"The wise woman removes her flaws little by little, one by one, in the same way that a good silversmith removes the impurities from silver."  -- The Dhammapada, Chapter 18

I don't know how many of you know Dae Bi Larry Ford -- he's usually here during retreats. He's a Dharma Student down in Florida, an older fellow who was P'arang's student before she retired. If you haven't met him yet, hopefully you will next month when he's ordained here.

Dae Bi runs a Dharma center in Florida, actually, and he's just one of those people . . . if you had a contest for Gentlest Person in the World, you'd have people like Thich Nhat Hanh and the Dalai Lama and Dae Bi Larry Ford in the running. And as a teacher, I have to check students like this a bit, because a lot of times people come to the temple with their "nice face" on, y'know?, but maybe they're actually masking a lot of anger or something -- it happens. So I was kind of pushing Dae Bi's buttons a little at first, just to see. And also, like the other Dharma Students, Dae Bi gives me a journal every week that examines his practice and life, and he had some serious difficulties at work for a long time -- he's also kind of like that bodhisattva who prays to go to hell after he dies so he can serve the people there, so Dae Bi's work difficulties are serious difficulties. And even when I was pushing his buttons, and even when there was really very little easy about his life, this gentleness, this real sort of open kindness, never left him.

So anyway, we're talking to each other on the phone the other day -- we check in every week about his training. We're talking, and (probably inevitably) the shootings at Virginia Tech come up. There really are no words for something like this, even though after the fact everyone tries to make sense of it. After Columbine, "the experts" were talking about video games and trenchcoats and Marilyn Manson. And I'm guessing I'm fairly less informed than most people about what happened this week, but it seems to me that every mention of this fellow I've heard in the media has been "South Korean this" or "South Korean that", as though that's somehow a factor and not just a convenient excuse to loosen the reigns a bit on our collective racism. But there does seem to have been indications along the way that he was really angry and antisocial and potentially dangerous.

But as I'm talking with Dae Bi, and he's talking about people at the Florida Dharma center asking him, "How could this happen?" you know what he says? This guy who just radiates nonviolence says that there was one instance in his life where if he'd had a gun, he would have used it. There was one time in his life where he was so angry, he could have very easily seriously harmed someone. And as he's saying this, I'm thinking, "Me too."

During a recent One Sangha meeting, Bassara was saying how he'd read earlier that week that one high school kid had shot and killed another kid over some graffiti. You tag a building, I tag over your tag, and we start shooting. And it really affected Bassara -- it was so senseless, for one thing, but also because he'd been at the kids' school a lot over the years planting trees and gardening. And he said, "Y'know, we read something like this in the paper and we think, 'How could something like this happen?'"

And then he talked about driving in to the temple that very morning, really tired from working and being up a lot lately at night with his new son. He stops at McDonald's for a coffee and there's a huge line and that sort of tension that seems to happen these days when there's a huge line anywhere; people sort of sighing and mumbling to themselves. And this guy comes in and says "hey look outside everybody" to distract people or be funny or something, and then cuts right in front of Bassara. And you guys know Bassara, right? I doubt he's anyone's definition of little. So I'm thinking this other guy possesses an almost admirable recklessness, if not courage, y'know?

And Bassara talked about the anger arise in that moment; watching the desire to do something harmful; watching all of it. Not doing anything at all, but just watching his reaction to the situation. And as he's talking about his own rage, he says, "That's where it starts." That's how something so senseless could happen.

I'm not making excuses for anyone. And I'm not trying to dismiss or oversimplify the levels of mental affliction someone like this guy in Virginia may have had. What I am saying, though, is every time something like this happens, it makes more and more sense that I wake up early in the morning for prostrations, sitting, and chanting. (And I must say it also seems more and more obvious that we maybe make guns a little harder to obtain than a pack of Chiclets.)

It bears constant repeating: we need to practice. The reason Bassara didn't act on his rage was not because he's read mountains of Dharma books and quotes sutras and shits prayer flags and levitates, y'know? Everyone needs to practice: exalted Zen master to beginner; monk to layperson. Dharma teacher Jack Kornfield hit the nail on the head when he wrote, "There is no enlightened retirement."

