Good morning. So about three days ago, I returned from a really remarkable two weeks in India in the sort of the Ambedkarite Buddhists, which are sometimes they're known as new Buddhists or Navajanists. They're communities that I've been involved with for the last eight years or so. And they're drawn from what were formerly known as untouchables. And I'll say a little more about that. It was quite amazing because it was the anniversary of the 60th, it was the 60th commemoration of the conversion movement that began in 1956, led by

[01:05]

This figure, Dr. Babasaheb Ambedkar, who converted to Buddhism and turned around and converted on the spot there. He turned around and converted 400,000 people to take on a Buddhist identity right there. Now, I will say I've got a report back next Saturday afternoon, and I'm going to go into a lot of details. This is not going to be kind of a travelogue or information. I'm trying to look at the conjunction of our practices, and we'll talk about that. But I must admit that I really, I feel like part of me is about, is like somewhere 35,000 feet over the Pacific still. And about 10 minutes ago, if you... I imagine everyone has had some experience of jet lag, but 10 minutes ago, I just got hit with this wave of fatigue, and it's like I forgot to bring my Zagu, you know, and I don't know what else I forgot, but I'm trying to bring myself here.

[02:33]

Anyway, so that's one, that's one leg, or that's one, point and tomorrow we will begin our 16th annual Aspects of Practice period, which is a month in which we, led by the senior students and by myself, focus in on really basic principles and teachings of our practice as a way to refresh ourselves and also as a way to bring in newer people and to kind of embed them in our our cycle of practice and so we begin with a one-day sitting tomorrow and for this month we'll be focusing on Suzuki Roshi's teachings, particularly drawing in all the classes and talks

[03:38]

from Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. So each of us has taken a chapter or chapters and we're going to lecture and discuss those in more depth than we often have a chance. I want to say all the details of this are on the bulletin board. And although the Seshin sign-up is down, all the other activities for the month, including the closing Seshin and the classes, are all open. And I'd like to encourage people to read the materials and sign up and take the class. It's really... It's a wonderfully collaborative effort that we make during Aspects, and so I encourage you to take part. And if you have any questions, you can ask me, or just looking down this line, you could ask Leslie, you could ask Ross, you could ask Jake, I don't know who else is, you could ask Alexandra.

[04:44]

There are various senior students who will be participating. Peter is back there. So please do check that out. So reflecting on this journey to Buddhist India, and I must say, this Buddhist movement, it's huge. I mean, there are something like 40 or 50 million people who identify as Buddhist. And I saw at the commemoration ceremony on the 11th in Nagpur, there were more than a million people. I mean, it was just... Incredible. You know, I've never seen so many people. I don't think any of us have. And they were all, you know, it could have been a little scary because just was a kind of was quasi orderly.

[05:52]

Let's put it that way. But everybody was so joyous. They were really celebrating. They were celebrating. the Dharma and celebrating their path of liberation. And, you know, they just, people were just very happy. So, when I was reflecting on these two things, my trip and then Asuk to practice, what came to mind was, were some words from Suzuki Roshi that I, I find as guidance for me. And he says, the most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet. The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet.

[06:54]

Now, one could quibble and say, that's actually two points. sort of in line with Suzuki Roshi saying, the most important point is two words, not always so. And I think in Japanese, it's two words. Actually, David Chadwick, who wrote Crooked Cucumber and keeps an exhaustive website of Suzuki Roshi's talks and writings about him. At one point, he ran a macro through Suzuki Roshi's lectures and found 224 instances of the word most important. And 85 of those were the most important point, and 87 of those were the most important thing. you know, including the memorable, the most important thing is to find out what's the most important thing.

[08:06]

Nevertheless, let's go back to this. The most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet. I found this after, I think, Sojin Roshi had given me a version of this teaching in Doksan. And when he gave me that, it's also been a very important teaching for me. The version that I heard from you was, you should always know where your feet are. Does that sound familiar? You've never told that to anyone else, right? That was just for me. At the moment, it was just for me, yes. But it could be for you, too. This is important.

