Once, in the time of the Buddha, there lived a robber named Angulimala. He lived in a forest and ambushed travelers on the roads in and around the forest, and killed them.

Soon, people were agape to travel. Merchandise ceased, the economy suffered, pilgrimages stopped, temples were abandoned and fell into busted. But Angulimala was not satisfied with this. With the roads empty, he started to get into villages, seeking more than victims. And he massacred villagers. Pretty before long refugees fled the region and whole villages were abandoned. The area was depopulated.

Angulimala, he never took money or annihilation from his victims. He only took, from each of them, one finger. He wore the fingers of his victims in a necklace. That'south how he got his nom de guerre, Angulimala. A mala is a bracelet or a necklace, and Angulimala is "finger necklace."

Angulimala'due south parents lived in the area, simply all they heard about was a murderer with this nickname. They had no thought that it was their own son. But one twenty-four hours, his mother, through divine omens, realized the truth and went to go find him.

Now, Buddha and his followers were camping nearby, and Buddha through his superpowers knew that Angulimala'southward mother was going to find him, and that if she did, Angulimala would kill her. And if you lot kill your mom, you lot will be reborn in hell for innumerable lifetimes. So, Buddha set off briskly to reach Angulimala earlier his mom did.

Imagine the scene: Buddha, a thin little man, arrives in an empty hamlet. The olfactory property of corpses everywhere. He's wearing a sparse robe and he's belongings a stick, and that's all he has. He stands in the middle of the dusty main street, barefoot.

All of a sudden Angulimala leaps from an alleyway! He's huge, and armored. He'southward carrying a gigantic sword. He charges toward the Buddha.

But, even though Angulimala is running at top speed, the earth betwixt them stretches and so that he can't actually reach the Buddha. He shouts, "You lot, end!"

Buddha says, "I am continuing still. I accept put down the sword for all beings. You are unrestrained toward beings. Therefore I am standing still, you are not standing even so."

Angulimala is impressed. He's astounded by the Buddha'southward courage. He'due south never seen anybody answer to him like this before, and he asks for an explanation.

Buddha says monks who follow him control themselves. They restrain their greed and their desire. And this liberates them.

Buddha was so persuasive—I really wish we had somebody like this today. Whenever Buddha talked to anybody, they woke up. Angulimala woke up. He repented for what he'd done and he asked to be a monk. Buddha shaved his head and accustomed him into the sangha immediately.

So, the monks and nuns of the early sangha had a criminal in their midst. I wonder how they felt almost that. Wider guild certainly did not accept that Angulimala had been transformed. When he went begging for nutrient they threw rocks at his face.

And Buddha's own followers, they'd taken vows, but they were ordinary people. I wonder if they had some fearfulness, or resentment that this guy would go unpunished and would become one of them, i of the noble ones.

But we all have to trust each other in this sangha. I mean, you don't know what I've washed. I don't know what you've done. But in this instance, the sangha knew exactly what Angulimala had done. It had been on the evening news. I wonder what they thought about having him as one of them.

What would y'all practise in their situation? Would you exist afraid? Would you welcome such a person?

Nosotros run into people similar this sometimes considering the zendo has a meditation program at Sing Sing. So we have a sangha in that location and some of our sangha members take killed people. When I started going x years agone, I was very interested in what crimes these men had been convicted of. And it actually interested and excited me to wonder about that. That's not truthful anymore. You lot know, I've never asked anybody, and now it's not of import to me anymore. I don't even wonder.

Nosotros meet where nosotros meet because of what they've done in the past, but it's clear to me that who I'm meeting is a person who is an issue happening in the room at that moment when we meditate at that place. And so that'due south where we meet. I don't need to know what happened in the past. Although in the cases where I have heard the stories, I wish I could tell you because they are incredible men, and their stories are devastating. But that'due south their story to tell.

Every few years one of our sangha members is released and sometimes they come here. One guy did the summer retreat and took Jukai, he was part of my class. More ofttimes they might come to sit with us a few times. And most often we just don't see them at all. We lose touch. Because their lives are very complicated. Being on parole is incredibly complicated and coming to the zendo simply does not piece of work for them in their lives on the outside. But they're welcome here and I hope sometimes they volition come up.

The reason that Buddha welcomed Angulimala into the sangha was because, from Buddha'southward perspective, every bit soon as Angulimala woke up, he was a different person. Buddha gave him a different proper name: Ahimsaka, pregnant "harmless." And now he's a monk, one of the noble ones, and then he belongs with the monks in the community.

