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Skillful Speech:Shifting Speech to Wholenesss - Rev. Liên Shutt

The following talk was given by Rev. Liên Shutt at Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, CA on January 07, 2024. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.

Skillful Speech:Shifting Speech to Wholenesss

Introduction and a Visualization

Thank you, Martha, for that introduction. And, of course, I want to thank you, Gil, for the invitation to teach here. I have taught at IRC, and I've been here a few times on Wednesdays, but not since way before the pandemic, so it's good to be here with you all. First of all, let's just say hi to each other. So turn around, bump fists or elbows, or whatever feels safe to you beside each other.

Sorry, I'm scent-sensitive, so I'm getting a little bit of dripping here. I apologize about that. Maybe because I'm Zen, but feel free to turn your chairs to face directly so your neck isn't strained at the end. Feel free if you want, or your bodies.

I actually want to start us out with a visualization. So if everyone could close your eyes—and of course, if you know that's activating anyway, perhaps just keep your eyes down. All right. I'd like you to visualize peeling a fruit. This is an ancient meditation I've made up, so you're peeling a fruit. Really visualize it. You can feel free to move your hands while you're doing this, too. Like, which hand are you holding the fruit? What kind of fruit is it? And now you're peeling the fruit with a knife. So how are you holding the knife? How are you peeling the fruit? All right. Okay.

Sorry, you don't get to eat the fruit in this visualization! Actually, go ahead, eat some fruit, since it's an ancient made-up one. Eat the fruit, and then whenever you're done eating or ready, just open your eyes and come back here.

My glasses are fogging up. All right. Anyone want to share first, what fruit are you peeling?

Audience: Apple. Rev. Liên Shutt: Okay, yes? Audience: Banana. Rev. Liên Shutt: Banana. I did banana, apple, and orange. Audience: Oh, you're very, very hungry this morning. Rev. Liên Shutt: Yeah, okay. Yes? Audience: Pear. Rev. Liên Shutt: A pear. Phew, I thought you said a bear! I'm going, "Wow, okay!" [Laughter] All right. Okay, and then with your knife, tell me which way you peel the fruit with your knife. Go ahead and maybe, in fact, everyone maybe just do it. All right. Okay, now I'll say a few words for those people online who can't really see us in the room. All right, I think I saw your hand first, yeah?

Audience: I had a mango, so I was doing it with a knife like that. Rev. Liên Shutt: Uh-huh. And then what do you do after you do those lines? Audience: Slice a section and eat it. Rev. Liên Shutt: Okay, anyone else? Audience: I don't peel my fruit. I'm sorry, I don't peel my fruit. Rev. Liên Shutt: You don't peel your fruit? A banana, you just eat the whole banana with the skin, right? Audience: Like, I don't peel it ever with a knife. Rev. Liên Shutt: Oh, with a knife, okay. All right, anyone else want to say? Yes? Audience: I went around in a circle around my apple. Rev. Liên Shutt: Uh-huh, a circle with an apple, trying to do one piece. Yes, yeah, that's a fun one.

Conditioned Habits

All right. I'll just say I made up this visualization for the beginning of one of these books. So I should say I'm here—my name is Reverend Liên Shutt. My pronouns are she and they. I live on Graton Rancheria land. Are we still on Ohlone land here? Yes, okay. I meant to look it up and forgot.

Gil was kind enough and gracious enough to be at Bookshop with me at one of the readings of my book back in November: Home is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Four Noble Truths—oh no, sorry, the Engaged Eightfold Path, we've changed the subtitle! Was anyone here for that, perchance? No one? Okay, there are a few. All right, there were a lot of people there, but different people obviously. He asked me to come and give a talk about the book.

This meditation, or reflection visualization, came about when I was literally peeling a mango a while back, a few weeks ago. I peeled a mango. I'm right-handed. I peel a mango with the skin towards me. And I had a memory about how one time I was doing that, and a white woman said to me, "That is wrong. That is so unsafe. You should not peel with a knife towards you. If you slip, you hurt yourself. You should peel away from you." And I was like, "Okay," but I continued to peel because this is how I was taught, right? Maybe I brought a little more mindfulness and carefulness to it.

