Three Treasures: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

00:00
00:00
Audio loading...

Welcome! You can log in or create an account to save favorites, edit keywords, transcripts, and more.

Auto-Generated Transcript

you're welcome good morning
so very very crisp
winter morning here in berkeley
i'm happy to
see you all so many people that i know and many people that i don't know ah
so better week ago i returned from three weeks in india
and i'm very happy to see linda has back here is one of the she's
ha she was a key part of that ah that time in india i'll tell you about that some try to figure out how long has i'm speaking
how to make this a dharma talk and not strictly a travelogue
ah
and i think i need to give you some historical background in some practical background and where i went and where i've been going for the last ten years and then to frame it and
ah the dharma that
ah i've been trying to share
post that i've been teaching and that i've been learning in the course of those travels
so thirty years ago and can't believe it that long ago i read a book ah then the name of it was beam ah and it was written by ah
a buddhist practitioner from great britain whose name is terry pill chick or naga body is is dominate and it was about his travels to india in the an early eighties i think karl mid eighties and what was going on
this is where i have take a step back
so without going into a lot of detail about the caste system in india just to say that ah in the same way that racism here is illegal and racial discriminations who is illegal
so with the care system in india and yet we know in both of these places they exist and a condition our lives the condition the lives of people who are oppressed they also condition lives of people who are privileged ah
ah so you know
early to mid twentieth century it was a remarkable man
who arose in the indian the but you might call the untouchable communities ah that was a designation from people below the caste system people who were in occupations that were seen as
ah polluting i had also included a tribal people ethnic peoples ah and
it
what's a very it's a large portion of a indian population
and in many ways they were dominated by upper caste people people from higher caste to add more positions but that who had education available to them who had jobs available to them and so forth ah i've written about should say i've written about all
of the save up a book which a neighbour put out it's called heirs to ambedkar the rebirth of engaged buddhism in india so the this
figure who arose as name's the general and bed car and he was a brilliant young man who won scholarships he won a scholarship to the university of bombay
and then he wanted a scholarship he went for
columbia in new york and another phd at the london school of economics and that he was admitted to the bar in great britain and he came back to india as one of the most educated people in the country ah and he was so
still
functionally untouchable he had a job in a in department office or in one of the princely kingdoms before independence and he was he was a a lawyer
the lore the law clerks word ha not place files on his desk but they will throw them in the direction of his desk some of them woodland haphazardly on his desk certainly would land on his floor he was not allowed to drink
from the same ah cups and pitchers fat the upper caste his upper caste associates were
and he became to make a long story short he became basically a political leader
of these underclasses and that went on all through the the thirties and forties
one at by nineteen thirty five when he was already a very prominent in a public figure he said i was born a hindu but i will not die a hindu
and he began he
ah investigation of all of the religious traditions that were available in india at that point islam
jainism sake sikhism christianity are looking for
where he would
ah locate his religious practice because of religious practice was extremely important to him
by the nineteen forties he had
decided that have the logical place for him to have to take on spiritual path was buddhism which of course was indigenous to india
ha although in many ways it had very much died out over the ah previous or maybe six hundred years but until ah about twelve hundred it was it was an all over india it was
if it was a very
widespread practice in the the buddhist sites and in india are quite incredible some of you may have heard of the ajanta caves there are many caves these caves where monasteries and when you go there you can you know you can see the
these rooms and cells that the that the monks lived in and you can see the the water
drainage systems in the you know it's very very elaborate kind of architecture beautiful and to imagine them as living practice places is quite incredible but they were they were living practice places until ah some of them until less than a thousand years ago
so
dr ambedkar ah
finished his political career and he finished it with a flourish he finished it by being he was appointed the lot first law minister in the heart
in the independent state of india after the british left and he was the primary drafter of the indian constitution which is a remarkable document
ah it's
it's quite long
and it raises a principles that principles of equality principals around gender principals around race and cast that ah you do not find in any of the other any you can look around the world and you can find a more progressive document
and he was fully the
the pivot point for that for that creation
what my nineteen fifty six he saw that his health was failing
and he decided okay
i am going to convert
and so at this this large field in the city of not for high he
invited the
senior monk in india
and then he invited people to come in and witness this in public and there were him because the two things kind of thing fifth time in india there were four hundred thousand people there it in this field at what's now called diksha boom
me which just means basically conversion ground ah and
he was administered
the three refugees and the five precepts
you just those of you were here for the bodhisattva ceremony ah you just took the refugees
refuge in buddha refuge in dimer refuge and sanga
ah and the five precepts
our sort of a distilled version that's common to all buddhist traditions and this is these three refugees in particular high though perhaps the one
ah the one element of of buddhism that is common to all food is traditions
ah and he received them hen was thereby a convert to buddhism and then he did an amazing thing he turned around
and he as a lay person very very unusual he turned around and he administered these ah
three refugees in the five precepts to all four hundred thousand people who are there
and that was the beginning of a buddhist revival in india
on my second day
in not for had the school that i teach a nagaoka this year
in the middle of nagaoka there's a fifty foot golden buddha
that is in its walking it's striding and purposefully for it is a beautiful beautiful finger and in the evening i like to walk around it
the evening ah there's something golden about the light of far
the twilight in india and it's probably the pollution actually
