Good morning, everyone. It's good to see you. Let me see if I can see you in a second. Great, and can you hear me okay? Yes, good. So today I want to talk about Thich Nhat Hanh, who died two weeks ago.

[01:10]

And I want to start with a short poem. Peace is every step. The shining red sun is my heart. Each flower smiles with me. How green, how fresh, how cool the wind blows. Peace is every step. It turns the endless path to joy. So on this crisp, winter morning when the sun is shining and some of the winter flowers are blooming. There's a beautiful yellow flower blooming right outside the abbot's office.

[02:14]

We can enjoy our walking, enjoy our breathing, and enjoy the teachings that we receive from from Thich Nhat Hanh and from all our teachers and from our own lives. So what I thought I would speak of today is just what I feel like I've learned from Thich Nhat Hanh and what many of us have absorbed and when we get to the section where you can respond, you may have your own experiences to share. So as you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, who is affectionately referred to as Thai, which is the intimate way of addressing a teacher in the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition.

[03:24]

He died two weeks ago in Vietnam at the age of 95. 2014 he had suffered a brain which in which he lost his ability to speak but he went through I think extensive rehab and they did as much work as they could to to bring him into a peaceful And most of those years, he lived at Tu Hue Temple in Hue in Vietnam. And he was surrounded by his disciples. And his death leads me to reflect on...

[04:26]

how deeply my practice, and I think all of our practice, was influenced by him over the last 40 years. I was looking through the shelves here in the Abbott's office, which was Sojin's office, and there's a half shelf of Thich Nhat Hanh books with bookmarks and places. flagged in them. And I think that what we find is that in many ways, the whole shape of Western Buddhist practice has really been influenced by ways that we see and some in ways that we don't, maybe we don't remember exactly. So I'm going to try to recall that, you know, bring to some awareness for myself what I've borrowed from him, what I borrowed from him.

[05:39]

And just to say that, you know, this week we concluded a four-week class on the three doors of liberation. And that in itself was a teaching that Thai, He didn't create it, but he brought it to our attention in a way that might not have, might not really have occurred to us. It's not the most prominent teaching in the Theravada or Mahayana tradition, but it was a live issue for him. And so he brought it to us and that, certainly made it alive for me. I hope it made it alive for some of you. And so I want to review light of my own experience and also in light of some, some principal teachings that I think we received from him.

[06:46]

Now I was thinking there's so many different aspects of the teaching that he shared. So if I had to reduce it to one bumper sticker, instead of covering my entire bumper with verbiage, the expression that comes to me of his is, we are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness. We are here to awaken from our illusion of separateness. And I think that certainly as we explore that illusion runs very deep in most people. And we have glimpses, whether brief or extended, of that awakening.

[07:59]

of the recognition that that all is connected or to come back to, again, an expression of Thich Nhat Hanh's of interbeing. So that's very broadly. Oh, look at this lovely little girl there in Nathan's arms. The breadth of Thay's teachings are Zen, mindfulness, peace, love, anger, ethics, ecology, community, all of these things. There's books of them. There's books about all of them and actually quite an industry of Thich Nhat Hanh publishing.

[09:06]

And many of these books are really good. I put a short bibliography in the chat if you're not familiar with them. Actually, I think I haven't really read many of the books that Thich Nhat Hanh's written in the last 15 or 20 years, which is... my deficiency, my shortcoming. But the ones that I put are ones that were being in the foundational years of my practice. And I think that for me, the kind of my immersion in Zen is contemporaneous with Thich Nhat Hanh as a teacher. in the West. You know, he really became known to us in in Buddhist circles in the in the 1980s.

[10:12]

So 40 years ago. And it's quite amazing. That's it's a long time. But at that point, the point at which he emerged as a teacher, he was already 55 years old. He had a long life and a long practice and a long experience of adventures in the Dharma and also of challenges, defeats, and painful experiences. And I'm going to talk more about that. But my own Uh, I had some, I had some opportunities to, uh, to encounter him personally or semi personally, uh, uh, in the, probably about 1989 or nine.

