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A Zen Buddhist Response to this Moment

A Zen Buddhist Response to this Moment

Last updated on: February 8, 2026 at 8:22 am by James Ford

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A Zen Buddhist Response to this Moment 2026-02-08T08:22:13-08:00 James Ford

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(The following is a Dharma talk delivered by Dharma Holder Thomas Wardle of the Empty Moon Zen community. Reprinted here with his generous consent.)

If you don’t know the kind of person I am

and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail,
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give – yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

“A Ritual to Read to Each Other” by William Stafford, from The Way It Is: New and Selected Poems © Graywolf Press.

This deep darkness around us all has been a frequent topic in our sangha lately. There is much in our nation and our world that is deeply upsetting, and it leaves us all struggling with how to carry this pain and what we should do. I am struggling with this also, and so today, I’d like to share a little about how I am trying to practice with this and what I have noticed in my own heart.

When I look at our world today, I often struggle to see it as anything other than a world of hurt. Often, it seems that the hurt is caused by us, and my heart breaks. Practice begins when I notice this view. While allowing for that pain, I try to remember that this is just a view, and it depends mightily on where I stand. I try to remember that there are other views to be had.

One of the things that helps me remember comes from the first chapter of the Vimalakirti Sutra, one of the very few texts about a lay practitioner. In the first chapter, the Buddha is hanging out with his disciples and Shariputra asks: “So, you are a Buddha, right?”

“Yes.”

“And all Buddhas have their own Buddha realms?”

“Correct.”

“So that means that all of this is YOUR Buddha realm, then, right?”

“Yes.”

Shariputra looks around: “Uhm… Don’t you think you could have done a little better?”

The Buddha replies, “It is just that your mind has highs and lows and does not rest on Buddha wisdom. Therefore you see this land as impure. Shariputra, the bodhisattva treats all things and beings, each one of them, with perfect equality.” At this point, the Buddha touches the ground with his toe and this world, our world, is revealed to be adorned with countless jewels, The Jeweled Adornment Land of Immeasurable Blessings.

The Vimalakirti Sutra reminds me that the dharma includes everyone. No one and no thing is left out.

Especially when I can’t see it, I try to keep that in mind, even as I care for my breaking heart, and I return to my root practice of paying attention.

When I do, one of the things I keep noticing is fear.

Whether thinking about Ukraine or Greenland, Venezuela or Minnesota, I see and experience so much fear.

I fear for our allies and our alliances, I fear for my friends and family. In this moment, I particularly fear for immigrants, people of colour, and our transgender family. I fear for the future of our nation and this fragile world.

Sometimes, I fear for myself.

Perhaps you share some of these fears. Perhaps you have a few more to add to the list.

In East Asian Buddhism, fear is associated with the hell realms. You may be surprised to learn that Buddhism has the most elaborate and extensive system of hells of any religion, including both hot and cold hells. While I am not much one for constructionism or cosmology, I think this offers us an important pointer: Fear is a sign that we are suffering deeply, like a being trapped in hell.

Without getting into the gory details (and they are very gory, by the way) the hell realms are defined by immense suffering, and it is an observable fact that suffering, when it gets the better of us, tends to divide us, driving us toward us & them thinking. If I am not careful, I can find myself making judgements about whose pain is legitimate and whose is not.

Fear and pain can make us self-centered, shrinking our circle of compassion to ourselves and those with whom we identify while excluding those with whom we do not, especially if we perceive them to be the cause of our fear or our pain.

Already, we are completely lost in stories.

Stories are powerful. Stories are how we understand the world and ourselves. You might say that stories are all we have. I’d rather say that stories are all we are.

Some stories facilitate a kind of intimacy and connection, while others do the opposite, but Zen suggests that true intimacy is found when we cast aside our stories and open our hearts to the whole mess, letting them break if need be.

When we realize that our identities are just stories, that all the categories and characteristics that we use to describe ourselves and differentiate ourselves from others are ultimately meaningless, we find that we are actually empty. Within this emptiness lies a profound experience of oneness with all that is, even those we disagree with, those we don’t like.

Even those we hate.

Even those we fear.

All one family, sheltering under a single tent as the storm rages.

Zenkei Shibayama gives us a good pointer to this deep intimacy: “If you take up a flower, you yourself are a flower; if you see a mountain, you yourself are a mountain; if you look at a pillar, you yourself are a pillar through and through.”

To this I would add, “When you see an ICE agent, you yourself are an ICE agent through and through.”

It is easy to be critical of those working for ICE, all too easy to judge, and parts of me do. Parts of me hurt and rage and talk a bluestreak of shit, but that doesn’t have to be a problem. Zen doesn’t ask us to be perfect, and as I understand it, the goal of practice isn’t to purge these kinds of thoughts and replace them with something nicer. Rather, I think of Zen as a kind of radical responsibility, so I try to take responsibility for those thoughts. They aren’t personal, after all. Thoughts like these arise for myriad reasons, unknowable causes and conditions. My thoughts are not a statement about my character, but what I do with them is.