you know but it's it's quite beautiful and peaceful on the birds are sounding and this is campus naga loca is very peaceful and so people come out from the city which is a dusty and wild hand are not all that scenic ah people come
out with their families and a picnic the circumambulate the buddha and it just a very very peaceful at atmosphere so i was walking around with my friend jill jamison from australia who i've been teaching with and we ran it is elderly gentleman who i've seen there
before years passed and we stopped we spoke with him and he was there he was in that first conversion group that day had to dip your roomie that's when he converted to become a buddhist and he was he was eighty five and looking good health but
i was kind of awestruck to
to see vote somebody who had actually been there that day it takes it out of the realm of myth
so
i read about this as i said thirty years ago and when i read about it i realized this is
what was going on there as it was described was engaged buddhism
ah in the deepest sense because people were engaged with their lives engage with buddhist practice and doing ah the work of social change of social transformation
and i wanted to see it
i spent about fifteen years looking for the right people to connect with ah and finally i i met them about twelve years ago i here i think
when the directly or indirectly but
they came and to hang get an evening presentation a couple of people who have since become a very good friends and talking to an afterwards i said well i'd like to come in it and visit hen shortly a year or so after i did
and i've been going back most every year
so this is
where i go usually is a school called nagaoka
and it's also known as the guardian or training institute ah and they began with schools from going seventeen years now
ah for young people from what's called scheduled castes and scheduled tribes all over india from this year we did a kind of
ha
got a survey of the people in the first year class they were from fourteen different states and that's very unusual because usually you would stay in your locality you would stay in your language group ah you would stay in your sub caste and so to have young people coming together
either from all these places and spending a year together
he is transformative so every day
they do two hours of meditation and chanting
and they do that from the first day there they learn how to do it and they learn how to teach it
they study basic buddhism
they study the writings and thoughts of dr ambedkar and they do study in various kinds of ah social social work and social activism
ah they also they play together they eat together they worked together they're living together and so you have this each cohort each year a group of young people from all over india from
what's in common in their background is that almost all of them are from ah
very very lower caste or tribal rural backgrounds ah and that's where the caste system is kind of most enduring and has kind of the deepest roots in in rural india ah hell it it's changing
a bit in the cities but it's still it's very deeply entrenched there and
a lot of these young people
they really had to struggle for their education ah for the girls there was kind of a double prohibition so families were afraid to to let them go to school and also because it was a always a very strong pressure for them to
be to become married and you know kind of that's the end of your education if once you marry your kind of in that system and so to go press on for education is a radical act
but education itself was hard often ah these young people were not allowed in the schools we had stories because i've collected these stories are
stories of young people who had to sit outside the windows of school to get education
and yet they were very really driven to educate themselves
a few years ago when i was there with a group from international network of engaged buddhists
we went to earth
a streetside vihara streetside practice place in mumbai
ah you've many of you have seen slumdog millionaire
well you know what it really looks like that ah just very very
narrow streets like narrow passageways like this wide with electricity stolen from ah from the utility poles that are running outside and the houses all crammed together and sometimes stacked on top of each other ah but this
was a this was a buddhist community
ah and
there was nobody there when we showed up and within about ten minutes they were like three hundred people around and there was a statue of buddha statue of him dr ambedkar and we did some meditation with the cars and buses going by hand we did job so
i'm chanting then they really wanted to show us their homes so to lead us back into this labyrinth of small passageways and homes and people were waiting outside their doors to welcome us in to their spaces
every space was immaculate
every space that we saw was orderly
clean when we were bulk of usually we ate and more cups of tea at night you know with with had already access to the bathroom which is which is a challenge for somebody my age
ah
but this one the thing that struck me has i was walking about was the children
they were all really neatly dressed
and they were all in school
had a really good dedicated to getting
as much education as they could
and what struck me as i was walking about was you know this is where i'm coming from
my grandparents
great grandparents fled oppression
in eastern europe they fled violence pogroms atrocities just as these people were facing in their native village in going they left their rural areas and they went to the big city here ah here in the states as they did in mumbai
and
ah instead of these horizontal you know endless horizontal slumps that you see in mumbai ah
my great grand parents and grandparents lived in vertical slumps tenements in the lower east side and just as whole villages would come and move to an area of mumbai ah you would have whole villages from the ukraine or from baylor bruce
ah they would be living in one or two tenements ah hand in fact ah that's interesting now that generation is completely gone right ah but they're all still living together in a cemetery in new jersey
a difference there is a safe place
ah you wander through that cemetery you see it all coming from the same village
that's right back to the horizontal ah your the vertical dimension and the or ozone that's a different talk never mind
ah
and as was to the grandparents' generation we're often not very well educated but they really believed in education for their children
and they really supported them to do that and all of the children in nagaoka loca
ah they all had at least one if not two parents who just supported them against all kinds of social resistances
so
i've been as i said i've been going there for about ten years and ah practicing with people with the students ah and building relationships with them and now seeing some of them mature and some of them going for
getting out of this program in and going to ah
college or university going getting masters degrees and becoming ah the leadership of the school
and this is is deeply deeply encouraging
so
i know i'm supposed to talk about the dharma ah
in a few minutes that remains
these three refuges that we take that they took and take ah our resident to me with three principles that dr ambedkar put forward ah