[11:16]

I worked at his publishing house, parallax press. And so we were seeing the, you know, these incredible. books that affected us all, they were just rolling off the production line, being peace and touching peace, standing, and the heart of the Buddhist teachings, old path, white clouds. These books just kept rolling out in the short time that I was there. And I worked there in a very, position, basically answering correspondence and packing up books to ship. And meanwhile, having some opportunity to read them and to help support Parallax Press as they were, if not on.

[12:19]

So in that, in the next period, by 1991, I was working at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And that was an opportunity. He was a very strong supporter. And that was very, it was really impressive to me because one of the things that had happened was that Buddhist Peace Fellowship was very closely identified with Thich Nhat Hanh and there was a kind of merging of our work, Thay's work and the work of Buddhist peace fellowship in the late 1980s. And then there was a separation where the BPF as an organization wanted to maintain an independent identity.

[13:25]

and not be merged or submerged into what was evolving as a Thich Nhat Hanh organization. And this caused a lot of tensions, but they weren't tensions with him. And he continued to really support and contribute writings and teachings for Buddhist Peace Fellowship. and invited to help produce talks in Berkeley and Days of Mindfulness. Every two years, he would be, he toured the West, and I'm sure that some of you attended these Berkeley community theater talks, did any of you? You see, yeah, I see a few people raise your hand.

[14:27]

Yes. Yeah, so I actually produced those, and it kind of blurs in my memory, but I see that we produced these talks in 91, 93, 95, 97, 99, and 2001, and that was a lot of work. Yeah. You know, because there would be 3,500 or 4,000 people coming. I had never done anything like that. We worked very closely with his people and with our people, and we put on these amazing events. And I was very aware. He didn't really need us to do this. This was a gift that he was out of a feeling of support. which is based on the fact that Buddhist Peace Fellowship had been one of the first organizations that supported his teaching in the Buddhist communities in the West.

[15:35]

So I was very grateful for that. In the course of that, I had opportunities to meet with him and talk with him. So I feel very fortunate in that. But I think that the bulk of my learning was not so much from those encounters as from his actual teachings and his books. And I've been going back in the last few days and looking. I realized that how much of Thich Nhat Hanh's strength was forged at the intersection of incredible difficulty and painful experience and practice, really diligent, dedicated practice.

[16:52]

So how do we forget about that? We convert our heroes to, as I said, to postage stamps. So like a postage stamp of Gandhi without looking at really all the difficulties in the anti-colonial struggle that he had. We have turned Martin Luther King into a postage stamp. We've turned, which is mind boggling to me, Malcolm X into a postage stamp. You know, we have this capacity, frankly, homogenizing and making nice our teachers and stripping away the sense of the real difficulty that they had.

[17:54]

Thich Nhat Hanh's challenges, and first of all, he became a monk. He was ordained at the age of 16, which was 1942 or 43. So that was 1942. And that is growing up as a monastic coincided with the war in Vietnam between the Vietnamese and the French in the 50s. It was really shaped by these anti-colonial wars and civil war. By the time we get to the 60s, you had a split into the Vietnam War between Vietnam and the United States, particularly between North Vietnam and also North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

[19:12]

So we had a civil war and an anti-colonial war at the same time. This was a very difficult time. I wanted to just read you something about Thich Nhat Hanh's practice. In a piece where he talks, he says, mindfulness must be engaged. This is one of his core practices, mindfulness. Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise, what is the use of seeing? We must be aware of the real problems of the world. Then we will know what to do and what not to do to be of help. And as context, he talks about how this evolved in the between

[20:19]

the anti-colonial war with France. He says, along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help people under the bombs? After careful reflection, we decided to do both, to go out and help people and to do so in mindfulness. So the language is simple. Examples are really, really difficult. In 1964, there was a great flood in central Vietnam. Lives were lost. And victims in the conflict zones where there was fighting were most vulnerable because no one could bring them aid.

