Good morning. It's a 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. So about a week ago, I returned from three weeks in India. And I'm very happy to see Linda Hess back here, because she was a key part of that time in India. And I'll tell you about that. So I'm trying to figure out how, as I'm speaking, how to make this a Dharma talk and not strictly a travelogue. And I think I need to give you some historical background and some practical background on where I went and where I've been going for the last 10 years.

[01:09]

And then to frame it in the dharma that I've been trying to share, both that I've been teaching and that I've been learning in the course of those travels. So, 30 years ago, I can't believe it was that long ago, I read a book, the name of it was Jai Bhim, and it was written by a Buddhist practitioner from Great Britain whose name was Terry Pilchik, or Nagabodhi is his Dharma name. And it was about his travels to India in the early 80s, I think, or mid 80s. And what was going on, and this is where I have to take a step back. So without going into a lot of detail about the caste system in India, just to say that in the same way that racism here is illegal,

[02:21]

and racial discrimination is illegal. So with the caste system in India. And yet, we know in both of these places, they exist. And they condition our lives. They condition the lives of people who are oppressed. They also condition the lives of people who are privileged. So in the Early to mid 20th century, there was a remarkable man who arose in the Indian, what you might call the untouchable communities. That was a designation for people below the caste system, people who were in occupations that were seen as polluting. It also included tribal people, ethnic peoples, and it was a very, it's a large portion of the Indian population.

[03:35]

And in many ways, they were dominated by upper caste people, people from higher caste who had more positions, who had education available to them, who had jobs available to them, and so forth. I've written about, I should say, I've written about all this. I have a book which I may go put out. It's called Heirs to Ambedkar, the Rebirth of Engaged Buddhism in India. So this figure who arose, his name is Bimrao Ambedkar and he was a brilliant young man who won scholarships. He won a scholarship to the University of Bombay and then he won a scholarship, he went for a PhD at Columbia in New York. And then another PhD at the London School of Economics. And then he was admitted to the bar in Great Britain.

[04:41]

And he came back to India as one of the most educated people in the country. And he was still functionally untouchable. He had a job in a department office in one of the princely kingdoms before independence, and he was a lawyer. The law clerks would not place files on his desk, but they would throw them in the direction of his desk. some of them would land haphazardly on his desk, some of them would land on his floor. He was not allowed to drink from the same cups and pitchers that his upper caste associates were. And he became, to make a long story short, he became basically a political leader

[05:46]

of these underclasses. And that went on all through the 30s and 40s. By 1935, when he was already a very prominent and public figure, he said, I was born a Hindu, but I will not die a Hindu. And he began a investigation of all of the religious traditions that were available in India at that point, Islam, Jainism, Sikhism, Christianity, looking for where he would locate his religious practice because religious practice was extremely important to him.

[06:49]

By the 1940s, he had decided that the logical place for him to take on a spiritual path was Buddhism, which of course was indigenous to India. Although, in many ways, it had very much died out over the previous maybe 600 years, but until about 1200, it was all over India. It was a very widespread practice and the Buddhist sites in India are quite incredible. Some of you may have heard of the Ajanta caves. There are many caves. These caves were monasteries. And when you go there, you can see these rooms and cells that the monks lived in.

[07:58]

And you can see the water drainage systems. It's 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, some of them until less than a thousand years ago. So, Dr. Ambedkar finished his political career and he finished it with a flourish. He finished it by being, he was appointed the first law minister in the 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. It's

[08:59]

It's quite long and it raises up principles of equality, principles around gender, principles around race and caste that you do not find in any of the other, you can look around the world and you can't find a more progressive document. And he was really the pivot point for that creation. But by 1956, he saw that his health was failing and he decided, okay, I am going to convert. And so in this large field in the city of Nagpur, he invited the senior monk in India And he invited people to come and witness this in public.

