Ambebkar and Buddhism

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just look pure light

wanting maybe i'll start with the song
caesar
a song from a classic bollywood movie that linda has taught me and i i've just returned from india i sang it there are
we'll see how it goes

yea doors the t
he taught gay
taurine gay
damn good
terrorists are the nacho really game
hi mary g kenny to dairy hi mary our son i may every year
terrapin mera kaam married john kerry and john acer laptop
john kirby carolyn game
terry the early game john every carolyn gay the learning gay sorry parade shown me
those t hum the he taught and game torrent game
a ago
kara south georgia games
logan car at a and done this a hamburger gay call he
i owed you are yakuza i could hire you our eyes or oh no he
ghana peter south hey
mauna kea no soft hey
connor peters out he barn and gino's ah the hey sorry zindagi
then i did a verse short versed in the english which is not a direct translation but conveys my sense of the spirit i love ways be your friend
from today until the end
life's road
is long and why
i will never leave your side
yea those the t hum the he charring game and me the movie
terrorists are the not to regain tory again no good
terrorism than a toll when gay

so
i returned from india yesterday
tom and five
fall asleep in the middle of the dock it's jetlag and jetlag is really bad going going eastward and traveling for
the flights were read twenty seven hours and they don't sleep on airplanes
yeah i actually ended a binge watching
a the entire season of the handmaid's tale has in
say one six it was really dark
but i couldn't stop anyway
if you'd kept me awake now have all these images from that i don't know avenue have you seen that it's it's pretty it's pretty amazing television but not so encouraging
anyway
so i was in india for about two and a half weeks and like many of you i have a variety of lives i've got my life here i've got my family life it's got my musical life and for last ten years or so i've been going to india and i've been
teaching and building relationships in a community of
what mccall ambedkar right buddhists ah and i will explain what that means these are these are buddhists who converted which is in a certain way true of most of us ah as lay people but who come from a background that is very
oppressed ah they come from what used to be called the untouchable sectors of society ah and most of the the students that i work with that's part of the great ah
the great pleasure of of doing the work that i do there is to actually work with young people ah
and they almost all come from
rural backgrounds of of great great poverty and oppression and they've come and they've come to this school nagaoka
seeking education seeking liberation and seeking a sense of self esteem and dignity as buddhists ah
i actually wrote a short book about this which is called heirs to embed car and there's some copies out at the book table if you would like to purchase one
but i have to give you some some background and
hopefully lead to why i think there is a
a resident senate and a connection between the practice that i encounter there and the practice that we were doing here and my own ah
cultural background going back before i took a practice
so this community is is called a
ambedkar right which refers to the figure dr br ambedkar ah who's otherwise known as babasaheb ambedkar ah and ambedkar was a remarkable figure
ah in twentieth century india who's known all over india ah but not much known here have any have you heard of him
i mean i think that
you may have some on your own in some through a tux and the something that i've written
but ambedkar came from an untouchable background and who is very bright his father had been in the in the indian army with british lady indian army and so his children were ah had the opportunity to get education
and ambedkar was was quite brilliant and he ended up being the the first untouchable to attend a
fairly elite private school in ah
ha
bombay which is now called mumbai and then he he was more than eighty ninety one ah and a by nineteen twelve he had also earned a bachelor's at the university of bombay which is one of the more prestigious universities in india at the time
and again and extremely rare for him to ah
to get a degree as what was then quite openly called untouchable
ah this is during the the british colonial period and he wants he won a scholarship and ah he won a scholarship to have to columbia university in new york ah we came pleased to say is my alma mater ah boy didn't
know that he had gone there at the diamond i hadn't heard of him
but at columbia he earned two master's degrees and a phd in economics
anthropology and sociology
and he studied with the great philosopher john dewey he was a college student of his
and even before he finished his phd at columbia then he went to the london school of economics and he got another doctor it ah and then he he studied for the bar in
great britain and was admitted to the bar at gray's inn which is one of the i don't quite understand how the bar system works but it's i graduated from a very good the law school and becoming a a barrister i suppose that's the writer
so he returned to india in nineteen twenty seven with two phds a law degree
and he was still untouchable
ah he got a a teaching position in a minor in a minor university
and his fellow academics would not let him drink from the same ah
the same pitcher of water as they did
and when they had papers to
