For Stanley Tookie Williams and Ourselves

Hozan Alan Senauke

Alan spoke these words at the Dec 12, 2005, vigil at the gates of San Quentin prison in California.

The hour is late. All the arguments have been made. They have fallen on deaf ears. So let's just 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 remaining minutes of life; that Governor Schwarzenegger is breathing; that the guards and reporters and witness outside 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 deaths Tookie is being executed 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 in mind. I want to wake up from this bad dream of these 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 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 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.

Hozan Alan Senauke is a Soto Zen priest and a disciple of Sojun Mel Weitsman Roshi in the tradition of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. He serves as Tanto or head of practice at Berkeley Zen Center in California. Alan lives at BZC with his wife, Laurie, and their two children. Since 1991 he has been a leader of Buddhist Peace Fellowship, working with BPF and others as a socially engaged Buddhist activist and advocate.

In another realm, Alan has been a student and performer of American traditional music for more than thirty years. His new album on Native & Fine Records is entitled, Wooden Man.