[10:02]

And there were, you know, because they do things kind of big, big time in India, there were 400,000 people there in this field at what's now called Diksha Bhumi, which just means basically conversion ground. And he was administered The three refuges and the five precepts. You just, those of you who were here for the Bodhisattva ceremony, you just took the refuges. Refuge in Buddha, refuge in Dharma, refuge in Sangha. And the five precepts, are sort of a distilled version that's common to all Buddhist traditions and this is these three refuges in particular are the perhaps the one the one element of of Buddhism that is common to all Buddhist traditions and he received them and was

[11:19]

thereby a convert to Buddhism. And then he did an amazing thing. He turned around and he, as a lay person, very, you know, very unusual. He turned around and he administered these three refuges and the five precepts to all 400,000 people who were there. and that was the beginning of a Buddhist revival in India. On my second day in Nagpur at the school that I teach in Nagaloka this year, in the middle of Nagaloka there's a 50-foot golden Buddha that is in, it's walking, it's striding kind of purposefully forward. It's a beautiful, beautiful figure. And in the evening, I like to walk around it. In the evening, there's something golden about the light of the twilight.

[12:29]

in India. It's probably the pollution, actually, you know, but it's quite beautiful and peaceful and the birds are sounding and this campus, Nagaloka, is very peaceful. And so people come out from the city, which is kind of dusty and wild. not all that scenic. People come out with their families and they picnic and they circumambulate the Buddha and it's just a very, very peaceful atmosphere. So I was walking around with my friend, Jill Jameson from Australia, who I've been teaching with and we ran into this elderly gentleman who I've seen there before in years past and we stopped, we spoke with him And he was there. He was in that first conversion group. That day at the Diksha Bhumi, that's when he converted to become a Buddhist.

[13:30]

And he was 85 and looked in good health, but I was kind of awestruck to see 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, 30 years ago. And when I read about it, I realized this is what was going on there as it was described was engaged Buddhism. in the deepest sense, because people were engaged with their lives, engaged with Buddhist practice, and doing the work of social change, of social transformation. And I wanted to see it. I spent about 15 years looking for the right people to connect with.

[14:33]

And finally, I met them about 12 years ago here, I think. I forget whether it was through Linda directly or indirectly, but they came and did an evening presentation, a couple of people who have since become my very good friends. And talking to him afterwards, I said, well, I'd like to come and see this and visit. And 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 Nagaloka. And it's also known as the Nagarjuna Training Institute. And they began with a school, it's been going 17 years now, for young people from what's called Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes all over India.

[15:43]

From this year, we did a kind of survey of the people in the first year class, they were from 14 different states. And that's very unusual because usually you would stay in your locality, you would stay in your language group, you would stay in your subcast. And so to have young people coming together from all these places and spending a year together 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, then 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 social work and social activism.

[16:50]

They also, they play together, they eat together, they work 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 very, very lower caste or tribal rural backgrounds. And that's where the caste system is kind of most enduring and has kind of the deepest roots in rural India. And 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.

[17:54]

For the girls, there was kind of a double prohibition because their families were afraid to let them go to school. And also because there was always a very strong pressure for them to become married. And that's the end of your education. Once you marry, you're kind of in that system. And so to go press on for education is a radical act. But education itself was hard. Often these young people were not allowed in the schools. We had stories, because I've collected these stories, 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 the International Network of Engaged Buddhists,

[19:00]

we went to a street side vihara, a street side practice place in Mumbai. Many of you have seen Slumdog Millionaire. Well, you know what? It really looks like that. Just very, very narrow streets, like narrow passageways like this wide with electricity stolen from the utility poles that are running outside and the houses all crammed together and sometimes stacked on top of each other. But this was a Buddhist community and there was nobody there when we showed up and within about 10 minutes, there were like 300 people. around and there was a statue of the Buddha, statue of Dr. Ambedkar and we did some meditation with the cars and buses going by and we did some chanting.

[20:12]

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 and we were welcome usually. We had more cups of tea that night, you know, without already access to the bathroom, which is a challenge for somebody my age. But the thing that struck me as I was walking about was the children. They were all really neatly dressed. And they were all in school. And they really were dedicated to getting as much education as they could.