If you get serious about Zen, you find yourself making a lot of vows. Those vows are not to never have impure thoughts, nor are they to only think good thoughts. For me, those vows basically come down to two things: Taking responsibility for myself, and being useful in this world.

One of my teachers used to say, “Don’t ask if you are stuck, ask where you are stuck.” Our vows can help us keep an eye on the sticky places, and one of the things that helps me remember my vows is remembering that I don’t know.

As objectionable as I may find the actions of ICE, I try to remember that I don’t know who those agents are and I don’t know their stories. From that not knowing, I can imagine other stories, ones that support my vows and help me to see these others as myself.

“He is the same as me, yet I am not he.”

I have found it helpful to remember that some people join ICE to stop the flow of drugs into this country. Some people join ICE to stop human trafficking. I wonder, how might those agents feel being reassigned to hyper-politicized, xenophobic, racist immigration enforcement operations?

There are a lot of very good reasons to criticize law enforcement in this country.

We can do better.

We must do better.

But can we acknowledge that even the puerile “stopping bad guys” motivation has at least some good intention in it?

I want to tell you a secret: Every law enforcement officer in America is terrified. There is a tragic irony here. Many of us object deeply to the gun culture of this country, and with good reason. Law enforcement officers are subject to the consequences of that culture every single day, and they know acutely that any encounter, no matter how banal, could abruptly involve a gun.

They are afraid. Deeply, deeply afraid.

In fact, if you learn about police training, what you find out is that they have been taught to be afraid. To be afraid of everybody and everything. To be afraid that any situation could turn lethal in an instant.

Fear has us all in its grip, and it was behind the deaths of both Renee Good and Alex Pretti.

Did you know that the agent who shot Renee Goode had been dragged by a car in another incident in June?

Fear.

Alex Pretti had a gun. Not in his hand, but on his body.

Fear.

If you look into it, you’ll find that it wasn’t just any gun. It was a customized gun, heavily modified and equipped with a number of features that would make it much more effective for killing. Why? Fear.

It is also a model that is deeply controversial for accidental discharge. Whether this is true or not is still a subject of fraught debate, but multiple law enforcement agencies around the country had already banned the use of that specific gun because of concerns over accidental, unintentional discharge of the weapon. There are hundreds of such reports, and the manufacturer has been sued by police departments and the State of New Jersey, amongst many others.

I’m not going to pretend that I know anything about what actually happened in those moments that led to Alex Pretti’s death, but I see fear all over it.

The fear that motivated him to bring the gun in the first place.

The fear that motivated the officers in their actions.

What fear must law enforcement officers experience, vastly outnumbered as they face crowds of angry people screaming at them and insulting them?

If you can’t admit that facing an angry crowd is fundamentally scary and threatening, then maybe think back to the last time you saw footage of a MAGA rally.

Fear is everywhere in our world right now, and actions taken out of fear tend to only cause more harm. Fear is also a marker of suffering and pain, and perhaps remembering that can help us to open our hearts just a little.

That is a lot to ask.

If you find it too much, can you open to curiosity instead?

I am a big believer in the power of curiosity. Curiosity can lead to intimacy, to connection, and from that intimacy, amazing things are possible.

One of my biggest role models is Daryl Davis, and you may have heard me speak about him before. I think about him almost every day. Daryl is a black man who has helped over 200 people to leave the Ku Klux Klan, and the way he has done this is absolutely extraordinary: by being curious. After his first experience of racism during a public march with his boyscout troop as a child, he was left with the question “How can they hate me if they don’t even know me?”

Daryl went on to become a professional musician, and he held onto that question. It guided him to ask a question of his own one night when a white man paid him a backhanded compliment after a performance. That question led to a conversation, and that conversation eventually revealed that this man was a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

It could have ended there. Daryl could have recoiled in disgust. He could have quite justifiably feared for his life and fled, but he didn’t. Daryl kept talking with the Klansman, and he kept listening, even when he heard things he disagreed with or found ignorant. They ended the night by exchanging contact information, and their relationship developed from there over years, a friendship that would lead to encounters with other klan members. Eventually, Daryl found himself attending klan rallies as the personally invited guest of the Grand Dragon for the state, a man who later became the Klan’s national leader. Despite the obvious risk to his life, Daryl maintained that friendship for 16 years, and eventually that man left the Klan entirely. Through it all, Daryl maintained dialogue, and critically, he was willing to listen and to keep listening, even when something ignorant or hateful was said. He literally invited killers to his table and kept company with them, and for hundreds, it opened their hearts. I can only aspire to that level of bravery.

Now I want to be clear that I am not trying to tell you what you should do, but I am asking you to pay attention. Please, pay attention to how you do what you do. Pay attention to what you say and how you say it. Pay attention to how you treat everyone and pay attention to the stories you tell yourself.

Pay attention to your values and your vows.

And pay attention to the fear, because we are all feeling it together.

Now that I’m done, please take the first opportunity to wash out your ears.

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