Mend Holes in the Fabric with Kindness and Compassion

Hozon Alan Senauke of the San Francisco Zen Center gave the following speech at the vigil for the Late Tookie Williams.

The hour is late. All the arguments have been made. They have fallen on deaf ears. So let us take a few moments to breathe together in silence and mindfulness…

This air we are breathing now is the same air that Tookie is breathing in his last minutes of life; that Governor Schwarzenegger is breathing; that guards and reporters and witnesses in the death chamber are breathing. This very air was once breathed by Albert Owens, Tsai-Shai Yang, Yen-I Yang, and Yee Chen Lin — whose pointless deaths Tookie is held accountable for. Tonight their family and friends also breathe with us. All living beings are doing so at this very moment. There is one single fabric of breath and starlight. And there are holes in this fabric for every being who dies by violence. We hold all these beings in our hearts and we grieve for each of them.

We have been out here together at San Quentin for too many such nights. The state of California has many more of these in mind. I want to wake up from this bad dream of execution nights. The Buddha, like all the great spiritual teachers — Jesus, Mohammed, the Hebrew prophets, Gandhi — tells us that violence only begets violence. The logic of cause and effect, karma and its fruit, is inescapable even when you dress it up in the emperor’s new clothes of retributive justice. Like many around the world, I can’t see Tookie’s execution as any kind of real justice. I see it as the enactment of a cruel and primitive urge for vengeance, elevated to an ersatz social principle. If this is the spiritual state of 21st century America, then our true grief should be for ourselves. Let us stop and share another moment of silence together…

And when we have grieved enough, let us organize and join the rest of the civilized world in ending the self-defeating barbarism of capital punishment. Let us enact a policy of kindness and compassion. Let us work for a justice system based on restoration and redemption, not on retribution. Too many have suffered and too many have died. Their deaths, and Tookie’s death bring us not a moment of peace.