Bearing Witness in Gaza

0:00Thank you for listening to UPAI's Dartmouth Podcast, an extraordinary series of talks from some of the finest teachers in the world. I'm Joan Halifax, founder of the UPAI's End Center, and we're happy to make these podcasts available to you. Please consider making a donation so we can offer these recordings freely. You'll find a donation but on our podcast page. And thank you so much. This is Dharma Podcast at thermapodcast.org. This is episode number 2597. It was recorded on April 1st, 2026. And it is titled Bearing Witness in Gaza. The speaker for this episode is Clayton Dalton.

1:10I lost my voice this best we get it. So hopefully you can hear me. It's better than it was a few days ago. Can't everyone hear me? Thank you for coming on this rainy day. Very beautiful. I feel like a year is enough time for me to forget how astonishing all of the seasons are here. And then it happens again and I'm like, this is insane. The red bud trees. Anybody seen the red bud trees that are going off right now? It's ridiculous. So beautiful. So thank you for coming. Thank you to the residents. Thanks to Rochi. I'm going to talk about some difficult things that I've experienced. And there will be discussion of violence and conflict. Just getting a bit of an advance notice for everyone.

2:15This code I said I work all-time as an emergency doctor in Western New Mexico. I think a lot about patients that I've seen there. Things that I've learned from them. A few weeks ago, I took care of a six-year-old boy named Josiah. He was brought in by a foster care service. Before I went into his room, the guardian who had brought him in told me what had happened. He'd only just come into their custody that day. He had been the child. Had been in a car with his family. And his mother was driving. She had been drinking. She rolled the car. And this child was ejected through an open window. And flew through the air. Landed some distance away.

3:16Pretty much unharmed. Just scraped up. He got up, went back to the car. He said that the rest of his family had been asleep. And they weren't very far from home. And so he walked home and let someone know what had happened. And got help. And the other people in the car had either been killed or flown to Albuquerque for emergency surgery. So I looked to the glass door of his room, hearing all of this. He was sitting in bed. He pulled all the way up to his chin just looking off into the distance. How do we think about a moment like that? It turned out that he was uninjured for the most part.

4:18No broken bones or anything else. But how would this experience change? What happened to his life? He'd been subjected to something really, truly horrible. Conditions that were no fault of his own. And what about his mother? For me, in that moment, a feeling of blame came up. Judgment. Anger, too. I think about another patient that I saw a few years ago. It was a woman who was in her 40s. She had also rolled her car. It was so intoxicated that she couldn't tell us what had happened when she came into the yard.

5:22She was also uninjured. She could have killed herself or someone else. It seemed so reckless to do that. And I watched her for a few hours. And she slowly. And then I sat down next to her bed. And I learned about her life. She had been sex crimes detective. Drinking was a way to make it stop. And the car crash turned out to be a suicide attempt. That softened up my judgment quite a bit.

6:29My view of her became quite a bit larger. And I could see her suffering more clearly. I think about these two women. What I not know about Josiah's mother. What experience had led her to get behind the wheel of a car with her whole family inside. She was drunk. I don't know. I don't know if she was alive even. But maybe she would have had something similar to tell me if she had also been my patient. I have a lot of stories like this. I see people in these crux moments where the entirety of their past precipitates into a sort of terrible diamond. Impossibly hard and possibly sharp.

7:32And it illuminates everything and alters the course of their future. When I say it illuminates everything, what I mean by that is I think it illuminates the principle of dependent origination. Which is Buddha's teaching that everything arises from this impossibly complex web of causes and conditions. I need to each moment. And it's always much bigger than anyone person. It's the size of the whole universe actually. I didn't really understand this until I started working in the version zero. I understand it now, but I feel like I can perceive this. It's better.

8:34This larger web of context, which all of us live. And behind recklessness, behind anger, and hatred, and vitriol is this has constellation of causes and conditions. And what I've noticed is that from this perspective, this bigger perspective. I find that judgment is often transformed. I feel like I am better able to see the root of suffering in these moments. Behind anger is suffering. Behind recklessness is suffering. Behind violence is suffering. Suffering something.

9:41There's a story that Dogen writes about. And the show begins. I called. I could go as a Zen master in China and eight century. One day, an old man showed up to one of his lectures. I said, hey, I could just said, who are you? And the old man said, I was once a Zen master, an abbot of this mountain. A student asked me whether an enlightened person is subject to the laws of causation. I said, no, an enlightened person is not subject to causation. For this answer, I became a fox for 500 minutes. And then the old man says, the shock joy says, now I ask you, is the enlightened person's object to the law of causation?