[09:09]

Of course, I know where my feet are. I usually can find them at the end of my legs. But what I understood Sojin to be asking is, both where are you standing in a literal and figurative manner, and also very literally, I've taken it to be, how are you standing? So when I'm standing, often I will put my attention on my feet to see, is my body balanced? Am I standing on two feet? Am I leaning on one? It's like how I am standing says something. It gives me information about how I am meeting the moment.

[10:09]

And I think the implication there is Can I accept myself? This goes back to Suzuki Roshi's teaching. Can I accept myself standing exactly in the place I am at? So I ask that of myself. And in light of Suzuki Roshi's teaching, I invite you to ask yourself that question. It's very simple. Where are your feet? So wherever I might be, whether it's in India or in Berkeley or in trouble, can I be right in that place? And from that place, can I take a next step?

[11:20]

This is always the way our practice is. We take a step back and sometimes that step back is actually not so much standing as sitting. Take a step back and having really entered that, whatever that space is for whatever time, whether it's an instant or a period of zazen, or a year to then take the next step. See oneself there and take the next step. That's the way I understand. Accept yourself and stand on your two feet. So I've been going to India for the last seven or eight years. And my home base there is a training center or school called Nagaloka in Nagpur.

[12:31]

Nagpur is actually the geographic center of India. And that might be one of the few things of interest about that city. They have a mile post which says mile zero. And all the highways radiate from there. And Nagaloka is a, is a campus a little outside of town and it has this motto which is reforming mind and world. So the vision that they have and the vision that they got from Dr. Ambedkar is that the mind, one's mind and the world are not separate. our effort is to engage with both. By engaging with mind, because we are in our bodies and are in the world of necessity, we engage with the world.

[13:38]

And ideally, the other, it works if you turn it around. Engaging with the world, of course, should point us back towards how we carry our mind. Where are we standing in that world? So at the center of this campus at Nagaloka, there's a 40-foot golden Buddha. It's really beautiful. It just, it gleams with the sun's reflection during the day, and then it's lit up during the night. And this Buddha is in a very unusual posture. He's kind of leaning forward a little and walking. Usually we see Buddha sitting, standing, reclining.

[14:44]

Those are three positions. of the four postures that the Buddha mentioned as the postures of meditation, of practice. And the fourth one, which he also mentioned, was walking. So he's walking. And it appears that his footsteps are very sure and that his direction is clear. And every evening, you know, we think many of you have been to India. And despite the kind of sort of the image that we want to have of India as some deeply spiritual place, which it is, it's overwhelming and chaotic. But Naga Loka is pretty peaceful, and every evening at dusk, families come out from town, and whole families, multi-generations come out, and they just come out to circumambulate the Buddha.

[16:05]

And there's great joy in that. So from wherever they are in their hectic lives, they know that they want to become and just encounter the Buddha, which is accepting themselves. And on their own two feet, pay respects by walking around him. And this is also true for the Nagaloka is a training center for about 80 or so young Buddhists from all over India and they are doing a year-long program of meditation and study and live there at the center.

[17:09]

And the Buddha is their guide as well. So just to say, you know, these students at Nagaloka come from rural villages for the most part, not from the city. When I asked, when I met with them the other day and when I asked how many of them were from the city, only two people out of like 75 raised their hands. So they come from these untouchable or Dalit communities that are marked by poverty and oppression and violence. The kind of violence that we've been witnessing that's directed against young black men in this community, in America, by coming from police,

[18:12]

is like the caste-based atrocities that are everyday. There's such everyday occurrences that they don't even make the news. But Nagaloka is a caste-free zone. When the students come to live there, they set aside their old identities And they are taught the methodology of practice and the values by which they can accept themselves and stand on their two feet. They practice meditation for two or three hours a day. They have long retreats every month. They have classroom time every day, studying basic Buddhism. and social theory, social thought. They work together, they eat together, they serve together.

