Dharma Talk by Ben Connelly: Flower Garden Sutra

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I just know it takes an enormous amount of effort to cause this place of practice as a physical environment to be both probably enormous amounts of financial generosity, physical generosity in painting things and making things and arranging things and enormous generosity of spirit when you all argue about what color to paint the walls and where should the bathroom go. So, you know, coming into this space and seeing the beauty of it represents a huge effort to support the flowering the dharma which will impact lives for many years. And so I love the dharma. So that makes me enormously happy and grateful. So, thank you all for keeping it real here in Bellingham. So yeah, I've been on the road for a while. I left Minneapolis a little over three weeks ago and I've taught at about 15 Zen centers since then and I'm beginning to turn my nose towards back east towards Minneapolis. Ah, so here is where I am. And one of the people go that sounds tiring. It's not that tiring to be where you are. You don't really have an alternative. So I'm going to shift now to talking about the subject of my talk. I'm going to talk for a while and then I'm going to leave a nice block of time for folks to bring their voices for questions or reflections. So I'm going to be talking about the material in this book that I have written which is called Inside the Flower Garland Sutra and I'm going to give begin by just giving some very brief sort of historical contextual background and then I'm going to be focusing in the talk on the implications of the teaching for our contemporary lives. So the flower garland sutra in Sanskrit is called the Avatamska Sutra. It's a massive Mahayana text that emerged in India about 1500 years ago. It was translated pretty promptly into Chinese and became enormously influential on Chinese culture and all on all East Asian Buddhisms. In Chinese, the title Avatamska Sutra is translated as Huāyán Jīng , which means flower garland sutra. So Huāyán means flower garland. In China, this text was so popular that it gave birth to an entire school of Buddhism called Huāyán Buddhism, which has existed and still exists 1500 years. You can go to China and find Huāyán teachers and Huāyán temples. I's particularly influential in Korea where it's called Hwaeom and it's also a living tradition in Japan where it's called Kegon. However, Huāyán is kind of a small niche world in school of Buddhism in our contemporary era. Really the my writing of this has to do with the enormous impact the early teachings from 1500 years ago had on Buddhism have on the way we embody practice today and more importantly can have if we understand them on how we live in our profoundly interdependent world. So the flower garden sutra is really a daunting text. It's the largest Buddhist sutra. It's 1400 pages in small print in a large volume. I was teaching and I had some Chinese monastics in the class and one of them told me it has 1 million Chinese characters. 1 million is a large number for those of you who are not mathematicians and that means about 1 million words. So just to give you a sense of the scale, this book that I wrote is 40,000 words. So just picture something about 25 times this big and you've got the idea. So I really thought that the teachings in this sutra and this tradition were very meaningful and timely, but I really had kind of given up on writing a book about it because writing about a million character text just seemed just really overwhelming. The Huāyán texts themselves are very expansive and various and complex. I thought, "Oh, good. I don't have to write a book. Thank goodness", but then I happened to encounter this great scholar named Dr. Jin Park and she told me, "Oh, no problem. You just need to use Ŭisang’s Ocean Seal Chart, the Korean text." And this is a text composed by one of about 1500 years ago by a Korean monk named Ŭisang’s that was intended to be a compact summation of the teachings of the flower garden sutra and the Huāyán school that could be chanted on a daily basis so one could really internalize the teachings and easily access them in your daily life. So the ocean seal chart is 30 lines seven Chinese characters each 210 characters total. So my hint for you, if you want to write a book and you have to go, am I going to write about 1 million Chinese characters or 210? Go for the 210. I swear it will be easier for you. So this book is a new translation and commentary with one chapter per line of the Ŭisang’s Ocean Steel chart as a way to provide entry into the Huāyán tradition and the flower garden sutra. So the themes of the Huāyán tradition and the sutra that I will be talking about today which are pervasive themes are celebration of abundance and