Scott Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Scott discusses how Buddhist modernism and American culture intersect in surprising ways and the significance of Buddhism in a society that often values individual over collective experiences. He shares his personal journey and reflects on the profound impact of his brother Eric's legacy.
Learn about and donate to the Eric C Mitchell Scholarship fund.
Purchase Scott's book The Making of American Buddhism.
Watch Scott give a talk at the DharmaBum Temple.
Scott Mitchell is the Dean of Students and Faculty Affairs at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. Scott discusses how Buddhist modernism and American culture intersect in surprising ways and the significance of Buddhism in a society that often values individual over collective experiences. He shares his personal journey and reflects on the profound impact of his brother Eric's legacy.
Learn about and donate to the Eric C Mitchell Scholarship fund.
Purchase Scott's book The Making of American Buddhism.
Watch Scott give a talk at the DharmaBum Temple.
And you know, meeting the social worker who comes in, who has a completely different vibe than the doctor, than the nurses and the hospital administrator and all these people, while I'm going through the worst thing in my life, right, and it's overwhelming and it's totally confusing, and I was like, oh, what we do really matters at the Institute, because we're preparing students to go out into the world and be with people on the worst day of their life.
Speaker 2:Welcome to season two of the superintendent's hangout. I'm very grateful to everyone who made season one such a success. We had 50 episodes in season one and now we're headed into, and still going strong in, season two. I'd like to thank a number of folks who are instrumental in this podcast's success my daughter, maya, for helping with editing, and she is a podcaster in her own right. Brad Bacchial for also assisting with editing and production. Tina Royster for helping with scheduling of guests and recruiting of guests. And to all of the listeners, thank you for helping this podcast grow and keeping the conversation going. Welcome, scott. Thank you so much for giving me your time today. I've been really looking forward to this for the past. I think it's been six months or so since we connected. I'd like you to start, if you would, with where we start with all conversations on this podcast, with your origin story, who you are, where you come from, what's your journey to today. That's a big question, and you can make it as short or long as you want.
Speaker 1:Well, I'm Scott Mitchell. I'm currently the academic dean at the Institute of Buddhist Studies. The Institute is a small graduate school and Buddhist seminary up in Berkeley. I tell people that I'm the dean of a Buddhist school and most people have all kinds of assumptions about what that means. But being administrative dean means that sometimes I teach, but most of my days are spent answering emails and signing checks and less esoteric things than just Buddhism. I got into the study of Buddhism when I was pretty young. When we were growing up, our mother didn't take us to church. We were not in a religious family, but she was very clear about encouraging my brother and I to be open and questioning things, and so I grew up as this pretentious punk who liked to talk about philosophy. That led me to have no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up, but eventually I ended up getting a degree in philosophy. What can you do with a degree in philosophy?
Speaker 2:I think you just got to stay in school, that's right.
Speaker 1:You go to grad school and you get a PhD. So I pursued the study of Buddhism and early on in my grad school career I learned about the history of Buddhism in the United States and that just became really my focus ever since, which was gosh 24, 25 years ago now.
Speaker 2:So you bring up an interesting point about growing up in a family that was not a religious family, yeah.
Speaker 2:So when you jump right into the deep end of the pool on that point, my very non-database, so completely anecdotal feeling about Buddhism in America is that recently there's been a trend that draws people towards the idea of Buddhism. Peacefulness, I don't know, vegetarianism, abstaining from alcohol and doing no harm, all of these things that seem to attract people. Meditation I know there's a mindfulness piece that we can talk about a little bit, but oftentimes, if we were to talk to people who are drawn towards it and say, are you religious? They resist that label. So why do you think that is? Because you're really in the heart of, you're located in the Bay Area, you're in a soup or a liberal. If there ever was a liberal, I'm not going to call it an anti-religion pocket, but if such a thing existed, it would probably be in the Bay Area. So what do you explain that?
Speaker 1:Well, I have lots of different thoughts about that, some more cynical than others. I think that a lot of people have been hurt by religion over the course of history, but especially in the last 100 years or so. When I say religion, hurt by religion, it's often particular kinds of charismatic Christianity, where people are taken advantage of or queer folks aren't accepted by their families or whatever the case might be other scandals that folks might be aware of from just the news and as a result of that, people reject religion. People tell all the time. I remember being not long after my wife and I got married.