[21:31]

And so Thich Nhat Hanh organized boats, the Tupan River, boats that ran between the lines of fire to distribute aid in that province. He wrote, he encountered children bleeding from gunfire wounds, malnourished, and fathers whose entire families had been swept away. In a gesture of solidarity, Ty cut his finger and let blood fall into the river for all who had perished. And it was in that time, that he also formed the School for Youth and Social Service, which again was a, at the same time he created something called the Order of Interbeing, which was a new order in Vietnamese.

[22:37]

And in that context, he and his disciples went out into the countryside and Quite a number of them were murdered by one side or the other. And part of the challenge was that for Thich Nhat Hanh, the communists called him a tool of the imperialists and the West called him a communist. He would not align. The side that he said that he took was the side of peace. So he was shaped by that. And he took this position of non-alignment. And then what happened.

[23:39]

Was that in 1966. He came to the United States. First he came to. to advocate for peace. But when he did a, let me just find this section here. In 1966, he met peace activists here in the United States, and that was where he met Dr. King. And he flew to Washington and had a press conference and presented a five-point peace proposal for ending the war in Vietnam. And it included an immediate ceasefire and a schedule for U.S.

[24:48]

troop redoing. withdrawal. And that day he was publicly denounced by the government of Vietnam, a traitor. And he was denied the right to return to Vietnam. So that's 1966. He did not return to Vietnam until 2005. He was not allowed back into the country. So he lost his country. There are other challenges that I could name, but I think I want to get to what I think is important. So this teaching of mindfulness and the teaching that mindfulness must be engaged is very powerful for me. There's a broadside that I have hanging over my desk with this excerpt.

[25:53]

It's an excerpt from his book, Touching Peace. Piece that I read you about mindfulness must be engaged. I received that. The first week that I was at Buddhist Peace Fellowship. And. It was a very powerful teaching. The mindfulness movement as it is that we have. That's so clear today. In many ways, the term was really put into our general parlance by Thich Nhat Hanh. It's one of his early books, The Miracle of Mindfulness, and then all of his books have really hammered home the principle of mindfulness. And I learned that I can't, I think I learned it.

[26:56]

aspects of it. For example, the teaching, the mindfulness teaching of a half smile. I don't know if people are familiar with that. I actually remember, I remember it was taught to us in the Zendo by Yvonne Rand, who was also close with Dittmanan. I remember And it struck me, and I was skeptical, and that that is the practice of health position, or you're facing something that is anxiety producing, try it right now. Just sit there and put a half smile on your face. And take three breaths.

[27:59]

The interesting thing is that it seems to from the outside in. You know, often we're taught that our awakening has to be from the inside out. But what Thich Nhat Hanh was showing us is like it also can work the other way from the out. And I've been using that for like almost 40 years. If there's a difficult encounter that I'm preparing to enter or I'm going to a Or something of that sort. I'll sit. And I'll breathe. And I'll put on a half smile. And something changes. From that.

[29:10]

From that very. Practice. It changes something. And that is. The application. Of mindfulness. That's the application. Of Dharma. To our actual. psychophysical or spiritual position. So I've used this, I've talked about this before. When I was working in the prison at FCI Dublin, often the hardest thing to do was to, was actually getting through the gate, was dealing with whatever officer was at the gate in whatever heart, he or she was having. And so I would sit in my car and I would smile and I would breathe. And I would prepare myself mindfully by saying, by asking, how do I want to encounter the next person I meet?

[30:19]

And just pause and do that. I find that enormously helpful. I'd recommend it to you. I'm going to, of Tai's teachings to share. The other teaching that came up very early in the reading was where he says, suffering is not enough. So we're all familiar. With the Four Noble Truths, which seems to imply that it's a misunderstanding, but the implication is that life is boils down, which is not what the truth means.