distribute to him rather and place them in contact with his desk they threw them in the direction of his desk and sometimes they landed on it and sometimes they landed on the floor
and he also had one point
because the housing was so difficult for him ah
he
he represents himself as a parsi as someone from our a parsi background to get housing and a parsi community and then he was found out as untouchable and kicked out so he experienced this of lot of caste oppression directly
in certain ways it resembles what we what we understand has racism here ah
it's
like racism according to the indian constitution now it's not legal
but it's a matter of reality in fact and it is still it's a living thing now more so in certain areas of india than others
ah but when you hear the story of the students that i work with it's it's it's remarkable and palpable and
a very painful dividing line that remains in india so dr in bed car ah
became a teacher and editor or writer and so
activist advocate and what he was advocating for initially was for equality of legal and religious rights within ah within india which meant rights for his
is
ah he's untouchable brothers and sisters so he was
while dondi was really conducting a an anti-colonial movement
ambedkar was in many ways you could think of him as as conducting a a civil rights movement ah and it wasn't just for the rights of his own people or identity but it was for inequality of legal rights
and he did this nonviolently
ah but he did it somewhat fiercely
ah it's a long story but he ran into certain differences and political divisions with with gandhi
ah i think there was some respect their but it was also a lot of a lot of contention
ah
and he became i'm cutting a long story short ah he became convinced by the late thirties that what he had tried to do was to work for reforms in in the subdominant hindu religious ah reality
he had he
came to realize that it was not it was it could be transformed ah that there was a fundamental he saw a fundamental inequality that was built within this religious system and so in in nineteen thirty five
ha
he said ah
he publicly i was born a hindu but i will not die i can do
and he began a systematic exploration of all the religious traditions that he could find in india so he he explored islam parsi seek christianity ah
and what he arrived at as the natural
religious tradition that appeal to him and that he felt was suited for his community was buddhism
buddhism was more or less gone from india for ha
close to a thousand years ah
it had been
after having a incredible flowering in effect he needed culture from the buddhist time on for for quite a few centuries it was in many ways
we infiltrated by a bra monism which we now call hinduism ah and also then
ah in certain ways finished off by the ah the incursion of well
the incursion of islam ah and so they were very few where buddhism had been spread throughout the sub continent and had it's great flowering in india which is how it got to to china and beyond ah
it was pretty much gone there were a few monks and they were view a very upper class a buddhist buddhist monks were a horse or hanging on but they had no popular following they had no no real constituency
ha
but he follows out that he made contact with buddhist figures around the world and gradually evolved a vision of buddhism that
that he thought was appropriate for his for his communities and it was based on a number of different factors ah but one of the things that he said yeah
yes he wrote in the nineteen fifty three or fifty four he said
positively my social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words liberty equality and fraternity
let no one however say that i borrowed my philosophy from the french revolution i have not although actually he had
ah ah he said my philosophy has its roots in religion and not in political science i have derived them from the teachings of my master the buddha
and in many ways you could say that his vision of liberty equality and fraternity were
parallel to our refuges to buddha as liberty food as the exemplar of a liberated being our model of the liberation that we aspire to
the dharma
for the teachings as an expression of equality have equality of value of of the substance of of life is equal in all beings and then fraternity as sanga
fraternity which is now where we question the word for gonna as a kind of reminds us of college high jinks ah
and it's it's interesting because it's in india or this time when i was talking about it i found it being questioned by a people that i was working with because the masculine
the connotation of the word fraternity in english i think is some degree and linda can confirm this they found the word that they used for a fraternity in hindi also had a masculine connotation and so they wanted to the they're looking for another word for
but
for now we take liberty equality fraternity
so
by nineteen fifty six after being a politician and writer and lawyer and so forth doctor in bed car
was quite ill and he realized that he had to get to if he were to convert it had to be now
and so he invited to senior monk in a buddhist monk in india to a a a group of other monks to witness to the city of not for which is where i just was which is in central india ah and
they're gathered four hundred thousand
ah x untouchables or untouchables dolly
ha and in front of them he converted he took the refugees and he took the precepts
and then he did a quite a radical thing which was he turned around to the four hundred thousand people gathered there
and he offered them
the refugees and the precepts
and so there was a mass conversion on the spot and then there were ah
