Suzuki Roshi, that giving a talk is making a mistake on purpose. But this one, Sojin asked me to give this talk, so I'm not sure whose mistake it is. But the mistake part is trying to find a Dharma context for what I'm going to talk about, and that's been my effort for the last month. A month ago, I went to Rome. I brought back a souvenir. Can you see this? It's a paperweight of the Colosseum. Now, the Colosseum is, somebody said in one of the guidebooks. This is on the cover of everybody's book, everybody's textbook on Western civilization.

[01:14]

And when you think about it, it's kind of odd when you think about what happened there. And actually, when you think about Western civilization, it doesn't, in certain ways, it doesn't get a lot better. So, but it was really I went there, and to feel, in a sense, in it, and of it, and not of it. And I think that has some resonances with our practice, and with our ways of seeing ourselves. This Rome is a fascinating city. just erupting out of the ground and continuing below the ground and went to a church in San Clemente, where the top level was a 12th century Byzantine basilica, underneath that was a 6th century church, and underneath that was a 1st century temple of Mithras, which was the religion that was kind of neck and neck with Christianity for a while.

[02:41]

And those still exist there. And on the one hand, I'm used to going to Asia and really feeling outside, even though I'm there within the spiritual context of what I've chosen to practice. And on the other hand, going to Rome, feeling, oh, this is Europe, the West. This is kind of more inside. Roman culture than I am Japanese culture. You know, my family roots are from far Eastern Europe, Judaism, you know, which in Rome, I saw the Arch of Titus as we entered the forum, they had a frieze of the Roman soldiers carrying off all the golden items

[03:48]

That was my stuff that they were carrying. That really is where I'm connected. So this is just all a construct. But the food was good. And the people were warm and friendly. But I didn't go there. I did have two days to look around inside on Sistine Chapel, the new cleaned up Michelangelo ceiling. Pretty exciting. But I was invited to participate in a working group, something called the World Faiths Development Dialogue, which was about 14 or 15 of us from, I was, Buddhist, there was Muslim, Baha'i, Sikh, Hindu, a couple of Christians including a bishop, all of whom were working on issues of poverty

[05:14]

You know, it was very... The World Bank, when I say that, I realize, since I've come back, people have been quite interested in this trip. And I think partly they've been interested because, to them, the World Bank is a distant, monolithic, and sort of faceless institution that we sort of have some sense Mostly it's kind of like way out there and we don't have much connection with it. And yet there's an awareness, if you think about it, of how deeply policies of the bank, or there's a sense that people have that policies of the bank really affect poor people around the world. And that is true. The interest that people have is like, gee, you really talk to those people?

[06:44]

There's a there there and they can be accessed and what was it like? And that was also my, that was my attitude. I was pleased and curious to be asked and I had a lot of preconceptions about, not so much about the people, but about the bank and its policies in relation to poor people around the world. And I wondered how I was going to be able to I tend to be kind of a righteous person, and I don't mean that in a good way. I tend to be... I can fall back on a kind of moralism, and I don't think that that is so helpful for me, and I don't think that that's a helpful attitude with which to meet people

[08:07]

or meet situations. And yet, I try to balance this with the fact that there are helpful and supportive things that can be done for people, and there are things that harm people. But that's what I had to work and also learn about a realm of society that I've spent a long time, my whole life, avoiding, thinking about economics.

[09:16]

It's very hard for me to think about. And it hasn't gotten any easier. So we met at a Vatican building. We were hosted by the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, which is quite an extraordinary place. And just the social issues that they're thinking about around the world, and the positions they take are quite radical and extraordinary. And yet it's embedded within a church that is not always so open and does not always do what I would imagine, what I could see to be good everywhere. So, right at every turning, it seems like there was one critical lesson

[10:24]

I can articulate for myself. You know, there's this... what's become a kind of cliché that I think came from Eldridge Cleaver in the 60s. You're either part of the solution or part of the problem. If it comes to you in some place else, somebody can correct me. And it's a very nice way to state of the situation, but it's completely dualistic. That what comes up again and again is you're always, you're actually simultaneously completely pure place, well, you may have moments of that in your life, but they're rare.

[11:39]

And by supporting some position or taking some action that you think is part of the And keeping your awareness as open as possible, sitting in the middle of that and always wondering how to act from moment to moment. And how to, you know, I think in our Zen practice we live in the midst of, we sit with ambiguity, we sit one and two simultaneously. So very much that situation here. So we had meetings for about two days and the issues at hand were descriptions and definitions of poverty and directions for development.

