Good morning. Thank you. I'm just back from India, which I'm going to speak about. We're actually, we're about two or three months ahead of them in the monsoon. It's really incredible. Come back to all this rain, and I gather it's been raining since I've been away. There's an album of photographs which you can look through that 10 or 12 photographs with some brief captions and I don't know how far around it will get but I made a few to take a look at and give you some idea of place and faces. Just what's at the top of my mind right now is the continuing unfolding crisis in Japan which is certainly not looking any better over the last two days.

[01:09]

This was on our mind through a lot of our time in India because one of the key members of a group that I was traveling with lives in Japan, his wife and family live there, her family lives there and then of course we have lots of friends in various Zen circles and just our hearts are really with them. There's much more to say about the unpredictable aspect of nature and the pretty predictable aspect of nuclear crisis. But I'll leave that for another time and another venue. Right now, the thing to do is just to be of help and be generous and keep our hearts open to the plight of all people over there.

[02:21]

Their plight is not so different from our own and I can see their faces and I know people who are affected by this. So I'll talk a little about this trip and probably it's just kind of scratching the surface. I'm still somewhat jet-lagged but I'm very happy to be home. I'm very comfortable here and I think the What I find as I continue in practice is that wherever I settle down, wherever I sit and cross my legs, wherever I stand and breathe mindfully, I'm home. This, I think, is the essential meaning of homelessness. It's not that one is lost, but that one is actually

[03:25]

finds one's home, wherever one is, with whomever one may be engaged, including oneself. Now, this is not always so easy for me, and not always so easy for many of us, but actually, we'll say that the act and enactment of Zazen in any of these settings brings me home. So that's a thread that weaves together all of my experiences which might otherwise look somewhat disparate and to some people's eyes scattered. But it all, it makes sense to me in this upright sitting. and in trying to move through the world in just that way.

[04:26]

So, my time in India, which follows on a trip that I made last year, had three purposes. The first purpose, and this is something we had been planning for several years, was a kind of study tour with a group called the Think Sangha which is a group of friends who've been we've been close for more than 15, 16 years and it's a loose grouping and people come and go and very loosely it's it's a kind of intentional community and also a kind of Buddhist social analysis group not in necessarily a formal academic way, but in how we try to look at the circumstances of our practice.

[05:34]

So, over the years we've had a number of meetings, we've done some publication, including actually rethinking karma, which really looks at the distortions of layer after layer of cultural thought on the idea of karma and deconstructing the notion of karma as destiny or fate, which is what it tends to mean in many Asian cultures. Two years ago, when we got together briefly, we thought we wanted to look at sustainable Buddhist communities. And we decided that it might be really energizing to do this in the context of being in these communities.

[06:39]

So we thought about India, and we thought about a community that I've written about. It's in my book, and in actually the most recent issue of Buddhadharma, the Ambedkarite, untouchable Buddhists of India, who are sort of new Buddhists, convert Buddhists, as in a sense some of us are. And also different other communities, including the Indo-Tibetan community in North India. So that was one aspect of it. Another aspect of it was within this study tour, which took place over about two weeks, to study our own communities, the communities that we are part of, and look at what makes them sustainable, what makes them work, what makes them not work.

[07:40]

And I felt very fortunate to come from Berkeley Zen Center, which I think is certainly not without difficulties or flaws, but it's a functional community. It's really whole. And that was cemented for me while I was in North India. One night we watched Ed's movie. I brought a copy of the short the half hour version that Ed gave me. And we watched that in the middle of this community and it provoked a lot of discussion and kind of in some people a sense of yearning. It looked pretty good from a distance of 98,000 miles. Although I must say, all of you who were in the movie looked a lot including myself, except for Sojan, who just gets younger.

[08:47]

Andrea had a little, she had a little flare in her hair, and Bob Rosenbaum had a mustache, and you know, some of us were thinner. So, that was one purpose, to look at the nature of engaged Buddhist, or Buddhist community, and look at, look at our own experience, and look at these, look at the realities we were encountering in India. and the difficulties. The second purpose was something that I had set for an intention myself after visiting this Dalit Buddhist community in Maharashtra for communities last year which was there's this wonderful school called Nagaloka or the Nagarjuna Training Institute which takes in about 60 to 80 young people in late teens, early 20s so close to the age of my children and they have a 10 month program that has really very strong dharma education teaching them sutras, teaching them basic teachings of Theravada and Mahayana

[10:10]

also gives them skills and teachings in really community organizing because all these young people are from almost all of them are from rural backgrounds all over India and rural backgrounds is where the problem of caste and untouchability is most deeply rooted and so a lot of them we did a lot of storytelling and a lot of them just had very isolated, painful lives. So this gives them a chance to socialize, to be together, to learn skills, and it's created a network because over the years there are now five or six hundred graduates of this program. So I have sort of set as an intention to go there annually and teach, and also to try to support students, so because of generosity of people like you to this non-profit I have, the Clearview Project, I was able to bring them about $1,500 in donations, which basically supports four students for their whole program for 10 months.

