Well, I think maybe I'll start with a song. This is a song from a classic Bollywood movie that Linda Hess taught me, and I've just returned from India. I sang it there, and we'll see how it goes. Yee-Daw-Sit-Tee-Hum-La-Heem-Tor-In-Gay Tor-In-Gay-Duh-Muh-Gur-Tere-Sot-Tha-Nah-Tor-In-Gay

[01:10]

I'm Mary Jeet, Terry Jeet, Terry Haar, Mary Haar, Sun-Nigh-Mary-Yawn Ter-A-Gum, Mary-Gum, Mary-John, Terry John, I-Saw-A-Poo-Nah-Pyon John-Peh-Bee-Keh-Lin-Gay, Ter-A-Lee-O-Leh-Lin-Gay John-Peh-Bee-Keh-Lin-Gay, Ter-A-Lee-O-Leh-Lin-Gay Sah-Ree-Preh-Shah-Nee Yee-Daw-Sit-Tee-Hum-La-Heem-Tor-In-Gay Tor-In-Gay-Duh-Muh-Gur-Tere-Sot-Tha-Nah-Tor-In-Gay Logan-Koh-A-Tay-Hen-Dun-Nuh-Suh-Hum-Nuh-Gur-Day-Koh-Doh-Nuh-Heem

[02:20]

Ah-Ree-Oh-Joo-Wah-Yah-Koo-Fah-I-Koo-Dah-Hi-Doo-Wah-I-Saw-Ho-Nuh-Heem Kah-Nuh-Pee-Nuh-Sot-Hey Mah-Nuh-Gee-Nuh-Sot-Hey Kah-Nuh-Pee-Nuh-Sot-Hey Mah-Nuh-Gee-Nuh-Sot-Hey Sah-Ree-Zin-Duh-Gee I did a short verse in English, which is not a direct translation, but conveys my sense of the spirit. I'll always be your friend, from today until the end. Life's road is long and wide, I will never leave your side. Yey-Doh-Suh-Teem

[03:22]

Hum-Nuh-Heem Chor-Rin-Gay Chor-Rin-Gay-Duh-Muh-Gur Tera-Sot-Nuh-Chor-Rin-Gay Chor-Rin-Gay-Duh-Muh-Gur Tera-Sot-Nuh-Chor-Rin-Gay So, I returned from India yesterday. And if I fall asleep in the middle of the talk, it's jet lag. Jet lag is really bad going eastward and traveling for the flights for about 27 hours.

[04:23]

And I don't sleep on airplanes. I actually ended up binge-watching the entire season of The Handmaid's Tale. It's like, what was I doing? It was really dark. But I couldn't stop. Anyway, it kept me awake. Now I have all these images from that. I don't know, have any of you seen that? 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. I've got my musical life. And for the last 10 years or so, I've been going to India. And I've been teaching and building relationships in a community of what might call Ambedkarite Buddhists.

[05:33]

And I will explain what that means. These are Buddhists who converted, which is in a certain way true of most of us, as lay people. But who come from a background that is very oppressed. They come from what used to be called the untouchable sectors of society. And most of the students that I work with, and that's part of the great pleasure of doing the work that I do there, is to actually work with young people. And they almost all come from rural backgrounds of great, great poverty and oppression. And they've come to this school, Nagaloka, seeking education, seeking liberation,

[06:38]

and seeking a sense of self-esteem and dignity as Buddhists. I actually wrote a short book about this, which is called Heirs to Ambedkar. And there's some copies out at the book table, if you would like to purchase one. But I have to give you some background and hopefully lead to why I think there is a resonance and a connection between the practice that I encounter there and the practice that we were doing here, and my own cultural background going back before I took up practice. So, this community is called Ambedkarite, which refers to the figure Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who is otherwise known as Babasaheb Ambedkar.

