness.

[44:14]

Uh... that was a drop in the bucket of what was happening in response to this violence. Because simultaneously, we had this whole mutual aid networks of people. So many people, I didn't think they were even paying attention. They were like, well, I have been driving my neighbor to work for two months, taking food to people, lots of people who are quite elderly who are just out patrolling outside of schools because there was harassment at schools. Jeez, the singing resistance, that was really good. Go out in the street and just sing about how we love each other and want to be together. That's wonderful. One time, I wasn't at this one, they went outside of the hotel that was housing a bunch of ice people and they just sang their little song, It's Okay to Change Your Mind. You can join us anytime. So nice. And we set up a... a group where every night we would provide meditation and spiritual care for people who were doing the rapid response work because it was very traumatic.

[45:20]

You know, as you know, we probably know a couple of people were murdered by federal agents and many other people were brutalized with chemical agents, physically beaten, including one of my family members. And so, so much care, spiritual care, food care, documenting care, like... I can't even believe, like I had no idea human beings could be so amazing and beautiful. And I already knew they were amazing and beautiful. And they're still amazing and beautiful. So, like the flower girl and spiritual people, like it's so over the top. And it is, as a piece of literature, it's pretty over the top. It's true. But the worldview it presents in this theme that we do have the capacity together always to do... And to see the world through that lens, to me, it's motivating and it's joyful.

[46:20]

And so that's why I've been wandering around the country talking about it. And I appreciate you all listening. So thank you all very much. And, yeah, we've got time for... Other voices. So I'll say a couple things about other voices. Reflections are welcome. I think there are quite a few people. So reflections that are short are the optimum. And questions are welcome. And any kind of question is welcome. I do not claim to be able to answer any kind of question. But the point being that some people have very philosophical concerns and some people have just more immediate concerns. familial concerns or whatever. So just, you know, whatever is important to you is the subject at hand, I would say. And I would love to be in dialogue with you. Go ahead. Are you just bowing to respond to that? Okay. I love bowing.

[47:23]

And I think people online can just talk if you want to. It looks like we're passing a mic in here. So we got one in the room and then I think... Okay, I'll go to online person next. How about that? Okay. Here we go. Now, the microphone, am I taking care of the microphone or is the microphone taking care of me? Correct. Yeah, what's your answer? Correct. Okay. If that's so, that's an interweb of interrelationship between things and sentient beings? In sentient beings, it seems like when you open up to the things you're taking care of us, as much as we're taking care of things, when you're traveling around in your car, your car is carrying you. Okay, and to be grateful to the car, and to realize the car, and my sentience and the sentience of the car, where's the dividing line?

[48:31]

It's a wonderful question. I think the divining line is only a mental event. So, yeah, I mean, I will generally, in this, because, you know, you've got limited time to focus on, we'll say, like, Huayin is emphasizing taking care of the material, but in Huayin, it's not actually material, because Huayin is a mind-only tradition, which basically means that as a sentient being, you don't have access to anything outside of your sentience. So the things you think are objects, objects are not. And the thing you think is a thing observing objects is also not that. So it's only intimacy. But for the purpose of sort of like kind of accessing our conventional worldview, it may be useful to think of them as objects. Thank you, microphone. Thank you, microphone. Oh, someone was online. Let's come back over here. I think I heard that. Let's go online.

[49:33]

Thank you. Earlier you had said something that was great, and I was trying to write it down, but you spoke quickly. And I wonder if you could touch on it again. You said, because the web of dependency is so complete, the entire universe is contained within every single thing. And I wonder if you could touch on that again, because there is so much packed into that, and I want to make sure I get it all. Yeah, let's see. There's so many ways to talk about this. I'm going to get a little bit technical, which may not really be what you're looking for, but that's okay. In many Buddhist systems of causality, they'll have different... You have an approximate cause, which is the most immediate thing that causes the thing. And then you have attendant causes, which are a little less immediate. And they have all these categories for things that matter more or less. And then at some point it sort of fades out and there's stuff that isn't considered as part of the causal web.

[50:41]

In Huayen they say every possible type of relationship is always part of the causal web. So there's one place where it says like we include the distant in the near. So that is to say like for this moment of consciousness to be occurring we need the moon and we need the sun. This is not a language you see a lot in early Buddhist texts. But in Hawaii, you see it a lot. We need the entire building for this to be like this for me. I need you to be like you are for me to be like me. I need actually all of your ancestors to be what they were like for me to be. And I need all my ancestors and their ancestors and all the bugs. And we've landed back again with Thich Nhat Hanh. So anyway, because all that dependency cannot be removed, none of it can be removed, That means the whole is always completely contained within each part because it's only our ideas of separation that make it seem like it is not.