[21:19]

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 and going, they left their rural areas and they went to the big city here, here in the States, as they did in Mumbai. And Instead of these horizontal, you know, endless horizontal slums that you see in Mumbai, my great-grandparents and grandparents lived in vertical slums, tenements in the Lower East Side. And just as whole villages would come and move to an area of Mumbai,

[22:25]

You would have whole villages from the Ukraine or from Belarus. They would be living in one or two tenements. And in fact, it's interesting now, that generation is completely gone, right? But they're all still living together in a cemetery in New Jersey. They're in the same place. You wander through that cemetery and you see they're all coming from the same village. That's right, back to the horizontal. You have the vertical dimension and the horizontal. Oh, no, that's a different talk. Never mind. And as was true, the grandparents' generation were often not very well educated, but they really believed in education for their children. And they really supported them to do that. Hence, all of the children in Nagaloka

[23:31]

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 10 years and practicing with people, with the students. and building relationships with them and now seeing some of them mature and some of them going for, you know, getting out of this program and going to college or university and getting master's degrees and becoming the leadership of the school. And this is deeply, deeply encouraging. So I know I'm supposed to talk about the dharma in the few minutes that remain.

[24:34]

These three refuges that we take, that they took and take, are resonant to me with three principles that Dr. Ambedkar put forward. So he said this in 1954. He 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.

[25:39]

Actually, he did. 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 I draw out in talks there and in talks here, is there's a resonance between Buddha, Dharma, Sangha, and liberty, equality, fraternity. The Buddha ideal, the Buddha refuge is about freedom. It's about being completely free. It's about becoming your true self. And that's what liberty is. Liberty is freedom to do what one is capable of doing.

[26:49]

It's also freedom from the shackles of whether it's worldly oppression or the shackles of our self oppression, the shackles of being free from greed, hatred, and delusion. That's freedom. That's liberty. Equality, I think that's, to me, equality is the mark of dharma. We have different ways of looking at dharma. One, it's just, it's the Buddha's teachings. That's one interpretation. Other Indian traditions, dharma is equivalent to duty. The responsibility one has to one's life.

[27:54]

We also have dharma as a sense of natural law, like gravity is dharma. The beating of your heart is dharma. And we have dharma in the sense of dharma moments, each feeling, each perception, each thought is a dharma. When you look at the analytical system, say of the Abhidhamma. But I think that one of the elements of dharma is actually is equality. And we talk about this in some of the Buddhist philosophy that when our minds, which are characterized by greed, hatred, and delusion are transformed, when there's a transformation at the base, then our minds manifest the great mirror wisdom.

[29:08]

And the thing about a mirror is, well, if it's a good mirror, if it's not a mirror at the funhouse, it reflects everything. It doesn't say, I'm going to reflect this, I'm not going to reflect this. It receives everything and reflects everything. And that is the nature of the Dharma. Particularly, it's the nature of the Dharma that we learn here, that we've learned from Suzuki Roshi, that we've learned from our Mahayana and Zen tradition. The Dharma includes everything. Nothing is left out, whether we like it or not. And so this to me is the resonance between Dharma and equality. And then fraternity and Sangha is kind of a no-brainer. Yeah, although here fraternity has a funny envelope of meaning, you know, we think of it as rowdy college boys drinking beer.

[30:22]

That's not what the French Revolution had in mind. And it's also a gendered word, right? But this kind of I was using in India, I was using the word community and people said, no, [...] you can't do that because community there has a communal and caste implication and community implies narrowness and exclusion rather than inclusion. Does that make sense? I see my Indian friends are nodding. Yeah. So I revert to the word fraternity, which is better than sorority. That's even worse. There may be no perfect word. Maybe, but that leaves out the animals.

[31:24]

You know, so Sangha, what do we mean by Sangha? In Buddha's time, he talked about the fourfold Sangha. Monks, nuns, laymen, laywomen. We use, we talk about Sangha as a kind of Maha Sangha. We talk about, we can talk about the community of practitioners. We can talk about the community of all living beings. But at any rate, it implies the interconnection among us all. And it ties together liberty and equality, which can have an individual implication, but community, fraternity cuts through that. So this is what I think Dr. Ambedkar was talking about, and I see it there. It's really amazing.