If you didn't already know Ango, many of you met him, I think, during his visit a couple months ago. Well, a few days ago he just got back to the States from Korea, and we got to talk on the phone the other morning. On the way there, flying out over the ocean to Tokyo, I guess an elderly woman coughed on him the whole time, which was probably extra special with the reconstituted air in the plane and everything. Well, he gets to Seoul, finds a yeogwan near Chogye temple to sleep at, and the next morning wakes up feeling half-dead with a fever, really weak and sweaty. He runs around Seoul for a couple days buying robes and things for people back here, and then he flies to Taipei to visit our friend Michael, who lives there, and sort of "convalesce" a little bit.

Anyhow, they spend a pretty relaxed few days just kind of hanging out or taking mopeds up into the mountains, and at some point Ango's feeling a little better and they head up to a nearby mountain, which is home to probably one of the premier Chinese Zen (Ch'an) training temples in the world at this point. It's a gorgeous campus, apparently, with a lot of modern buildings and many monks practicing diligently under this world-famous Zen master who, after the Cultural Revolution and all that happened in China, is really determined to make sure Ch'an gets passed on.

So they go up there, and they do some bows in the Buddha Hall, and then they're walking around taking everything in when one of the senior monks introduces himself, starts asking them where they're from and all that. When he realizes they're practitioners, he invites them to his room for tea. It turns out he's some really well-known monk-scholar (not that he ever says "I'm a famous monk-scholar"), and up in his tiny little room there are all these shelves filled with ancient books, just tons of sutras and commentaries and things.

Well, they're up there in his room, and he's got an attendant in an adjacent room making tea -- and probably special tea for guests -- and they're talking and Ango and Michael are sitting across from him all respectfully at this low table, and it's quiet and they're listening to the old monk, and all of a sudden Ango gets hit in the foot with something, and he looks down and it's a little radio-controlled Knight Rider car!

For a second, Ango's completely shocked, right?

And then it backs up and bumps him again.

Well, in seconds, this little Knight Rider car is flying around the room of this unfazed old monk who just keeps talking as if nothing weird is happening, and Ango and Michael can't even look at each other for fear that they'll laugh, and maybe that wouldn't be appropriate.

So at some point, the owner of the car shows up, a monk somewhere in his mid-twenties. And he's really excited to see a couple Americans, and he starts asking them all about Knight Rider and whether or not they've ever met David Hasselhoff! Now, on your list of conversations you think you might have in the room of an ancient monk up in some famous mountain monastery, David Hasselhoff as Deity is probably not one of them. And apparently, this monk just goes on and on about our boy Dave, and about all the little things his car can do, like shoot missiles and track down villains and whatnot. At one point, he's telling them how the original car from the show was recently on ebay and how he just obsessed about how he could buy it and get that car up the mountain.

When it's time to leave, the older monk asks the Knight Rider to drive their guests down the mountain. On the dashboard of the monk's car are all these little models of the Knight-Industry-Two-Thousand and David Hasselhoff, this roaming shrine to this pinnacle, this apex of American pop culture.

So when Ango tells me this, I'm thinking, "How do I get that into my Dharma talk on Sunday?" And actually, I find the Hasselhoff monk really endearing. Not everyone is Bodhidharma, I guess, and I don't want to sound like I'm knocking him too hard when I say that for me the whole thing -- besides just being a funny story I had to tell you -- the whole thing illustrates that it doesn't matter if we live on Trumbull and Canfield in Woodbridge, Detroit, U.S.A., or in some world-famous monastery: our obsessions and delusions will follow us anywhere and everywhere. It's like every Korean Zen master of the last couple hundred years seems to have said to his or her students at one time or another: "Don't think you'll get enlightened just because you live in a monastery." Moment-to-moment we're either practicing or we're not, wherever we are.

"The wise woman removes her flaws little by little, one by one, in the same way that a good silversmith removes the impurities from silver."

And in closing, I just want to add that there's far more silver than impurity, in us and in the world as well. This past week, every single college campus in the world but one had no shooting. And this is not to diminish or dismiss these heartbreaking tragedies, and this is not to say that we shouldn't mourn them. But if we just listen to the news -- and only talk about what we heard on the news -- it can start to seem like it's all impurity, and this makes it very difficult to feel as though there's anything we can do about it. And we can remind ourselves, too, that nothing we can do about it starts outside of ourselves.