[51:46]

So I don't know. I think that's what I'm going to do with your question for now. So thank you. Go ahead. Thank you so much, Ben. This was very inspiring. And I particularly appreciate your way of connecting an ancient sutra from hundreds and hundreds of years ago with what has been going on in Minneapolis and making them part of the same world. And I had a question about your sangha in Minneapolis and how all the work that you and other people in your sangha and the people around you all over Minneapolis, but particularly your sangha, opening itself up to people and welcoming workers, EMTs, etc. I'm wondering how did all of that affect the sangha and the relationships in the sangha and how did it, if it did, did it change the feelings in the sangha about being a sangha and is there still some, now that the

[53:03]

great crisis part is over, is there still some continuation of a new feeling in the sangha? Yeah, it's interesting. I have to admit, sadly, this isn't really all that admirable. People are really proud. You hear a lot of people just like, I'm proud to be from Minneapolis. And I mean, that's good. I don't know how good pride. Yeah, I think it's... We have six afflictions. Desire, aversion, delusion, pride, wrong view, and doubt. So... Anyway, I'll just be honest. But it's beautiful. People are like, we survived this and we cared for each other. So it's wonderful. I don't feel like the Sangha itself has been enormously transformed. I do think people are more... Witnessing the kind of violence the federal government brought to our community has changed people's view of what the world is like. You know, violence... federal violence against U.S.

[54:05]

citizens has been a part of the origin of the country all along, and still is pervasively, but the level of it was pretty extreme. So I think people are sort of like, wow, this is kind of new. I would say, you know, it's like a lot of people. So for some people, they really, they come to our Zen Center because they're just like, things are, I have... enough difficulty and stress in my life. I just need to come here and be quiet. I need to be with some people who are kind and have good values. There was no way we were not going to talk about this stuff during Dharma Talks, because it would have been, frankly, bizarre. Like, it was so extreme. So, you know, we felt together in that. And then there are people in the community who are very actively engaged in things like mutual aid, We had some people who got very involved in fundraising. That $5.7 million, a lot of it is due to the efforts of some of the members of our community who just took all their time off to focus on fundraising for rent relief.

[55:13]

And we had people on ICE Patrol. So people were doing all different kinds of things. I think the main thing I want to say is we're all different. And we... I think we did a pretty good job of making room for us to be different and for our needs to be different and the way we practice to be different and to actually have that room make us more close. But there are probably some people who are a little more energized, also exhausted. In Minneapolis in general, there's this weird combination of energized, exhausted, and traumatized that's will change to sort out. Well, thank you. And it sounds like it was an opportunity for people to just realize, as you said, how important it is for each person to be as different as they were. I mean, to be themselves. And in that way, you could all do things together. Yeah, I hope people feel that way.

[56:15]

That's the way I feel it. So, yeah. Linda. Thank you. The two topics that you mentioned at the very beginning that you thought that avatamska is a celebration of abundance and a celebration of sensual world. I have questions. Both of those. I only get one question, so I'm going to go on to the abundance question. You told a story from the Pali Suttas about a king whose advisor told him, you know, just... I mean, if we're so... But first you set the scene by showing a tremendous abundance, jewels falling everywhere and so on. So this king just had to kind of get that. Oh, and then... Well, if there are so many people that were struggling and didn't have enough to eat and didn't have enough to clothe their children,

[57:22]

until a king made up his mind. Maybe there's a problem about saying it's a world of abundance. Maybe it works with the abundance. There's so many people who don't have anything. Whoa. So then I thought, well, in that story, the model is that the king has to give stuff. So maybe the implication in modern terms is dismantle capitalism. I'm taking this exit. But really, the story tells us that the king is like a top-down benevolence of billionaires. That doesn't sound really useful to me. Well, I think the thing is that's a conversation between a king and his advisor. So everything in this tradition is relational. So you could say, wouldn't it be better if the advisor said, don't be a king? You could say that. And that's reasonable.

[58:24]

Actually, I would say specifically, generally Buddhist texts don't dismantle the inherent power systems in which they exist. Like the Buddhist teachings on social engagement generally don't radically counter those social systems. He dismantled caste system, the Sangha, but does not generally challenge it a great deal outside. It only challenges Brahmins a lot. So... their spiritual authority. Anyway, so that's a very reasonable critique of the tradition. But I will say, if you have billions, good advice is to give them up. Billions. If you're the king, it's pretty good advice to give the stuff away. And the implication then for the rest of us is also to realize we can, instead of thinking from a scarcity mindset, realize that there is enormous abundance here and operate from that, and it changes how we hold on to things. Now, it's only one kind of medicine. The other particular medicine for clinging in Buddhism are one, renunciation, which is to actively give things up so we don't cling, and two, emptiness, to realize we can't actually hold on to anything.