10:44I could just said, enlightened person is not blind to the law of causation. That was his answer. And the old man was enlightened. I said, I'm no more a fox, he said. But I have to leave my fox potty behind. Please perform a funeral for it, and then he disappeared. And so the next day, Hiyaka Joe took the monks out behind the mountain to a cave. And they found the corpse of an old fox in the dirt. What does it mean to not be blind to the laws of causation? That was his answer. And enlightened person is not blind to the law of causation. It's still subject to it. For me, I think it may mean taking a more capacious view of things, particularly of others.

11:51I think it might mean seeing the suffering and the roots of suffering behind whatever it is that we recoil from or that we judge or that we condemn. I feel like that is what I had been taught by my work. Why is this important? Why does it matter? I think it's important first because it's the way things actually are. This is just reality. It's never just about the one person in front of us. It's much bigger. But second, I have found that something happens when you begin to perceive things in this larger, more inclusive way. I have found sometimes to my surprise that compassion rises up into this spaciousness, like water filling a well from below.

13:13I keep a way-seeking mind-talk last fall. And in that talk, I mentioned an inscription on the Han at Tossara. It's my view. I know Tossara. And it said, do not pass this life in vain. Maybe some of you also know that the Zendo burned down at Tossara last week. That Han has probably a pile of ash now. So that last line of the inscription, do not pass this life in vain, really became embedded in my mind. That was 17 years ago. I still think about it. I think it actually means don't waste any time getting serious about your practice. But it's affected other areas of my life, too. I feel a powerful urge to try and earn what I've been given.

14:18Sound body, relatively sound mind, safe and secure upbringing. I don't deserve any of those things. It's not even mine, really. But these conditions have profoundly shaped what my life is now. And I wonder how I can be worthy of it. As the conflict in Gaza was unfolding, I felt so strong urge to find some way to be useful there. And I'm trained as an emergency doctor. It seems useful on war zone. And so I went in February of last year. Dogen has an essay called The Needle of Zazen, which I've also mentioned before in another talk.

15:19But this idea is so resonant for me that I'm going to mention it again. Reb Anderson, who's his teacher in California in a commentary on this essay. He says that Zazen is like an acupuncture needle that we stick into our lives. I really love that. I think my urge to go to Gaza was another way to stick an acupuncture needle into my life. And it was. I thought I knew something about suffering from my work in the year. But I didn't. And guys, I saw it on a scale that I cannot communicate to you. More bombs have been dropped on that place. 25 miles long.

16:21That's it. More bombs have been dropped on that strip of land. Then we're dropped on London, Hamburg, and Dresden in the entire Second World War. And that was true last year. I don't know where it stands after I came back. It was a mosaic of destruction. Everything was touched by it. And the northernmost towns there were no buildings at all. It was just piles of trouble. I met doctors who had lost whole families, children, wives, parents, grandparents. I met nurses who were living in tents, skipping meals so that their children could eat. I met patients who had lost arms or legs, sometimes arms and legs.

17:24Or patients whose bowels had been sliced open from hot bomb fragments. That's a very common injury there. Or patients whose bones were held together by metal pins protruding from the skin. I felt like I could just begin to perceive the weight of all of the causes and conditions which had given rise to that conflict. The histories, the decisions, the events compounding for decades, for centuries, forever, actually. I could almost feel it turning.

18:26It was overwhelming. And then I thought about how all of these causes and conditions were pouring forward into the future in that place. How they were giving birth to the next moment, the next year, the next decade. What consequences will they yield? There was another moment there that I remember very strongly. I was there with a team of healthcare workers, mostly doctors. We were passing through a checkpoint in Israel. I was in a van with my colleagues who were all Arab American doctors.

19:27And a soldier who must have been a teenager, probably conscripted, climbed aboard our van at a checkpoint within a salt rifle. And she started to scream at us in Hebrew. I don't know what she was saying. None of us spoke in Hebrew. I don't know that we needed to know what she was saying. I could see the anger that was boiling inside of her trying to get out. It was much bigger than her. It's not her fault. What's bigger than us, too?

20:40A couple of years ago, I was walking by an estuary near the coast in Maine. There's a high berm with a road on it that goes right through the middle of it. And so there were water on the left, water on the right. And the water looked totally still calm. And then as I walked, I noticed a culvert that connected the two bodies of water under the road. And there was water just pouring out of it. It was the tide. The tide was coming in, but you couldn't see it in the larger body of water. But when it was constricted to a specific point, some movement was revealed. I think war zones make visible what's usually hidden.

