Today is the 20th, right? Oh, well, welcome to spring. So I haven't been here for several weeks. I've been in India, and I'm going to talk a little about that, but I'm also aware that today is a day of sashi, for a bunch of us who are here, and some of you are coming in for the lecture, but whether it's the Sheen or not, the person who sits in this seat is supposed to give a talk that is basically encouraging of practice, not exactly a travelogue or a social or religious history, so this is a little tough. But I will try to bridge this in what I hope will be a useful way.

[01:19]

I think that sometime later in April, what I hope to do is a more full and detailed report back on, with slides on the really the remarkable experience that I had there. So I'll say a little about it. I've just been back for several weeks where I was both visiting and learning and actually doing a lot of teaching of a particular sort with what might be termed the untouchable or ex-untouchable communities of new Buddhists in the state of Maharashtra. I was in Mumbai and in Pune and Nagpur, which are all quite large cities.

[02:21]

Mumbai is mind-boggling, actually. This movement of new Buddhists is something that I was very curious and wanted to visit ever since I first heard about it 20 years ago. And the experience I had was wonderful and very powerful. There was a sweetness and sincerity, generosity and intelligence to them. regardless of their social circumstances. And I really feel that I'm only back two days and I'm still terribly jet-lagged. It's really far. I was awake for like, because I don't sleep on airplanes, for 39 consecutive hours. And so I was in a bit of a daze as I went through customs.

[03:27]

but I feel that I left a kind of piece of my heart there with these friends in Pune and Nagpur, Mumbai. I'm going to risk a kind of sweeping generalization, which is about my experience here, which is always kind of dangerous with Linda Hess in the room. because she really knows India very well. But I had a very, pretty much a first impression which stayed true for me the whole time that I was there. And I've been a considerable time in Burma and Bangladesh and other countries in Asia, but there was a sense of freedom and intimacy that I felt while I was there in India that was quite remarkable.

[04:43]

Even in the midst of just the most jarring discrepancies of wealth and life conditions, you know, Mumbai's as it rivals Tokyo for the most expensive rental prices in the world, at the same time as I was giving talks in the middle of slums and people living in places where there was a common toilet facility that was about 100 yards down the road from their houses. I won't go into more graphic details but it's hard to imagine coming from this country. The notion of slum here and the notion of slum in India is a whole different ballgame. But there was this sense of freedom and intimacy and for me it felt in the best and maybe

[05:56]

maybe sometimes in the worst sense of the word, familial. And that I was being allowed into this family. And I was aware that despite the vast great flaws in democracy, the democracy that we have here and the democracy that they have there, I was in what is essentially the world's largest democracy and there's something to that. I'm not quite sure, I need to be there more to understand better, but still there's an energy of people in the streets and in the fields and in their homes, a kind of limitless wonderful energy that I really valued. So, what I thought I would try to lay out is how inspired and encouraged I was by the practice that I encountered there and consider

[07:16]

some ways in which it resonates with the practice that we have here. So I thought I'd lay out some points and then give you some background and maybe leave time for discussion. It was one thing that I did everywhere I went, which was not so usual for people. When there's a teaching, they're used to the teacher sitting up there and just presenting and I gave over a lot of my time to question and answer because that's how actually I can learn. So I think the first thing that occurs to me is that there's a new Buddhist revolution in India that dates from a kind of conversion movement, which I will say more about, which in a very general way coincides with the growth of Buddhism in the West.

[08:34]

A lot of our teachers came here in the mid to late 1950s, and that's when our practice began to sink its first tentative roots and that is when this took place in India among people who were known as... it's hard to find the right word because to every group the word... there's one or more dimensions of unacceptability to used to describe people, but I'm talking about mostly people who were formerly, their background was, in caste terms, untouchable. They're also known as, sort of self-identified, at least by some groups, as Dalit, which is a Marathi word which means broken to pieces, or crushed, or oppressed.

[09:40]

And in the Indian constitution, they're known as scheduled castes, and scheduled castes and scheduled tribes. But this is about a quarter of the population of India. So the movement, Buddhism was very, very, it was a very slim presence of Buddhism in the country of its origin in India up until this time, up until this conversion in late 1956. And the conversion, as I said, was mostly among the most oppressed people. So aside from the kind of temporal agreements between the rise of this new kind of Buddhism in India and the rise of Buddhism here in America, there is also another fundamental characteristic that I think gave birth to it, which is that if I look around this room, I don't think there are some people

[11:08]

but not very many who were born into a Buddhist tradition. Many of us adopted Buddhism, turning from whatever the religion of our birth may have been, because we needed to grapple with the realities of our lives. We were drawn, whether we knew it in these simple terms or not, by what the Buddha said. He said, I just teach about suffering and the end of suffering. So we come to the Dharma generally because there's some kind of suffering that we're experiencing in our lives, in our families, in our society, and we want to find a way to engage with that.