so he said this in nineteen fifty four said positively my social philosophy may be said to be enshrined in three words liberty equality fraternity
that no-one however say that i have borrowed my philosophy from the french revolution
i have not
really good
ha
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 i think what he did implicitly and this is something that that i draw out in talks there and in talks here is ah there's a resonance between buddha dharma sangha hell liberty hickey
quality for eternity
the buddha ideal the buddha refugees about freedom
it's about being completely free
it's about becoming your true self
ah
and that's what liberty is liberty is hum
freedom to do what one is capable of doing
it also freedom from
the shackles of whether it's worldly oppression or the shackles of ourself oppression the shackles of being free from greed hatred and delusion
that's freedom
that's liberty
equality
ah
i think that's to me equality is the mark of dharma
we have different ways of looking at dharma
ha one it's just it's the buddhist teachings
that's that's one interpretation
ha in
other indian traditions dharma is equivalent to duty
the the responsibility one has to one's life
we also have dharma as the sense of natural law
like
gravity is the his dharma hell ah
the beating of your heart is twyla
henry we have dharma in the sense of
dharma moments each feeling each perception
each thought
is a dharma when you look at the analytical systems say of the abbey dharma
but i think that one of the elements of dharma is actually is equality
and we talk about this in ah in some of the buddhist philosophy that when when
our minds which are characterized by greed hatred and delusion are transformed
what is a transformation at the base
then our minds manifest the great mirror wisdom
and the thing about a mirror
he is both if it's a good marriage is not a mirror at the funhouse ah it reflects everything it doesn't say i'm reflect this i'm not going to reflect this
it receives everything and reflects everything and that is the nature of the gone by the particularly it's the nature of the damage that we learned here that we've learned from suzuki roshi that we learned from our my honor and zen tradition this the the dharma includes every
a thing
nothing is left out whether we like it or not
and so this to me is the residents between ah
dharma and equality
and then
fraternity and sanga is kind of a no brainer
yeah although here fraternity as a funny of a lot of meaning you know we think of it as a rowdy college boys drinking beer ah that's not what the that's not what the
french revolution had in mind and it's also engendered work right but is this kind of
i was using in india is using word community and people said no no no no you can't do that because community there has a
a communal and cast implication it community implies narrowness had exclusion
ah rather than inclusion does that make sense i see my indian friends are nodding yeah ah
so i'm revert to the word fraternity which is better than sorority that's even worse
may maybe no perfect word
maybe but that leaves out the animals you know ah you know so sanga what do we mean by saga you know in buddhist time he talked about the the fourfold sanga monks nuns les mis les women we use we talk about sanga as a
kind of my sanga we talk about
we can talk about the community of practitioners
ah we can talk about the community of all living beings
but any rate it implies the interconnection among us all ah
and it ties together
liberty inequality which can have an individual
ah implication but community for totally cut through that
so this is what i think dr ambedkar was talking about and i see it there's it's it's really amazing i was having dinner with a with a friend in the
small town outside great outside the gate of nagaoka and he was a young guy you know maybe in his thirties and these three older guys in their sixties came by and just the quality of interaction between them was so sweet
you know it was really a feeling it we're all in this together and it was a feeling a mutual respect that was
ah just really really powerful
i think that the the notion of community that we're talking about here that's the interception of liberty equal inequality ah
he's very much what dr king spoke about when he spoke of beloved community
and that's also a whole other talk but hum hai sci fi or a correspondence
and the beloved community
he's a community of people who understand
our connection to each other you understand how we are co-creating the world that we live in
and ah as dr king pointed out it doesn't mean we agree on everything
but it does mean we agree on how we're going to conduct ourselves with each other with respect with nonviolence
so
the last part of this trip
ha
linda has been working with the the kabir tradition which is really a dharmic ah poetry and song tradition ah that goes back to thirteenth century
fifteenth century ah and it's marvelous because it has a garment component it also has a very strong social critical component in some of these songs and or
she gathered a bunch of us few from the west and some from india to go to this village in madhya pradesh a farm really hand or stand for five days with ease with a group of kabir singers
mother hen for us are for those days him
it's interesting because when you enter this farm with is the center ah on the wall there's a picture of kabir
and there's a picture of dr ambedkar handing over the constitution
two maybe to nehru ah not sure who is any good too but it's right there ah and
so it's quite amazing that
the example of dr ambedkar cuts through it unites all of these different communities with the a buddhist or not
and this case they're very very close connections and one of the things one thinks that i'm generally good at is like connecting people and so i convinced one of our one of the
good friends that i have from the ambedkar a buddhist movement to who happens to like kabir i convinced him to come with me he's there now that's right he went he had an amazing time he went back home to hyderabad and then came back to madhya pradesh
with this other really close friend and like oh they formed
they formed a link
and to me
that's recognizing and manifesting
fraternity manifesting community manifesting the commonality that we have
in all of our and all of our lives