Speaker 1:We went to a cocktail party that her boss was throwing and we're mingling and whatnot, and somebody asked me what I do and I say I'm a teacher in a Buddhist school and immediately this guy says, oh yeah, I hate religion. It's just like it has a really interesting thing to start a conversation with. So for years I used to tell people when I go to parties, I'm going to start saying that I'm a fireman, right, because nobody's going to be like oh, I hate firemen, I really hate EMTs. So there's this weird cultural, and I don't think it's just in the Bay area.
Speaker 2:I like to pick on the Bay area because it's the California rivalry.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think there's some justification for that. So part of the reason to go back to my origin story part of the reason our mom wanted us to be open and questioning our things was because we were raised by a single mother, which means that we had a whole lot of babysitters. And we have this one babysitter who was an evangelical Christian and when he found out that we weren't baptized, he lost it and started telling my brother and I all this stuff about how we were going to go to hell because we weren't baptized and we were playing D&D and he's like oh, that's all Satan stuff and video games are the devil, and so on and so forth. We were little kids, so it scared the hell out of us, right? This is terrible.
Speaker 2:We were in the bathroom and dunked you in the bathtub as a.
Speaker 1:So we told my mom this you know, you got to get us baptized.
Speaker 1:And my mom was like no, I don't and I'm going to fire that guy and sat us down and had a conversation about people who believed different things. You guys are free to believe whatever you want to believe. If you want to go to church, I'll take you to church, but it's not what I believe. That really made a depression on me. I was really young at the time, really younger than you need to be to have that kind of like share deep, kind of conversation. But also like how formative is that right To be able to have that experience of a parent saying you can choose to do whatever you want, you can believe whatever you want, which I think set me on that questioning path. But I bring up that story about the evangel of Christians because I think that's a lot of people's experience right of people who are sort of forcing things on you or trying to scare you or harm you in some way. So I think a lot of people have rejected religion because of that kind of bad experience.
Speaker 1:Why come to Buddhism? I think there's a lot of different reasons. I think that there are certain aspects of Buddhism that can be really healing in a lot of different ways. You mentioned mindfulness and meditation. Personally, I'm not a big meditation person, but I also recognize that if you are doing it the right way, with the right kind of support, meditation could be extremely healing and extremely beneficial, even if you're not religious right. So there's some practical benefits that I think attract people. I could think of some more cynical reasons, but I think I'll be kind for a change.
Speaker 2:This is a conversation about Buddhism.
Speaker 1:after all, it's supposed to be a nice guy. It's supposed to be kind.
Speaker 2:So on the meditation topic and we were speaking prior to hitting the record button that the majority of the world's Buddhists actually don't meditate. So why do you think that has become kind of a? It seems like it's become an American trademark of some connection to Buddhism, is it? Do you think it's a reflection of the challenges we face on a daily basis in Western society?
Speaker 1:I think there's actually a lot of different things that have come together both historically and in the sort of contemporary world. On the historical side there's this whole field of study called Buddhist modernism. That is looking at a sort of historical moment when a lot of things changed for Buddhism in Asia, and that was also when Buddhism was coming to the West. Meditation became a big part of that for a variety of reasons. If folks are curious about that, there's a book by actually a friend and colleague of mine named Eric Brown, b-r-a-u-n, called the Birth of Insight, which is about sort of how meditation became a thing in Southeast Asia. Anyway, eric Brown's work looks at the way in which meditation became a big sort of reform movement in Burma and Thailand, in places like that late 19th, early 20th century.
Speaker 1:More in the contemporary scene, I think my hypothesis, my theory, I think it has a lot to do with certain strands of American culture which are sort of ironically, very, very individualistic. I think most Americans, you know, have this idea that you know we're sort of in charge of our own lives, right, like I'm the only person who can fix my shit, that's my responsibility, I have to do it the sort of individual, lone wolf kind of mentality. Meditation can feed into that pretty easily. Right, like you might go someplace to do meditation, but you're alone, you're in your own head, you're.
Speaker 2:In your own head, you're alone there on the cushion.
Speaker 1:I think that there's also a sort of self-determination kind of rhetoric of American culture. Right, american culture is all about self-determination and you know, this is what we're doing, and so I think that there's some resonances there with the way in which meditation sort of gets popularized in the mid to late 20th century of like. Here's this thing that you can do to fix yourself.
Speaker 2:You can do it wherever you want, even in an airport lounge, that's right. Close your eyes and put your earphones in it.