[07:47]

And Ambedkar was a remarkable figure in 20th century India, who's known all over India, but not much known here. Have any of you heard of him? I mean, I think that you may have some on your own and some through talks and stuff that I've written. But Ambedkar came from an untouchable background, and he was very bright. His father had been in the Indian army, with British-led Indian army, and so his children had the opportunity to get education. And Ambedkar was quite brilliant, and he ended up being the first untouchable to attend a fairly elite private school in Bombay, which is now called Mumbai. And then he was born in 1891, and by 1912 he had also earned a bachelor's at the University of Bombay,

[09:00]

which is one of the more prestigious universities in India at the time. And again, it was extremely rare for him to get a degree as what was then quite openly called untouchable. This is during the British colonial period, and he won a scholarship, and he won a scholarship to Columbia University in New York, which I'm pleased to say is my alma mater, although I didn't know that he had gone there at the time, and 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 close 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 doctorate.

[10:10]

And then he studied for the bar in Great Britain and was admitted to the bar at Grey's Inn, which is one of the – I don't quite understand how the bar system works, but it's like graduating from a very good law school and becoming a barrister, I suppose, if that's the right term. So he returned to India in 1927 with two PhDs, a law degree, and he was still untouchable. He got a teaching position in a minor university, and his fellow academics would not let him drink from the same pitcher of water as they did. And when they had papers to distribute to him, rather than 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.

[11:26]

And he also, at one point, because housing was so difficult for him, I think he represented himself as a Parsi, as someone from a Parsi background to get housing in a Parsi community, and then he was found out as untouchable and kicked out. So he experienced this – a lot of caste oppression directly. And the caste system, in certain ways, it resembles what we understand as racism here. 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, but when you hear the story of the students that I work with, it's remarkable and palpable and a very painful dividing line that remains in India.

[12:53]

So Dr. Ambedkar became a teacher, an editor, a writer, and an activist advocate. And what he was advocating for initially was for equality of legal and religious rights within India, which meant rights for his untouchable brothers and sisters. So he was – while Gandhi was really conducting an anti-colonial movement, Ambedkar was, in many ways you could think of him as conducting a civil rights movement. And it wasn't just for the rights of his own people or identity, but it was for an equality of legal rights.

[13:56]

And he did this nonviolently, but he did it somewhat fiercely. It's a long story, but he ran into certain differences and political divisions with Gandhi. I think there was some respect there, but there was also a lot of contention. And he became – I'm cutting a long story short – he became convinced by the late 30s that what he had tried to do was to work for reforms in the dominant Hindu religious reality. And he came to realize that it was not – it couldn't be transformed, that there was a fundamental – he saw a fundamental inequality that was built within this religious system.

[15:02]

And so in 1935, he said publicly, I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu. And he began a systematic exploration of all the religious traditions that he could find in India. So he explored Islam, Parsi, Sikh, Christianity. And what he arrived at as the natural religious tradition that appealed to him and that he felt was suited for his community was Buddhism. Buddhism was more or less gone from India for close to a thousand years.

[16:04]

It had been, after having an incredible flowering and effect in Indian culture from the Buddhist time on for quite a few centuries, it was in many ways re-infiltrated by Brahmanism, which we now call Hinduism. And also then in certain ways finished off by the incursion of – well, the incursion of Islam. And so there were very few where Buddhism had been spread throughout the subcontinent and had its great flowering in India, which is how it got to China and beyond. It was pretty much gone. There were a few monks and there were a few very upper class Buddhist monks who were sort of hanging on, but they had no popular following.

[17:16]

They had no real constituency. But he followed this out and he made contact with Buddhist figures around the world and gradually evolved a vision of Buddhism that he thought was appropriate for his communities. And it was based on a number of different factors. But one of the things that he said, yeah, yes, he wrote in, I think, 1953 or 54. 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 have borrowed my philosophy from the French Revolution. I have not, although actually he had.

[18:19]

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. Buddha as the exemplar of a liberated being, our model of the liberation that we aspire to. The Dharma. Or the teachings as an expression of equality, of equality, of value, of the substance of of life is equal in all beings. And then fraternity as Sangha. Fraternity. Which is now a word we question the word fraternity because it kind of reminds us of college hijinks.

[19:29]

And it's interesting because it's in India. This time when I was talking about it, I found it being questioned by people that I was working with because the masculine. Connotation of the word fraternity in English, I think, is some degree. Linda can confirm this. They found the word that they used for fraternity in Hindi also had a masculine connotation. And so they wanted to. They're looking for another word. But for now, we take liberty, equality, fraternity. So. By 1956, after being a politician and a writer and lawyer and so forth, Dr. Ambedkar was quite ill. And he realized that he had to he had to if he were to convert, it had to be now.