That makes sense because even if y'all accept a snapshot of us at one moment, we're not i thing. Even now. Nothing in the universe is always a single thing. Similar, if you pick a floorboard. Information technology'southward both equanimous of parts and of a larger whole. The floorboard contains the cells that grew when it was part of a living tree, and it's likewise role of something larger: the floor. And that'southward part of something larger still: the room. All beings in beingness are like this, because this slicing up that we do, it'southward a product of our perception. And we can break apart or stick together infinitely.

I am also equanimous of parts and I am likewise office of a larger whole. I normally perceive myself as my skin and everything inside of it. But if you've been following along for any time at all, you lot know that this is a delusion and that the falseness of this delusion leads to anxiety and suffering.

Because information technology's a fact that existence is fractal. If y'all zoom in, there is but every bit much detail, and if yous zoom out there is also just equally much detail. My liver is just as complex as I am. And my society is besides only every bit complex every bit I am. It'southward arbitrary where you say "here is a person."

The Buddha said that for each of united states of america, our consciousness is composed of v parts.

  • One: Class, which is the body, stuff.
  • 2: Sensation.
  • Three: Perception, which is the procedure of labeling the things that we're sensing.
  • 4: Conception, which is the procedure of conceiving intentions or desires, or making plans.
  • 5: Consciousness, which is the process of experiencing of beingness.

And these five "heaps"—in Sanskrit they are skandhas—these five skandhas of processes are all interacting together. And briefly forming something like a person.

I don't commonly see myself this way, though. I encounter myself as "I'1000 me, and I am in control of myself." And that'southward why information technology's such a shock to sit downwards and meditate and see what a chaotic and dynamic system is going on in my head all the time. And how little influence what I think of as "me" has over this set of processes. And that's a big portion of the point of meditation, is to experience that and to see through the mirage that nosotros are single people in accuse of ourselves.

Given how dynamic and chaotic this whole system is, wouldn't information technology make sense that at one moment it could all modify completely? That each of u.s.a. could be transformed at any moment?

I've been arrested merely once. I was virtually 16 and my buddy and I liked to cartel each other to shoplift. We would gear up goals for each other similar, "Let's go into this Barnes & Noble and you have to steal every book by Anne Rice." I would go in with a big trench glaze and merely pocket them all. And the clerk doesn't care because she'southward my age. And it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So we got more than ambitious. One twenty-four hours we went to a shopping center with about a dozen stores and we said each of us has to steal i thing from each of them. We started from the east finish and hit every store, all the way west. The concluding store was a big grocery store and I lifted, I think, a box of colored lightbulbs that I wanted for my room. I tin't remember what my buddy stole.

Of course they had security cameras and the security guard was just calmly waiting for u.s.a. at the exit.

He took the states upstairs to the surveillance room where we could see just how obvious and stupid we must have been. He called the cops and the cops came and cuffed us, and picked us up and took us to the station. We waited in that location on the bench while the cops called our parents. I was picked upward first by my mom and I have completely blanked out what happened when she arrived.

After a few weeks I got a letter. The urban center had declined to prosecute. They just said I've got a record until I turn 18, so I better exist on my best behavior. That was that. And of course, I never shoplifted once again.

The city, the justice system of our little suburb, saw me as complex, equally capable of beingness transformed. They figured: Squeamish white boy from the neighborhood, I would probably abound out of it. And they were right.

A lot of 16-year-olds are not treated this fashion. I'm thinking correct now of Kalief Browder. In 2010 he was 16 years old. He was accused on extremely flimsy show of stealing somebody'due south haversack, and he was arrested and thrown into Rikers. And he waited there for three years for trial. At that place is a technicality in the New York City justice system that allows them to show up every few months, say they're not ready to prosecute and throw you back in jail indefinitely. There is no correct to a speedy trial hither. He was beaten past guards and he spent two of those three years in solitary. Finally the city simply said they weren't going to prosecute him subsequently all, and released him. He insisted the entire time that he was innocent, and he refused therefore to accept any plea bargain that would require him to prevarication and say that had done it.

He went home. Got a degree. Tried to hold down a task. Spoke out against the arrangement. And he was severely psychologically damaged. Two years after he was released, he killed himself. He died in 2015.

Information technology was his activism and those who remember him that led to the #CloseRikers movement. He'southward the reason why Metropolis Council voted to close Rikers this twelvemonth.