several months of conversion ceremonies particularly scrap maharashtra state ah and
a number of millions of people were converted dominantly to buddhism
that was in october of nineteen fifty six in early december of nineteen fifty six dr ambedkar died
i think he knew that he was dying he had of
very serious heart condition and diabetes and other things ah
and left his movement without sort of headless and to some degree directionless
but there were millions of people who had re identified they chose to
let go of the identity that they were born with has untouchable and to take on
we identified themselves as buddhists which was a a radical existential act what the legal repercussions of it or not always clear but it is that we take up this identity as a way of having respect for ourselves
and i read about this in
nineteen eighty nine ninety ninety and as soon as i read about it i i felt i really wanted to see this i wanted to figure out how to make contact
and it took me about ten years or so to find the the right people they were some people that lived in as well ah and they came from a movement from a buddhist movement that had ah
some of the leadership came from great britain but they'd built they were building and are building an indian movement of buddhists ah
among the ah this impact right communities
and so i went there about ten years ago
first just to see
and then i've returned almost every year ah to continue to learn
but also to teach
and that's what i was doing for the last two two and a half weeks i was really fortunate to be able to work with an old friend
it was also zen den student a jill jamison ah she's from australia cheese she was in buddhist peace fellowship in australia and was a student of ah akin roche's and i introduced her to her current teacher showed a harada ah
and we worked together we have taught don training and workshops together in in burma and in india and in thailand and this time we be mapped out a a program to to teach for ah the to do to trainings are
did to five day workshops
on based on
ah
embed cars teaching of liberty equality fraternity
and his vision of what he called probably a bharat which is enlightened india
and i paired that with martin luther king's vision of beloved community because i think that there are remarkable parallels between dr ambedkar and and dr king and the students really had
no information or knowledge of dr king nor of the of the history of race in this country and how it came about how came back to slavery and how the civil rights movement evolved so that was one of the things that that i taught on one of the day
it's these workshops so as is the workshops were on the subject was ha building community
building we building community and and building and creating cooperation
across various lines based on liberty equality fraternity so is based on friendship based on
ah working together on practicing together and so forth
one of the things that inspired me as i as i read about december great community and also has i've experienced it is that ah there's very strong
they're strong meditation practice that is evolving there
as particularly at i go to a school yeah and the central indian city called nog for which is i've been going to not for for ten years in ah i have yet to discover other than nagaoka to i yet to discover it's ch
charms it's it's just a really hot dusty noisy crowded place your possibly your
you know some of the secret ideas that you have a bad india can be confirmed their ah but it's also ah
the people are energetic
the students are really bright and there's this school which is serve an oasis it's a little outside with center of town there's a fifty foot golden buddha in the middle of it and ah was a gift from people in taiwan and so every evening people come out from town and nature
ist
walk around with their children a picnic it's a it's a it's an escape from from the craziness of the traffic and the dust in the noise
and it's also really escape for the students
there are about a hundred and fifty students there now
ah and they there's an initial eight months training program and those students are pretty young seventeen eighteen nineteen and then they can stay on and get a bachelor's degree ah in buddhist studies and ambedkar thought so they can stay
there for three or four years ah as they can also then then they can go on to university and get more advanced degrees which a lot of them do and this is amazing easier children from nothing you know who had virtually very limited education very little limited educate
or occupational opportunities and when they come to the school the first thing they do is they teach them to practice
they meditate ah two and a half hours a day
they meditate in the morning about six thirty or they actually we've got earlier and start with qigong and then they meditate in the evening and they have academic studies during the day and work cooperation ah and they are from
every state in india
ah the
they've had representatives of twenty three indian states at the school schools were going for about sixteen years and it's are
it's graduated ah
more than fifteen hundred students
and they form a network is one of things that that i've been tried to support financially and encourages to form a network of alumni who support each other and they bring new students in and so this is really been are accelerating over
the last few years
and the students have
it's just so it's inspiring to work with them so we did and i did two five day workshops one for people who had graduated from the school and we're we're out in the world ah and then we did