[20:35]

And so he invited the senior monk in Buddhist monk in India to a group of other monks to witness to the city of Nagpur, which is where I just was, which is in central India. And. They're gathered, four hundred thousand. X untouchables or untouchables Dali. And in front of them, he converted. He took the refuges and he took the presets. And then he did quite a radical thing, which was he turned around. To the four hundred thousand people gathered there. And he offered them. The refuges and the precepts. And so there was a mass conversion on the spot. And then there were.

[21:37]

Several months of conversion ceremonies, particularly throughout Maharashtra state. And. A number of millions of people were converted nominally to Buddhism. That was in October of 1956. In early December of 1956, Dr. Ambedkar died. I think he knew that he was dying. He had a very serious heart condition and diabetes and other things. And left his movement without sort of headless and to some degree directionless. But there were millions of people who had reidentified, they chose to. Let go of. The identity that they were born with as untouchable.

[22:40]

And to take on. Reidentify themselves as Buddhists. Which was a radical existential act. What the legal repercussions of it are not always clear. But it's that we take up this identity as a way of having respect for ourselves. And I read about this in. Nineteen eighty nine. Nineteen ninety. And as soon as I read about it, 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 right people. They were some people that Linda knows as well. And they came from a movement from a Buddhist movement that had.

[23:42]

Some of the leadership came from Great Britain, but they had built. They were building and are building an Indian movement of Buddhists. Among the. These embed correct communities. And so I went there about ten years ago. First, just to see. And then I've returned almost every year. 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. Who's also Zen Zen student. Jill Jameson. She's from Australia. She's she was in Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Australia and was a student of. Aiken Roshi's.

[24:47]

And I introduced her to her current teacher, Shota Harada. And we've worked together. We have taught, done training and workshops together in. In Burma and in India and in Thailand. And this time we mapped out a program to. To teach for. To do two trainings. We did two five day workshops. On based on. Embed cars teaching of liberty, equality, fraternity. And his vision of what he called Prabhupada 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 Dr.

[25:49]

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 it came back to India. How it evolved through slavery. And how the civil rights movement evolved. So that was one of the things that. That I taught on. One of the days for these workshops. So as the workshops were on the subject was. Building community. Building, building community. And and building and creating cooperation. Across various lines based on liberty, equality, fraternity. So it's based on friendship. Based on. Working together on practicing together and so forth. One of the things that inspired me as I as I read about.

[26:52]

This embed correct community and also as I've experienced it is that. There's very strong. There's strong meditation practice that is evolving there. And it's particularly at. I go to a school. In sort of central Indian city called Nagpur, which is. I've been going to Nagpur for 10 years and. I have yet to discover. Other than Nagaloka to yet to discover its charms. It's it's just a really hot. Dusty, noisy. Crowded place. You're possibly your. You know, some of the secret. Ideas that you have about India can be confirmed there. But it's also. The people are energetic. The students are really bright and there's this school, which is sort of an oasis.

[27:56]

It's a little outside of the center of town. There's a 50 foot golden Buddha. In the middle of it. And. It was a gift from people in Taiwan. And so every evening people come out from town and they just. 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 and the noise. And it's also really an escape for the students. There are about 150 students there now. And they. There's an initial eight month training program. And those students are pretty young, 17, 18, 19. And then they can stay on and get a bachelor's degree. In Buddhist studies and Ambedkar thought. So they can stay there for three or four years. And they could also then.

[28:57]

Then they can go on to university and get more advanced degrees, which a lot of them do. And this is amazing. These are children from nothing. You know, who had virtually very limited education, very little limited education or occupational opportunities. And when they come to the school, the first thing they do is they teach them to practice. They meditate. Two and a half hours a day. They meditate in the morning about 630. They actually wake up earlier and start with Qigong. And then they meditate in the evening and they have academic studies during the day and work cooperation. And they are from. Every state in India. The. They've had representatives of 23 Indian states at the school schools and going for about 16 years, and it's.