[12:57]

the World Bank is a kind of opening where, at least nominally, the bank is open to a kind of social agenda and to And yet, there are some deep problems. So let me say something about the bank, if you don't know where it comes from. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were created by a conference in 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire.

[14:00]

And the main focus of that conference, realized that they'd better get something in place coming out of World War II, or there was going to be just total chaos, social and economic chaos in the world. So they created these large institutions. And the International Monetary Fund, which we've heard a lot about lately in Russia and in Asia, the financial crisis, was brought about to regulate the value and supply of money and allowed trade, to facilitate trade among all these different areas of the world so that the system of trade, the system of economic circulation, originally designed to provide a fund for the reconstruction of Europe, which was pretty seriously harmed by the war.

[15:26]

But within 10 years, that kind of groundwork was done. inaccurate euphemism or terminology we want to use. And they've been moving increasingly in that direction to where they are now. And they make loans to governments, essentially, for what they call development projects.

[16:34]

There's some ambiguity there about whether it's really development, but it's development on the model that they define. growth, what's called growth. And that is beginning to be questioned even within the bank. So it's an interesting time. A lot of their major efforts have been spectacular failures. to build these huge dams which are supposed to generate tremendous amounts of electricity little process of self-reflection or criticism by which they can evaluate their work so they can keep it from happening another time.

[18:07]

And it's an enormous institution. There's about 10,000 people. And they have made something in the order of between 400 and $500 million worth of loans in the last 40 years. And that they lend, in this book that I was reading, an average of $2.5 million an hour. You can just think of that and go, how do they spend that money? How does it go out so fast? They have enormous staff, and as somebody, one of the people who worked at the bank said, the bank is this incredible idea-crunching organization, that within the bank there are many, many good people, and I've been having email correspondence with some of them, who really see what the problems are, who are really good intentions.

[19:17]

Some of them are Buddhists. And the bank has the capacity to hold, contain, all these people and all these ideas, but it's like a huge food processor or a blender. It takes all these ideas and it mushes them up, and then the stuff that comes out is usually the same old stuff. It's the economic free market paradigm which wins out. Anyway. The principles that I brought for myself into this discussion, there were several, and I've been talking about them over the last several months here, so please excuse any redundancy, but this seems to be what's been on my mind as an ancient practice for myself. The first one is identity action, which is one of the Buddhist

[20:24]

which means to me just very roughly recognizing the connection between all beings that each of us includes the other, which means to me that in my being I include the poor people, poor people in the Philippines or India or Bangladesh, that their lives in London, who was with us for this meeting, and the researchers and economists whose models trouble me greatly, that all of them, all of us, have a common connection, identity, That's the ground beneath which identity action calls upon the Bodhisattva to speak to each one from a place of non-separation, to look at the suffering of each of those people, because they each are suffering, some of them in very direct ways of need, some of them spiritually,

[22:00]

and one can distinguish. The bank is always trying to distinguish between these sufferings. They always say, well, we don't want to deal with this level of suffering, we're trying to help the most abject poor. But there's suffering at each of these levels. which I talked about at the meeting, is basically the second precept, which we take as the precept of not stealing. It's also the precept of not taking what's not given. And that, to me, calls for looking at the content and quality of lives that we lead here. and of looking at where things come from, and seeing that much of what we have that sustains our life, our lifestyle, our comfort, comes from people who have a lot fewer of those comforts, who are actually giving us

[23:29]

much of what we think we need without being asked. And this applies, I think, more broadly in areas of economic policy where loans are made on policies and on development. This development always has a cost. And the bank, the World Bank, is in fact a bank. It makes a profit. Even though its mission, it has a deeply contradictory mission to my mind. At the top of its website, it says, to end, to create a world free from poverty. and how you create a world free from poverty and maintain an 8% to 10% return on the loans that you're making, I think that's kind of an insupportable tension.

[24:45]

And I did raise that, and I think I have to keep exploring it. So it's interesting. The other principle that I try to keep in mind, and it's something that I, well, I just want to say, back to the second precept, inherent in that, to me, is looking at privilege, looking at the privilege that I have as an inhabitant of as a Caucasian, all these privileges, to all these privileges certain things accrue. And how am I willing to live in the face of that? What does my practice demand?