celebration of the sensual world. For those of you who are students of Buddhism and have read early Buddhist texts, celebration of abundance and celebration of the sensual world are not themes of early Buddhism. So the Huāyán tradition takes Buddhism in distinct new places that had a big influence on how people understand the tradition. So we have celebration of abundance, celebration of the sensual world, celebration of interdependence. Most people would say this is the main hallmark of Huāyán is its emphasis on interdependence. And how beautiful and amazing and wonderful it is that things are interdependent. So celebration of abundance, celebration of sensual experience, celebration of interdependence and then celebration of social engagement and the diversity of people of their needs and of their practices. So these are the themes I will be talking about this evening. So first up, abundance. Oh, wow. We have abundant lights and colors, an abundance of technology available. Could you just No, never mind. So, just ask chat GPT to write a talk about Huāyán and I'll just sit here. So, focus. Sorry, this is I'm supposed to know how to focus. You would think that would be my area of expertise. So, abundance in the ocean seal chart. Ah, welcome. I'll just say hi to the folks who are joining online. Good to see you here. In the ocean seal chart, we encounter a series of lines about abundance. 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. Pretty abundant. So my assumption is you have seen rain. So the Avataṃsaka sutra is very, very visual. And in fact some people will say that the flower garden tradition in the flower garden tradition the the dharma is seen. It's not heard in words, but it's directly perceived through sight and smelled and touched with the body. So anyway, you've seen rain before, right? So it's like rain and then just imagine that every single raindrop is a jewel, a rain of jewels. So, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires, rubies. I don't know much about jewels, citrines, colors, precious, unbelievably beautiful and precious things filling everything you can possibly see. So, this tradition is saying this is how things are. Or perhaps you could say this would be a useful way to view things. So the teaching of abundance is medicine in two ways. The first is to evoke a sense in us where we see the abundance of things so that we don't feel any need to hold on to anything because we're just like there's so much. Why would I grasp or hoard anything? There's plenty. And then when we are freed from grasping by recognizing abundance, our energy can go to helping the people around us meet their actual material needs. So this is the first way in which abundance is a medicine. The second is I encountered as I read Korean commentators on this poem. They generally said what do the rain of jewels represent? What do the jewels represent? The jewels represent skillful means. Many of you would be familiar with the term skillful means. Well, what does skillful means mean? So, we're saying the whole of space is filled with this beautiful and precious array of skillful means. Skillful means refers to the capacity right now of every sentient being to do something which is effective at promoting liberation from suffering for everyone and everything. This is the basic underlying principle of Buddhism. We have the four noble truths. It says there's suffering and you can do something about it. And it doesn't say you can do something about it on Tuesday at 3:00 or or you know when you're in a good mood. You can always practice right speech. You can always develop mindfulness. You can always develop the capacity for concentration. You can always be applying effort for liberation from suffering. All of the elements of the path are always available. So this is true for every sentient being all the time. So if we're just super limited in how we think about this and we're only going to refer to human beings, that is currently 8 billion people. Now I've just read this article about how people absolutely can't understand what a billion is. It was talking about money. We just don't understand what it means for someone to have a billion dollars. But a billion people is way more trippy than a billion dollars. And we got eight of them. And every single one of those people right now and always has the capacity to do something which is conducive to liberation from suffering for everyone forever. That is so mind-boggling and amazing to me. It makes the image of a bunch of rain of jewels be paltry as a way to evoke how astounding it is. What if I go through every day being like I and everyone I know and all these people I can't even imagine always and right now have the capacity to engage in liberation. Wow. So inspiring. It's like this Buddha stuff is cool.