[12:16]

Sometimes that engagement is intrapersonal, sometimes it's interpersonal, sometimes it's transpersonal, sometimes it's social, but these are all expressions that we can manifest in our practice. And that's why people in India, the ex-untouchables, that's why they turned to Buddhism. In their case, I think there were overwhelming social conditions and an overwhelming religious oppression that they felt from the kind of strictures of what was known as Hinduism. But still, this commonality of wanting to find a way, a productive, wholesome, reasoned way to engage with suffering and to join with others.

[13:29]

who have a similar calling, similar voice in their heads. For quite a while I've been thinking of what are the defining characteristics of Dharma in our country. certainly in our Sangha. And the three points that I've been thinking about for a while also parallel what I found in the Buddhist communities that I was visiting in India. So, I think the first point is that unlike much of Asia, The Buddhism that they practice there, like the Buddhism that we practice here, is a practice of deeply committed laypeople.

[14:37]

And, you know, even though I'm ordained, I would count myself sort of in that category. People who have jobs, people who have families, people who are living in society, people who are not living as monastics. There is certainly a place for that. It's an important place of training. Among the leaders and senior practitioners that I met there, like many of us, they had all done or do periods of monastic training. intensive medication. Some of us need that too. Intensive meditation, training in just having an opportunity to live quietly and to live in some way a bit apart from the overwhelming conditions of our lives.

[15:50]

But still, that's That's a ground from which one moves back into the world itself, as all the great Bodhisattva exemplars did. So this commitment to lay practice, I think, is unique, because in most of Asia, they have a, if I think about Burma or Thailand or Sri Lanka, Vietnam, other countries, there is not much opportunity for lay people to practice the Dharma. Their practice is to sustain and offer dana to the monks, sometimes the nuns, but mostly the monks. Nuns don't count for much, unfortunately, but that's a whole other story.

[16:54]

That's actually the next point. But what I saw there was not about some separation between monks and lay people. It was a practice for everybody. And the leaders that I saw in this particular group mostly were people who come out of the tradition you may have heard of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order. Has anyone heard of that? Which is essentially a kind of lay-ordained school. It began in England with Venerable Sangharaksita, who's a kind of controversial character, but the people that I met were really wonderful and dedicated, and very well schooled in Buddhism, very well schooled in meditation, and I will say that unlike many places I've been in Asia, often when you go to Asia, when you go to different countries, you get the feeling that, you are given the feeling, because they're communicating it to you very clearly, that they're doing the real Buddhism.

[18:21]

their Buddhism is the best. Whatever their meditation practice or devotional practices are, that's it. And you know, yours are maybe, we'll sort of let you in the door. That was not the feeling that I had. Wherever I went, what people wanted, they wanted to know what it was that we're doing. They wanted to know, what's your practice? What's your meditation method? theirs was commonly a mindfulness of breathing which is not so different than ours not again and also like ours not in a really intensely focused way but in a in a sort of broad way and then they also commonly did metta bhavana, cultivation of metta as a practice.

[19:25]

And they were very interested in Shikantaza, and very interested in how I was describing our practice, which is to be receptive to all the thoughts and feelings and experiences that come up as we're sitting, to see them, let them go, to return to your breath as a very broad, soft focus, to keep coming back to that, but without this highly, highly concentrated focus. So that way, what we encounter as we're sitting, what we're going to encounter as we sit here all day, The way in which we do that is really a tool by which we can cultivate what we call continuous practice.

[20:27]

And that's what I was talking about. Continuous practice, which means what we learn in the narrow place of sitting here is something that we take outside the confines of this room and don't so much distinguished between the zendo and the world outside that door. We're cultivating this continuous practice which means being able to meet ourselves moment by moment and that was extremely interesting to them. So, the first characteristic is a committed lay practice. The second characteristic that I would say about our practice is that it's, I don't know, for lack of a better word, there's a feminization of it.