Then, this time when I was doing it, I remembered that I used to hang out with a friend in the Vancouver, BC area who is from Malawi. One time, when I was peeling a mango my way, she said, "Oh, this is how we peel it in Malawi." So she took the mango, and with a knife did those lines, and then with her finger just peeled it off.

To me, it's a way of understanding how each of us are conditioned all the time. This book is basically about how we are conditioned, especially in the system of white supremacy culture, to inhabit or take certain places within the oppression system in general. But very specifically about race here, and very specifically from the Asian-American perspective, because there isn't a lot out there, especially in the Buddhist world. A lot of it has to do with how we were conditioned and in our location. How, then, do we come to understand how to accept other ways of being or not? And by that acceptance, it doesn't have to be some rejection—like lock the door, go in the back, or whatever. It can be other ways that are unconscious or more mild.

The Four Noble Truths as a Restorative Model

Since most of you weren't at the book reading, this book arose out of a response. The first response was in 2017. I was at a Generation X teacher conference, and another round of sexual misconduct had come to light in various Buddhist communities in North America. At this conference, they brought in Right Use of Power as a restorative model. Who here knows Right Use of Power? Okay, look it up—Cedar Barstow. It's really about up-power and down-power. I mention it a little bit in here. Really useful, and I really appreciate it.

And yet, it got me thinking that in my career and in Buddhism, I've been to a lot of trainings. Always something else was brought in for conflict resolution. I was like, "Well, what in Buddhism can we have as a restorative model?" So with the support of the Hemera Foundation, which is a Buddhist Foundation, I've been developing the Four Noble Truths to be a restorative model.

In that model, the First Noble Truth—you know, in life there is dukkha¹—starts out with that. There is harm, and harming has happened, because to restore anything we have to begin with acknowledging that something has been broken. So much of conflict, I will say, is about defining that. I've heard of many divorces where it's defining who hurts who in what way, and then from there what kind of resolution. Wars are about who has hurt whom in what way. When there's conflict, when we can have some sense of where we could meet, we could at least start to say, "This is the issue that needs restoration." That's how restoration begins. Otherwise, it's just conflict. So that's why it starts with that.

The Second Noble Truth is usually about the causes or the origins of dukkha. In the engaged version, it's about understanding fully the causes and conditions for the arising of hurt and harm. It's similar to the classic one; however, we focus a bit more on the systemic conditions. For instance, in racism. I know that for many years when a racist incident happened to me, mostly my response was, "Why are they being so mean to me? What did I do?" Until I took ethnic studies. By the way, I'm adopted. I'm from Vietnam, I lived overseas until I was—well, I came to the US when I was nine and a half for like a year and a half, then I went to Egypt and didn't come back till I was a teenager. So I didn't understand the structure of racism in the United States.

But once I understood that, then I realized, "Oh, it's not so personal." I mean, the impact is personal, without a doubt, but there's a whole system that creates that, and so it's a systemic thing. It depersonalizes a lot. It actually lowers my sense of blame. Again, not that the individual impact isn't important and valid, but it also gives me this wider sense that, one, I'm not alone, and two, that there are many pieces that come into being, and therefore there are many pieces that can rectify the issue.

Essentially, the premise of this book is that these are all things that were conditioned. The suffering part—of course, certain things are dukkha. Dukkha is just part of life. But the dukkha that we can do something about is the things that we've learned. We were taught, at times, in a way that was understood to be for our safety or for our good. Our parents do that. I know in Vietnam, my mother would ask us to move aside when a GI was coming towards us, or a group of GIs. Black children, children of color, are taught many things to be aware of around white-bodied people, blue-bodied or cop-bodied people. These are things that are taught. White bodies are also taught who might be safe to you or not. So what we need to do is examine that and think, "Now, is this a truth that works for me?" Not only now, as in this year 2024, but also where I live. I'm an adult now; I have more agency.