So, I'm going to read a short passage from the book related to this.

Oh, wow. How's this going to work?

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. Huāyán emphasizes seeing a world so replete with riches that we feel no need to hold on. Huāyán teachers understand that these abundant manifestations require our actual giving. In his commentary on this line, Pab Young 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." End quote. In a palicanon text, so this is from the earliest layer of Buddhist text, a king gets wise counsel on how to deal with bandits overrunning the realm. His adviser tells him that punishment and violence will not end the epidemic of crime. But, and here I quote the Palicanon Sutra, 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 own occupations will not harm the kingdom. Your majesty's revenues will be great. The land will be tranquil and will 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 that punishment and violence are an ineffective means to prevent crime and actually providing the material resources necessary for people to thrive is effective. It's a it's a thing that floats around. There's two kind of amazing movements. The police abolition movement and the prison abolition movement are basically rooted in this idea. But it's also pervasive in many other contexts that we'll see. And people might think, oh, this is this crazy novel idea people got in the United States in 1985 or something. It's kind of an old idea. It's in the palicanon.

So I had a very vivid sense of the power of viewing things with abundance in these two ways of kind of letting helping me let go of wanting to hold on to things and also just being sort of relentlessly inspired by people. But it's gone to a new level in the last few months as a resident of Minneapolis. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about this later, but I'm gonna just talk about one small corner of one small thing that I happen to be a part of. And this would be, you know, I could talk about like many, many things like this and then I would still not know about most of the things. So this is the one I'm going to talk about. In early December, a friend of mine said, "Well, we have a long history of mutual aid networks here in Minneapolis, but I really want to set up a new thing because we know that when ICE came to Portland, to LA, and Chicago, they were they were brutalizing and scaring people." And they're talking about bringing a lot more people. It ended up being 20 to1 more people per capita than they'd ever brought to any city, by the way. And so there's going to be people who are immigrants and it's not going to be safe for them to leave home. So I'm going to make a form so that they can sign up and say, "I would like someone to deliver groceries to me." And I made another form that says, "I would like to de deliver groceries." So it was nice. Like a week or two later, mid December, we're at a meeting and they're like, there's like 40 or 50 people and now I think we need a volunteer just to manage like the spreadsheet and help coordinate people. Like we need a next level volunteers. So I started getting the next level volunteers. Well, within a couple months there were thousands of people in this little group, Neighbors Helping Neighbors. And we weren't just delivering food. It's also giving people rides to work, accompanying people to court and various other things. Also, we realized there were a lot of people who weren't leaving their homes or the businesses been shuttered, so they couldn't pay rent. So, we started raising rent funds. And that little thing that started with a spreadsheet within 3 months had raised $5.7 million to pay rent for people in our community. That's just one example of one little thing like that. I have friends who started almost the exact same thing in other neighborhoods and the same thing happened. And then there's a lot of people I don't know. I live in a big city. So what happens when people just realize we can take care of each other? What happens? We have the resources to take care of each other. Amazing things happen.

So next theme is interdependence. As I said before, generally people would say this is the hallmark of the Huāyán tradition, the emphasis on each thing depends on everything. Everything depends on each thing and each thing depends on each thing and every possible permutation of how you could think about that, perceive it or embody it. So in the ocean seal chart we have a series of lines that say within one is all within many is one. One is all the many are one. Within one mote of dust is contained the 10 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. So because each thing is depending on everything else, you can't pull, as my friend Enzen said at Gejogi last week, a thread out of the universe and be like, "Oh, this one's not connected to everything else. They are inherently connected. And because of that, there's ultimately no separation. So the entire universe is present in each thing, no matter how minute. And the universe in its entirety can only exist as it is expressed in every particular exact thing.

So I'm going to read a little bit related to this.

Uisang’s is the author of the ocean seal chart. When Uisang’s traveled to China for the dharma, he met a woman named Sonyo who fell in love with him. He told her that his vow of celibacy meant he could not requite her love and her ardor 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. She is perched there right now. A great stone guardian overlooking the temple of the floating stone Buseoksa near Yeongju 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 and 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 disorder. Somehow I could be totally 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.

Teachings on karma have much in common with contemporary theories of trauma. So does the Huāyán 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.

So, Huāyán and teachings just go over the moon to find different ways to try and help us see that things are interdependent and all the ways that they are and it's wonderful. But I will say my favorite method is the one that we have right at our closer than our fingertips in this Zendo. When we practice zazen, we have the opportunity to not do something, to not make something happen, to not objectify the world, to not objectify ourselves, and to allow the tendency of the mind to divide things into parts, to be manipulated, and to actually see the seamlessness of the world that is always already here. And it's you don't have to make something happen or get good at it because it's already here.

Also you might notice it a little more if you keep at it.

Okay. So because the whole universe can only appear in its particular expressions then that makes everything really matter. So this is one of the ways in which Hen has such had a profound influence on Soto Zen. I don't know how you're doing it around here.