[59:37]

But this is a different lens that I just think I've seen it expressed and very effectively in many social contexts lately about just saying, What if we like trust what is here rather than trying to desperately get something else? So I found it to be a medicine which can be helpful, but it's just a medicine which can be helpful. It's not the truth, which is not my purview. I'm done even though I'm not done. Right on. Cool. Thanks so much. Your talk, your presence, your stories, good medicine. I was reticent to say anything because in light of what you've been engaged in, what I'm engaged in feels very, very small. But then, of course, it's all. And as you were talking, what I realize I'm landing on is something about...

[60:43]

how to engage as abundance, the abundance of worldviews. The context that I'm dealing with is, so I work as a hospice chaplain in what had been and, well, remains one of the last local nonprofit hospices where there are like 54 profit hospices. But recently in the last year affiliated, quote, affiliated with a national organization that's kind of destroying it. because the hospice is struggling to survive in that field. And so, interestingly though, about a year and a half before that, before I joined, the folks working formed a union. And it's been basically almost three years, and we're still not at a contract, so we have these bargaining. And one thing leads to another, and now I'm on the bargaining committee for a while.

[61:45]

And, you know, it's really, really, really hard. We had a one-day strike, I don't know, about six months ago. That was fabulous because it really, it was like a party in the end. And people were completely, you know, like you were talking about, unfamiliar with how joyful it could be. People brought their kids and food and music. And, you know, we had our struggles and all this. We had press come, you know, the whole thing. But the next day, it sort of felt like, well, nothing changed. But what changed was morale. And it changed for a time. And then, you know, so now we have various struggles going on with this. And one of the things that's really interesting and really challenging is that... There's a table, and there are those of us who are various kinds of clinical staff. And then directly across from us is management. Now, these are our team managers.

[62:46]

These are the people we're working with, and we're a hospice. We're in the business of compassionate care. So it's almost surreal. And of course, our NUHW lawyer, and their lawyer, and the head of HR, and our And it's very, very contentious, but one of the things that's emerged is that the people on the committee, and sometimes we have more people show up, we're getting better at speaking in concrete terms instead of sort of these emotional distractions. We get heated, but we stay on point. And a lot of what's going on is obfuscating that. So, but that's one thing. That's hard enough. But the next day, or even, you know, the next hour, depending on how long these things are, you now have to relate with all these people, including all the people who are union members, but, you know, have differing degrees.

[63:52]

And so I was just reflecting on that in terms of an abundance of worldviews. because what we're engaging is system on system on system, but like you were talking about relationality to really feel, I mean to genuinely feel a compassion and a closeness when it's heated. And of course we practice with this in so many ways, but this is a particular context that I'm not familiar with, particularly in a context of caring for the dying. and all those who love them. So, I don't know exactly what my question is, but I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about this in terms of abundance of worldviews as a practice of, I don't know, nonviolence. Yeah, well, thank you for sharing and for taking care of people as they transition from whatever this is to whatever that is.

[64:56]

But... You know, what's coming to mind is just acknowledging it. It's like, oh, yes, I want to think that I know what it is and what should happen, and that's never very helpful. So if I can be like, this is what it seems like, and this is my choice, that's a lot better. So I keep trying to pivot from reifying and figuring out... and move towards openness and just doing my best moment to moment. There's a lot of freedom there in abundance of worldviews. I mean, that's how it is. I mean, that is always true, and conflict usually has to do with that. But I think what I want to say is just pretty simple about this abundance frame and the particular type of medicine it is. It's kind of simple, but it's just as you're looking at the people and you're like, why the hell are they? they doing that, and they're doing that stupid thing, and the situation is bad, and you go, oh, that person did something kind.

[66:03]

That is what the abundance of you is about. It's about focusing on the liberative qualities that are present. So the mind can focus on a lot of things. So it's an active shifting to just being like, oh, in this whole context, the narrative I'm going to construct is based on seeing the beautiful things people do. and not emphasizing the harmful ones they do. And it doesn't deny the harms. I'm not at all interested in that. I'm interested in being inspired by the goods. And you can do both those things, but right now I'm teaching Huayin, so my emphasis is on, like, using that flavor. But it can be kind of an amazing thing. It's just like, oh. Because the thing is, there are millions of acts of kindness in every single day for everyone. So, that's some... you could play with. Thank you. Thank you. We have a couple more minutes here. This is less a question than a comment.

[67:15]

I went to your Minnesota Meditation Center once and I saw you give a beautiful talk about bell hooks in February of last year. And I just want to say thanks for coming here, for stitching our communities together. It's really beautiful. Thank you for coming there and stitching our communities together. That's very beautiful. Thank you. Hello. Thank you so much for your talk. I have read your book and I loved that as well. I feel like you just answered my question. Well, so I'll put it out there anyway, just to see. Which is, it can be so inspiring to hear or read about this story. right? Everything's a jewel, right? And in an overwhelming world like we're in the one now sometimes, it can be so easy to feel like my actions are just some drop in a bucket.