[19:18]

It's very much like our Zen life. They play together and they emerge from the difficulty of their situation's home. you see the shell fall off and these really bright, joyous young people emerge. And you see quite a number of them developing in remarkable ways and going on to further education. A young woman that I've been close to for about seven years or so just finished her master's degree in social work at the sort of foremost social work school in India and she's working for a while and she's going to pursue her PhD. It's really inspiring. And they become also dedicated to not just to their own community but to transmitting the Dharma to everyone.

[20:29]

And they understand that to be themselves and to stand on their two feet is to be on the Bodhisattva path. And it's not so different. It's not really so different for us. In fact, one of the things that came to me that I never quite articulated is, you know, so these young people are Buddhist converts. And I realized, we're Buddhist converts. Is there anyone here who was born into a Buddhist family? Not one person in this, oh, yes, one person. Good, thank you. It's because of you and your relations that we're actually here. So we're, most of us now, not all of us, most of us are converts.

[21:38]

Why? I can speak for myself. I came to this practice because I encountered suffering. and I read that the Buddha taught, I teach about suffering and the end of suffering. That sounds good. And it's the same thing that Dr. Ambedkar offered to the Dalit community in 1956, and this continues to be offered. One of the things that I witnessed on my second day was a conversion ceremony for 150 people at Nagaloka. Not an ordination, but just conversion, where people took, they took the, three refuges and they took the five precepts which are basic to not to kill, not to steal and so forth.

[22:50]

And they took on the responsibility of sustaining this practice. It was very moving. And I think this was Suzuki Roshi's vision. which he tirelessly transmitted from his arrival in 1959 to his passing in 1971. Sometimes he did it in informal Buddhist terms by referring to texts and to teachings. I think that From what I recall, this expression, to accept yourself and stand on your two feet, I think you can find the citation in a lecture that he gave on the Lotus Sutra.

[23:54]

Do you know? Yeah, I think I found it, but I think it was in one of his Lotus Sutra lectures. what his teaching and what I feel like is the message of the practice that we are sharing with these so-called new Buddhists in India is to loosen the grip that we have on our habits and our patterns of life And it's out of these habits and patterns that we concoct something that we see as our identity. It's not that we don't have an identity, that's a whole other question, but to hold it lightly rather than to grip it tightly and to wake up right where we are.

[25:10]

So to me, accepting yourself and standing on your two feet includes sitting cross-legged in Zazen. It includes Soji, straightening up, cleaning the Zendo, taking care of the altars. It includes carrying our Zen practice into this kind of dicey ground of our daily lives. And if we can do that, then our feet, then we are standing on our two feet, even as we hurry along through our appointed rounds. Now, it's nice to think that the ground we stand on is a pleasant green meadow. That would be very nice.

[26:15]

It's nice when we do that, you know. Often, though, the brown we stand on is just mud and muck and mire, and it's slippery. and it sucks you down into this territory of our sorrows and our conflicts and our likes and dislikes. The ground we stand on is the difficulties of a world that's scarred by fear and degradation. And this is personal, interpersonal, environmental, certainly multi-dimensional.

[27:15]

For my sisters and brothers in India, it's, they're standing on a ground, they have to stand on a ground often of poverty and of caste and gender discrimination. On a ground like this, we have to step carefully, but really firmly. And the irony is that the method that we have for standing on our two feet is first we sit down. So to know where my feet are, Right now, you know, I can feel my right foot is resting on the Zabuton.

[28:24]

My left foot is nestled in the crack of my leg quite comfortably. And, you know, it's amazing to me that this posture is actually really comfortable. And it's amazing to me also when you think of our teacher, Sojin, in his childhood or his teenage years now, he still comes and he sits in this way every day. Now some of us can't. Some of us have to sit in chairs and that's fine. We have to, those people have to know where their feet are. I often catch myself when I sit in a chair, I cross my legs and it seems like something a little off about that posture for me. And so when I notice myself doing it, because that's really habitual,

[29:32]

I'll uncross them and set them on the floor so that the bottom of each foot is allow myself to be supported by the floor instead of kind of crossing legs and sitting back and being in a posture that is unmindful. So this sitting down is It's the expression of our standing up. So we do sit down. And then, of course, when the bell rings, we stand up. We sit down and we accept ourselves. We stand up and we accept ourselves prepared to take the next step.