Speaker 1:Listen to your breath and counter breath and all that kind of stuff, which is, like I said before, like I think that can be really great and really powerful for people and there's nothing wrong with that. At the same time, buddhism has a lot more to offer, and another aspect of that is the community aspect. Something I tell my students all the time is that, regardless of all this cultural stuff about individuality human beings you know we're social primates. You know we're not that different from chimpanzees and bonobos and we like to be in groups and we like to know who's in our group and who's not in our group.
Speaker 1:There's a deeply survival piece to that right, like we seek out community, and so that's, I think, another part of it. Right, it's like, yeah, you're in your own head when you're on the meditation cushion, but you're also in a room with a whole bunch of other people, so that's also filling some sort of oftentimes unvoiced need or desire. Right, there's an irony there of people who have been hurt by religion. They leave religion and then what do they do? They go find another religion, but they don't want to call it a religion, because on that intellectual level, religion is bad. But there's still that like genetic need to have community, and religion is just one of the ways that homo sapiens creates community.
Speaker 2:I say this with all due respect from one middle-aged, bald white guy to another. So when you're scholarly work, in a couple minutes we'll talk about kind of drilling down a little with more grand. Another focus on your recent book. But just in general, do you wrestle with the fact that you're a white middle-aged guy or the age part doesn't have anything to do with it but if you're researching about Buddhism, you're having to peel back layers of culture, language, tradition that clearly you weren't raised with. How do you manage that intellectual dance in your own head? Maybe it's not a thing, it's just something I would think about.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, but it's definitely something that comes up. I get asked not infrequently. The book that I wrote is about a very specific community of Buddhists that has its history in the Japanese community. I'm obviously not Japanese, so there's questions about how it is that I can do research on this community, that I'm not a native so to speak.
Speaker 1:But I also think that how this comes up more on a day-to-day basis has to do with a lot of those assumptions people have about Buddhism positive or negative, like the jerk at the cocktail party who hates religion.
Speaker 1:There's that kind of stuff. But also, if people find out I'm a Buddhist, there's a lot of questions that immediately follow Do you meditate? Do you do this? I saw you with a beer.
Speaker 1:Yes, I've got lots of stories about people who are horrified to find out that I don't have certain vegetarian restrictions. So, which is to say, there's lots of different ways to be a Buddhist. But it also comes up when you're talking about the fact that I'm a white guy, that there's other assumptions too that are sometimes not as savory. For example, a lot of my colleagues in the field of Buddhist studies, a lot of the white male people that I know, happen to have Asian wives, for example. So for a long time, a lot of people, when they first met me, would often assume that I also have an Asian wife, and so there's something unseemly about that, right, because there's a lot of fetishization of Asian culture that might overlap with Buddhism and the study of Buddhism, and so there's all that kind of stuff too, that kind of have to peel back and wrestle with, and honestly, I think that the best thing to do is just to be honest about it.
Speaker 2:Wow, I didn't even think about that angle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and just be honest about what's real and true for you, right? Like my wife's not Asian and also I bring that up. And then one of the reasons why a lot of colleagues of mine happen to have Asian wives is because they spend a lot of time in Asia where they were doing research, and it's not like their wives are not also scholars. Most of their wives are also brilliant people that work in the same field and, of course, they married this person. How many times do we get involved with people we work with? Yeah, like it just makes sense, right, but there's that stereotype that comes in, right.
Speaker 2:That's right. It's not like I'm really interested in studying Buddhism. And you know what I need a Asian wife. Yeah, that's not usually how it happens.
Speaker 1:So you have to deal with all those stereotypes and I think again, as long as you're honest about it, like that's that to me, that's where the sort of authenticity comes in right Interesting. Of you know I'm doing this work because it speaks to me and I'm honest about that. And I know there are things I don't know and I know that I have certain privileges because I'm a white guy and you know all those kinds of things Well it's interesting.
