I decided to join this symposium in part because of a conversation I had with my father when I was seventeen. It was December 1957, and I had just finished my first quarter at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. I took a Greyhound bus back to New York City, and my father met me at the terminal. As we were walking across town to catch the subway to the Bronx, I spotted a storefront with the sign SANE, for a sane nuclear policy, recognizing the name from conversations on campus. I pointed it out to my father and wanted to go inside. My father froze, would not enter, and told me not to go in. “What difference can one person make anyway?” he said.
His question has reverberated in my life ever since. It led me to participate in a voter registration project in Greensboro, North Carolina sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, in the summer of 1963. At the end of our three weeks of knocking on doors to register Black voters, we got on a bus and joined the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. I heard the voice of Martin Luther King, Jr. for the first time. Those experiences sparked in me an awareness of racial and economic injustice that has been a lifelong concern for me.
Eventually my father’s question led me to attend a weekend workshop in 1982 with Joanna Macy titled “Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age.” That weekend motivated me to train with Joanna to learn how to lead despair and empowerment workshops. I became a member of a women’s civil disobedience affinity group and, with many others, climbed the fence of a nuclear arsenal in upstate New York and was arrested. A few years later, I went to Japan to lead workshops and meet peace activists in Kyoto, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Tokyo. I visited the Atomic Bomb Museum in Hiroshima and vowed to do what I could to prevent the use of nuclear weapons. I began to see that one person, together with others, can make a difference in their community, country, and beyond.
I began to meditate and attend Buddhist meditation retreats in my 30’s and when I moved to the Bay Area in 1990, I joined the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and began to practice Zen Buddhism. I became a resident of San Francisco Zen Center in 1999 and was ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest in 2003, vowing “to live and be lived for the benefit of all beings.”
In reading Dr. King’s sermon, “The Man Who Was a Fool,” several themes resonated with Buddhist teachings, especially the teachings about interconnectedness and cultivating the qualities of lovingkindness and compassion. The man whom Jesus called a fool is depicted as a rich man who kept his wealth to himself and died at the peak of his prosperity. Dr. King commented that it was not because the man possessed wealth that Jesus called him a fool, rather it was because he misused his wealth by hoarding it. He had no sense of his interconnectedness with others and focused his efforts on material comfort – which Dr. King refers to as the external realm – ignoring the internal realm.
The internal “is that realm of spiritual ends expressed in art, literature, murals, and religion. The external is that complex of devices, techniques, mechanisms and instrumentalities by means of which we live – the material stuff we must have to exist…There is always a danger that we will permit the means by which we live to replace the ends for which we live, the internal to become lost in the external… the tragedy of the rich man was that he sought the means first, and in the process the ends were swallowed in the means.”
Buddhist teachings include recognizing the presence of the Three Poisons – greed, hate, and delusion – in in our minds and in our lives. Seeking only what is good for oneself is an expression of greed, as well as an expression of delusion – the fundamental delusion is seeing oneself as separate from other beings. Hatred arises from this delusion when we “other” people who are not like us in their appearance, culture, or beliefs.
A frequently quoted passage in “The Man who was a Fool” resonates with many Buddhist teachings and undergirds Dr. King’s teachings about non-violence: “In a real sense all life is interconnected. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.”
The Buddhist image of Indra’s net depicts an infinite net of strands with multifaceted jewels at every node, showing how each of our lives reflects and is reflected by all others. The late Vietnamese Buddhist teacher and scholar Thich Nhat Hanh used the term “interbeing” to describe this. Nothing and no one is separate. He wrote, “All phenomena are products of interdependent co-arising. They do not have a separate self.” (The Other Shore, pp. 20-21). The Buddhist precepts for ethical conduct flow from this understanding. Knowing that we “inter-are,” we do not want to cause harm to other beings – humans or other animals – or to mountains, rivers, oceans, the earth, the air.
This understanding of our interconnectedness has shaped my thinking and actions in my years of living at San Francisco Zen Center. I have worked with others to make our center more welcoming and inclusive to BIPOC and LGBTQIA residents and community members and participated in outreach activities.
I began attending the San Francisco Interfaith Council’s monthly breakfasts after the 2016 election, wanting to find like-minded clergy outside San Francisco Zen Center. I participated in the interfaith march on Dr. King’s birthday that year and every year since then. I joined some of the participants in this symposium at interfaith services, blessings, and vigils in San Francisco and took part in interfaith demonstrations outside the Richmond jail when immigrants were detained there and later outside the Department of Homeland Security. I also took part in an interfaith action outside the Fort Sill army base in Oklahoma organized by Buddhist priest Duncan Williams in July 2019 to protest the inhumane treatment of migrant children.
The Loving Kindness Meditation, which we chant frequently at San Francisco Zen Center, encourages us to embody qualities that support this vision of how our actions impact others:
This is what should be accomplished by the one who is wise, who seeks the good, and has obtained peace.
Let one be strenuous, upright and sincere, without pride, easily contented and joyous.
Let one not be submerged by the things of the world.
Let one not take upon oneself the burden of riches.
Let one’s senses be controlled. Let one be wise but not puffed up and let one not desire great possessions even for one’s family.
Let one do nothing that is mean or that the wise would reprove.
May all beings be happy. May they be joyous and live in safety, all living beings, whether weak or strong, in high or middle or low realms of existence, small or great, visible or invisible, near or far, born or to be born, may all beings be happy…
Let no one deceive another nor despise any being in any state.Let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another.
Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over and protects her only child, so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things, suffusing love over the entire world, above, below, and all around, without limit, so let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the entire world.
Near the end of his sermon, Dr. King asks, “May it not be that the “certain rich man” is Western civilization? Rich in goods and material resources, our standards of success are almost inextricably bound to the lust for acquisition…We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish, but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers…We have guided missiles and misguided men…we have absorbed life in livelihood.”
He urges us to pay attention to the inner life. “Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish the spiritual ends of our lives in personal character and social justice.”
We cannot do this alone. We need one another. Together, we can make a difference.