[21:28]

Many of the practice leaders, priests, teachers in our various traditions as we make a generational shift, there are, from my perspective, at least half women, if not more. And that this is also a radical manifestation in the Buddhist world. With the possible exception of Chinese Buddhism in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where for some reasons many of the powerful teachers are women. I think that's because it's more acceptable for them to do that than for men who are supposed to succeed in the business world. But by and large, women as practitioners are devalued in

[22:38]

particularly in the Theravada world. This is not the case in the Buddhist movement in India. There are an equal number of Dharmacari. Dharmacari means basically Dharma followers. That's the designation for order members in India. And it seems like something amounting to like 40% of the order members in India are women. And the ones that I met were very strong. They're leading meditation groups, they're leading social projects, they have equal voice in kind of in the growth and operation of the order that they're building.

[23:45]

And it goes back to something that, I'll talk about him a little more, Dr. Ambedkar, Dr. B. R. Ambedkar, who led this conversion movement in the 50s, he said, you know, a society is judged by the position of women. in that society. And this is what they are making very conscious efforts to build as completely equal practitioners. And that seemed to me to be the case. I sat in on meetings, as I did teachings. It was quite wonderful. So I think maybe there's something that they can continue to learn from us. And I look forward to when some women teachers go there, because that'll be a powerful experience.

[24:52]

But still, I think that's something that we have in common, something that we're on the road to doing together. And the third element that I see that is unique or, not unique, but it's a mark of Buddhism in this country. I'll just say, in a broad sense, social engagement. I'm not necessarily talking about social action or social change work, but a sense that Buddhism is the responsibility of our practice is to be in a broad way or very particular ways involved in our society. If I look around this room, many of you I know, you manifest this day by day.

[25:54]

Not wearing some badge that I'm a Buddhist, but flowing from your true human nature. The true human nature that we're able to contact as we manage to set aside some of the self-centered hindrances that we have. So social engagement is also, social engagement I wouldn't say as well as a commonly found characteristic in Asian Buddhism. There is a sense in which in Asian Buddhism there is a symbiosis between the wider community and the monks. But still, what I saw in these communities in India, they were leading

[26:59]

health projects. They were doing earthquake relief. They were running hostels, residences for very, very poor children so that they could have a place to live where they could study and be with each other and come back to after school to live there. They were running nursery schools. They were doing livelihood training for for women. They were in the middle of investigating the ongoing social violence and atrocities that happened in the Dalit communities. So this is something that Dr. Ambedkar It comes from him, and I think I need to talk about him a little, if that's okay.

[28:04]

So... As I said, roughly 25% of the Indian population is, and distributed across the country, is Dalits or Untouchables, Ex-Untouchables, whatever term you call them. And there was this extraordinary figure, Dr. B. R. N. Bedkar, who, I think he was born in 1891. He was born in Maharashtra to a Mahar caste. This was a caste that traditionally had the employment of sweeping. Castes or sub-castes are they're identified with particular tasks, which are tasks associated with impurity or pollution.

[29:13]

So these untouchables were the people who swept the streets, collected the garbage, picked up the shit, retrieve the bodies of dead animals with leather workers and butchers. These are all tasks that many of the caste Hindus could not see themselves doing for the most part. So he was born into an educated Maha family and He was very bright and he won scholarships and became one of the first untouchable youths to go to an Indian university. And then he had the good fortune to get further scholarships and he ended up with PhDs and law degrees from Columbia and the London School of Economics.

[30:19]

So this guy was like heavy duty. And he really was heavy duty. He was a very controversial guy, when you read his stuff, it is so fiercely and well argued, you wouldn't want to kind of hash it out with him. In 1935, and he and Gandhi were kind of, they went head to head in many ways for many years. And again, I'll say more about this when we do the report back, but he made an interesting statement. One of his fundamental things was to argue against the inequity of the caste system, and to see that he described caste as a system of graded inequality, which meant not just between the four higher castes, but even among the

[31:25]

the untouchables, and this is what people were telling me, still holds true. There are so many different gradations, and everyone is looking to where their position is in the social structure, and so graded inequality is a wonderfully effective tool for keeping people from being able to work together. So, at a certain point, Ambedkar said in 1935, I was born a Hindu but I will not die a Hindu. And then he proceeded for the next 20 years to investigate most of the religious traditions that existed in India. And he was courted by many of them because they saw he was the leader of the untouchables in India, and they figured whichever religion could win him over was going to get a huge voting block.