Speaker 2:I just heard you deliver a talk and a Q&A session at the Darmanbaum temple in San Diego and we'll also link that in the show notes and you made an interesting comment in answer to one of the questions about. You said someone asked about if somebody meditates, does that make them a Buddhist or is it possible to be Buddhist without meditating? And you said I'm going to go with the under the assumption that if you say you're a Buddhist, you're a Buddhist. Can you talk more about what that means and are there some limits to that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, I say that because of a colleague of mine, natalie Cooley. She also teaches at the Institute of Buddha Studies. Um, she's got a background in anthropology and one of the things anthropologists do is they go out into the field and they listen to people and they just report what those people are saying rather than imposing on people, you know, whatever your assumptions are about them. And so part of my answer comes from that perspective of if someone says they're a Buddhist, I'm going to take their word for it, even if the way that they behave or what they're doing seems bananas to me, right, like, even if they're a bad Buddhist, so to speak, because that's more interesting, because then you have to wrestle with those questions of like, how does, how does this person square what they're doing with what I think I know about Buddhism? I think is part of it? Um, but I think there's also this is a big question Like the idea of religious self identity, um, the idea that you know to claim I am a Buddhist or I am a Christian or I am this or I am, that there's a lot of assumptions in there about what it, about what, what I am, right, like what the individual person is, and a lot of that stuff actually comes from Christianity.
Speaker 1:Christianity is a religion that says you know if, if you, you know if, if you believe in Jesus Christ, that's it. You know most, most Christian traditions. It's an either or a thing either you're a Christian or not, and that's actually weird in the history of religions around the world. It's actually really weird to have this sort of exclusivity of religious identity and most cultures, these ideas are much more fluid. Um, there's a, there's a stereotype or a cliche about um, traditional Chinese culture that says something like um, uh, in China, if you're sick, you go see the Taoist cause. They have all the medicine. Uh, if you want to know how to run a business or your family, you go talk to the Confucians, and when you're planning your funeral, you go to the Buddhists. So there's a very sort of you know clear, like uh, delegation of responsibility. If these different areas have a religious menu?
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:Um and so to to go into that context and say you know what are you and you know somebody be like, uh, that questions. This doesn't make sense, right. And so I think part of the um, part of the difficulty here is just that issue was that for a lot of different times and places and cultures around the world, this idea of a sort of singular, exclusivist kind of identity is not normal for most people. Um and so when you try to fit people into this box of Buddhist, usually it's in a particular time or place, right, like I'm going to claim them a Buddhist in, you know, 1950 America, because it has certain kinds of meanings and values and that's important. But in 12th century China that's all meaningless, right. So I think that's part of the issue. And, uh, and where we're at now in American culture and history, like, things are just everything's nuts, everything's all you know there's there's a lot of things that are changing just in terms of the way we think about things Religious affiliation, identity, everything's really, really fluid, especially for for younger people.
Speaker 2:And let alone the connection to political affiliation and how that ties in and to that. Yeah, well, I want to. You made passing reference to your book and it deserves much more uh than that. So the making of American Buddhism. Um, this just came out in the last year and first of all I want to congratulate you on your book. Um, and I know that this is, um, you know you're getting invited to speak in different places and some travel and and um and so, um, that's an important thing for scholars. A lot of times we were joking that that you know scholars write things and the only people who read them are other scholars. And you call up the people you know and say would you write a book review for me? And then they call you up in two years and you do it for them. And, but this seems to be getting getting some traction, um, from kind of outside that community as well. Can you give a an overview of your book for the lay person? Sure, I'm going to try.
Speaker 2:Well, you do you know it's? It's um how much time we got.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, I thought it was really interesting. You know the overview that you just gave in in in this presentation. We had people in the room who think were really informed historically about Buddhism in the U? S to people like me who not so much, so kind of in the middle of that range.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, uh, the book.
Speaker 1:The book is primarily about a particular uh uh Buddhist community in Berkeley in the mid 20th century and one of the things that a lot of people you know we're we're talking about some of this right now. Right, the certain assumptions people have about Buddhism it's a religion of peace, it's kindness, mindfulness and so forth, and that's all this kind of stuff. Um, and a lot of that stuff is actually pretty recent. Um, what I started talking about in the talk today was about how, prior to World War II, americans were really, really suspicious of Buddhism. People thought that Buddhism was this dangerous foreign religion. What are we going to do about it?
Speaker 1:Um, and, pretty quickly, after World War II, public opinion shifts and by the 1960s, you know, the beatniks and the hippies are, are doing Buddhist stuff left and right. How did that happen, right, how did that change happen? And so what I talk about in the book is the? Um, the American Buddhists that were already here, who were primarily Japanese Americans, who had created these communities, um, created these publication projects, these educational projects. Um, we're doing all of this labor to really spread Buddhist teachings, uh, not just in their own community, for their own uh, for their own uh, folks. But but really beyond that community as well, that sort of created the foundation for other people to come along and become interested in Buddhism, and then those other people tend to become more, um, sort of valorized and lifted up and we we remember those guys, but we overlook this sort of earlier generation.