So the Third Noble Truth is: Where do we find agency even in the midst of dukkha? Right in the midst of hurt and harm. And then the last, of course, is the Eightfold Path. In this version, the Eightfold Path, I've restructured them a little bit, but I'll leave that for now because I wanted to talk a bit about one of the chapters.

Three Aspects of Healing

In general, the book is laid out three ways, and it parallels or echoes what I see as three essential aspects of healing from trauma. Racism is certainly a trauma, other oppressions are trauma. Acknowledging what is, is the first step towards restoration. So much of our practice, actually, is the First Noble Truth: acknowledging what is. Now, I like "acknowledging" because it's not just knowledge; it's really investigating the knowledge, how you know the knowledge. In fact, the practice instruction of the First Noble Truth is to investigate. That's why we want to be curious. We want to lean into it. We want to go and explore it further, right? Isn't that true? You come here thinking, "Oh, I'm going to get instruction on how to avoid my suffering." But if you stay for any length of time, we're asking you to look at it. Sure, we give you tools, and the Eightfold Path gives you lots of great tools for how to be, to identify more and more clearly what is your dukkha, and to build a capacity to be with it.

Then, knowing what shifts are especially needed. Skillful Thinking, Skillful Motivation, Skillful Effort, Skillful Mindfulness, Skillful Speech are under this category. In this book, I frame it as: the first, acknowledging, is "Seeing the World as It Is"—that's hard. Second is "What the World Needs Now." And then the third is learning "How to Put Those Shifts into Practice."

Buddhist practice is not a passive practice. A lot of people go, "Oh, you just sit there." In fact, when I ordained, my uncle—my adopted mother's older brother; my mother was already 48 when I was adopted at 8, so they're pre-civil rights generation for sure—he came to my ordination and said, "Do you guys have to chant like that?" Has anyone been here to a Zen center? We chant very monotone, right? The idea, supposedly, is that we chant in monotone because if you chant melodically, the Buddha supposedly says that then you start comparing to each other. "Oh, he sounds better, I sound worse," or "I sound better, he sounds worse." So supposedly in Zen we just chant monotone so we don't arise comparison. And then he also said, "Well, you're just navel-gazing. Why are you just navel-gazing? What do you do in the world?"

It's useful, especially in restoration, that we actually put shifts into practice. It's not enough to know what the impact of harm is, or to know what your responsibility from the up-power position is, for instance. It's what are you going to do about it? How are you going to put those into effect? So here, it's "Realizing the Wholeness of the World," which is Skillful Enacting. I think it's Kaira Jewel Lingo who said that I rearranged the furniture of the Eightfold Path to "Skillful Enacting" from "action," because to me, enacting gives a sense much more of the vow to do something. Essentially, skillful action is the Five Precepts, right? So by saying "enacting," to me there's a vow that I'm going to do something, I'm going to put it into action. Also, laws and policies are enacted, so it gives it that systemic framing as well.

And then lastly, in realizing the wholeness of the world, there's "Skillful Living." How do we use our energy, especially after examining and realizing what the shifts are? When we do these shifts, we actually find a lot more energy. Isn't that true? Because what happens is we realize a certain thinking that we were taught, certain views that we were taught, brought with it a lot of tightness. If we can understand and make the shifts from practice, then we find a lot more energy. So what do we do with this energy? We keep on validating what we value and hold to be true. Essentially, restoration, to me, is that some sense of our wisdom, our values that we thought we agreed upon—like not killing, not stealing, not misusing sexuality, not lying, and no intoxicants, those are the main five—these are values that we hold, and how do we enact them? So that's essentially the framing of the Eightfold Path.

Shifting Speech to Wholeness

Today I wanted to talk about Skillful Speech, which is in the shifting part. So this is chapter seven, Shifting Speech to Wholeness.

I am in a practice period, a 90-day meditation retreat at a convert Sōtō Zen monastery where I've been living for three years. I'm part of the doan-ryo, a selected group of senior practitioners who are in charge of organizing all the activities in the zendo, or meditation hall. This position involves tasks such as letting people know when to come to meditate, how to participate in ceremonies, leading chants, and leading the serving teams during oryoki, Zen formal eating in the zendo.