[31:22]

that suffering is a mark of our life. Yes, that's true. But what Thich Nhat Hanh said is, this is not enough, is suffering. And the course of his life, what he experienced was great, great suffering. And, you know, fierce emotions, but he also cultivated light and joy. And that's our job. Not that that light and joy is our permanent state of mind, but it coexists with suffering. And actually, I think that the teaching we get from Tai, Sojin, and our ancestors is that the suffering is the characteristic that arises in

[32:27]

when we want to hold on to the joy, or when we want to get rid of something that's unpleasant. So just that life does not boil down to suffering. That it's this great, as I was saying the other day at class, to cite a teaching of Bernie Glassman, what we're charged with doing is cooking the supreme meal. Cooking the meal out of all the ingredients of our life, and that includes the ones that are bitter and the ones that are sweet. So suffering is not enough has been really important teaching for me. And of course, we have this principle of interbeing, which is a word that it seems Thai at a retreat at Tassar in the early 80s.

[33:45]

That's where he first used this word interbeing as a way of articulating, an accessible way of articulating Buddha's term, patichasamuppada, or dependent origination, which is kind of abstract. Interbeing is very alive. Interbeing implies that what we call is made up of non-self elements. You know, as we were talking about a few weeks ago, you know, a bicycle is made up of non-bicycle elements of rubber and gears and chains and metal pipes. All these things, if they're lying on a heap in the ground, you wouldn't necessarily identify it as a bicycle.

[34:50]

We put it all together, and for that moment, we call it a bicycle. together and we call it a car. And in some parts of the country, when the car dies, you put it out on your front lawn and you turn it into a planter. Not so much in Berkeley. But this interbeing is a way of describing how all of reality is co-creating the things that we think have an existence. Ty talked about engaged Buddhism and he coined the word engaged Buddhism. He was using that term in the 1950s.

[35:55]

That it was something, you know, he was very, he had a very broad intellectual view. So he was reading everything. And, of course, he was reading this principle of engagement. You certainly find arising with the existentialist philosophers, in France in the 40s and 50s, and he was fully aware of all of that. And so he talked about engagement, and he was teaching this again from the early 50s, and he paid a price for it. He would set up schools, he'd set up courses, and the monastic powers that be would shut him down. teaching the orthodoxy.

[36:59]

He was teaching something that was really new, which was that how we see suffering is not just some experience that either we create for or we inherit through some mysterious transmission of karma from generation to generation. but that suffering was something as well that we shared across our cultures, our societies, our families, and that the principle of engagement is that the suffering that one experiences in an individual sense is also shared And the suffering of those around us affect us individually.

[38:04]

So again, you have, just as with the half smile, this principle that he was articulating was of working from simultaneously or by choice. You can work from the inside out or the outside in. There is no inside and outside. I think that's part of the teaching, again, which is in complete consonance with the teaching that we receive in Zen. I mean, he was a Zen teacher. But one of the things that I learned early on, the sense that you had, particularly early in the 80s, in the 80s, what was doing... was creating circles of practitioners in the West, because he was here in the West.

[39:08]

He was mostly, his primary location was at France, and he was mostly dealing with lay people, working with lay people there. And when he would come on tour, to the states and to Europe and to other places in the world. He was building what became the living. He was building communities of lay practitioners who were committed to the practice and they were also committed to social action and social change. And they didn't see those as separate. So that was... the emphasis, particularly in the early 80s. And what I saw, you saw him as this great beacon of engaged Buddhism, which initially I understood as social change.

[40:12]

Gradually, as I listened to, particularly, I learned this from listening to, from reading these books and listening to lectures at the Berkeley Community Theater, He would talk about families. He would talk about relationships. And the point that came very powerfully was if we're going to talk about engaged Buddhism, it's not just how we stop the war or various wars. It has to, we can't start there. What he was advocating was, basically, you start with your family. You start with, and you start with building dynamics of peace, love, gratitude, among those you are close to.

[41:23]

And what I realized, this is my extrapolation, was if you can't do that, you're really going to be spinning your wheels. If you're talking about stopping the war or ending racism or some large, very challenging and difficult social activity, it's like you build it from the ground up. Step by step. You know, we saw this. We saw this again and again in Buddhist Peace Fellowship. You know, we'd have. Do we arguments within the staff and it happens here in Sangha. Arguments or conflicts in the Sangha. If you can't deal with them. At this very local level. Can't make peace in that level. Then it's. Presumptuous and. idol to think about doing it on some broader scale.