Speaker 1:Um, and a big part of that for me is is sort of recovering not just the history of this particular Buddhist community but the, the actual, like day to day work that goes into running a community. Um, you know, a lot of times when we think about Buddhism, we think about all this mindfulness and meditation and all this kind of stuff. Um, and a lot of that stuff happens in a community and as, as you know, running any kind of organization takes a lot of work. It takes a tremendous amount of work to make anything happen with a bunch of other people. Um, and I think that's really valuable to to talk about the labor that goes on behind the scenes that helps create, uh, the possibility for people to come into contact with Buddhism. Um, without temples, without buildings, you know none of, not none of the other actual practice happens, right, you know you can do the meditation at home, but you know you need to go somewhere to learn how to do it. Someone's got to pay the mortgage. Yeah, someone's got to pay the bills keep the lights on, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So and it reminds me, as you were saying, that I was thinking a flash to this kind of almost an idea of a restaurant. Yeah, you know, you could have your executive chef and or you can have the, the, the popular waiter waitress who comes out and they're the ones that are the face of the restaurant. But without the general manager behind the scenes, without the bus, people busing the food, all that stuff, yeah, the front of the house just doesn't exist.
Speaker 1:Right, exactly. And then the, the accountant, who does the? Taxes and the you know everything else.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Um, what's, what's the what's, the what's, the what's the what's the what's the what's one thing that surprised you in researching this book. Did you stumble upon something and have a Eureka moment? Or maybe that's too dramatic, but what's something that surprised you? Yeah, we go into these projects and you're here and accomplish scholar, so you, you kind of probably knew prior kind of what the corpus of the research was and what direction you were heading. Otherwise the publisher never would have agreed to to do this project anyway, right, yeah, but within that there are still gems that you didn't expect. What were those gems?
Speaker 1:Some of them were subtle. You know I talk about, um. One of the one of the things that I did the research on was, uh, one of the one of the sources I went to was a, an archive of material that the, the head priest of this temple, had. Um, I have boxes and boxes of stuff in my office, um, and some of that stuff includes letters that were written to the, the priest and his wife, and some of those letters are from some relatively famous people like Alan Watts or, uh, dt Suzuki, and so one of the stories I was telling was about, uh, finding this handwritten letter in this box in my office from DT Suzuki, uh, written in, you know, the mid 1950s, and it's it's, it's like scribbled uh, japanese characters, um, hard to decipher even if you know Japanese, and I you know it's on this very, very thin, beautiful paper, and I'm thinking, oh, this is, this is a treasure, this is like a really important bit of wisdom from DT Suzuki.
Speaker 1:He was a really well known Zen teacher. You know what amazing thing is going to be on this, this, this note that he wrote, and a colleague of mine comes to my office who's a uh, uh Japanese he's a native Japanese speaker and I say, hey, can you help me read this? And he looks at it for a while and he's like, yeah, I think it's saying, uh, my plane lands at such a such a time. He's he's organizing somebody to pick him up from the airport and I'm like, okay, it's the 1950s version of hey, I'm going to.
Speaker 2:I'm going to text you my itinerary Exactly. Yeah, this is my flight number. It's my flight number, yeah.
Speaker 1:Um, and that you know, and, and it's sort of funny, but that's that got me into thinking about the, the whole thing I was saying about labor and the work that it takes to make things happen, right, the, the fact that this great, brilliant person who we usually associate with you know all of this amazing intellectual work, was also just a dude who needed to ride from the airport and somebody had to do that, who, who actually picked him up, and so that's that's a direction of research that I, um that I went in. Another, another aspect, kind of to go back to Alan Watts, is, um, alan Watts, you know, in the fifties and the sixties he became a relatively well known, uh, intellectual, talked a lot about Buddhism and uh other religious stuff. By the um sixties and late sixties he's getting into, you know, really like interesting hippie stuff. If you can actually YouTube, uh search on YouTube for videos of Alan Watts, they're, they're trippy, they're really, really out there. But in the fifties he was a little bit more straight laced and, um, he was really good friends with the folks that were in this book.