All right, cool.

No one's on fire right now except for the dharma. So, anyway, so, you know, I remember coming to the Zen Center and they're like, "Okay, you put your cushion here, you put your cushion there, you puff your cushion up, when you sit up, you clean off your cushion, then you stand and you bow this way and you that way." And I thought, "Why are we doing this?" Because everything matters. Because everything matters. It takes practice to recognize that everything matters. We get a context in a soto zen temple to practice seeing that everything matters. And this emphasis on taking care of things is distinctly comes to Buddhism through Huāyán. Early Buddhist teachings are predominantly about investigating consciousness itself. The internal what we would think of as internal processes. Ultimately, by the way, everything is consciousness. But let's not get into that. Okay. So, I'm going to read you a little bit more about particularity and activity.

Yes. So, the book we have the new translation of the ocean seal chart. It's 30 lines. So, there are 30 chapters. So this is the commentary on this line. Within one is all within many is one. If you want to sum up why in 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 people for an article about Tommoy Katagiri, who was central in transmitting the practice of hand sewing Zen religious garments to North America, Andrea Martin said, Tommoysan continually showed that everything matters. End quote. If the whole world is here in this cup of tea, this stitch, or this bow, don't you want to care for it? The Huāyán master Xian wrote, quote, "Because in the Huāyán teaching, phenomena are the teaching. Whatever phenomena are brought up, inexhaustible teachings are included." End quote. Because everything is precious. Discernment about how to care for things is precious. Once Tommoysan was carefully making us tea, appropo of something we'd 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 quote from the sutra was over, she returned to the tea. In Ŭisang's commentary on the poem, yes, he wrote a commentary on his own text. don't get any ideas.