[42:33]

And so engage Buddhism, again, not just did it work out in the outside in, but it worked from the ground up. It had to be based in the transformations of relationships. And for Tai, what that what that took shape in was in the creation of communities. And so one of the things he said, you know, speaking of the future of Buddhism, so we think that, you know, that one way of looking at Mahayana Buddhism, we're awaiting the arrival of Maitreya. Buddha, the future Buddha. And what Tai said was, the future Buddha will be a Sangha.

[43:39]

And that I've taken very much to heart. And that's part of what I value about Berkeley Zen Center is that what I value is our collective wisdom. Our collective practice. That that is the manifestation of a multifaceted Buddha. And we're all part of it. We're all adding our own style, thought, delusion, and enlightenment to the buddha of the future we're building the buddha of the future which is the sangha so tai did this by uh first he did it by building uh mindful living which which are all over the place all over the world and he also at a certain point uh he began to build monastic community uh

[44:56]

He began to see the possibility of building a monastic community, and he did that. He founded more centers in U.S., in Thailand, in France, and elsewhere, and in Vietnam, and ordained monks and nuns. And when he ordained monks and nuns, again, he did something that was radical. He revised the liturgy. and revised the structure of relationships. Traditionally, these monastic structures are patriarchal. And traditionally, the nuns ordination has a whole lot more rules than the monks ordination. And he revised that. You know, it doesn't, to us, you know, we can think, you know, everything's fungible.

[46:05]

You know, we're not bound to this. But in a traditional monastic system, most of them, it's very, very hard to change the rules. You know, the Dalai Lama has been talking about this for years. for 30 years and, you know, he still hasn't been able to do it. He hasn't been able to create a situation where, where Tibetan can actually even be ordained within the Tibetan tradition, even though he wants to do it. I just did it. He wasn't afraid of, he'd been bucking the powers that be all of his life and he wasn't afraid. He, when you encountered him, there's a way, and I'm going to close in a few minutes, there's a way in which the quotation from Richard Baker, Richard Baker, who was the successor of Suzuki Roshi, and

[47:24]

He described Thich Nhat Hanh early on as a cross between a cloud, a snail, and a piece of heavy machinery, a true religious presence. And that's the way I think many of us encountered him. You saw this, you know, this gentle, this seemingly gentle person and everything he said was full and very nice but he was like a bulldozer he just moved in his own direction and didn't stop doing that never stopped doing that never stopped moving in a direction that he felt was right and he had he had presence that I was thinking about it earlier today that Based on his practice, based on the formation that his history had led, he proceeded from a place of tremendous confidence, of complete confidence in the Dorma.

[48:51]

And you saw this when you met him. When you saw him on stage, it wasn't just this gentleness. It was this really formidable confidence. And he communicated that. He communicated that to people who met him. He communicated that to his students. Just as... in many ways that Suzuki Rishi communicated this, and Sojin communicated this, and other teachers that we meet, they have confidence in the Dharma, not as an abstraction, but as something they have practiced, tested, and used. And so they find it to be completely reliable.

[49:54]

even in the most difficult circumstances. So I think I'm going to end there. This was a kind of wandering talk in a way, but you may have some questions and you may have some questions of your own to share. So I will turn things back over to Blake to call on people. we'll see what ensues. Gutsanga, please raise your hand, and I encourage you to, with your statements, memories, these tend to be longer, but keep it to a bumper sticker rather than the whole bumper. Tenacity, please... I'm getting quite... I'm getting... Habit of going first, I apologize.

[51:00]

Thank you for your talk, Hosan. I wanted to visit a question about creating communities. So I live in Athens, Georgia now. There is a not insignificant queer and transgender population here. It is not a specifically Buddhist community, but I intend to create, to bring that spirit of practice to whatever community I engage with. My difficulty is that the prominence in this community is the discussion of suffering. And I'm wondering if there's aged way to not dismiss that reality, but to expand the experience to something that's more fuller and more whole for these people who I intend to care deeply about.