[25:50]

What does identity action demand? What is non-separation of self and other demand? What do I learn simply by sitting zazen next to anyone who may come in this end up. There's an incredible connection that we feel sitting together where many differences are dropped and then others of them are resumed as we walk out the door. This is really a challenge. And what is the principle, what is the evoke, so that I would not take what's not given, or I would be aware of what I'm taking, and choose not to, choose to give it back, choose to say no thank you, choose to recognize, as I said before, that gee, I am

[27:01]

on that second precept. And finally, the principle that I tried to carry into the discussions was, we wonder a lot, particularly at Buddhist Peace Fellowship where I work, we've seen things change. We've seen things stay the same. And I think over the years I've come to believe that we have to have structural change. And yet, to my mind, they're all made up of people.

[28:23]

And I know that it's possible for a person to change. If I didn't think it was possible for a person to change, not only wouldn't I be sitting here talking And so I feel like one way that you change whole structures is by creating processes by which the individuals within those structures can change. And that means also empowering the people, particularly a kind of homogenization.

[29:37]

These are just people who are caught in a certain set of circumstances, causes and conditions, but they're people just like any of us. And some of us are poor, and some of us are not poor, even right here in this room. And I don't think any of us would doubt the full policy decisions of the bank, you would think they'd be the first people who should have say over what those policies were, and how they affected their lives, where they live, what they do. But they have almost no say right now. And so one of the things I think I hope to persist in this process, and the other people at Facebook are saying,

[30:38]

is to have this become more of a reality, right? And not to accept the kind of lip service that comes from the bank of a lip service of empowerment. And it's very tricky, because you just don't know whether their motivations are sincere, whether they can really put this in action and really incorporate people, but that has to be done structurally. And one thing that I have proposed following this meeting was to create some kind of basically retreats where in local areas that might be facilitated by religious people or by other people with particular kinds of training, where people from the bank, people from local or national governments, and the people who are affected by the decisions or policies, would actually just tell their stories, would tell the stories of their lives, and would meet each other, and begin a humanizing process.

[32:01]

This may be a complete pipe dream, and it may be possible It may not be possible. It may lead to some kind of change or it may not. But trying to figure out how to change an institution like this is just very hard. Even trying to figure out whether they really want to change is very hard. And trying to figure out why you are, why I was, on this plane and in this hotel to Rome, you know, was it to serve, boy, I mean, was it to serve the process of change, of social change? Was it to be window dressing? So the bank had pointed itself saying, see, we really are trying. And Also, you know, there was an uncomfortable section for me, section of thought, which thought, gee, this is really, talk about privilege, you know, getting flown to Rome, you know, big privilege.

[33:21]

And I asked around a lot before I accepted. People told me to go, even critics of the bank said you should go. So I went. But how far am I going to, participate in this process, I'm not sure yet. I really want to participate in it because I want to be helpful. And I want to see if my notions of social change and transformation is sort of an experiment. Can they work? Can I take what I feel I've learned from practice and from encountering people here within this community and within the related Buddhist communities, can I take that experience and put it in a different place and see if it's useful in breaking down distinctions.

[34:23]

But when I start thinking about the economic ramifications, in my mind it's kind of I don't think that we don't have any clear alternatives to an economic system. I know that a system that's just driven by the market does not feel right, but how you have a social system that's based on values, not on economics, how you move towards that, I don't know. And I haven't met anybody who knows. But there are people of goodwill trying to think about it. And I think we have to keep thinking about it regardless of whether, regardless of what the outcome is. Just like we have to keep sitting regardless of notions of enlightenment or transformation.

[35:33]

We sit here because it's what we know how to do. And because we have some faith, we have faith in each other, and we have faith in people. And that faith supports us in our city. And I feel, you know, it's great that this is called the World Faiths Development Dialogue, because I think that the faith that we have in common, and very interesting to sit and talk with Muslims and Catholics and Baha'is and Sikhs and find that you have a lot of common ground, which is not to just, you know, pave over differences, but a lot of fundamental things are shared by us. So, you know, in that faith we just kind of persevere. And I think I'm going to stop there. and take some questions.

[36:34]

And I am open to questions, and I'm even open to advice and suggestions here and outside the context of this room in this moment. So thank you. Mark? There are a lot of thoughts that come up around this for me, because I spent about 10 years of my life devoted to not the World Bank, but the United Nations and one of their research projects. So this brings up a lot of thoughts for me, but I think that what you're trying to do is a very good idea in the sense that I'm trying to bring the people that the aid is going to and the bankers and the investors together. So possibly there might be some, at least from the investors and bankers' side, there might be some actual transformation where there's identity action that they see, you know, they actually make a connection with these people.