[30:35]

That is the way we really feel our true selves moment by moment. That is our way. That's the Buddha way wherever you go. This is one of the things that I love. Even though the expressions of Buddhism are different. And we saw this very vividly. We had a conference on suffering and liberation at Naga Loka. That was part of the events that I went for. And there were Buddhists, lay people, monks, priests from Tibet, Bhutan, China, Thailand, Burma, Sri Lanka, Japan, India, America, Europe, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, and everybody had a slightly different expression.

[31:51]

a slightly different manifestation of the Dharma. And yet, at root, what we say about Buddhism is just, it's one taste. It's the taste of liberation, and it's the taste of liberation right in the middle of the lives that we have. So again, Suzuki Roshi's words, most important point is to accept yourself and stand on your two feet. And Sogen's words, you should always know where your feet are. So thank you very much. We have a little time for

[32:57]

Questions and thoughts? Does anyone have anything? Yes. I see a hand. I saw a hand. Yes, again. Yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. No, it's quite incredible. I love it. And the whole space is so peaceful, especially in the evening. In the days it's hot, but in the evening it's cool and everybody just meets each other with respect and joy. Yeah. Megan. In the beginning, you said that Yes, so what happened was, in 1936 he said, I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu. Because the caste system is embedded in Hinduism, as he saw it.

[34:04]

And he made a lot of efforts to try to bring about reform. But he just felt that was not going to happen. And then in 1956, he had decided some years before, but he was also the, M.Bedkar was the primary drafter of the Indian Constitution. He had been recommended as the first law minister of India. Gandhi recommended him to Nehru, even though he and Gandhi were They did not get along, but Gandhi recognized his vast capacity. This guy came from an untouchable background, won a scholarship, finished university in Mumbai, then got a scholarship to Columbia and got a PhD, then got a scholarship to London School of Economics, got another PhD, was admitted to the bar. So, you know, he was like an overachiever. Yes, everybody knew him, and in fact, I think, second to Gandhi, he's probably the most well-known figure in modern Indian history, and nobody's heard of him, you're right.

[35:20]

How many of you have heard of him, aside from me? Yeah. Not very many. So by 1956 he decided to convert. He had a conversion ceremony at this place where I was in Nagpur. He was administered by a monk, the three refuges and the five precepts. Then he turned around, there were 400,000 people present. Then he turned around and administered the three precepts, the three refuges, five precepts, and he had 22 vows, which were vows of getting people vowing to set aside their Hindu religious practices and other belief systems. And he administered it to 400,000 people. Then this other place I went, two days later, he gave vows to another 300,000 people.

[36:23]

Then he went to Mumbai and gave it to another 600,000 people. And shortly thereafter, he died. There was not some causality there. He was very ill. And so he had to get this done before he died. But there was no teaching infrastructure. That's what's happening now. Sue. Thank you, Hosan, for giving me a connection to a place far away and a very as tall as 40 feet? It's one more than 39. Is it compared to the front house? Is that 40 feet? I think it's a little taller than that. Thank you. That's pretty amazing. this realization that, oh, I am a convert like they're a convert was a very important, it was just really powerful to me.

[37:36]

I never quite, I mean, I've been going there for eight years and I know that, but somehow it came up as a really fresh connection. And I wonder if the literal reflects what's going on figuratively for balance within. I think it does, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. Does the outside reflect that side? Yeah, I think so. Sojin, what do you think? Did I kind of interpret what you were saying Relatively accurately? Very accurate. Thank you. Do you have something you would like to add? Well, in response to Kim, in Thailand, although I've never been to Thailand, the walking Buddha is very popular.

