regularly on email and every now and then we get to spend some time together. well-known and provocative, challenging months in modern time history. So since you're here, it would be wonderful to invite you to give a talk. So thank you for coming. Thank you. Since there's going to be a workshop this weekend on unlearning racism,

[01:12]

and since I've been allowed to participate, which is for me very nice, Alan and I were thinking I could try to say something that would connect up with the workshop. So what I'd like to do is reflect a little bit on identities and I'll share with you some some teachings or perspectives that I've benefited from quite a bit in my years of dharma practice, mainly as a monk. I meditated for a few years before I ordained, but most of my study and experience happened since I became a monk. partly because I had the time. Like many people here, and it's true increasingly in places like Bangkok, it's hard to find the time.

[02:25]

When I was in Peace Corps, which is what I did before I was a monk, I was doing 70-80 hour weeks, driving around on my motorcycle, trying to save the world, and having lots of anger and frustration about corruption in the Thai government, World Bank taking a blind eye to corruption. Back then I wasn't so, I was still a little bit politically naive about how the World Bank works. Not so much these days. Now that groups like them have taken sovereignty away from countries like, or with the help of the US, have taken sovereignty away from Thailand, Indonesia, Mexico, places like that. Anyway, wasn't always much time to practice.

[03:31]

It was also easy to go out and get drunk or do other things. See, Ellen asked me to introduce myself a little more. That was a little bit. Let's just say I grew up in suburbs of Chicago, was kind of off and on a Christian, at times really wanted to find out what life was about, other times I was just, you know, fairly average Midwest college kid going to classes occasionally, getting drunk, playing sports, chasing girls the rest of the time. But somehow, little things came together I ended up in Thailand largely because I wanted to see what it was like to live in a non-Christian culture and that I think ties in a little bit what today's talk will be about.

[04:38]

So I ended up in what's supposedly a Buddhist culture And it's still pretty much is, although that's weakening, as in most countries where we become more, where the religion is money and consumerism, rather than, I think it's kind of old fashioned to speak of a country now as Christian Buddhism or Buddhist. Very few countries that identity is very strong, except maybe some Muslim countries. perhaps India. Anyway, I had the privilege of living for four and a half years as a school teacher. I was a rural school teacher teaching English and agriculture, doing small-scale development projects. raising chickens, vaccinating chickens, teaching farmers how to use pesticides, how to use fertilizer, which are basically things I'm not for, but the alternative was people using these things in highly destructive ways instead of moderately destructive ways.

[06:02]

I did that for a while, and In the process, meditation became a more and more significant part of my life, especially a few periods where things kind of fell apart. And part of the things back together was usually to start meditating again. That started to sink in that things fell apart when I didn't have something to ground me, to keep me somewhat aware of what I am. what I'm doing, where I am, instead of just going on automatic pilot according to habits. So, after my Peace Corps time, I took advantage of an opportunity that's widely available in Thailand. That is what? Temporary ordination. The process leading up to being a monk in Theravada countries is very simple.

[07:12]

It doesn't take much preparation or much time because one becomes a monk or a nun in order to study and practice. So one doesn't have to do any specific study and practice in advance. And so I tried that out, thought I'd do it for a few months and then come back here and go to grad school. But I was gonna study religion go to Chicago Divinity School or something like that. But somewhere it started to click that I ended up at the monastery where, of all the monks in Thailand, my teacher's the one that Western grad students are writing PhD theses about. And since I've been advising people on their PhD theses, So somewhere I figured out why go to Chicago to study second or third hand what I could do where I was first hand.

[08:22]

It wasn't, I mean, it's not like that's all of Buddhism, but one living, vital, and for me, one tendency in Buddhism that made a lot of sense, and especially now that I've been doing it for more than a decade, still makes a lot of sense. Although I'm also aware of lots of flaws and problems, especially institutional. So I, three months became six, became a year, two years, five years. Now I'm an atera, which means an elder. after 10 years you become an elder and if I stick around to 20 and I'm a Maha Thera, which means a big elder. Maha means great, large or big. And so I've been living in Suon Mok, the Garden of Liberation, for almost 14 years.