In Ŭisang's commentary on the poem, he repeatedly refers to the teaching of the 10 coins. This is a common Huāyán metaphor. If you have 10 coins, any one of them completely contains all 10. For if you remove that one, there is no 10. Within the 10 coins, each one is completely contained in the 10. For if the 10 were gone, so too would be the one. More subtly, if part of the 10 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. If a bowl of soup costs 10 coins, the one is part of 10 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 someone with thousands, millions, or billions of dollars in the bank. The power of one coin to buy a cup of tea or 10 coins to buy a bowl of soup contains the entire universe which shows up in the form of a 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. 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 Arendt is a philosopher, was a philosopher. She was a Jewish woman who escaped Europe in the late 30s as Nazis were coming to power and immigrated to the United States. And she wrote extensively about how authoritarianism comes to be and how to prevent it. a topic of great interest to me at this time. And she once wrote, "Even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness." Even the smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of boundlessness. And if you would have told me that came from a Huāyán text or the flower garden sutra, I would say that sounds about right. But it didn't. It came from Hannah Arendt who was writing about authoritarianism because she recognized people tend to look at the authoritarian leader and the people around him and they go that person is bad and evil and we need to get rid of them and then everything will be good. And her point is that authoritarianism exists authoritarianism exists based on millions and millions of act acts by millions of people of active support and passive complicity. And that's how authoritarianism exists. It's a Huāyán view that the system is what produces each particular part and a Buddhist view that everyone has agency within it. So this was just interesting to me because for the last six months I've been part of a crew in Minneapolis providing trainings in how to not cooperate with authoritarianism. And the training was designed by social scientists. It was designed by freedom trainers and based on social science research. They studied places where there was an authoritarian breakthrough as we have had in the United States in the last couple of years and they looked at when this happens which countries became authoritarian states and which did not and what were the effective means of resistance to prevent it from happening and then let's do the things that are effective. So that's what the training is about. And one of the things about the training is it says don't just look at the person up there and go, "Oh, you're bad. We got to get rid of you." But realize there's an entire system of complicities that produces the authoritarianism and everyone has agency and we all have different particular places where we relate to that system. There's we in the training we talk about pillars. There's the religious communities, educational communities, business communities, political communities, military. All these places have are supporting the thing and can be eroded and prevented from supporting it and every one of us has a place in that. So if you like authoritarianism, you know, don't worry about it. So so it's just interesting how the Huāyán view completely and powerfully aligns with this set of teachings that I've encountered in a fairly different context. I do want to talk a little bit more about particular activity. In Minneapolis after George Floyd was murdered, which is a couple miles from my house. Also, where Alex Pretti and Renee Good were murdered a couple miles from my house, all within a mile and a half of each other. So after George Floyd was murdered, immediately there was a lot of rage and outside the third precinct where the officers were based that killed him, there was a massive encampment with thousands of people and within a few days the building was burned down. At 38th and Chicago where he was murdered, within hours it became a site of vigil, of spirituality, and of community building and it still is. So there started to be a daily community meeting at what's now what we call George Floyd Square and it's still going on. You'll be like five degrees below zero and you're driving down the street. You look over and there'll be people sitting around a fire pit on the corner talking about how to build community. It's an amazing wondrous thing. It's also very chaotic. But at that place early on people would just bring things. So like within days it was just full of flowers, candles, religious symbols, poems, works of art, dolls, people just bringing things and it's kind of overwhelming. And a woman named Janelle Austin and there were other people involved too, but she's taken a lot of leadership just said every one of these things matters. Every single thing brought to the square was brought by a person who cared. And we're going to take care of all of them. And so they began to curate the space and take those things that were brought into the square and find ways to arrange them and present them that honored the gift. And when they fall apart, when they dispose them, they try and do it respectfully or they archive them. There's a massive archive of offerings. So, everyone has a particular place where they can do particular things, but they're all different. She chose that way to honor every one of those things as utterly precious and valuable, but you don't have you're not there. I'm not there. So, we get we have different opportunities. So that kind of brings me to my last topic I want to talk about here which is social engagement of diversity of practice diversity of people of needs and of practices. So the flower garland sutra was composed was compiled from many other existing texts that were much shorter and then brought into this giant thing. Three of those texts that were included in it were particularly influential and some people here are soon to be studying the utterly miraculous Gaṇḍavyūha Sutra which I'm going to talk about here. The Gaṇḍavyūha Sutra or entry into the realm of reality is the third of the key standalone sutras that were incorporated into the flower garland sutra. It constitutes the final and longest chapter of the Avataṃsaka. It tells the story of a young man, Sudana, 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. Each one sends him on to visit another teacher to keep practicing. The teachers include beggars, queens, boys and girls, monks, 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 such as Avalokiteśvara, Manjushri, and Samantabhadra. 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 sense and buildings, 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 Buddhist communities.

So we have this text that's all about relationships entering opening to relationships with all different kinds of people and then seeing how different they are and how different the ways that they enact and embody liberation can be.