[68:22]

How do you see that drop as a drop of a diamond or a jewel? How do you remember that? Yeah. Well, one of the remembering practices, so mindfulness, the word smriti or sati, means remembering. And actually, one of the most influential sections of the Avatamsaka Sutra is the Purifying Practices Sutra, which is, basically, it starts off and it says, how does a Bodhisattva do this amazing, you know, just joyfully engaging with the sorrows of the world in such a liberative way forever? How do they do that? And it says, well, this is how they do it. And then it's just a series of about 120 verses. And the verses are things like, when seeing an empty bowl, they wish that all beings be fed. When seeing a full bowl, they wish that all beings be supported. When putting on their lower garment, they wish that all beings be clothed. Things like that. When seeing a tree, they wish that all beings be strong and sturdy and supported. When brushing their teeth, this is the tooth-brushing verse we have at Zen Centers from the Avatomska.

[69:26]

So the point is, in every moment of activity, you have a particular thing that reminds you to care about everyone and wish that they be free from suffering. and then to do that activity with that wish. And of course, you'd be like, well, how does brushing my teeth save everyone? You don't have to figure that out. My experience is, if you do this, it changes how you perceive the world and how you act. And we live in a world made by how people perceive the world and how they act. No, you don't control the world. I don't even know if I control my hands. And yet, what we do does create the world we collectively live in. So actively finding practices that remind you. Bodhicitta, the wish that everyone be free from suffering, it underlies the entire sutra. And the last section is just this massive explosion of metaphors for how valuable and beautiful and beneficial it is.

[70:31]

So there are many ways, but one way is to just pick particular things and have a reminder for yourself. So there's an idea. There's an idea. Thank you. And I think maybe we're out of time here. Does anyone have a burning... Ah, well, I think I would like to hear from this personage, my beloved friend. Ben, I don't know that I have a particular question, but I wanted to thank you very much for coming. And for the work that you do, the joyful offering that happens to look from the outside like work and sometimes feels like it, but is always an offering to the world. And just thank you so much because you show us ways to do it, us here and many other people. And because you've been in Minneapolis, you've been a little bit in the forefront.

[71:36]

modeling this and because it's been so intense you know you were talking earlier about how the very intensity of that experience brought forth all of this so kind of like you know the jewel coming out of the fire you know so just deep deep gratitude and our love and support goes with you back to Minneapolis thank you so much for coming thank you so much Linda and yeah it's just a joy to be with you and yeah I could talk about exciting, cool things that I've been a part of, but guess what? I'm pretty sure you're involved in exciting, cool things. You might be like, oh, not me. But this tradition I'm talking about is one that's like, if you are kind to people, it matters. And you don't, the point is not to be Sudhana. It's not to be the teacher who teaches through physical touch. It's not to be Manjushri. It's not to be, it's to be you. I have like enormous faith. in you, in your capacity to engage in liberation and trust that you're already doing it.

[72:42]

So I'm just deeply, deeply appreciative to be a part of it with you. So thank you all very much. Things are inexhaustible, I vow to end them. Dharma gates are boundless, I vow to end them. This way is unsurpassable, I vow to give it. Things are boundless, I vow. Thank you.

[73:58]

Thank you. Thank you. Yes.

[76:53]

Yes. Yes. Okay. Okay.

[77:54]

Well, yeah. The first two characters are a transliteration of white. Because I just know that the pop character is white. Oh, it's terminate. Talk with you. So, yes, it looks like dragging.

[78:59]

So, yeah. So, yeah, he's here. That's. How are you? Which slide? Are you checking? No, I drive. Where do you have a car? We'll have to drive. Yeah, I'm going to drive.

[80:02]

I don't want to get your home. I'm sorry. It's not great. It's hard. I don't. Well, you should think that, do you? I didn't. [...] Yeah, that's it.

[81:04]

It's hard to remember yet. I know, that's how I kind of all went to our papers. Sometimes it goes back, and people put papers on me, and I was like, this is really good. I forgot about that. It's not working. It's not working. I don't know what I'm saying. I didn't even remember. I said it's a sport. I thought it really should work out. Yeah, it's good. I might try it as a sport. It has a...

[82:14]

Well, that's the way that it's so poetic, isn't it? The visual, you know, I don't know. It's not there. I know. If I say wake up, there's all the sutures that I like so much. Do you mind me? I'm going to call it for like a person. Yeah. And I'll imagine him having a enchanted thing. And when asked if it was something like that. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, [...] yes.

[83:19]

If I'm reading, sometimes it's hard to understand. I'm not understanding at all. It's not just like anything else. It's a hard sutra. Yeah. Yeah. We're talking about English. Chanting in English, they're still not. Or the Chinese or whatever. Definitely. Definitely the Chinese. But yeah, even in the English, we're done with the entire time.

[84:09]

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