[32:27]

So he was courted by the Muslims, he was courted by the Sikhs and by the Christians, and he decided that after a lot of study, Buddhism was the religion that he wanted to identify with and to convert to. So, what he wrote, he said, the teachings of Buddha are eternal, but even then the Buddha did not proclaim them to be infallible. The religion of Buddha has the capacity to change according to the times, a quality which no other religion can claim to have. Now, what is the basis of Buddhism? If you study carefully, you will see that Buddhism is based on reason. there is an element of flexibility inherent in it, which is not found in any other religion. So, in 1956, after consultation and long consideration, and he was in ill health, sort of feeling the shadow of mortality, he converted in Nagpur, received

[33:45]

the three refuges and the five basic precepts, not killing, not stealing, not lying, not misusing sexuality and not intoxicating oneself or others. He received it from the senior monk in India. And then he did this radical thing. There were 400,000 people there. watching this. And having received the refuges and the precepts, he, this lay person, and I don't think anybody quite knew he was going to do this, he turned around to these 400,000 people and offered them the three refuges and actually 22 vows, converting them to Buddhism. It's like, they were Buddhism, which meant they could try to shuck off their Hindu religious identity, at least for themselves.

[34:54]

The 22 vows included the five precepts, but they also included very clear and particular vows not to do certain ritual and religious practices that would be incumbent on a Hindu practitioner, somebody who was following the Brahmanistic teaching. So this was radical, and there were several other mass conversions, events that followed, and it was extraordinary. He had extraordinary promise, and six weeks later he was dead. And the movement was left really functionally without leadership. which finally leadership was picked up in the late 70s. There were many Ambedkarite political groups and groups that were identified with Buddhism, but Buddhist teaching and Buddhist practice came in in the late 1970s.

[35:59]

So that's a bit of background. There's much more I could say about Dr. Ambedkar. He also was the primary drafter of the Indian constitution, and was the first law minister of India. But I want to skip ahead. There's one more point I want to make. He said, if you ask me, this is what he said in 1936, if you ask me, my ideal would be a society based on liberty, equality, and fraternity. So this is an expression, this is probably the expression that, for some of us, is all that we remember about the French Revolution. Except for the guillotine. But he took this to be, he also saw this as the Buddha's teaching.

[37:01]

And one day I was lying in bed, in the countryside, and I was thinking, liberty calling fraternity, and then I thought, Oh, Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. What an original thought. And I went and I talked to, I was having breakfast with Loka Mitra, who was kind of the key organizer of this Buddhist movement from 1979. He said, oh right, this is what we always used to talk about when we were creating this movement, that liberty, equality, fraternity parallels Buddha, Dharma, Sangha. So let me just say something about that and then leave a little time for questions. So what I say is that liberty is the quality of actualized liberation, which is what the Buddha embodied. But as in the realization of enlightened life, liberty

[38:10]

is a practice. It's something that we have to aspire to and do. It's not just some noble quality that somehow bathes us in its light. To be a Buddha, to be free, means you have to live in just that way, which means we have to cultivate that. So that's the That's how I see those being parallel. Equality is Dharma in the sense that as we deepen our practice, we see all beings as equal. In Thakawin's Song of Zazen, it begins, from the beginning, all beings are Buddha.

[39:11]

So each sentient being is precious, is equal in that sense. So I like to say that coming from a Jewish background and having some difficulty with that, I like to say all people are chosen, not just those of a particular caste or religion or nation. At the same time, Dr. Ambedkar, when he was talking about equality, was very clear that each person has strengths and weaknesses and skills and shortcomings. And in this respect, we are perhaps unequal, but we're also individual and unique. So, taken together, I think liberty and equality encourage us to be completely ourselves, as and open as we can be and respecting each other and valuing each other as precious.

[40:16]

Then the third fraternity slash sangha is really the cutting edge of Ambedkar's Buddhism, the new Buddhism society, you may have noticed. So we see fraternity as Sangha, as the community of practitioners, or the wider community of all beings. So in that way it's linked to equality. In the Buddhist time there was a fourfold Sangha. Monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. And somehow Asian Buddhism is trying to reduce this to the one-fold Sangha. Sangha means the monks, for the most part. And that's not the kind of Sangha that we have at BCC. That's not the kind of Sangha that I saw in India. But fraternity and Sangha is a challenge for all of us.