21:41That we inherit conditions we didn't choose. That we act within systems of cause and effect that are much bigger than any one of us. How can we relate to any of this? What do we do with it? The cause is very far away. Are we implicated in it? When I was there, a doctor showed me a photograph on his phone of a huge gray missile sticking out of the ground in front of his house.

22:44He had been at home with his family and this missile landed in his right yard and didn't explode. And there was a numerical designation stenciled on the side. And you can look it up. It was a 250 pound guided bomb made by Boeing in this country. So yes, we are implicated in it in this way. But that's not really what I want to talk about. I'm going to read something that Roshi has written about this recently. She writes, each moment is the enactment of every aspect of reality.

23:44From the realization of this perspective, our present lived experience is the complete and undivided expression of existence itself unfolding in time. In this way, our inclusive humanity is revealed. She goes on, these teachings from mind is that we are not separate from the events unfolding in our world at this very moment. We are not separate from what is happening in Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Gaza or anyone else, including the violence of war and the work of peace.

24:44So we are implicated in this, actually in a very intimate way, despite this entanglement occurring over great distances. This is our problem. What do we do with it? When I was in Gaza, sometimes patients or doctors would need my help medically. But mostly what they asked us for was to be seen over and over again. They felt invisible, cut off, isolated, forgotten. They said, please tell the world about us.

25:46They wanted us to bear witness for them. They didn't need our skills as much. They're very good at what they do. The doctors and nurses I worked with there. They wanted us to bear witness for them. This is actually an important part of our tradition here, you buy. Some of you might know that Glassman Roshi, Roshi's teacher, led formal bearing witness retreats at Auschwitz. The idea was to go to a place of extreme darkness and witness it. I can relate to that. Here is what Glassman Roshi said about this practice. He said, when we bear witness, when we become the situation,

26:50homelessness, poverty, illness, violence, death, the right action arises by itself. Once we listen with our entire body in mind, loving action arises. Like water, filling a well from below. He has more to say. He said, when we bear witness, we open to what is and we learn. The things that we are in denial about, teaches. We don't go to them to teach them.

27:53When we can listen, when we can bear witness, they teach us. This was my experience in Gaza. But you don't have to go to a concentration camp or to Gaza to do this. Glassman Roshi said, bearing witness is not something to be done only at Auschwitz. When we bear witness to the unfolding of our daily lives, not shrinking from any situation that arises, we learn. We open to what is. And in that process, a healing arises. To me, he said, Saazen is a form of bearing witness to life. So we can do this right here.

28:56If we're not separate from all that is, as Roshi has taught us, then bearing witness right here is enough. We can do it. I have one more story. This one is hard. One day in the hospital where I was based in Gaza, I met a man named Abdullah. He was only a few years older than I was. He was living in the lobby of the hospital with nothing but a few blankets. His home had been destroyed by an air strike in November of 2023. Twenty members of his family were killed.

29:57The only ones who survived were he and his four-year-old son, who was critically injured. His son had to be flown out of the country to Tunisia for more advanced medical care. Abdullah had no way of contacting him, and he didn't know if he would ever see him again. I asked him how long he would stay there in the hospital. There's nowhere to go, he said. Nothing to do, nothing to have, nothing to lose. No life, he said.

30:59But even as he said this to me throughout our whole conversation, he was smiling, radiant smile. I asked him how he was still able to smile. And he said, I'm not smiling for me. His heart was heavy. He said he was smiling to make another happy. It's not for me, he said. It's for you. There is a story about the Zen Monk Ryokan.

32:09It was also about it. The story goes like this. One night a thief entered Ryokan's hut. Ryokan was a hermit. Didn't have very many possessions. In fact, he had only a single blanket. He felt great compassion for the thief, because he knew there was nothing in the house for him to take. And so Ryokan could not resist. He gave his blanket to the thief. And then when the thief left, he wrote a poem. The poem goes like this. The thief left it behind the moon at the window. Poor fellow, I wish I could have given him the moon.

33:11Abdullah did not even have the moon. Where did he? Take that on, another of Roshi's teachers said, the present moment contains past and future. That's what most of this talk has been about. And then he said, the secret of transformation is in the way we handle this very moment. The present moment contains past and future. The secret of transformation is in the way we handle this very moment.

34:27And Klasmin Roshi. Our actions, whether they make peace or war, reverberate throughout the entire universe. And now Abdullah's smile is here in this room. It's not for me. It's for you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.