right
he has sent backers father was ah was a follower of career ah so
i'm sharing this with you because
i'm trying to make this connection between us
and these communities
because they're practicing communities and they're very open they keep asked me what is this gin
you know and i say what's not so different from you do it if you know ah but i don't try to teach them i teach him
about suzuki roshi i teach them what i've learned from sojourn roshi ah i don't necessarily call it zen because i'm not trying to create zen students i'm trying i'm trying to support people waking up
and
when nice i think all of us can know when we meet somebody who's awake right
ah and doesn't matter the christian or a muslim in for i don't give a shit you know it's like are they awake means are they kind
are they thoughtful
do you feel the connection with them the you know some of the people that we met in linear katie the the village that are this kabir singh is were
deeply awake
and
to me when i talk about awakening or enlightenment
you know it's not a state of mind
and it's not an experience
it's how we live and how we act
enlightenment is an activity
zazen is an enlightened activity
how we talked to the checkout person at the berkeley bowl
can be enlightened activity or not
each person that we meet
we can manifest our natural enlightenment we have do we may have to experience in recognizing ourselves but maybe not if it's deeply enough folded in in inculcated into we are
we just act is lightened way it's like the code ah of avalokiteshvara what is the bodhisattva of compassion to with her thousand hands and eyes
yeah she is thousand hands in front of as an eye on it and ah
the response to his ah it's like reaching around for a pillow in the middle of the night
it's just a natural activity that sets one at ease nobody in the middle of night none of us are lying there with a crick in our neck and wondering do i deserve to be more comfortable
yeah don't we just we just reach around and we put ourselves at ease
and actually the with bitcoin continues it's like ah not having hands and eyes all over the body but all through the body
we put ourselves at ease but the responsibility
that we have as bodhisattvas his been to share that ease to help others be at ease
to think in the spirit of bodhicitta may i be awake
that i may help others to become a week
and i think that's been the whole that's the whole thrust it's what i read when i first read about ah dr ambedkar and movement he started it's what i encounter that brings me back there
year after year
so i'm gonna stop there actually and take a few questions on
please let me know what you're thinking or what you would like to know
patrick
yeah