[32:25]

I was having dinner with a friend in the small town outside, right outside the gate of Nagaloka, And he was a young guy, you know, maybe in his 30s. And these three older guys in their 60s came by and just the quality of interaction between them was so sweet. You know, it was really a feeling like we're all in this together. And it was a feeling of mutual respect that was just really, really powerful. I think that the notion of community that we're talking about here, that's the intersection of liberty and equality, is very much what Dr. King spoke about when he spoke of beloved community. And that's also a whole other talk, but I see the correspondence

[33:33]

and the beloved community is a community of people who understand our connection to each other, understand how we are co-creating the world that we live in. And 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, uh, Linda has been working with the Kabir tradition, which is really a dharmic poetry and song tradition that goes back to 13th century? 15th century.

[34:37]

And it's marvelous because it has a dharmic component. It also has a very strong social critical component in some of these songs. And 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, and spend four or five days with a group of Kabir singers. And she was kind of the mother hen for us for those days. And it's interesting because when you enter this farm or this center, on the wall there's a picture of Kabir and there's a picture of Dr. Ambedkar handing over the Constitution to maybe to Nehru.

[35:42]

I'm not sure who he's handing it to but it's right there. So it's quite amazing that the example of Dr. Ambedkar cuts through, it unites all of these different communities, whether they're Buddhist or not. And in this case, there's very close connections. And one of the things that I'm generally good at is like connecting people. And so I convinced one of the good friends that I have from the Ambedkarite Buddhist movement who happens to like Kabir, I convinced him to come with me. He's there now. That's right. He went and he had an amazing time and he went back home to Hyderabad and then came back to Madhya Pradesh with this other really close friend. And it's like, oh, they've formed a link.

[36:47]

And to me, that's recognizing and manifesting fraternity, manifesting community, manifesting the commonality that we have in all of our lives. Right. Yes, Ann Becker's father was a follower of Kabir. 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.

[37:55]

They keep asking me, what is this Zen? And I say, well, it's not so different from what you're doing. But I don't try to teach them. I teach them about Suzuki Roshi, I teach them what I've learned from Sojin Roshi. I don't necessarily call it Zen because I'm not trying to create Zen students. I'm trying to support people waking up. And I think all of us can know when we meet somebody who's awake, right? And it doesn't matter. Are they Christian? Are they Muslim? I don't give a shit. It's like, are they awake? It means, are they kind? Are they thoughtful? Do you feel the connection with them?

[38:56]

Some of the people that we met in Lunyakedi, the village that these Kabir singers were in, 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 talk to the checkout person at the Berkeley Bowl can be an enlightened activity or not. Each person that we meet we can manifest our natural enlightenment. We may have to experience it and recognize it in ourselves, but maybe not.

[40:00]

If it's deeply enough folded in and inculcated in who we are, we just act in an enlightened way. It's like the koan of Avalokiteshvara. the bodhisattva of compassion do with her thousand hands and eyes. You know, she has a thousand hands, each one has an eye in it. And the response to that is, 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 the night, none of us, are lying there with a crick in our neck and wondering, do I deserve to be more comfortable? No, we just reach around and we put ourselves at ease.

[41:03]

And actually the way that Koan continues, it's like 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 is then 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 awake. And I think that's the whole thrust. It's what I read when I first read about Dr. Ambedkar and the movement he started. It's what I encounter that brings me back there year after year. So I'm going to stop there, actually, and take a few questions. Please let me know what you're thinking or what you would like to know.

[42:11]

Patrick. Let's make the connection with our own neighborhood here. Yeah. On the corner up here, I wonder who else saw what I saw. It was a man who was naked except for I saw that, and my instinct was, forget about coming to this endo. What am I going to be called on to do here? So I crossed the street, started crossing the street, and by the time I got to the corner, he had stood up and was walking down the street. I was somewhat relieved. I saw two other things, and I wonder if you can put these together for me.

[43:26]

There's a tall gate on a house over on the corner, and on the gate were two signs, and they were kind of superimposed on each other. We probably walked by these signs many times. One said, love, and the other said, You know, life is full of contradictions. You can find them posted on a gate. Each of us actually has, we have those messages. We carry those messages kind of emblazoned on our hearts. And we're always trying to find which way to go. I don't have an answer.