A white male teacher is leading this practice period. As is part of the format of any Sōtō Zen intensive session, each practitioner goes to see the leader of the intensive for a formal dokusan, a Zen word for a one-on-one interview about your practice with the abbot of the temple. Meeting with the leader one time is mandatory, after which it is up to the discretion of the student or teacher to decide if more meetings are needed.

The format for dokusan I had been trained in thus far was to bring in a question to the teacher that was about a teaching point, one's practice, or how practice can support a life difficulty. On this occasion, being the first meeting with this person I didn't know, I didn't have a question for him. So I asked him if he had one for me. He did.

"I've been watching you. You go around looking glum a lot. What's going on?"

I answered, "I'm having a lot of body issues. Some of it is overwork as head gardener the past two and a half years, but most of it is that I'm having a hard time with the racism that's happening here at the monastery."

He answered, "You need to not think about yourself so much. You should focus on taking care of others."

I looked at him baffled. I just started to share a pain that was a result of the impact of systemic oppression, and without having had any discussion with me, this is what he had as advice. I paused, then said, "You don't even know me. How can you say that? As an Asian-American woman, my whole life is thinking about other people. I've been taught to always put other people's needs first. And what does that have to do with my experiences of racism here, anyways? The glum part, right?"

"Your practice," he says, "your practice as a doan is to take care of the sangha, a community of practitioners. So you should be putting the sangha's needs first," he asserted, as he had completely ignored my point twice now—the subject of racism and its impact on me and thus my practice. I realized this was going to go nowhere, so I politely bowed out of the room.

On one level, the abbot was correct. As a doan, my role was to focus on making sure members in the practice period were taken care of around the forms, a Zen word for appropriate conduct in the various ceremonies and skills that are part of Sōtō Zen practice. However, he did not act in context. His focus was limited to being an authority and thus commanding. It is true that the abbot, as the leader of the practice period, was technically everyone's boss. However, if you have a boss with whom the only interactions are about how you should do your job, how good a relationship would you have with that boss?

This wasn't simply about professionalism and job responsibilities. I was trying to share how racism was impacting my ability to practice, which I would argue also had a profound effect on how well I could do my job. Because he was in a position of authority and he believed the job I had to do was what was most important, he did not listen to me and what I was trying to share. To the abbot, racism was irrelevant to my practice, and he only focused on how he thought my glumness affected my ability to do my job well.

In retrospect, it's a little bit creepy, somebody watching me all this time.

In the system of racism, white people's point of view is centered. BIPOC, or people of the global majority, voices and points of view are considered "less than," from unimportant at the minimum to irrelevant. Also to me, there was an intersectionality of oppression in this situation. I doubt he would have pointed out to a male body that they looked glum. The predominant stereotype of Asian and Asian-American women is that we should always be smilingly accommodating.

Additionally, he did not know me, only what he interpreted by watching me. We had never interacted until that moment. If he had been my teacher or was a person I had a relationship with, the result would likely have been different. The abbot on several levels ignored the context of the situation, focusing only on his authority and what he deemed important. The priority in his style of communication was not about connection or context. To live from liberatory agency in wholeness, we need to shift not just our perspective, but also the ways we interact with each other and the world. Let's explore skillful means to do so as we talk about Skillful Speech.

The Eightfold Path and Skillful Speech

Remember that the Eightfold Path is broken up into three sections. The first is called the wisdom section. The traditional translation is "Right," as in appropriate. The analogy is that if you go up to a cow and you want to get milk, the right way is to pull the udder, not the tail. So that kind of right. However, we tend to think of right and wrong, so "Wise" is very popular now. I myself like "Skillful" because the elegance of the Eightfold Path is it actually tells you what is wholesome or skillful, and then it gives you skills to develop those.