[30:01]

It's graduated. More than 1500 students. And they form a network. This is one of the things that that I've been trying to support financially and encourages to form a network of alumni. Who support each other. And they bring new students in. And so this has really been accelerating over the last few years. And the students. It's just so it's inspiring to work with them. So we did Jill and I did two five day workshops. One for people who had graduated from the school and were were out in the world. And then we did. Another workshop for about 40. Of the second and third year students. And then we were done with that and we realized, well, we hadn't met the first year students, so we did two days.

[31:09]

To sort of compress days of meeting 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 and poverty are probably and are probably the three significant. Impediments. But one of the things that's really inspiring to me, I've mentioned this before. You go to people's homes. When you go to when you talk to the children. 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 they're that's what they're trying to develop. And when you go to people's homes in these really impoverished communities that sometimes we call slums.

[32:25]

The homes are. As crazy as the 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. And great grandparents generation. Coming over here from Eastern Europe. With nothing. Peddling. 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. In a tenement. And living with. The communities. That you find in Mumbai and Nagpur. Are. Sort of transplants of their rural communities.

[33:30]

Set into. These urban settings. And that's the same thing was true with. With. My ancestors. Who came to the United States. The tenement was filled with people from the same village in Eastern Europe. And similarly. Even though. On my mother's side, my grandparents were. I would say barely literate. All of their children graduated from college. This is what we are seeing there. This is. What I had the opportunity to work with. There and to to encourage. And this is they're encouraged to work. To practice. In their lives. They have the advantage now of. Being in this peaceful campus. But they set up. Practice places in their. In their homes and in their in their hometowns and in their cities.

[34:32]

And they they do meditation practice as. Something that's integral in their everyday life. Which is very much what we do. And they learn to be. The young people learn to be teachers. Because they don't have very many teachers. And so they have to. They have to learn and be able to teach themselves. So another thing that that doctor embed car. Two things that he said. One is ours is a battle. Not for wealth not for power. How is this battle for freedom. For reclamation of the human personality. That's what he saw. He saw this is what drew me was. That. In embed cars writing.

[35:35]

I see. The. Integration. Of a social vision. And a dharmic vision. And this seemed to me. Quite unique. And if you read the Indian constitution. Dr and beggar 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. Which was confirmed in 1947. And if you read that constitution it is the most progressive constitution in the world. Would that it were. Functional but one could say the same thing of our constitution. But. It guarantees. Communal rights it guarantees women's rights in a way that is. Far ahead of anything else that you'll see in the world.

[36:36]

And doctor embed car said and he said this in the late 30s he said. I measured the progress of a community by the degree of progress. Which women have achieved. You know that. That's visionary. And this is what we see we see we still see patriarchy there and I even see patriarchy among. My friends who are in leadership of these communities. But it's it's gradually shifting. One of the things that I. I have this small nonprofit and some of you know called clear view project and we support training of in India and in Burma. And. For the last couple of years I've been supporting a women's empowerment. Program in rural India and I just met with them and got a report and. I want to continue and actually if any of you would like to contribute to that I can give you details.

[37:40]

It's tax deductible. But they're really working on developing women's leadership in in rural communities. 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. I'm not sure how to. 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 there. I came back. I don't know this morning sitting down here.

[38:42]

I just felt so. Encouraged to see wall in this endo. And to feel. Deeply refreshed. Though jet lag deeply refreshed by my time there. And I hope. I hope you will feel some of that from me. You know I don't go there because there's something. Missing here. I go there because there's something that I can contribute there that I feel is contribute is connected to what our practice is here. Ha. And so I'm very happy to be back in home because this is my home.

[39:45]

And I wish that I I wish I could share what we have here. With my friends there. And I also wish there were a way to share what they have there 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. Be happy to respond Alexander. I'm. They from from time to time they asked me about Zen. As they want to know what Zen is and actually one of the people that I've that I visited and then I'm close with is a is an Indian Zen teacher. Who. Is it student of.