[11:29]

So that was Purpose 2. Purpose 3, which is, I think, is kind of an overarching purpose for all of us was to study myself to study how I am when removed from circumstances that are familiar circumstances that are comfortable which is not to say that I was terribly uncomfortable there but you know it's The food is odd. The rooms are rather basic. The food is good, but it's just not what I'm used to. The rooms are rather basic. You have to take great precaution with water. And also just the climate. In Nagpur, where I was, it was really hot.

[12:32]

And then we went up north and it was cold. And then I come back home here and it's like, have lunch. to study oneself through each motion, each activity, each place, and to find one's home even where that is not always the simplest thing to do. And I will say, and I'll talk about this at another time, because I've been thinking about this a lot, the hardest thing for me are the transitions. first week or so in any new place there is a kind of formless yearning to be home in bed watching television even though if I were home I wouldn't be in bed watching television but it's like a kind of sense of get me out of here

[13:41]

And I've learned this. This actually applies, in a sense, it's like the first couple of days of session. It applies very broadly, at least in my experience. I wouldn't generalize for everybody. But it's a passage that I have to go through, that I'm very familiar with, but it's pretty painful. And in the midst of this, and this is something that I will also talk about later, not in this talk, but I'm thinking about and trying to write about, I also have to contend with depression as a manifestation of disconnection. And this time it was hard in particular because when I got to the school, everybody that I knew said, oh, you're here now, we can leave. you know, a kind of sign of trust, but it's like, oh wait, where are my friends?

[14:50]

Where are they going? But, so I had to figure out how to sustain myself and really what I had to figure out which was great was to connect with the students. And that was wonderful. Very different than being here with my family where, frankly, my children or my children's friends are not going to look on me as the font of wisdom and excitement. You know, they love me. They respect me. But, you know, I will say at the risk of getting back some kind of opprobrium. It's not unpleasant to be flirted with by 20-year-old girls and guys. It makes me feel relevant.

[15:52]

I feel very relevant to myself. But to see myself through all those transitions. So that was kind of the three purposes. Now, where we were... So what happened? For the first week, I was in Nagaloka by myself, and I had set a kind of curriculum to teach. And what I taught, what I had been thinking about was, I taught about gender. Gender and Buddhism. Gender and society. And where I began was with hearing what some of the students' experiences were, which are really difficult. Like the young women, they don't go out of their houses. They're really kept close to home.

[16:55]

And for every woman that I spoke to, it was an incredible struggle to get to this school and be allowed to get an education because there were pressures, intense pressures to marry, to get them out of their parents' household, to get them to relieve the economic burden on their parents, who are very poor, and to get them settled. And when they're married, that's it. They're going to be mothers, they're going to be thoroughly ensconced in that kind of life for the rest of their life. And if you see, it's like children everywhere, if you've traveled. They're just as alive and just as smart and just as promising and just as interested as any of our children. And so I admired them for making this step and sometimes having to resist their parents to do it. And I also saw

[18:01]

real differences between the kind of opportunities that were available to the men, to the young men, that were available to the women. And so we began with storytelling, and then I talked about women in Buddhism, in the early Buddhist history, in the formation of the Bhikkhuni Sangha, and the role of women the difficulties of it. Even the difficulties, we had interesting discussions about whether the Buddha, what was the Buddha's state of mind, what was his attitude in relation to women, that he had to be convinced by his attendant, Ananda, to allow the creation, the formation of a bhikkhuni order. A really interesting discussion with him. Then, the next day, I talked about in the Vimalakirti Sutra, which some of you know, there's a wonderful chapter called the Goddess, where this Goddess is speaking to the Bodhisattvas, and I think it's Manjushri.

[19:26]

Is that right? And, you know, he's asking these kind of snide questions like, how long have you been here? What's your state of enlightenment? all these things and she's just like just being direct back and finally she kind of waves her magic wand and he was talking he was saying if you're so enlightened how come you're not in a male body and she goes poof and changes Manjushri into well that was It's not Manjushri, it's Sariputra. Right. Foremost in wisdom, but... No, foremost in... No, that's Manjushri. Maybe... Anyway. Sariputra, who we invoke in the Heart Sutra every day, and she turns him into a woman, or a woman with a body.

