The Three Tenets Of Zen Peacemakers

Thich Nhat Hahn said, “Teaching is not done by talking alone. It is done by how you live your life. My life is my teaching. My life is my message.”
This is a message about socially engaged practice.
This talk is about what are known as the three tenets of the Zen Peacemakers. Not Knowing, Bearing Witness and Taking Action.

Transcript

So as we enter a new year,

The customary teaching that I offer at this time is to go back to fundamental teachings.

So next week we'll dive into those fundamentals again.

But for today,

I'd like to remind us why those early teachings actually matter.

Thich Nhat Hanh said,

Teaching is not done by talking alone.

It's done by how you live your life.

My life is my teaching.

My life is my message.

And this is a message about socially engaged practice.

That's why we practice,

So that we can be in the world.

We can affect the world.

In 1980,

The Zen master Bernie Glassman,

Who I quoted at the end of practice,

Was set on exploring spiritual training and social action.

And he said,

How do we bring our Zen into our life?

But Zen is life.

So where is there to bring it?

And into what?

The point is to see the point is to see life as the practice field.

Every aspect of our life has to become practice.

What forms can we create in modern society that will be conducive to seeing the oneness of life?

What are the forms that will make it easier to experience interconnectedness?

This was his question.

So what Glassman did was he departed from his formal Zen training,

And he went on to found Greyston Bakery in New York,

And actually in the Bronx.

And the way that this bakery is described is as a place of inclusion and opportunity.

Bernie recognized that people in the community of the Bronx,

And later in Southwest Yonkers,

Needed jobs.

And so he opened his doors to provide employment,

No questions asked,

Employing individuals regardless of education,

Work history,

Or social barriers such as language skills,

Homelessness,

Or incarceration.

And offered supportive services for the community so that the community could thrive.

This was through a bakery,

And they did thrive.

They did thrive.

Twelve years later,

He and his wife then decided to create the Zen Peacemaker Order.

And this order is based on three principles.

The first is diving into the unknown,

Bearing witness to the pain of the world and the joy of the world,

And a commitment to healing oneself and healing others.

So I want to talk about what are known as these three tenets of the Zen Peacemakers.

The first tenet is not knowing.

You know,

Every day we wake up and we don't know what's going to happen,

Right?

There are sudden losses of loved ones,

Or our health,

Or there's political upheaval,

Or your partner is sick or leaves,

Or you lose your job,

Or the internet is down.

All these things happen and can make life up here really unstable.

But according to these Buddhist teachings,

Things are always unstable.

It's just that we have a tendency to live life from a set of unquestioned beliefs that make our life feel solid.

How can you know what will happen next?

You can't,

Because the universe from its tiniest particles to its largest forms is in continual flux.

So not knowing trains us to continually set aside our fixed points of view.

And the felt sense of not knowing,

When you're moving from and living from not knowing,

It's like a flash of openness,

Of openness,

Or a sudden shift of being really present in the moment.

When we're not favoring our viewpoints as they arise,

And not like clinging to them or attaching to them,

It allows ourselves to recalibrate and center ourselves,

And maybe even see the boundlessness of this kind of interconnection that is life all around us.

And practicing not knowing,

It can seem impossible at times,

Because we have so much knowing going on,

Right?

But when you realize that life itself excludes nothing,

Practicing not knowing over time will enable us to really become more aware of what we choose to let in and open to,

And what we have excluded.

If life is excluding nothing,

Can we?

Maybe.

The second tenet is bearing witness.

And the practice of bearing witness is to see all the aspects of a situation,

Including your attachments and your judgments.

What Bernie Glassman would do with the Zen peacemakers is he would take trips to Auschwitz and go to the concentration camp,

And bear witness with others to the atrocities that happened there.

Really powerful,

Powerful practice.

So we can't live solely in a state of not knowing,

Because life also asks us to face the conditions that are coming at us by being present with them,

Bearing witness to them.

When we bear witness,

We're opening to the uniqueness of whatever is arising and meeting it just as it is.

In our meditation practice,

What we do here trains us to bear witness by strengthening our awareness of our thoughts,

Of our feelings,

Of the sensations that come and they go.

And as our awareness strengthens,

What happens?

We begin to experience spaciousness and stability.

And you start to see that you have choice in your responses to what are arising.

That soft readiness I talked about in practice to meet whatever comes,

To bear witness.

And what bearing witness can also allow for us is to eventually come to terms with the most difficult the most difficult circumstances in life,

Our own aging,

Sickness,

And death.

And the practice is always available,

Regardless of the time or the place.

It's always available in every situation we can bear witness.

And over time,

We learn to bear witness with curiosity and compassion.

And the third tenant of the Zen peacemakers is taking action.

And the action that we're taking arises out of not knowing and bearing witness.

It's impossible to predict what the action will be in any situation,

Or what might result from the action.

But the underlying intention,

Based on not knowing and bearing witness is that the action that arises will be a carefully a caring action,

One that serves everyone.

Another thing that the Zen peacemakers did in New York,

Is that Bernie would take out groups of people,

And they would live on the streets with the homeless,

They would make themselves homeless for like a two week retreat,

Under a bridge with the other homeless people.

Not knowing,

Bearing witness,

And the action was to do and to live in this way,

To really feel it,

What it's like to be a homeless person.

So training with these tenants is kind of a matter of taking a backwards step again,

And again,

And again,

Kind of continually discerning your internal process,

In the midst of kind of acknowledging,

Well,

What's happening around you.

I mean,

The Zen tradition,

Taking the backwards step,

Sort of refers to a deep sense of letting go,

As opposed to trying to gain something.

So there's this teaching in Soto Zen,

Called no gaining idea.

So this backwards step is letting go of this gaining idea of the knowing,

Of having the solution.

And there's so much reverence for this instruction in the practice.

So when we can consistently kind of perform these practices of these tenants of not knowing,

Of bearing witness and taking action,

In the midst of all the activities in our life,

This practice will be really accessible during the most challenging circumstances.

Because it's a training in resilience,

A building,

Really building our spiritual muscle,

So that as life unfolds,

We're always directed back to our center,

Our soft readiness to meet it.

So as we go forth into our life and back to some of the foundational teachings,

Maybe there's a better understanding that they're meant to be these foundational teachings,

All the lists that we'll cover are meant to be engaged with.

They're not just nice ideas or a philosophy that you can subscribe to at a dinner party.

The practice is meant to be brought forward into your life,

Into your way of being.

I'll close with this from Thich Nhat Hanh.

He wrote,

When I was in Vietnam,

So many of our villages were being bombed.

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 who were suffering under the bombs?

After careful reflection,

We decided to do both,

To go out and help people and to do so in mindfulness.

We called it engaged Buddhism.

Mindfulness must be engaged.

Once there is seeing,

There must be acting.

We must be aware of the real problems of the world.

Then with mindfulness,

We will know what to do and what not to do to be of help.

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