[52:16]

Sure. Well, I think I'd be happy to talk with you more about this and to point you towards more resources, but I think that this principle that suffering is not enough is really important. And the example that we have of our teachers is our teachers are all very intimate with suffering, and we see they laugh a lot. You know, there's a lightness. There's a lightness, I think, that is also generated by the practice, and it's important to communicate that this is not a goal, but it's something that happens with the practice. But, yeah, we have to show that this practice is about liberation.

[53:23]

And liberation is about release and freedom. It's not about just how to be wearing your chains of oppression. It's like, it's really shucking off the chains. So let's talk about that. Okay. That's a good plan. Thank you. Thank you. Raghav. I invite you to unmute yourself. Everyone, you were talking about how something shifted for you in terms of thinking about social work and, you know, working with families, you know, instead of looking outside complete wars within communities or countries, starting with families. You know, what occurred to me is uh um you know talked about you know in terms of like stopping the war within you know which is why i think it's not so just teaching for example or you know teaching in the sense you know we start with the war within um and once we stop that then we can see maybe like the

[54:51]

as far as the mind goes, there is no inside or outside. Also, another thing that came to my mind is, you know, Sojan used to talk about, like, when talking about Maitreya, that, you know, we don't have to wait for any special Maitreya to show up, but we are, you know, we are the ones who have to step up. And, you know, he used to say, you know, we are doing Shakyamuni Buddha's practice. And that was in line with what you said about Thich Nhat Hanh, which is Sangha. Sangha being the manifestation of Maitreya. I think that's right. I mean, the part of the formation, this is the interesting thing about their decision in the 60s to do both, not to stop, but to maintain their meditation practice.

[56:01]

And my feeling is just to say the meditation practice is the motor of compassion, that this is what allows us to sustain ourselves. And, you know, I come to it from, a previous life as an activist. And that, on its own, that did not work. But to move, you know, one of the things that Sojin did, which is actually really kind of unique, when we leave the Zendo, We don't turn towards the altar and bow and walk out. We just do a little shashu back door and walk through because we are not leaving our meditation inside that room.

[57:03]

We are taking that meditation outside into the world with us in perhaps a different form. And this is very much the same as Thich Nhat Hanh saying peace is every step. It's every step, not every step in the Zendo. It's every step in the world. So, thank you. Fulani's iPhone. Please unmute yourself and ask a question. No, I would just like to make a statement. I attended those when Thich Nhat Hanh came to Berkeley at the community theater. And I remember bringing tapes home and having my whole family listen to them about the hugging smile and the flower. Oh, it's such a beautiful thing. Anyway, did the hugging meditation with my aunts at a family reunion. And, you know, I was very present.

[58:08]

She was right there. That aunt died. Anyway, when Thich Nhat Hanh died, I didn't even know my... and called, I mean, well, they're adults now, called and told me I was so touched by that, that they had remembered. It's beautiful. So that's all I wanted to say. And I worked with a kid at work, and he, my God, he's brilliant. But he's very, very left-brained. It's very challenging to be with him, but I just, I just stay, I'm just there, I'm just there for him. And so we met with, we meet with counselors. One day when we were meeting with the counselor and my supervisor, that kid, it was just him and I and the counselor. And that kid, he's like 12. He says something about, that whole room lit up, that room I was in, we were in lit up green.

[59:09]

Like this cosmic green light went all through the room. And I was just stunned. Anyway, I just wanted to say that. So thank you. And I remember that you used to bring him here. Well, I did bring him here. He brought him. Well, I mean, I remember you had something to do with him being here or something. But that's no longer though. He brought us there. Yes, he did. Oh, what I really wanted to say was, speaking of community, someone had got... Somebody, some kids, some young people had got killed, died through gun violence. And we knew the family. I mean, I still know that family. And that was mentioned in Titna Hans about it. And they, like, blessed the family that was harmed and blessed the family that did the harm. And I still know these people. So I just wanted to say that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Polani.