[20:29]

And he said, yeah, what happened to me? And then she basically says, well, you know, do you still have, are you still Shantiputra? Why can't you change yourself out of your body and become a man? And it was a very, again, a very interesting discussion with them, which is like presenting some way of supporting equality of Buddha nature within social circumstances that are highly unequal. I could go on about that, but it was really interesting. I learned when I go back next year, if I do the same thing, I think what I'll probably do is this time, work more with the men. Because, not so surprisingly, the women got it.

[21:38]

The last day I gave them an assignment to... I gave both groups, they sit separately in the room, and I gave both groups an assignment, please reform groups and please be able to report back tomorrow on how you see the position of women in the cultures and villages that you come from and that includes your mothers and sisters or yourself if you're a woman it's like the women gave these great presentations and you know and then there were thousands and the women said well we haven't heard from the men what do the men say? and I turned to them and They said, oh, oh, we didn't really understand the assignment. And I apologized for if my introduction had been incomplete.

[22:41]

And then my translator said, oh, no, you were very clear. I translated this very clearly. And so I say, well, let's look at this without any blame. Let's look at this and see. How is it that the women actually took this seriously because they understood that it was about them, and you guys didn't, because you didn't think it was about you, but it's actually about you. It's about everybody. It's like, there's this wonderful book, Women Hold Up Half the Sky, which is very difficult, difficult reading. So anyway, I have some idea of what I would do. But then we went to, now I'll have to compress this, we went to Mumbai for a couple of days and had, I've been there before and I've been in the kind of Buddhist communities of the slums before and again it's a sort of extraordinary experience of you're in a very unusual place, a kind of

[23:57]

terrible iconic environment, and yet they're sitting, I'm sitting, they're chanting, we're chanting together. This Sri Lankan monk, Venerable Kalupahana, who was part of the Think Sangha group, oh, the Think Sangha group met in Mumbai, and then we started, and I gave very brief talks and comments. And it was just, it was very moving. You can see in some of the pictures, the children were right up front. And they were very exciting just to be, to have visitors and to be seen. And it took us about an hour and a half tour through this neighborhood, which was just this narrow war on the streets. And the ways between the houses was about as wide as this town. and a house for four to six people might be 12 by 12.

[24:59]

Everything immaculate. Everything in place. And people so honored to be, to have guests who are seeing their lives, not shamed, honored. And all of their children really seeking education. In college, in professional schools, And in the middle of that, to realize, you know, this is not so different from how my grandparents lived when they came here from Eastern Europe. They lived in a tenement with three families, like four rooms, and they valued their culture, as these people valued the dharma culture, and they valued their lives, and they valued education. And there's something incredibly inspiring and hopeful about that. So we saw a community, and we wondered where it was going to go.

[26:01]

And all these people in this community in Mumbai, over the last 20 years, they'd all migrated there from rural villages because the rural environment was just completely oppressive. And even though this looks pretty dire to me, compared to where they were living in the countryside, this was opportunity. So then our group, so our group was highly international. It was myself, from, the only person from, well, my friend Anshuli, who is Thai-American, people from Thailand, people from, a woman from Burma, Indonesia, Japan, Australia, Sri Lanka, I'm trying to think if it was anywhere else, It's only about 12 people. And we were mostly old friends, but we had some young people with us. Two people in their very early 20s.

[27:01]

And very harmonious. We went from Mumbai back to Nagpur. And we had these very highly interactive workshops for several days with the young people. And there was a lot of singing that went on. Just a lot of intimacy. a lot of friendship. And from Nagpur we went north to a very small town called Bir, B-I-R. And it's about two hours from Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, right up against the first wall of the Himalayas, which I had never seen before, just incredibly beautiful. And there was an essentially, it's a Tibetan settlement, but we were at a place called the Deer Park Institute. Did any of you see The Cup, the movie?

[28:03]

And the movie, this is another movie, Travelers, Magicians and Travelers, Travelers and Magicians? Yeah, so this place was created by Tsongsar Kense Rinpoche, who was the director of The Cup, and he's He's a sort of multi-talented guy, and he created a foundation that supports this place, which is a very ecumenical center in Bir, even though it's at a former Tibetan monastery, and his root practice is Tibetan. But again, there we had people coming from all over India just to meet and talk with us, only about 20 people, but they were from different kinds of Buddhist communities. And we had three days with them, which was very rich. And we also traveled around the area. We went to several nunneries, including a rather amazing one run by a woman named Jessima Tenzin-Palmo, who is an Englishwoman, about 67, 68.