So the first is Skillful View or Skillful Understanding, and it's very specific of the Four Noble Truths and of Karma. Then there's Skillful Thinking—usually intention, and I like "motivation" because thinking in Buddhism is never passive. Your thinking propels you to the next section, which is usually called the ethical conduct: Skillful Speech, Skillful Action, and Skillful Livelihood. To me, motivation takes us into the next section. Ethical conduct I like to call "Compassionate Connection" or "Compassionate Conduct," because it's the interactive part: how we speak and how we interact with each other, how we live with each other.

And then the last is Skillful Effort, Skillful Mindfulness, and Skillful Concentration, usually called samadhi². From Gil, I learned that it's actually both emotional and mental development. It's often considered the bridge between the wisdom section and the compassionate conduct. We use the meditative factors to reflect on how the two are working out. You sit down and you think, "Oh, am I living in accordance to my values, my wisdom?"—which is really your values, right? In Buddhism, as I understand it, the Four Noble Truths is your set of values, of how you view the world. And then your thinking is how you process that and how it motivates you to act in the world. So you sit down and you meditate to see, "Is that in accordance?" Or you sit down and you maybe just had a fight with somebody, and so you go, "Ooh, my speech, how does it align?" Sure, we sit down, and especially in Zen we're just being with things as they are, but I know if I just had a fight, I sit down and I think it through and try to work it out.

So if we think about it not just as ethical conduct as some kind of morality, but really how do we interact with each other, then are we interacting in a way that fosters wholeness, that fosters a sense that we're interconnected?

The Acronym TUGS

Skillful Speech is a great section in the Eightfold Path because it gives us four factors on how to have skillful speech. The classic wording is: abstaining from lying, abstaining from speech that divides, abstaining from harsh or abusive speech, and abstaining from idle chatter. Who would like to recite those back to me? Kind of hard, huh? So I made up an acronym so we can remember them more easily, and also put a little positive spin on it. The acronym is TUGS, like a little tug on your sleeve to remind you, "Hey, skillful speech is like this."

T is for Truthful

Truthfulness is very layered in context. We most often think of truth as being about facts and information. We've heard, "Just the facts, please." But facts can be manipulated or wrong, as we are hearing a lot about these days in social media. Facts can deny hurt and harm. For instance, when this book was being written, the spa shooting in Atlanta happened. The sheriff spokesman said that the shooter was just "having a bad day," even though eight people were killed, six of whom were Asian-American women.

So facts are not just facts. They're not really objective. Journalism is starting to really sense that there's no objectivity because we all bring a lens. And in Buddhism, the more and more you practice, the more you realize 99.999% of the time you are just projecting, because everything is associative. We do not see this as just this, right? Most of us here who speak English would say a glass. But some of you might already say more than that. You would say, "Oh, this is a glass mostly filled." I'm sitting here going, "This is a dirty glass," right? Because I see some stuff—not in a bad way, just noticing these things. "This is a heavy glass. I don't like this glass. It's too tall, it's too heavy, it's too whatever." We don't just see it as it is and leave it alone. We make all sorts of associations: "Oh, I have a glass just like that at home. That's a nice glass, I'll go get one. I wonder how much it costs. I wonder where they got it." It just goes on and on.

So truth is really layered. With oppressions, truth is that much more layered because it's about safety. I know before I came out back in the '80s, on Monday at work people would say, "Well, what did you do for the weekend?" And I for many years would use the pronoun "he" even though I was a lesbian, because it just wasn't safe in my places of work at times. Truth is very layered.

As oppressed people, we have to reflect on how we may have taken on valuing white-centered dominant society's idea of what is considered significant truth over our own. If so, we need to work with it, shifting internalized white-centered views into ways that make sense to us in our lived experiences. Of course, we do need to be mindful; it doesn't mean we can say whatever we want at any time. Another way to put it is: how can we re-center truth to be more inclusive of our complex experiences in contemporary life, and more specifically as oppression-liberated people?

My example is about how even though in the Bay Area we think we're very open about people being queer, in a lot of Asian-American communities it isn't always safe to be out to your family. The family usually knows, but they don't want to talk about it. In interracial couples, that can be a real conflict. Perhaps non-Asian partners would think, "Well, you're not accepting me by introducing me to your family as your partner." See? So it's very layered.