[40:47]

Jodo Haradas. This is. His name is Bodhi Dhamma. Which is. That's that's pretty good. And he's about he's about five foot two and was a wrestler he's like this big strong you know strong. Very energetic guy. And fierce. But generally what they're learning at Nagaloka is a very it's a broad kind of. It's basic Buddhism but it's. No it's not it's [...] an integration it's a modern integration of of Theravada Mahayana and to some degree some Vajrayana. But what they do as meditation practice is very straightforward they do. They learn like at one in the morning they do anapanasati.

[41:52]

Which is mindfulness of breathing. And in the evening they do metta bhavana they do. Metta practice. And we began every. Every every morning and afternoon session we began with a short period of just. Breathing so when I'm teaching I'm teaching I gave a meditation instruction. At. One of the Viharas 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.

[42:53]

When I'm there. Yeah. It's a it's a it's a temple. What does it mean to mean like a boat or. But like the Brahma Viharas are like the. Yeah. Yeah. But there are there are small temple a lot of them are their street corner Viharas. You know there'll be a small altar. With a picture of with a Buddha and a picture of Dr. Ambedkar. And when the time comes everybody assembles on this corner and they will do met what. Outside with the traffic going right by you know this is this is India it's like it's all happening at once.

[43:59]

But but some of them are really are peaceful. And you know very dedicated sort of devotional spaces. Linda. Please. Right. Which I think he got from the Wobblies. I don't know. Of course.

[45:04]

After. Absolutely not. Yeah. 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.

[46:07]

And not be victimized by their anger. And so we talk about this. We work about it. We work with it. We do role play to get them to. 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 to Dr. Embed car. For the first five or 10 years. All the people that I met were on the political side of the of the of the street. And you know I was just very clear. No these are not. This is not. They're 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 and you can't just say you know don't worry be happy. That ain't going to work.

[47:08]

You have to respect the sources of of the anger. Yeah. Manuela. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Or your community your community's role was to do these occupations. Mm hmm. Yeah.

[48:13]

Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Mm hmm. Yeah. But then it was the British applying it, and they didn't demand any discrimination.

[49:24]

They demanded all discrimination on a daily basis. They had many tribals in the mountains, and they were treated the same way. And they demanded incriminative action. You have to have a number of... What do you call reservations? They demanded for an appointment of tribal at a past and scheduled time, which is regardless of their status. They must be appointed to positions in the parliament, in the state, in universities, in colleges, in universities. They could not be booked up. And then people could... And in the first government in India, there was... Not just in India, but in lots of other Indian states. And then there was reservation activity. I don't know what was that. Civil rights, civil constitution.

[50:26]

And Gandhi, a clean toilet in his ashram, he didn't like to model that. During the National Movement, that this was bunk, you know, and you can't even see him. Just like that. Yeah, well, I understand what you're saying. And we can, we should discuss it further. But what I would say that what I discover among my students is we can understand the class system to some degree here. But I think in the way that it resembles race here, even in its illegality, is in the internalization of oppression.

[51:32]

And what I see in these students is, despite legal corrections, despite certain kinds of progress and reservations, there is a... And the British have a lot of responsibility for this. There's a way in which I see the caste system as infinitely graded, which is what what Ambedkar said. But it's about a mental colonization. And the advantage, the opportunity of Buddhism, which is really remarkable, is to free yourself from your mental oppression. That you can't free yourself from your situational oppression unless you develop some freedom in your mind. And the colonialization and internalized oppression is what it's really painful to see.

[52:36]

And it's really joyful to see when people are awakening from that. But we can continue this. One more question. Yeah, Judy. In that respect, what would you say you've learned about the distinction between tribalism and the refuge of Sangha? That's interesting. It depends on your vision of Sangha. Your vision of Sangha can be... This is one of the things that Jill and I taught. We were talking about models of power. Of power over, sort of top-down power. Of power within, internal authority. And of power with. And she drew a circle with dots around it, each one being a locus of sort of collective authority. And what I saw, what I realized as she was drawing this was, oh, there's an inside and outside.

[53:39]

So power with, even, can be... It can be inclusive. It can be a Sangha of all beings. Or it can be exclusive. It can be the Sangha, it can be my tribe, my circle. And this is... I don't think that's what we're being taught here. 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 blow the shadows away. So thank you very much. 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 tax-deductible donations are much welcome.

[54:46]

And I'm glad to be home. [...]

[54:50]

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