[29:12]

She's really She's got this huge institution. She has a lot of money. And she's training nuns from the age of about 14 to 30, including providing resources there so that after a number of years of study, the women can do three-year solitary retreats there at this place. Very dynamic person. So we were learning about these communities and hearing about people from all over India. Now, that's just a sketch of what we did. A lot of talk, a lot of informal meetings, a lot of engagement with young Indians. But we were also looking at this community, at this aspect, the aspects of community. It was painful. And I don't think this is something that's endemic to India.

[30:18]

It might be more endemic to human nature in its kind of group or community or tribal instincts that we may have. But when you went to the Tibetan group and you talked to them about the Dalai Buddhists, they were very sympathetic. and then as you press, you say they are very sympathetic for their social plight and at the same time saying, but they are not really Buddhists and saying that because they don't have the notion, they have a highly rationalistic notion of karma That is, they really underplay it, because in Hindu society, karma means something very different.

[31:19]

Karma really does mean destiny. Very different from the way the Buddha framed karma as actually opportunity to transform. Moment by moment, opportunity to transform. I think that our untouchable Buddhist friends would not deny that. But in a Hindu system, karma is used to confirm your place, your caste or non-caste, you know, for generation after generation. Meanwhile, the Tibetans think, they really believe in karma and rebirth. Not so much rebirth moment by moment as we might hear about here, but rebirth in a sort of concrete physical form. generation after generation. There were communal differences. One group wouldn't work with another.

[32:21]

The Dalit Buddhists were very, very reluctant to work with Buddhists of any other caste. So, you have social factors, you have doctrinal factors, but ultimately What keeps us apart are these kinds of belief systems, which we are not. We have our own. And sometimes they are not so obvious even to oneself. But I think that for me what was wonderful in each of these situations was simply to sit down. It's a great joy in contact with all these people. And really, the deepest joy was to actually be able to practice together. And what I really wish in a long term, kind of taking a long view, and I do have a long view, is that as we can actually get people to practice together,

[33:41]

to work together side by side it serves to deconstruct some of the belief systems that we have because they are transcended by this practice of upright sitting no matter what you call it among the Dalit Buddhists they practice they have very clear practice of anapanasati which is mindfulness of breathing and Metta. One day at Deer Park they asked me to do a meditation instruction. So I did about a half hour meditation instruction and my friend the Sri Lankan monk Venerable Kalupahana said, oh that's That's exactly what we do. That's the same practice. I think that the practice is core. You may call it Zen, you may call it mindfulness, you may call it different things, and there are some minor distinctions, but the act of sitting down and sitting upright and just paying attention is universal and unifying.

[34:59]

Maybe I'll stop there and leave some time for questions or thoughts. As I said, I'm still processing this. If you want to see in more detail, you can certainly see my blog pieces at www.clearviewblog.org, which were reflections as I was traveling. And I will say, one other thing about the Think Sangha Sangha, department, a redundancy department, is that it was extremely harmonious. Despite our differences in age, differences in cultures, differences in practice tradition, what we have that made us sangha, I think, was a unifying wish to practice harmoniously. We had no fights. It's pretty good for twelve people in unusual circumstances over several weeks.

[36:06]

And what we saw is that at different times, different people were ill, different people were out of sorts, in bad moods, all these things. And we gave, there was an ability because of the strength of the practice of people who would come together to give each other the space to be themselves. So, if someone is in a bad mood, you let them Oh, they need to step back or they need to stay in their room or not go on a trip for that day, fine. Let them do that because let them take care of themselves. And in some places where people were ill, if there's something we could, anybody could do to be of help to them and help take care of them, then that was offered. It was really remarkable and very hard to leave the group. very difficult. We sort of peeled away one or two at a time over the last three days until I was left with my friend John in a guest house in Delhi and they're still emailing going back and forth but I miss them and I can see them very clearly and I hope you will get to meet some of them.

[37:30]

You have met some of them. About half the group has already been here and stayed here I feel like this is a connecting point for us in America. I'm grateful for that. The last thing I'd say is just, again, it's just sort of mentioning a large topic which I won't go into, but the personal situation I find myself in in the early in my early sixties is feeling called very strongly here and being called in the world and trying to see trying to practice in such a way that these are not not vectors that are pulling me in different directions

[38:32]

but figuring out how I bring this together so that my experience here is the root of my ability to be home anywhere and my experience there is a way of bringing these parts of the world that many of you know about here and understanding the deep interconnection that we have and that as both a fruit and a responsibility of our practice. So this is the tension that I work with and I know that different people probably have varying opinions about how well I'm working with this and what the balance is, but I think that's probably for another time, another year, later. If you have thoughts or questions, we're open for a few minutes.