So, as I was saying before, I had a lively sense of this before, but being in Minneapolis just took it all to another level. So, I just want to talk about a few things that I've seen people do that I thought were conducive to liberation from suffering recently. So, people, we had relationships to people in Chicago. And when the ICE started brutalizing people more in Chicago, they've been brutalizing people for a long time. There was like they were like, "Oh, we're going to alert people in neighborhoods with these networks and then people could show up and let people in the neighborhood know this is happening." So, they contacted people in Minneapolis this you can set up these networks. Using relationships, we were able to try and find a way to take care of each other. And within probably a week of we started what they called Operation Metro Surge. We had hundreds of people and within a couple weeks there were thousands of people who were available on a moment's notice to run out literally run out of their homes and document what was happening. I was talking to one of my Zen students who I thought was like really not all that engaged with any of this and he was like running I've never done this running down the street and then watching my neighborhood my neighbor be taken away. It had to be really fast because they were often taking people the strategy was to get people in like five or six minutes. So, I know people who witnessed ICE come in, jump out of a car, pull someone out and drive away, and the car was not was still moving and bystanders had to put it in park. Other people witnessed people move from their cars. They drove away within two or three minutes and there were children still in the car. So, it was necessary to move very, very rapidly. Hundreds, thousands of people willing to dive into this and it was dangerous. Two people were murdered by federal agents while documenting what they were doing and many other were tear gas, pepper-sprayed and brutalized. I know lots of people and detained illegally. Enormous courage. It's like wow that was a drop in the bucket of what people were doing. Now if you know anything about the violence that came to Minneapolis, it's probably because those people did that because the journalists would not have been there on the scene. they do not have the capacity. There needed to be thousands and thousands of people. So, wow. But while that was happening, these little mutual aid networks like the one that in my neighborhood we started up that would are it was like those were happening all over many many of them. I met this like superintendent of schools from a suburb who was like I can't even go into all the amazing things she did to challenge what was going on. There were of course protests and vigils. We had a beautiful Buddhist vigil and while we were doing all our meditation and chanting in front of the federal building, there was like this heavy metal band playing a song called blank ice, blank ice, blank ice. And we're just like, oh yes, diversity, diversity of people and practices. And we had singing resistance where we just go in the street, hundreds and thousands of people just singing. We love each other. We care for each other. We had a really beautiful Buddhist walk where we walked from to George Floyd Square and to the Renee Good Memorial Buddhist walk for justice and 700 people came and just walked in silence for a couple hours. Only the sound of bells and the sound of children coming out of their houses and going, "What? What is that? It's peace." I could just go on and on. Listen, people being amazing in countless different ways. And the point of this talk is not that you should do those things at all. The point is that practice in its boundlessness is way I didn't I didn't see any of that coming. the possibilities are vast and people can do things that are amazing and beautiful. So, it's like something about looking to and trusting and be inspired by what people do and looking in here and trusting and being inspired by your own capacity which looks like whatever it is. It's very different. When I came to practice, all I knew how to do is sit on a cushion and cry.

I get to do a different kind of practice now. That's cool. I cried it out. Something else was revealed. So, it is a great joy to to share this with you. Thank you all very much. And now, I would like to give some time for other voices. So, I'm just looking at a clock. Hold on. Questions are very welcome. questions of any kind. I'm not saying I can answer any kind of question, but it's like if someone asks a philosophical question, you don't have to feel like, "Oh gosh, we're really smart in here." You can you can ask whatever kind of question matters to you. Also, reflections are welcome. If there are reflections, it's nice if they're somewhat brief, as there are many people. And it looks like if you're in the room, we're going to ask you to wait till you have a microphone. So, people online. So, uh, what's up? What's up with you?

Yep. Yeah. You're you're talking about silent walking. We did that practice here as well and and it was kind of astounding. We have we have somebody who's pretty good in social media. We just kind of put the word out and a couple of us showed up at the meeting place and 100 people showed up, you know, it just and it's interesting to do an action that's about peace without like sort of an action plan, you know, that's not trying to make something happen and I don't know but it but by the end and we did this several times and by the end of every walk it really felt like I don't know what this is but something important is here, you know. So there's something about connected to what you're saying about just showing up in the world and you know in some way right in some way without even if we haven't figured out how to affect some sort of objective external change you know so I love that last part yeah why why does it have to be a world of objects right it's like if you want there to be peace why not just do peace do peace thank Thank you.

Chris is over here with the gassho hands. Thanks for your inspiring talk. Thank you for your inspiring talk. I love the long form of the Avatamsaka. There was a group of us and we read the first 800 pages until the energy kind of fizzled out and I was in an email exchange with Tyken Denladen about it and he called it the environmental sutra because it shows over and over again how we are connected with everything whether we like it or not, whether we want to see it or not But it's the reality of it. And I personally found it very heart opening just to read it and to to hear all the voices represented in it. It was very beautiful. Thank you. Yeah, I could definitely have given a talk that was all just like same framework but all the examples would be about environmentalism for sure. There's all these deities that emerge from the earth for one thing which are quite wonderful but also just beautiful images of nature and I will say the abundance teaching I've encountered it a great deal when working with indigenous people. One very notable example is Robin Wall Kimmerer's book, Braiding Sweetgrass, which is principally about trying to recognize abundance to get us free from extraction. But I heard the same message repeatedly when I was working in a movement to stop the line three pipeline in northern Minnesota, which was led by indigenous women and spent a lot of time talking about just recognize the richness and completeness of this land without the extraction of tar sands oil. So thank you. Thank you.