[09:33]

And I'm also sort of an abbot, novice master, occasional mommy and daddy to a small community of young monks and visiting laymen, some of whom are thinking about becoming a monk. So I think that's a bit of the self-introduction. What I'd like to do is focus a bit on identity, and I'd like to do that by introducing what, for Ajahn Buddhadasa and for me and for others, is perhaps the most a powerful and precise teaching we have for getting to the bottom of a lot of our suffering, a lot of our dukkha.

[10:39]

According to the first accounts of the Great Awakening, while the Buddha was sitting under the Bodhi tree, for the Three Watches of the Night, he reflected on or contemplated what is in Pali called paticca-samupada. In Sanskrit, something like paticca-samupada or something. My Sanskrit's not so good. My Pali is weak, which can be translated depending co-origination. I'll give you an abridged form. Some of you, I'm pretty sure have come across this because it's usually taught in the same way, whether in Theravada, Mahayana or the Tibetans. And it's about, tries to, it's usually explained in a way that tries to explain how rebirth happens from one life to the next.

[11:50]

However, In our practice, that is not so much an issue because rebirth isn't going to happen for a while. And for many of us, it's a speculative issue or an issue of faith. I won't pick fights with people who believe one way or the other on this. But our preference is to focus on this teaching more, what's going on right now. and there's another way of looking at dependent co-origination or paticca samuppada that you can observe now and throughout the day and this way of looking at it is very relevant to identity the way we create the way we keep recreating or rebirthing a sense of me of self this somebody that we keep constructing and reconstructing and protecting and fighting for and often then behaving quite selfishly the buddha talked about this over and over again at least in the pali suttas

[13:16]

from various angles, so I'll try to give a short summary of the main points. The bottom line is that we're operating in ignorance, avicca or avidya in Sanskrit. We don't know what's going on, to put it simply. We are operating on instinct, habit, social conditioning, and so on. We don't generally pay that much attention to what's going on in our lives. And further, we are not aware of certain basic truths. For example, the simple fact of impermanence which for modern people is intellectually pretty obvious. So most of us kind of nod our heads and say, yeah, everything's impermanent, but that doesn't mean we're aware of impermanence every time we breathe in and out.

[14:26]

The same with voidness, which is a little tougher intellectually and also pretty tough to be aware of with every breath. So unaware of certain basic realities, we then react to those realities in certain ways. And the Buddha gave a summary of this, the basic steps, you could call it, there's a certain cognitive process that goes on that we can observe. And the Buddha pointed this out so that we observe it. course traditional Buddhists take that well the Buddha said it's the truth we believe it we argue with other people about it but it seems pretty obvious to me the Buddha talked about these things mainly for us to to watch it to observe it in ourselves so with the underlying lack of awareness lack of

[15:36]

awareness or wisdom into our basic reality, the reality of this world, of others, what's going on. We experience, we see things, we hear, we smell, we taste, we touch, we remember, we think, We imagine there are feelings, dreams. So we have this, we're in this physical, sensual world. We have a very active, emotional, mental life. And so experience is constantly coming up. That itself is part of what dependent origination means. Whatever is happening, it's not happening independent. It's happening because of other stuff. like the fact I look out and I see your faces. That involves eyes, nervous system working over here. It involves the face being these faces over there and then light going back and forth and so on.

[16:41]

Nothing's happening independently or by itself, although the mind forgets that or it doesn't realize that repeatedly. With experience, some experiences feel good, are attractive, beautiful. Some food smells good, tastes good. We call that positive feeling or pleasant feeling. Other experiences have a negative, unpleasant, unattractive quality. and which we tend to be somewhat repelled by. And some experiences have an ambiguous quality, which the Buddha called neither pleasant nor painful feeling, or neither painful nor pleasant feeling. So there's experience, all experiences, any experience that means something to the mind. Some things just kind of pass through.

[17:44]

But a lot of stuff means something. You see a face. Well, for most of us, all human faces have some significance. And then many faces have a lot of significance. We recognize them. Or they have features that attract us, that frighten us, and so on. Or a face may be black. A face may have a nose shape that we associate with certain ethnic groups. A face may be masculine, feminine. And that's another stage where the mind recognizes, it categorizes and labels the experience. And often in the labeling, there's an evaluation taking place. Now between the feeling part in this, often there's a bit of liking and disliking that comes in.