[39:33]

Thank you. Megan? Yes, Hozon. When you asked the women what they thought the Tudor had in mind when he was asked to create a Tuduni community, what did they think? It was hard to pry them loose from a this kind of tremendous devotion and valorization of the Buddha. In private conversations, you began to get a sense... What I was trying to do was plant a question, not so much get an answer. I was really interested in questions, not answers. And letting them have the discussion among themselves. Everything we did was translated, and I saw the energy was so different when they were communicating in Hindi. You know, it's like, whoa, youthful energy.

[40:37]

So I don't really know the answer to that. But I was trying to plant the question, not as a criticism of the Buddha, but as a way of looking at what's the power think about this. Yeah. Yes, when working with the youth and asking the young men how they felt about the feminine energy and how they felt about their mothers and stuff, what do you think you could have done to have to make them understand or, not even understand, but just, I don't know. I do, I do, and that's what I'm thinking about. I mean, I think I would spend some time, next year I would spend some time with them, in particular, and try to get engaged with them instead of, maybe engage with the men and women separately, in a sense, rather than have them as a whole class.

[41:48]

But I would be a little stricter, because they needed they needed some more reining in and make sure that they had formed groups to talk about this stuff and just really have them clarify to me what they thought the question was. And they were very responsible, they're great, but it's like they fuzzed out. So just to hold them a little to it, I think is entirely possible. I mean, the women were very clear, you know, they were saying Oh, the women at Naga Loka, they all wore these beautiful, it's called samar kameez. It's kind of like a sari, a version of a sari. Beautiful, beautiful, like imaginative cloth. And the guys wore jeans and t-shirts. And this is something they had come to at the school as a way of kind of tamping down

[42:52]

useful sexual energy, which is inevitable. You can't exclude it. But the women said, oh, how come we have to wear this and you can wear that? And then the next day, one of the women showed up dressed like that. And so these are questions. There are different ways of really addressing this. But we'll see how it goes next year. You can ask me next year. One or two more. say that when you're immersed in these cultures where the belief systems are different, it allows you a new perspective on our own beliefs here that we might not recognize as such. I didn't say that, but I meant that. I meant exactly that.

[43:55]

So I'm wondering if you've identified, because of that experience, some belief systems that you didn't see that we have. that you didn't see before, that actually if we were to recognize them ourselves and hold them as not necessarily true might be somewhat more liberating. Yeah. Unconsciously believing it. Yeah, I mean, there's all kinds of things that we have, but I think that one of the main experiences that I have there is that I'm aware of my privilege, much more acutely, because people are deferring to me, they're calling me sir, you know, they're serving me, there's all these kinds of things that are not so common here, but they exist in subtler ways here. And I just, you know, I had to be aware of that. You can't sort of take this on, head on, as much as possible.

[45:03]

I took care of myself. And also I feel like there's ways of using that privilege to be helpful. And I try to do that. And just also to connect on a human basis past that. You know, to play, to sing, to do different things, rather than to hold a position. So that's one It's one way of looking at it. It's an ongoing investigation. But I think it's useful, certainly useful for me, I think it's useful for most of us. Even a poor person going there from the United States is going to be seen with certain kinds of privilege. Privilege of language, privilege of just being able to go there. So it's something we have to look at, how we move in the circumstances of our life.

[46:10]

One more. Thank you. I'm wondering, you've probably thought about this, but I'm wondering what would it be like if a woman Buddhist teacher co-taught with you? What would that be like? Well, there were women who were teaching, in the Feng Sanga. And people really related to them. Men and women. And I'll tell you, a fantasy that I have, which is year after next, I'm very comfortable at Nagaloka. I like it there. They like me. In all the years I've been traveling, I've never gone anywhere except on my honeymoons with Lori. or my family and so the year after next when Alex goes to college I'm thinking it would be a great thing to go there together kind of mom and pop, good cop, bad cop for a month to go there for a month and just be there and teach and be a presence and be no problem

[47:31]

there's really openness to women teachers. That's not a problem at all. Well, I wasn't thinking about that so much, but I'm thinking of the value of the role modeling and all the non-verbal messages and interactions and so on and so forth. I think that would be wonderful. Yeah, exactly. It's true. And there's, you know, again, there's a They put monks, and I'm not a monk, in their eyes. I should have worn my robes, Soji and I were talking. But I didn't. Because in this Dalit community, people don't wear robes. But everywhere our two monks went, people were so happy to see them. So, that was another area of interest. You know, monk lay is a hot topic here, in certain quarters anyway. So, I think you're right.

[48:34]

I think that would be really instructive. Well, I'm going to end and we can talk over tea in the community room. Thank you very much and happy to be home.

[48:45]

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