I don't have to turn it on. Okay. Eat the microphone. Right. Well, thank you very much, Ben, and I so appreciate your efforts in Minneapolis. And I was just really inspired when you started reaching out to others. And I love the the term that developed out of this movement called neighboring. And I think that we can all learn from that. In the peace walks we we ended up at at a little playground and I heard this little child say, "I don't know who they are, but there's a bunch of them and they're all being quiet and I think they're doing something."

And I also just wanted to put a plug in for if you are moved to go to a demonstration but you don't want to go there to say ___ ice you might be thinking you can you can wear your rakusu and just show up and be a peaceful person at that group.

Thank you. Thank you, Ben. I just wanted to say too that one of the things that is so inspiring to me which you've talked about a lot in Avatam is the integrating of skillful means you know and it's just I mean pages and pages of oh you know how you can be a painter how you can be a construction worker how you can be a government agent and you know it's so inspiring because it it gives everyone the feeling that oh okay you know I can I can do something here too and I think that's one of the main emphasis you know emphasis in Avatam and Gaṇḍavyūha is skillful means and how we just like you were saying everyone you know has an ability to do something in some way so thank you. Yeah yeah thank you and you know it's such an active talk you know I'm a I'm a kind of an active person. But you know, I during this whole time where all that other stuff was happening, I just went to the temple in the morning and practiced zazen and then did a service and did so and we had meditation retreats and classes on the palicannon, you know. And so all that still goes on and you know when I talk about the capacity to engage in liberation, I mean things like knowing the sensations in your body right now. You know all those carpenters and mathematicians and perfumers in the Gaṇḍavyūha they're like why is it a bodhisattva activity? One because it's grounded in the desire to free all beings from suffering. So it's rooted in bodhichitta and two because it's radically rooted in the present moment and objectlessness. So not trying to control fix or dominate anything but just to give the effort into the whole. So thank you. Thank you for that.

There's someone back here want to come up.

Thank you so much. Really appreciate the talk and wondering if you have any more that bubbles up around rage in these movements. I teach college students and they don't want to be quiet and they are trying to find their the place for that like both youthful energy and also like true burn it down absolute no, you know, clarity really. And then in some other places where I work that have a maybe more like explicitly politicized lens or stance on things. And it feels for me like I'm often straddling like spiritual community that struggles to let that in and then more politicized communities that are not anchoring in anything else. And sometimes I feel a drift in that. But I wonder about you talk about these like diversity of strategies and ways of being and what about that one? Yeah. Yeah. So um one what I didn't talk about here you you could talk about a lot of different things. There was a huge amount of rage in Minneapolis and there still is and like unbelievably vitriolic hateful things shouted at ICE agents constantly. There are literally people who are there 24 hours a day outside the federal building with bullhorns just spouting vile things at the building and anyone who came in and out of it and and in the streets too. So I was like, "Okay, yeah, there's there's a lot going on here." So I didn't want to deny that that's true. And you know, I have a long-standing practice of bearing witness to what is present. So I came to practice to be like, "Holy crap, there's a lot of stuff in here." you know, I had a lot of rage. And so that's still true. When there's rage, my practice is to know it and care about it. And yeah. So, I have no interest in I don't recommend anyone sort of get into policing people or, you know, you can just you can decide, is this a place for me? I've been like, okay, the guy was over there with the bullhorn just yelling vile insults. I'm going to go to the other end of this chain link fence where we're putting up pray prayer flags. You know, they get to make that choice. Finding context for people to bear witness to the emotion of rage itself is incredibly valuable and there may be opportunities for you. You know, you don't have to say like now we're being mindful of rage. You just let people talk about how they feel. So, one of the things I was a part of that started in mid-December is we had an every night we had a healing zoom call where one of a group of about six of us would provide meditation and spiritual care for people who are doing the rapid response. So, we were tied into the rapid response networks. So the people who are on the most traumatic front lines who were often really enraged and/or traumatized or exhausted could come in and talk about how they felt and could process it through their bodies. So you can look for opportunities to make context for people to do that. But in my experience that was a rare and precious chance I had. Normally it's more just like, "Oh yeah, you're you're really mad." Knowing anger is profoundly liberating. So there are some ideas. Thank you.