another workshop for about forty of the second and third year students and then we were done with that and we realized when we hadn't met the first year students so we did two days ah to serve can compress days of a meeting and and
talking with them
they have a great awareness of caste discrimination they have a great awareness of gender discrimination which is i think caste discrimination gender description in poverty i'm probably end are probably the three significant
ah impediments but one of the things that's really inspiring to me i've mentioned this before
ah you go to people's homes
when you go to when you talk to the children ah their parents mostly their parents have sent them their parents may have very little but the children have a sense of self esteem and self respect that's what their that's what they're trying to develop ah
sort of people's homes in the written is really impoverished communities that
sometimes we
to fall asleep our slums
the homes are
as as crazy as neighborhoods are the homes are really clean the kids are well dressed and all the kids are getting education and for me this is
a curious parallel to
what i know of my grandparents great grandparents generation coming over here from eastern europe with nothing
pedaling pencils on corners you know working for next to nothing in a textile factory living in instead of a horizontal
slum neighborhood living in a vertical slum
ah in a tenement and living with the the communities that you find in mumbai not bore our to transplants of the rural communities set into these urban settings and that's the same thing was true with with my ancestor
years ah who came to united states the tenement was filled with people from the same village in eastern europe ah and similarly even though
on my mother's side my grandparents were how it's it barely literate
all of their children graduated from college
this is what we seeing their this is what i had the opportunity to work with their and to to encourage
and this is are encouraged to work on to practice in their lives
ah they have the advantage now of being in this peaceful campus but they set up practice places in their in their homes and indoors in their hometowns and in their cities and they they do meditation practice as something that's integral and their everyday life which is very much
what we do
ah and they learn to be
the young people learn to be teachers because they don't have very many teachers and so they have do they have to learn and be able to teach themselves
what another thing that that dr ambedkar to things that he said it
one is ours is a battle dot for wealth not for power
how's his battle for freedom for reclamation of the human personality
that's what he saw he saw this is what drew me was that in ambedkar is writing i see the
integration have a social vision and a diamond vision
henderson to me quite unique
and if you read the indian constitution dr ambedkar was the first law minister of india and he's seen as one of the as basically one of the key drafters of the indian constitution which was ah which was confirmed in nineteen forties
seven and if you read that constitution it is the most progressive constitution in the world would that it were
a functional but one can say the same thing of our constitution
ah but
it guarantees communal rights it guarantees women's rights in a way that is far ahead of anything else that you will see in the world
and dr ambedkar said that he said this in the late thirties he said i measured the progress of a community by the degree of progress which women have achieved
you know that that's visionary
hand this is what we see we see we still see patriarchy there and i even see patriarchy among ah
my friends were leadership of these communities but it's it's gradually shifting
ah one of the things that i wanted the i have this small nonprofit and some of you know called clearview project and we support training of in india and burma and
for last couple of years they've been supporting a women's empowerment ah program in rural india and i just met with them and gotta report and i want to continue and actually if any of you would like to contribute to that i can give you details it's tax deductible
but they're really working on developing women's leadership in in rural communities
ah and that's i think that is going to be a game changer sooner or later just looking at the demographics looking at the politics
and you know just as it might be here in the next election
so on
i'm not sure how do
i'm not sure i'm doing i don't think i'm doing a very good job of tying this into
what we're doing here
but i think that what we're doing here is really connected to what they are doing their i came back
i'd heard this morning sitting down here
ah i just felt so encouraged to see wall in the zendo
and to feel deeply refreshed
though jetlag deeply refreshed by my time there and ah i hope
i hope you will feel some of that from me ah
you know i don't go there because there's something
missing here i go there because there's something that i can contribute their that i feel as contribute is is connected to what our practices here
ha
and so i'm very happy to be back in home because this is my home and i wish that i i wish i could share what we have here
with my friends there
had i also wish they were way to share what they have their with you and that's what i've been trying to do
this morning so i will stop here and we have a little time for for questions and comments and ah can be happy to respond alexander