Only if you expect at how the justice system treated him, they saw him as one solid thing, as simple, as probably guilty of the thing he'd been accused of and incapable of being transformed. And that'southward why they decided to just throw him abroad.

It's a mutual attitude in the U.S., I think, stemming from our puritanical founders, that if you're convicted of a criminal offense or maybe even accused of a criminal offense, then y'all are beyond redemption and you deserve to be thrown abroad.

Early Buddhism kind of tilted in the other management, which is very interesting. The question is, if we're not unitary individuals, if we're changing all the time, are we responsible for anything we do? If I hit my jisha, can I just say, "Don't blame me, man. I'm not the same person I was five seconds ago"?

Even the person I am correct now is just this heap of interacting processes—there'due south nobody even here to blame! So why practice the precepts? How could we possibly be responsible for whatsoever of our deportment?

In the first few centuries afterward the lifetime of the Buddha, a dozen, ii dozen schools all arose with competing answers to this question of, "If there is no cocky, what does karma cling to? What is reborn?" Clearly, harmful or skillful deportment have consequences for us in the futurity, but how is that possible if at that place'southward no self and it doesn't propagate from moment to moment?

There were lots of different, often rather technical answers to this question. The ane that really makes sense to me was by Vasubandhu, who was i of the founders of the Mahayana branch that we do today. He lived around the 4th Century CE in India.

Vasubandhu says, "Karma is a procedure that is an interaction among beings." Just like beings are, ourselves, interactions of our parts. Karma'south real and nosotros're responsible for it. But it doesn't exist carve up from anything else. Information technology'south part of the period that is continued past interactions from moment to moment among all of the processes that we are.

Karma doesn't have to be abstract. I call up it actually makes a lot of sense if you think of this analogy:

Retrieve of the United states. The U.s.a. is non a person. The U.s.a. has innumerable parts. You lot can't point to it and say information technology's here but not in that location. Y'all can't signal to i person and say that's the The states and that isn't. And nonetheless, the United States does things and we're responsible for those things.

In the Trump administration, the U.s. has abased our allies, turned away refugees, supported dictators, weakened democracies, started trade wars that have ruined people's livelihoods, and abandoned climate agreements, which makes it that much harder to preclude climate crisis. Not that our country was e'er perfect, but the last few years I recall would impress even Angulimala.

So, who is responsible for this? The United States is responsible for this.

And that'south true, even though the United States is a complex system composed of hundreds of millions people and sort of a vague territory. Private people in the United States are responsible for different parts of this issue, and all the same the United States is still responsible. Information technology can and must transform and repent and repair—hopefully soon.

Then that's actually pretty simple. We're used to reasoning about responsibility in this fashion. Then information technology'south likewise true of the states. I'm a little nation. I have billions of parts. I have arguments with myself. And withal, what I do is my responsibility. I can and must transform, resolve all my evil karma, repair the impairment that I've done.

If everyone was here for David Loy's talk about climate justice a week or two agone, I'one thousand kind of riffing on the same thought he has that nations, like people, suffer a mirage of self and nevertheless are responsible for what they exercise.

Next Saturday the 14th, Judy Clark is coming to speak here along with members of an activist grouping called Release Aging People in Prison house. Judy Clark is a prison reform activist. She was incarcerated in the state system for 38 years.

She was an accomplice in a robbery in 1981 that left four people dead. At the time of her trial, she was completely unrepentant, but over the form of her years in prison, she really transformed and became an exemplary person. The zendo and many other groups take been advocating intensely for her. This spring she was finally paroled.

I wish I could exist here to meet her, but Keishin and I are going on an errand that day, we're going to go visit a prisoner on the jail barge that the city runs. In that location'south a barge moored off the Bronx with 800 people. I retrieve it's probably completely miserable. And there'southward a Buddhist man in that location who wants to talk with somebody almost his practice. And so we're going to go see what we tin can practise for him.

And so we won't exist here for Judy Clark. I'yard sure that she and her young man activists are going to have a much more forceful and personal way of saying this, but here'southward how I would say it.

Everyone deserves the opportunity for redemption, because it's in our nature that everybody has the power to transform.

And everybody has the responsibility to transform.

That'southward why we practice, to absolve for our evil karma, to transform ourselves, to redeem and repair. And that's why nosotros welcome everyone, fifty-fifty Angulimala, to practice with u.s.a..

Angulimala chasing the Buddha, from a temple in Sravasti, India.