[18:45]

So experience, feeling, liking, disliking, categorizing, recognizing, categorizing, labeling, which is all called sanya in the Pali language. I think it's the same in Sanskrit. It's one of the five aggregates that gets chanted in the Heart Sutra. And that ends up often with evaluation. Often when we recognize or label something, there's And this is very important for some of the stuff that will happen, be discussed, I think, this weekend. Often in the labeling something, the label has an implicit value. Certain things, if we explore them, we find out that we believe certain, for example, skin color is better than others.

[19:50]

or even height. I've learned from living in Thailand that I have a height bias coming from the way I grew up. You know, white people like me are taller than brown Thai people or Filipinos. I have a lot of Filipino friends as well. Or Cambodian or Laotian or Burmese. The shortness, the skin color, the fact that they look different. Often I notice, I've come to notice, and this is rather painful to accept that this obnoxious thing is going on in me at times, but in the recognition there's also often an evaluation of inferior, lesser. Other people I look at and I give it a positive spin. Generally, that's habitual.

[20:52]

We can become aware and conscious of it, but often it's not. It's just habit, and it clicks in. And from there, desire arises, wanting. If something has a positive, attractive quality or feel to it, we want it, we want to get it, keep it, have more of it. If it's got a negative, repulsive, unattractive quality to it, we want to push it away, get away, or even kill it. What we really want is just to get it away, but sometimes the way to get rid of it is to smash, or nuke it, or send in an aircraft carrier, or whatever. and we do that both on the you know the interpersonal level the intrapersonal wait intra interpersonal and then of course political level wanting and this is where we get closer to the whole thing of identity wanting is

[22:05]

then stirs up something very interesting and I think uniquely human. We interpret the want as having a wanter. This is one way to explain it. The Buddha's language was with desire as condition, craving or attachment arises. And the way we understand it, when I say we, it's like my teacher and people who follow his approach. When desire arises, we interpret the desire to have a desirer. This is very similar to what anthropologists call animism. And if you study child development, or at least people like Jean Piaget, who studied these things in kids. That's a stage we've all gone through.

[23:11]

Like little kids, you see the moon, you walk, you look up, the moon's there, you walk further, you look up, it's still there. It must be following me. Where we imply agency to things, or when we're young, things that move, we assume they're alive. And we imply that there's a being in there that is consciously choosing to do whatever it does. And of course, when we often use the word animism, it's pejorative for religions that are primitive or backwards or we look down on. Even if we're trying to be politically correct, we may still, deep down, because of our social conditioning and other things, look down on it. But, anyway, I don't want to get off on that tangent too much, but we have a tendency to assume that there's somebody responsible, somebody who's doing it.

[24:22]

So there's desire and we create a sense of me and mine with the desire. Another way to understand that is when there's desire, desire wants a payoff. And what good's the payoff if somebody's not there to get it? So when desire wants to, like wants the sun to come out, of course you want to be there to have the nice warm sun shine on you. And so, with desire we create both time and we create somebody. And then once we create this somebody, the next step is we start to dress this person up. The Pali word for this is bhava, which means being and having. By the way, this sequence is very quick.

[25:25]

So as we react to experience, one moment there was hearing. A few mental moments later, now there's I am hearing. And depending on the experience, the situation, we start to latch onto parts of the reality as me, as mine. So, for example, let's see, last night the Bulls were playing the jazz. I'm from Chicago. So, it's easy to identify with being from Chicago. So, not only is there somebody, but this somebody is from Chicago, this somebody is a Bulls fan. at the same time this somebody is also a monk and so you're not supposed to get too excited about this and so what exactly the mind builds the identity of the moment out of depends on a lot of things at this point we don't need to

[26:36]

The point isn't to try to describe all the details. Just to be aware that we do this and then we start watching it in ourselves. Or a similar thing. While I'm here, another monk, a much younger monk, is now visiting his family in Virginia. And we were talking about the feelings of going home. This is his first trip back as a monk. He's been a monk about three and a half years. And there's still some family pressure to, you know, come back home and be normal. But for him this time, he was telling me how the excitement that used to be there of going home, has weakened quite a bit. And so I replied about a few years ago, my plane was flying from Detroit or someplace, and it was about to land in Chicago, and at the last minute I remember, oh yeah, this is home.