Did you want to ask something? Yeah. No. Okay. I thought I I thought you or say something. Thank you. I this I love this. I also work with young people who are really angry and I find that a lot of activists these days are finding language around you have to take care of yourself. You cannot be pissed off all the time. It just doesn't work. And I'm so grateful because I think at times I have felt guilty for not being able to stay mad because I find things pretty delightful. But I do sometimes find this in between place with people going, "Okay, you got to take care of yourself." And I'm learning how to do it. And if you're my patient, I might even be able to do it with you, but I don't know how to tell anybody how to take care of themselves. So, I'm thinking of what you're sitting in the middle of and how much joy you brought to this talk and like depth of it's complicated this whole perfect moment. really includes some things that are painful to look at. So, I can feel it all. I can't say it all. And I don't know if you can either, but I'm sort of wondering, how do you know if you're okay? You have to have days where you're not delighted. Probably true. I've heard that. I think that's true. I have plenty days where I was not that delighted coming through Seattle today. I mean there's a little bit it's like what's a tunnel anyway yeah so I'll say what can I say about this I think you know I'm moving more towards yoga teachings so which are you know this talk today is about Huāyán which is so positive and beautiful so that's like what I'm doing but that's just one thing that I think about Yogachara really winds us back to looking at the emotional content of experience and helping people do that in ways that you know are going to feel good to them. And you know one basic principles I have is there's never I don't want anyone to feel obligated to have any emotion ever. I don't want anyone to feel obligated to have any emotion ever. You feel how you feel, you know, and it's like you should be angry. I don't want to should people that way. And then with that frame, then it can be like this is the feeling that is present. And can I get used to just being like this is the feeling that is present. Can I notice it and that's it? There doesn't have to be a second layer. There probably will be, but that first those two first principles can both be very helpful for me and for also in context with other people. And it's nice you could find ways to create like I go to a lot of meetings and we're just careful to make it so that one person can be like I'm really having going through hell and another person can be like I'm having a great day and you don't have to apologize for either one and those that's like anything you can do to make people more have those contexts is a powerful way to build community I think. So thanks

Let's see. We have a time for maybe one or maybe two more if anyone wants to say anything. Anybody on Zoom want to say anything.

Don't have to

You used the term objectlessness a few minutes ago and I can't remember exactly context but would you just talk a little more about that really yeah yeah I think you use dirt as well or some slightly different version of it when you're talking about the peacewalk you're like what what is what is the purpose or something you know there's no object so objectlessness would be a way to think about emptiness or non-duality. They're all not identical terms, but they sort of point to some similar things. So, I'm just playing with the word. So, if you hear the word emptiness, it might be talking about what I'm talking about here. So, and this idea of emptiness or non-duality or objectlessness is without it none of the Huāyán system makes any sense. You have to have those as the philosophical basis. So, now what am I actually talking about? Generally speaking, it seems like I'm here looking at things, right? Is that how it is? Does it seem like you're looking at me? Probably. So, that means there's a sense of a subject and an object. And the basic idea is that's never true. There's never a subject separate from an object. None of the things of the world are objects which can be manipulated or held on to or controlled. That's what emptiness is about. You might think that's crazy. I can obviously look, I'm controlling my phone. I could I could spend a lot of time giving you proofs that that's not true or why it's an unhelpful view, but we don't have time. So, and that's lots of Mahayana Buddhism because it's such a strange and difficult thing to access. Mountains of texts trying to get us to realize it. But what's it about? We we have feminist theory. Then they were like, look, objectifying women's bodies harms people. It certainly harms women, but it harms culture and it harms everyone within the system. That's a tiny fraction of the view of Mahayana Buddhism that objectifying anything always creates a harm because there's always a sense that there's something to be controlled, dominated, or manipulated. And when we begin to recognize or see emptiness, it's possible to enter into an intimacy that's seamless. That's seamless. It's not a world of objects. It's only a boundless intimate seamless relationship moment to moment which has an opportunity to make an offering and that's life. And I think that's how I want to end this talk. So thank you all very much.