[37:42]

And eventually that might transform their product-motivated bank into a more charitable institution. I mean, maybe they can drop their 10 or 12 percent profit down to 2 or 3 percent. It might focus nations rather than spending like we do $112 billion on our defense budget. It might bring a sense of cooperation among nations of the world. giving back to these third world countries that we take so much from. Because I think the Western nations are like about 20% of the world's population, yet we consume 80% of the world's resources. So if we can see, or at least the institutions, the investors, get some feedback, or some way like you're talking about these conferences, has now mandated their new policies.

[39:07]

Every field work, every bank staff has to go and spend three days a year in the field. That ain't it. What I'm thinking of is, you spend a week in a closed room or in some place outside, you spend a week with the same people. All you're doing is talking to each other. In a week, you can at least begin really to know a small group. I'm talking about 10 to 15 people. Small. That has transformative power. A week with 10 or 15 people, you're going to know a lot about each other. You're going to know more than you ever want to know about each other in many ways. you can begin to know something that actually has a possibility of being transformative.

[40:10]

Short of that, even our meeting, like two days, it's like, what's the point? That's really just putting a shine on things. And it's like, for some reason, it puts me You're in trouble. Your shoes are going to smell. But I think that people need to be together in a way for an extended period of time. Who are these people there? Are they going to be the CEO and the board of directors? Or are they going to be researchers? No, they're not going to be either. I mean, what I think they should be is they should be I mean, a lot of this needs to be thought out.

[41:12]

But I think it's got to be people who actually are designing policy. And the CEOs, those people come and go. And the reason that they can't affect any real change in the bank is because the real power is in middle management economists who, you know, vice presidents and presidents and directors go. And they circulate. But these people are there forever. And they are quite cut off from what the results of their work are. And so I think that they primarily, I think they need to be there. Could you please speak about two things? One, what was the tone of communication in this group? between these two different types of people. And also, did you have any, did you get any feedback from the other spiritual participants about what their experience was?

[42:15]

Yeah, everybody, the spiritual participants all, this process has been going on for a couple of years, and I was invited into it, and their perspective is all the same. It's like, well, we gotta, we don't know if we can really have any effect, we feel like we should. And they're all very savvy and not having many illusions about the difficulty of what we're doing. And as far as the people from the bank were concerned, not much different, actually. Really not much different. But Again, they weren't the policy-making people. I don't feel like we didn't have those. There's this level where decisions get made, and even the people who were there were saying, well, we can decide this stuff, these principles, but then things just kind of move ahead on their own.

[43:19]

So they were good people. And I'm sure even if you got to these policy people as individuals, they were good people. but how you get them to detach from the kind of market-driven economic models that they have. And everybody wanted, they're talking, a lot of what we got hung up talking about was indicators, numbers, that everything has to be quantified. And during the numbers, well, in a way, that's true, but it's not true if, the numbers are not attached to anything. If they have no objectives, if they have no values, you know, if you look at some of this in the World Development Report, which I have upstairs, there's like a hundred pages of numbers. You know, great. What does it say? You know, they're not attached to values, they're not attached to objectives. So that's where a connection is going to be. I think I have time for one more question. I'm not even aware of the circumstances in which our goods are manufactured, social consequences, and it made me think about some kind of a labor disclosure tag on each item.

[44:42]

So this was made by someone who made $15 an hour, that kind of thing. I thought that might be possible in this field. It might. And there's a group that's doing, I think, the US labor community or something, that's working on these issues. But that's where it starts getting really murky. Because, yes, that's exploitative. On the other hand, people need those jobs. And it becomes very trippy. It's simple when you think of something like Disney. Disney is manufacturers in And they were manufacturing in the Philippines, in Mexico, in Indonesia, making Mickey Mouse t-shirts for, you know, the workers were getting like 25 cents an hour.

[45:44]

Haiti, they were actually, that's another place. Incredibly low pay. And Michael Eisner, who's the president of Disney, is making something like $250,000 an hour. You know, there's a little discrepancy. Couldn't there be a little give and take here someplace? But how do you actuate that? And that begs the question, that just begs the question also of, do we need Mickey Mouse t-shirts? Is this an item of use? And much of, if we cut out the things And this is what the bank economists would argue. If you cut out the things that we might say, these have no value, then the world economic system collapses in a big heap.

[46:46]

So they would say, yes, we need Mickey Mouse t-shirts. And it's like, wow, how did you even think about that? So I don't have an answer, but that's some of the complexity of the question. I think we need to stop and I'd be glad to continue talking with people.

[47:04]

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