[60:10]

Thank you. You're welcome. So I see two more people in the queue and maybe that's what we'll take. So maybe Preston first. Hassan, I like what you were saying about Buddhahood, enlightened activity, wisdom, beauty, whatever you want to call it, revealing itself in relationships between people and in concerted efforts. And I'm thinking about the stories I've been told about social movements and those stories oftentimes center on charismatic leaders. So I think about like the story of

[61:12]

the Montgomery bus boycotts and how that story tends to be focused very much on Rosa Parks and her refusal to give up her seat. And then, you know, later I learned that, you know, she had this whole organization of people around her and they had been strategizing about, you know, this particular... And then the boycott itself, you know, that required all of these people in Montgomery to not take the bus to work and to give each other rides and to put up flyers all over the town about the boycott. And so I'm wondering if you know anything Tich Nhat Hanh's story as it relates to, like, the people around him that allowed him to be the person that he was. Yes. I know quite a bit about it.

[62:15]

And he was functioning. He was pulling together like-minded people to create these organizations, groups that would do the work. there were significant numbers of them, and there were people who were inspirational to him. And I'll say, I maybe hesitate to say this, but part of the challenge with Thich Nhat Hanh was what I felt was the degree of idealization and objectification of of him. And so when we were doing these talks at, at the Berkeley community theater, we were fielding all the stuff at BPF.

[63:19]

And it was, it was kind of desperation that we experienced from people, you know, and getting tickets and making sure you get tickets and, Oh, I've got to see tick not on. And it's like, I understood that. And I had to say, You know, there's dozens of places of real practice around just here, around Berkeley and Oakland, where you can do this practice every day. You know, one person is not going to save you. Thich Nhat Hanh is not going to save you. But Thich Nhat Hanh, but I will say, Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings can save you. And, you know, so it's fine. I understood that. But nothing functions. We have this tendency, as you're pointing out, to justify, and that's what happens when you turn somebody into a postage stamp.

[64:26]

You know, you make it look like, and this is what, you make it look like the whole spectacle turns on this one person, whereas actually, That's doing this. And that is very much the case. And Thich Nhat Hanh was never, never reluctant to share that information or that perspective. And what he did was he created community. He helped people organize into these communities of mindful living. He created monastic communities. And where decision making was based on consensus, not on strict authority. So he was doing his best while he was a singular, very important figure, doing his best to show people where their own authority and leadership could arise.

[65:27]

And we need to do the same thing. So, Joel, I think you're going to be the last. Thank you. Wonderful. I want to ask about confidence, the confidence Thich Nhat Hanh had and Sojin had, Suzuki Roshi, complete confidence in the Dharma, you said. And that's wonderful and true. And it was striking for me because I was expecting you to say complete confidence in himself. And confidence has been a problem for me, and maybe that confusion of the self and the dharma is part of that. So you can speak about the quality of confidence in Thich Nhat Hanh and yourself and all of us. I don't think... any of those people had complete confidence in themselves.

[66:30]

I think they saw themselves. They saw their flaws and their shortcomings, as I do. I see my own. For Sojin, I know there were places that he was more confident, places that he was less confident. If you hear something I didn't read, I think Andrea, it last week, Ryushin referenced it last week. When Thich Nhat Hanh came in 1991, it was just after the Rodney King episodes, he was really angry and he didn't want to come. And that was, you know, but his confidence in the Dharma informed his actions and he realized, I have to come.

[67:33]

So I think all these people, their shortcomings and areas where perhaps something was not complete. And this is something that we know from Dogen. When Dharma fills your body and mind, you realize that something is missing. But you have complete confidence. They had confidence in the Dharma. And that's where we should place our confidence. Exactly. That's great. And they had confidence in some sense in themselves as embodying Dharma. They would do their best. Yeah. And try and do their best to make sure that that was to the best of their understanding in line with the Dharma. Yeah. And they did it. They did it, you know, and they were not perfect people, you know, but they might have been perfect.

[68:39]

So let's end there. Thank you. Close with the four vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to awaken with them. are inexhaustible. I vow to win them. Dharma gates are boundless. I vow to enter them. Buddha's way is unsurpassable. I vow to become it. Thank you.

[69:14]

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