so
for short

i
it was

so across

st

yeah
for
furniture
one said love
no trespass
hum
you know life is full of contradictions you can find them posted on a gate ah
each of us
actually has we have those messages
we carry those messages
the job kind of emblazoned on our hearts
and we're always tried to find
which way to go
ha i don't have an answer you know you i appreciate that you turn towards this person who appear to be suffering
and he went away and he knows your momentarily off the hook
but we're always on the hook
we're always on the hook and we have to decide what within our capacity
we we have to decide the extent of our liberal literally the extent of our responsibility
how much ability do i have to respond at this moment in time
hum and each of us his finding or balance and making those decisions i think you know in a lot of ways
there's some acetone there are so generous but there are other aspects of it that are really cold
and really willing to exclude others
and each of us i think is responsible
for deciding what to include and what to exclude and that's just an endless conversation ah but i really appreciate the question
aiko
me with my mean we understand that is revealed i wonder if you found in your work in the earth
the community is revealed rather than pay for be
what do you mean revealed but you know if oh my buddha dharma and sangha and and gouda the enlightenment is not something we chased after finally put together and building and have but we revealed can hire in our that we strip away
and will you resent me have all the boxes beauty is there something that we will find inherent as we strip away more moines words
nine five
i don't you know i don't think of it so much as
revealed i think that that there's a work ah sometimes the closure the ah
ha
the hindrances we call the glaciers the i think it more literally translates as coverings
and there's a work
a hard work of sometimes hard sometimes not hard of removing those coverings so it's not that it's revealed its that or nature he's uncovered sometimes it's a revelation sometimes there's no effort at all it just drops away but sometimes it's a life's work
to and it is not conclusive i mean if i look at myself i'm always did like has a okay you know i see this and an x situation comes up and i'm blind to it i have to see it again i have to strip it away again and again because
the society and habits and background are reinforcing that delusory aspect of self the clinging of the the the reflexive clinging his ah
is very strong and we have we have to work against it so ah i think get community to meet community is what happens when you're all working together to not something that's revealed it actually the part that to reveal this is part that i don't trust you know it's a
point says everybody of this religion is a community everybody of this cast or background everybody of this color is a community he wrote that
that's a distorted kind of community it's not based on values and unenlightened activity so i think community is something we have to build and for anybody who's been in community which includes a lot of you you know that it's a constant effort it
it's a constant practice it's not like you reach the steady state has i go okay for their sorry to make one more question then stop ah yes this gentleman

i've not had that experience
but i've heard you know
i have heard criticism if i if i go in other circles i have certainly heard criticisms of them
criticisms of these communities criticisms of their of say
ah

the difficulties when i think that the difficulties that people may have with
the principles or critiques that come from say the and great communities in the same way that i think we have were challenged sometimes ah in say in racial dimensions hear that there's you know there's a critique coming at coming
from
those who feel oppression that's uncomfortable to those who feel privileged and so those who feel privileged will kind of ah you know weekend we say oh we're enough you know here in america we're in a post-racial
environment or their you notice a a caste system note that's where a post cast situation well no
and so that kind of stuff ever but nothing systematic ah
but i'm with i'm in a sheltered place am really almost always within communities of of people who are trying to work this out a hint and i have to realize they just have to say i have to realize my own i have privilege in that
because i'm a white person older
coming from a dominant culture
and ah
i just i'm always i'm always conscious of that myself decide i try to be careful ah
but i recognized that's a dynamic and if if if there's something some energy that comes back at me i really need to pay attention to it and listen and learn
ah hell
maybe that we have some some way that i can be of help
yeah yeah we discussed it in the training that we did it not a loca we we did a a day on
privilege in barriers to communication and we had to start by identifying ourselves you know ah and ah
that's gonna new territory for them to for somebody of some people but there are other people that we workers were very educated very smart and very quick to recognize ah these dynamics and so we have to be transparent with them
i think i need to end i'm going to them
these will be available outside as and ten dollars is something if you want want up a a staff down but i would love to talk with anyone who's interested in these things and particularly interested in how this
what the interfaces with her practice or with practice that's
when i found the community that i mean that the missed the piece that i have been looking for was the piece of practice and what i found that than i i felt home so i'm home their am home here
and may all of you find your true home