[27:45]

which is a little strange, because generally if I, actually now I don't know where home is, because I live in Thailand, and I'm much more rooted in the little forest where I live, some of the communities around it, actually than I am back in Country Club Hills, which is a pretty boring suburb of Chicago. But mom and dad are still there, so it's still kind of home. So anyway, for me, that identity with that place as being home has weakened a lot, but now I've noticed when I get back to my monastery, that's more like home. So these are little examples that pop into my head right now of how we take experience, we respond to it with desire, And then we create the subject of desire, the somebody who's going to, not only wants it now, but the somebody who's going to be around in five minutes, ten minutes, an hour, tomorrow, next year, to get it.

[29:04]

Of course, if we watch, we usually don't get it the way we want, but often we forget to watch, because we're blinded and overly focused. by our desire. So out of that we create the self, the sense of me, mine. We dress that up with identities, our bodies, our gender, our class or our education, the way we dress, the way we wear our hair, the people we hang around with. You know, we come to the Zendo. So we're dressing it up even when we sit. You know, supposedly it's just sitting, but often it's not just sitting, it's me sitting. And me has got images stuck onto it. I am, you know, today I feel good, so I have a nice image of I'm a good meditator.

[30:08]

you know and another time I don't feel so good and maybe my back is stiff and I move around and so my image today is not such a good meditator I'm nodding off or those of us who are competitive there's not only our image of ourself but we compare it with the image of other people around us and the next step in the process that the Buddha mentioned is birth Unfortunately, a lot of people mistranslate it as rebirth in this context, but it's literally just birth. We take that to be the birth of the ego. A fully self-centered, egocentric mind has now been created. First, it was just experience, which is normal. It's part of life. It's what we've got. and the experience has got feeling, which is also perfectly natural.

[31:12]

But then our particularly human mind starts kicking in with its recognitions, evaluations, it thinks, desire is thought, this clinging to me and mine is thought, the building of the identity self images is thought, and then we have this me, this person, this individual who I am, that we have constructed in this way. And according to the Buddha, thus arises the entire mass of dukkha. This is the cognitive process, this is what we call concocting in the mind out of ignorance of the self and that's how we create suffering. Now, since our workshop is about unlearning racism, it seems to me to observe this process that I've tried to describe would be a key

[32:28]

A key way to attack, or that may be a rather aggressive word, but in Theravada Buddhism sometimes we speak about killing the defilements, things like that. But a way to address the racism in ourselves is first of all to observe the self-images we create of ourselves as white people, black people, Asian people, whatever. kind of identities we carry. By the way, in Thailand we don't have political correctness, so I don't always get the right terms, so I apologize if I mess up. But we create identities, we have our gender, which often is a very prominent part of how we see ourselves in any moment. With Alan and some other friends in the Think Sangha, we've been at times studying how now in the modern consumer capitalist world, we often construct our identity about the things we buy and own.

[33:51]

class in the modern economy, class is becoming a less important basis for identity, both individually and groups. And increasingly, what we consume, what we buy, how we dress is important. And unfortunately at times that can include the way we consume Buddhism or Zazen or retreats, partly because we get locked into that way of thinking. By the way, I'm used to giving, I'm under a time constraint that is more strict than what I'm used to, so I'm trying to condense this. There's a few minutes left, so I'd like to leave what I tried to describe with you as something to observe.

[34:59]

I'm very confident that unless you're awakened, I know in Zen sometimes you're supposedly already awakened, or something like that, but I'm pretty sure that for most of us, the thing I described is going on. I know it still happens in me much more than I'd like, although through practice and lots of little tricks and shifts, it goes on less destructively. the ego that comes out of it is a somewhat healthier ego less wounded in my case less angry less competitive less domineering than it used to be but it's still there and so even when it's being good this ego it it still screws things up it's still

[36:08]

it's as I think everybody here is realized at times you know there's when the mind is void free whatever you want to call it things are one way and then the little the good little meditator comes in and owns it and then things aren't quite so free and so open and then if the good little meditators not careful he or she can start to create pride or whatever. So I'd like to leave that description with you as something well worth observing as a fundamental part of our practice. I'm not saying you have to spend your meditation time observing it. For me this is as much something to observe throughout the day. For me, sitting is more to refine mindfulness, to refine the mind.