ah

they from from time to time they asked me about xin as they want to know what zen is and actually one of the people that i that i visited than i'm close with is a is an indian zen teacher
who ah is it student of a
a kyoto hurghada is this is
his name is bodhi dama
is it's it's pretty good ah
and he's about he's about five foot two and was a wrestler he's such as big struck you know strong
very energetic guy ah and fierce but generally what they're learning at nagaoka he is a very it's a broad kind of
it's basic buddhism but it's
no it's not it's it's it's it's an integration it's a modern integration of of terra vada mahayana and to some degree some virginiana ah but what they do as meditation practice is very straightforward they do ah
they learn like at one in the morning they do on a pinar city which is mindfulness of breathing
and in the evening they do metta bhavana they do
mehta practice and we began every
every every morning in the afternoon session we began with a short period of just
teaching i gave a meditation instruction
at all
one of the vihara is that we visited and basically the instruction is is what i learned here you know it's just
adjusting your posture
adjusting your body
settling
breathing
allowing your thoughts and feelings to to come and flow through established on your body so that's what i teach when i'm there
yeah
it's a it's a it's temple
what does it mean to me like a boulders
but like the brunt of the horrors are like the
yeah
one

yeah
but they're they're small temples and lot of them are there street corner the horace you know dubya a small altar
ah with a picture of with a buddha and a picture of dr ambedkar and when the time comes everybody assembles on this corner and able to make what how outside with the traffic going right by you know this is this is india it's like it's all happening at once
ah but but some of them are really are peaceful and know very dedicated so devotional spaces
linda

please

right
which i think he got from the wha bullies
oh know

absolutely not

yeah

yeah

that's right
and that's one of the things that actually that was one of the things i'm not trying to take away people's anger but i want the students to understand and not be victimized by their anger and so we talk about this we work about it we work with it we do roleplay to
get them to
ah to see what the roots of it are and to envision what it is that they actually want and to begin to think more strategically about how they might get it one of the when i first started looking for connections to the doctor in bed car
ah for the first five or ten years all the people that i met were on the political side of the of the of the street and the i was just very clear know these are not this is not
these are not the people i'm looking for and i haven't found them yet but i think we found them now but anger is is a real factor in you can't just say no don't worry be happy that ain't gonna work you have to respect the sources of of the anger
yeah meanwhile
yeah

yeah

right
are your community your communities role was to do these occupations
it

is it isn't
yeah

it

yeah
right
reservations
yeah

yeah well i
i understand i understand what you're saying and
weekend we should discuss it further
but what i would say that at what i discover among my students is week we can understand the class system to some degree here ah but i think even in the way that it resembles race
here even in it's illegality is in the internalization of oppression
and what i see in these students is despite legal
legal corrections despite a certain kinds of progress and reservations ha here's a and the british have a lot of responsibility for this ah there
there's a way in which i see the care system as
infinitely graded which is what ah what ambedkar said but it's it's about a mental colonization and the advantage the opportunity of buddhism which is really remarkable is to free yourself from your mental depression that you can't for yourself
situational oppression unless you develop some freedom in your mind and that the the colonialization and an internalized oppression is what ah it's really painful to see and it's really joyful to see when people are awakening from that but we
when continues one more question yet to the

that's interesting
it depends on your vision of sanga
your vision of sanga can be this is one of the things that that jill and i thought we were talking about models of power of power over to top down power ah of power within internal internal authority and of power with and she drew
circle with dots around it's each one being a locus of of sort of collective authority and what i saw what i realized as she was drawn this was oh there's an inside and outside
so power with even can be it can be inclusive
you can be a song of all beings or it can be exclusive you can be the saga can be my tribe my circle and this is i don't think that's what i don't think that's what we've been taught here
but it has but
buddhism and any religion has that potentiality so community is not a
community is wonderful and it has its shadow side you have to recognize the shadow side and be aware of it and keep trying to to blow the shadows away
so
thank you very much there's as i welcome you you can look at my book out there and please feel free to talk to me and if anyone's interested in supporting women's empowerment program your your tax-deductible donations are are much welcome and i'm going to be home