[41:20]

Even though we can sit very nicely together in Zazen, it's like, how do we get along in our meetings, in our business, in our families, what happens to Sangha? And that's the crucible within which Sangha and fraternity have to bubble and clarify themselves. And it's a real, as I said, because of the system of graded inequality, it's a real problem within Indian society as a whole, but it's particularly a problem within the Dalit community, where you think that oppressed people should find their commonality and get along, but when people are oppressed, they are often struggling for resources between each other. It's a very painful reality. So, fraternity, or Sangha, is the principle of

[42:24]

seeing the unity of society, seeing that this is something that we have to do together. And as we all know, this is very hard work. So I think I'm going to stop there. I hope this is somewhat useful and somewhat informative, but we have a few minutes. I'd like to take a few minutes for questions or comments. Are there any converts to Buddhism among the Muslim community? No. That wouldn't fly too easily. But where I went for several days in Nagpur was to a place called the Nagarjuna Training Institute which is bringing young people from all over India and there were two Muslim women there who were from

[43:31]

Even though, ostensibly, these other religions don't observe caste, in a practical sense they do. Even Islam. And so these were women who came from oppressed groups. It's not easy to be a Muslim in India, in a lot of places, even though India actually has the second largest, I think the second largest, third largest, after Pakistan and Indonesia? Is that right? Muslim community in the world. But there have been political forces that have been driving a wedge even deeper between Muslims and other religions. That's the most I could say about it, is that you had these women there actually do that. I don't think there's any Buddhist movement within the Muslims. India, are they doing this descendantism or is it?

[44:41]

Well, the FWBO is an interesting hybrid. They're doing, what are they calling it? In India they're calling it Buddhiyana. So it's a hybrid of Theravada, Zen and Vajrayana. And so they do some of all these practices. The meditation, I mean, it's strongly, it's strongly sort of basic Buddhism and basic meditation and basic chanting. But they were very interested in Zen. Zen was, you know, more just a word to them. They weren't, they're not taught these things as separate kind of traditions there. But they were quite open. I just wanted to say thank you for a wonderful talk and welcome home. Thank you kindly. How much influence does the Dalai Lama's community in Dharamsala have on the rest of Indian Buddhism that you're talking about?

[45:50]

Very little. They don't approve. Frankly, that's one of the communities that think we're doing the real Buddhism. And this is one of the... I think in the Tibetan settlements and in Nepal, this is one of the only other really strong Buddhist group in the country. But they are quite separate. On the other hand, it was a donation from the Dalai Lama that built the Nagarjuna Training Institute. So he understands the connections, and this is something that we're talking about now, is how to build, is there a way to help build a more unified circle of Buddhist communities in India?

[46:52]

Ed? Absolutely, we talked about that. And they had a kind of study with my friend Viradhamma from San Francisco on the civil rights movement and this is something that I wanted to talk about more. It's a little different in that, well there's all kinds of differences, but one of the differences, one of the strains, the civil rights movement came out of the church. there, the oppression comes out of, functionally, what's the church. At least that's their analysis. So there's not an institutional center from which they can draw. There wouldn't have been a civil rights movement without the church, I don't think.

[47:56]

So, anyway, there's much more to say about that. Bob? When you mentioned that Dr. Imbedcar is the name? reminded me when we first went to India in 88 and my family moved into an apartment, we wanted to get a broom. And our friends looked at us and went, what? Because even though our friends were very much involved with equality and would have said they weren't prejudiced, certain people did the sweeping. And when they took us to the hardware store to get a broom, All of the brooms, none of the brooms had handles longer than three inches, than two feet. Right. Because the people who sweep are the people who... Stove. Right. Yeah. And so I saw how this was just embedded in the society without people thinking about it. Yeah. So my question is, sometimes coming back from a place like that, I will see something in our society which I don't, which I usually take for granted,

[49:00]

And then I'll look at it and go, oh gosh, this is perpetuating X, like just the number of toothpaste choices we have. I remember it. It's amazing. So coming back in these last few days, has anything struck you, either in our sangha or in the society, where you just had a kind of aha experience? The traffic. The driving. I can't go into it, but it's very spacious here. Not just the driving, but our society, and I've had this experience again and again, I'm Dr. Mejia, there's a sense of space, even when we feel crowded, that's quite different. I just want to, Linda, do you have something to say? Just a really small point that includes, but it's sort of important to me. The traditional occupations of untouchables are very oppressive and degrading.

[50:02]

But the reason that the brooms don't have handles is not due to that. It's similar to the reason why we only can sit in chairs if they're comfortable sitting on the ground. We've lost our flexibility and use of our body. It's more natural for Indians to squat while they sweep. So not having handles shows that their bodies are in better shape. I think we have to end and obviously we could go on and on. There's a lot to ask and inquire and I hope that I was going to talk to Ed next week about seeing if we could set up something, a slideshow and a report back where we can go into more of the social and practice. I must say there's no place I've been where I've been able to fall so deeply and so quickly into a conversation where there was no gap between the issues of social engagement.

[51:07]

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