[37:12]

But if stuff is coming up, to watch it. But then, the rest of the day, since I'm doing lots of things other than just sitting, to watch as this process over and over takes over my life. And then I'm stuck in the various somebodies that I've become familiar with. And again, like most of those somebodies have a certain masculine identity to them. and I grew up in a sexist, patriarchal country. I moved to a sexist, patriarchal country, and I'm ordained in a sexist, patriarchal hierarchy. And part of my identity is I'm fighting it, working against it, trying to undermine it, but at other times, you know, it's spinning inside.

[38:17]

Now, one advantage of observing this is the possibility, instead of feeling guilty, you know, by identifying with being, still having certain sexist, chauvinistic thought processes, but when I'm just aware of them, and I can recognize it as something that keeps getting created and recreated out of ignorance, then I don't have to be guilty about it, And I just can recognize that it's still there instead of thinking I'm, which is another identity. I'm better than, you know, I'm better than my Abbott who's much more sexist or something. Um, or identifying with, you know, I'm a good guy helping out the nuns or the women or whatever. So observing it, And even when it's not going the way I'd like it to, at least not getting, re-identifying from in a negative way, like feeling bad about it, not liking it, feeling guilty, having, lowering my self-confidence or self-esteem and so on.

[39:39]

Last thing I'd like to say is probably okay on one level of practice it seems to me we just watch and we try to cut through this this whole business especially the non-dualistic aspect of practice is where we don't separate say spirituality in the world to the degree possible we we can cut through this and just try to see beyond to to voidness, that this body, this mind, this life, this world, it's just flowing, none of it is me or mine. But in reality, much of us don't manage to do that a lot of the time. So I think it makes sense, and I think this is part of our practice, whether in Theravada, Zen, or any healthy religious tradition, before it's gotten corrupted by certain institutional and other forces, that part of what we do is also

[40:57]

give ourselves healthier identities to, if we're gonna, as long as we're still ignorantly creating identities, we might as well do it with healthier ones. So for example, there are practices in Buddhism to encourage kind thought processes or generous ones. So It's better to identify with being generous than with being greedy. When we're greedy, it gets a lot uglier. Of course, it'd be nice just to be generous without identifying with it, but that's not always easy. So on one level, we can use the teaching I've tried to share to see how we can have. Part of my old identity was somebody who drank a lot, and now my identity is somebody who doesn't drink, although that's not actually something I think about all that much, except when I'm staying in a friend and I open the fridge and there's a lot of beer, or when drunks approach me on the street.

[42:23]

but to have a healthier, more worthy, more noble things to let this habit of identity cling to. I'm not saying we should do this. I'm just saying it's gonna happen until we're aware enough to step out of it. But at least if it's gonna happen, work at giving our lives healthy stuff for it to happen around. So, I think that's probably enough for the talk part of this. We have maybe 10 minutes if anybody wants to respond or question or something. Peace worker.

[43:31]

And would you mind telling us what your Christian name is? I mind a little bit, but it's not going to kill me. It is was Robert. I'm discursive and taking I don't have, no I don't believe that, nor do I have a strong belief in the opposite direction.

[45:03]

Although when I read the newspapers, forges, like my monastery almost burned down the beginning of last month by the same kind of fires that were burning at the same time in Central America and Mexico. And they're going on all over Southeast Asia too. Just so both direct experience in what I read in the papers I think it's pretty hard at this point to argue that humanity as a whole is evolving in a healthy direction. There's individuals or certain groups and tendencies seem to me to be going in a healthy direction. But collectively, I can't see it. I'm not saying we're necessarily devolving into some really destructive, well, let's just say we're in bad shape, and it's hard to say which way we're going.