[44:27]

You know, you, I appreciate that you turn towards this person who appeared to be suffering. And he went away and, you know, you're momentarily off the hook. But we're always on the hook. We're always on the hook and we have to decide what's within our capacity. We have to decide the extent of our, literally the extent of our responsibility. How much ability do I have to respond at this moment in time? And each of us is finding our balance and making those decisions. I think, you know, in a lot of ways, our society, there's some aspects that are so generous, but there are other aspects of it that are really cold and really willing to exclude others.

[45:32]

And each of us, I think, is responsible for deciding what to include and what to exclude. And that's just an endless conversation. But I really appreciate the question. Echo. we understand that that is revealed. I wonder if you found in your work in India that community is revealed rather than made, or if you could talk about that. What do you mean revealed? Well, you know, we talk about Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, and Buddha, the enlightenment is not something we chase after, finally put together and build and have, but we reveal it in our, that we strip away And when you were saying we have all these blocks of community, is there something that we will find inherent as we strip away more and more?

[46:38]

Now I'm talking, but I want to hear what you have to say. I don't, you know, I don't think of it so much as revealed. I think that there's a work, sometimes the klesha, the hindrances, we call them glaciers, 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, it's that our nature is 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 not conclusive. I mean, if I look at myself, I'm always, it's like, I think, okay, you know, I see this.

[47:41]

And then the next situation comes up and I'm blind to it. And I have to see it again. I have to strip it away again and again. Because society and habits and background are reinforcing that delusory aspect of self. The reflexive clinging is very strong and we have to work against it. So, I think that community To me, community is what happens when you're all working together. It's not something that's revealed. The part that's revealed is the part that I don't trust. It's the part that says everybody of this religion is a community, everybody of this caste or background, everybody of this color is a community. That's a distorted kind of community.

[48:43]

It's not based on values and on enlightened 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's a constant practice. It's not like you reach this steady state and it's like, oh, Okay, we're there. Sorry. Maybe one more question. Yes, this gentleman. I've not had that experience. But I've heard, you know, I have heard criticism.

[49:44]

If I, if I go in other circles, I have certainly heard criticisms of them, criticisms of these communities, criticisms of their, of say, the difficulties. I mean, I think that the difficulties that people may have with the principles or critiques that come from, say, the Ambedkarite communities, in the same way that I think we're challenged sometimes in, I would say, in racial dimensions here, that there's a critique coming from those who feel oppression, that's uncomfortable to those who feel privileged. And so those who feel privileged will kind of, you know, we can, we say, oh, we're in a, you know, here in America, we're in a post-racial environment.

[50:56]

Or they're, you know, they'll say a caste system. No, that's, we're in a post-caste situation. Well, no. And so that kind of stuff I've heard, but nothing systematic. But I live, I'm in a sheltered place. I'm really almost always within communities of people who are trying to work this out. And I have to realize, I just have to say, I have to realize my own privilege in that. because I'm a white person, older, coming from a dominant culture. And I just, I'm always, I'm always conscious of that myself. So I try to be careful. But I recognize that's a dynamic. And if there's something, some energy that comes back at me, I really need to pay attention to it and listen and learn.

[52:07]

And maybe that way I have some way that I can be of help. Yeah, yeah, we discussed it in the training that we did at Naga Loka. We did a day on privilege and barriers to communication and we had to start by identifying ourselves, you know, and That's kind of new territory for some people, but there are other people that we work with who are very educated, very smart, and very quick to recognize these dynamics, and so we have to be transparent with them. I think I need to end. I'm going to bring up These will be available outside, I think, $10 or something if you want one.

[53:11]

I'll bring a stack down, but I would love to talk with anyone who's interested in these things and particularly interested in what the interface is with our practice or with practice. When I found the community that I'm in, the piece that I had been looking for was the peace of practice. And when I found that, then I felt home. So I'm home there, and I'm home here. And may all of you find your true home.

[53:53]

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