[38:41]

And we have, we used to have, I don't know if it's still there, in the community room, when you walk up on the porch, above the door, is a metal, small metal, representation of a walking Buddha. Oh yeah. Wasn't it outside your door? Wasn't it outside? Okay, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. It fell or something and broke, I think. Really? Yeah. I think what's a little unusual about this posture is it's more striding than walking. Yeah, that's unusual. Ed. Yeah. Thinking about what you said at the beginning around a conversion ceremony, I'm just wondering do we have something

[39:54]

because I never, I guess when I sold my rockets, I didn't think I was converting. And I'm just curious about how you-. I think you're mistaken. So what does it mean to convert in this country? It's different than India. Well, first of all, I'm not talking about all of India, I'm talking about the communities that I'm with, and in order for them what they need to do, which is different from what I think we need to do, they need to renounce religious practices and orthodoxies that are like chains. For some of us, and I will say this for myself, When I took up Buddhism, I didn't renounce the fact that I was born Jewish, but I have resisted when somebody says, oh, you're a Jubu.

[41:08]

No, I'm not. I do not practice Judaism as a religion. but other people in this room do. It's not that these are incompatible, but I don't feel that Judaism or Christianity or other religions are necessarily shackles. It's just I have everything I need in terms of practice in in the world of Buddhism. And I do think that the lay ordination ceremony is a formal transmission of the refuges, the pure precepts, the Bodhisattva precepts, and that's the heart of the ceremony, and that is taking on

[42:11]

of Buddhist vows. Anyway, that's what I would say. Is that? What I would say, thank you. Yeah. There are various schools of Buddhism. Each one has its own precepts, its own way of thinking about what that means. The Buddha Dharma, I like to use Buddhism to Dharma that was transmitted to us was not conversion. It's simply you step into the practice and there's nothing to give up. As soon as you start choosing one thing over another, you're creating divisions. thing which is not based on divisions.

[43:21]

Yeah, I really agree with that and I would say exercising my critical mind is that the practice of conversion there creates another set of difficulties and problems. And it might be the best way that they can go, but it's not without its own contradictions and problems. And quite honestly, I have to be careful because I believe that anybody should be able to talk in a respectful way to anybody. But it doesn't always come out that way. And if you convert, which means actively renouncing something else, as soon as you actively renounce it, then you have set up a duality, and it's problematic.

[44:31]

wrestling and talking with, not preaching to, but talking with my friends about this question there for the whole time I've been coming. And it's a live question, but I really understand why they needed to do it, because there needed to be a renunciation, a re-identification. But just in that, as soon as you create an identity, then another set of difficulties arise. This is the world we live in. One more, Alexander. you have to tell them something.

[45:43]

You can't just tell them you don't like sweet meat because you're a picky eater. Anyway, so then I started to go, okay, I'm a vegetarian. It was at Thanksgiving then, last year, and there was this amazing turkey that my friends had cooked, and it was delicious. And you ate it. And then you had to say 10 Hail Marys. I am really the wrong person to ask this question to. No, I mean, so much is so deeply imprinted in us, and some of it may even be biological.

[46:51]

I don't know. I wouldn't presume to say. This is one of the things that I said in a talk that I gave at Nagaloka. As animals, we are programmed to be self-protective, self-defending, hardwired. As mammals, In order to embody that self-protection, we form tribes and clans and we have hierarchies and that's what mammals do. As Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, we have the opportunity to make choices. choices that cut against the grain of what might actually even be hardwired. Just because it's hardwired doesn't mean it's true or useful in the circumstances of our existence.

[47:52]

So this is why we have the precepts. We make a choice. We make a decision. We base it on the vow. We slip off it because we can't keep it for whatever reason. But because we have the vow or the precepts, we have something to return to. So please return. And when you mess up, return. And when you mess up, return. The whole act, the essence of zazen is returning. It's not beating yourself up because you can't hold or follow your breath. It's returning to what your vow and intention was. And I think that's a really good place to end.

[48:41]

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