[46:14]

But I think as part of being human beings, as long as we're human beings, and they've been around, Homo sapiens has been around, what, 100,000 years or something? We've been using, as a species, have been using language at least 50,000 years, it seems. So I think part of being a human being is we use language. And so I think, I don't think there's any problem with using discursive thought. The thing is just to learn that that's all it is, is discursive thought. Concepts are limited. They're good for certain things and they're not so good for others. The problem is we don't remember that. We believe our words. We believe them too much. Some of the times and other times we're too sloppy or careless or dishonest with the way we use them. So for me,

[47:21]

words are not themselves the problem. It's our lack of understanding them and then using, not using them wisely enough. So one and then two and maybe three. Well, thank you for your talk. And as you say, from one point of view, we are in that chain. So I'd like to hear about how you what you can to make the world better, but what is the shape that that vow takes for you when you're a Dharma teacher? And what else can you say about the shape of your effort to make the world more livable? Well, one is to try to live in the world in a way that doesn't harm it, although recognizing, i.e.,

[48:22]

and I walk around and step on things. So, recognizing that, trying to do it, you know, as to minimize the destruction, to take only what's necessary. So, and I still have a ways to go on that, but trying to sort out what's necessary from what isn't necessary and what's, what's, um, what's harmful from what's not harmful. That's one level. Second is, I believe in, I think community and sangha are vitally important. So a fair amount of my energy goes into trying to, with the other people I live, develop a healthy community. In the 18 years I've been in Thailand, I've seen the breakdown of traditional community under the onslaught of market forces and consumerism, as well as a certain education system that tends to deny or belittle traditional values or rural values in order to take over with

[49:44]

city values, which are coming largely from Bangkok. That's the way the bureaucracy has worked in Thailand for a hundred years. So, one is the personal level, trying to live in a noble way, trying to live up to my name. Second, doing that with friends, our immediate community and other groups I work with, other monks, nuns, I have a lot of Catholic friends, a few Muslim friends, and so on. Third is, through certain kinds of involvement, working to bring the kind of things I talked about today, bring those perspectives into social discourse. I work with some NGOs, non-government organizations in Thailand and other Asian countries.

[50:49]

I've been involved with other friends organizing a peace, kind of ecology walk, peace walk, which is both for the environment, community issues, community cohesiveness and unity, and preservation of cultural values. And in doing these things, not letting the debate just be economic, political, or just seeing the environment as a material thing. So bringing in spiritual perspectives. And reminding people that these are all moral issues. These are not just economic, political issues. For example, the financial crisis in Southeast Asia is as much, or even some of us feel more so, a moral crisis. And it's not just the morality of Southeast Asia. It's the morality of the IMF, which is generally doing the bidding of the US government.

[51:52]

And in large areas of Thai life now, decisions are being made in Washington. both by the Congress, State Department, Clinton, and then of course the IMF is based in Washington, International Monetary Fund. So anyway, in talking about these things, trying to bring in spiritual perspectives, those are three of the three main ones. One more minute. One more question. Okay. In the Mahayana we talk a lot about the Bodhisattva ideal. I think it's often the Mahayana understanding that the ideal in the Theravada tradition is the Arhat. And clearly what you're talking about is a much broader perspective than the traditional understanding of the Arhat. I'm wondering if the Arhat ideal has also evolved in ways that I'm not aware of over the past 1,500, 2,000 years, or if the ideals in the Theravada have changed, or if you're really unique, or some of the individuals that I've met are unique?

[53:08]

My understanding of history of Buddhism in Thailand and a few other countries, you know, There are a lot of Buddhists who have Mahayana mind or whatever. To me, Mahayana... I've met a lot of Hinayana-minded Mahayanists. And, of course, there are Theravadins with Hinayana mind. Now, some of what you've got is just Mahayana propaganda. When Japanese Buddhists never saw a Theravada Buddhist in their life, it was easy to kind of use them as an intellectual foil and say, okay, this is the ideal, and there are those stupid guys over there who are narrow-minded and selfish. But, first of all, if we go to the way the Buddha is pictured in the original sutras, that's the original Bodhisattva ideal, and that's pre-Theravada.

[54:12]

and pre-Mahayana, what my teacher called Buddhayana. He thinks it's time to forget about some of these distinctions. It's okay to keep the distinction, but realize Buddhayana is more important. So, I could say more, but time's up.

[54:33]

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