U is for Uplifting

In this book, I'm bringing in uplifting as not only how do we talk in a way that uplifts each other, but also as we've internalized either racism, homophobia, sexism, ableism, or fatism—all sorts of internalized "isms"—how do we work with that? Especially when we're in that category.

G is for Gentle

It's actually really hard to be gentle when you've been conditioned to be defensive. And with oppressions, we are conditioned to be defensive. When I even bring up the word "racism," probably anybody in the room would start to tense up, because we're all conditioned that we should not be talking about racism, or that it's going to be painful. This is why it's really hard to approach understanding places in which we were taught to actually not bring our attention to, to give it validity. Some of us don't have a choice because we lived in those areas, right?

Part of our practice is not only opening up to where we're unconscious about our everyday suffering, but also the specificity of our lives and the systemic specificity. When I first started meditation in the Insight tradition, I went to a women of color group off of Spirit Rock. One of the teachers asked me to do metta³ recitation regularly, and in particular to use—I still use this—"May I know inner and outer safety." Safety can be in metta classically, or in karuṇā⁴ phrases, but she specifically asked me to include that as one of my metta phrases because there's obviously a lot of safety issues for me. And I did it, but it was very hard.

I have met many people of color, queers, and other oppressed people where metta is really, really hard. Because it takes that unconditional friendliness to all that you are. Sometimes we think of metta as just going, "Oh, be nice, be nice." But metta is a really difficult practice because in all the Brahma Vihāras⁵, we're going from the point of something simple to expanding it in all directions, in all time, and to all things. For most of us, yeah, I could be metta towards the fact that I have a college degree, that I'm 55, that I like my clothes today. But having metta towards... I don't know, maybe someone's looking at me and I'm like, "Do I have food in my teeth?" Am I going to have metta towards food in my teeth right now? I'm making this up right now, so that's a really silly example, but it's harder, right?

Yesterday, I gave a dharma talk and there was something I wasn't that happy with the way I said it. Then this morning in the car, all of a sudden I winced, and Deb, my girlfriend, said, "What are you doing?" I said, "Oh, I was just thinking about something I could have done better yesterday." And I'm trying to uplift myself, so I'm just going, "Ah!" When I think about that, that is my way of bringing metta to myself, uplifting myself. Metta is hard. I was at a two-month retreat at Spirit Rock many years ago, and a friend who was a gay man said at the end, "Oh, I thought I would just come out so oozy in love with everyone." Instead, it was the hardest practice he had ever done because the Brahma Vihāras actually act as a purifying practice, so they bring up all the difficult stuff also.

And I'm looking at the time, so I will move on. Metta is hard, essentially.

S is for Significant

Perhaps this is where it relates most to the beginning story. Significant speech is communication that takes into account what is important for everyone in a conversation and is in service of connection. In the memory at the beginning of this chapter, the abbot responded in a way that was significant for him, but it wasn't significant for me. I brought up what was significant for me, but he did not acknowledge it at all.

A culture of domination, such as white supremacy culture, centers white people's point of views as what is important and valid. White privilege carries with it the sense that white people's point of view trumps other races' points of view, and thus they feel entitled to decide or designate value to what topic carries more significance than others. A crucial part of anti-racism and anti-oppression work is to open up our sense of what is significant and valued. Our practice needs to actively and persistently emphasize becoming more aware of what is significant in particular for other people, not just ourselves. Especially in areas where we have been conditioned by white supremacy culture to ignore, deny, or minimize race and racism.

I will say in this book I write "white supremacy culture" a lot, and the reason for that is that white supremacy culture is the air that we all live in here in the United States. It's the ground we all live in. But we don't have to act in ways that keep on promoting white supremacy culture. For those in dominant positions, deep listening is a practice of not reacting from or centering one's point of view first and foremost. We can practice from a place of understanding that each of us inhabits our social location in the very systems of oppression and the resulting power differential each interaction carries.

All right, I'll leave it at that given the time. Thank you for your attention.