Speaker 1:Um, and uh, I wouldn't say this was a eureka moment, but it's one of those things that I that I wrestle with a lot, because Alan Watts was, um, pretty pretentious and pretty judgmental about what he viewed, as you know, appropriate or appropriate or real Buddhism, and was pretty dismissive of a lot of the more what might call cultural practices that folks were doing, and yet they were all friends, they were all hanging out together and, um, that, that's just really that's.
Speaker 1:It's something I keep going back to and thinking about, um, I think, probably because of where we're at right now in American history, where everybody is so polarized, right, everyone, there's a lot of um like ideological purity, right, like, if you don't agree with me on every every little thing, then I want nothing to do with you, right? Um, so here's a guy who, if you look at his, his life, work, there's no reason why he should be part of this community, and yet he was, and he was apparently really good friends with these people that he would often write about in very dismissive ways. So how do you, how do you square that? You know, and I and I still don't really have a good answer to that question, but I I think that there's an important lesson there, right, about being a community even with people that you think are kind of nutty.
Speaker 2:Could it be that we're just using a modern lens of sensibility to look at something that's 75 years old? Yeah, yeah, they talk about. Even the Senate, for example, used to be the, the, the great hall of debate and exchange of ideas. Yeah, yeah, the part of real parliamentary process. And when you watch British parliament, for example, they've got this thing where they go back and forth and they stand up and they say things about each other, but then afterwards they're not sworn enemies. They know that they have to work together to get things done. You can have a differing of opinion. I think we've lost. We lost that in. Certainly in the US to, where you're either in or you're out, you get canceled by both sides, depending on you know, sometimes you're not even sure why you got canceled. Yeah, that's it Really interesting. So you discovered some of that in in your research?
Speaker 1:Yeah, you know, and there's a thing historians always say about, you know, learning from the past and all that kind of stuff, which is true and I believe in it. But sometimes it's just hard to be like, okay, what do I, what do I take from this? What do I? What's, what's the lesson here? And I, you know, because I'm, you know, I'm a product of our current moment, right, and you know, I don't necessarily want to cancel people, but there's definitely people I'm like, yeah, you've crossed a line right.
Speaker 1:And how do you, how do you know where that line is? How do you work with somebody, even if they have crossed the line, because you have to work with them? You know all those questions. I'm not, I don't, I don't know, but I guess I'm going to have to figure that out in my professional life.
Speaker 2:Well, I mean, I think that's the, that's also the struggle of the, of the historian. Right, it's, there's, there may never be a simple answer. Yeah Right, we're complicated, we're human, and and the factors, many of the factors, are lost to time anyway, right, you, you? You see writings and I often think about what's going to happen a thousand years from now, or even 200 years from now. When people look back on these times, it seems like everything we do is documented to the nth degree, there's, you can always look at those graphs. There's been more information generated in the last year than there were in the first. You know from the year, you know whatever 1000 to, to to the year 2000, whatever.
Speaker 1:But it's all digital.
Speaker 2:It's all digital, but it's still there's gaps, like there's still the human experience and I don't know if we ever get there right, and so I guess it's. It would be, as a historian, both the source of some frustration but also of hope, because the journey never ends. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And I think there's also some, some create hit, creativity and playfulness involved. Like you know, the letter from Suzuki, which is just as itinerary, is pretty clear. Like, this is just a human being, but you can also sort of do that speculation and other contexts, right, you know, yeah, maybe the historical record has some great speech by somebody, but you can, you can anticipate or you can, you know, sort of extrapolate that before that speech, whoever that person is, whoever that person was, had anxiety about it, you know, and because, because, like I'm saying, he's a human being, they're a human being.
Speaker 2:Well, it's like the and this is appropriate because we're coming up on the, the honoring of Martin Luther King Jr but the I have a dream speech actually wasn't supposed to even be delivered, right? So I had a different speech prepared and there were some last minute changes and some even some dynamics, once he started to speak that have kind of been lost to the general, simplified version of history and he started to launch into this thing and that's all we remember, right, and all the only footage we ever see. It's really, really an interesting thing. So, you know, in addition to this book, you, you have other scholarly, scholarly pursuits, when you're not answering your emails and trying to figure out how to keep a bunch of graduate students on track so that they can get their degrees and that the degrees can be worth what they're paid for and all that kind of fun stuff. Something jumped out in in, in your, in the jacket of the book that I wanted to ask you about what's pure land Buddhism?
Speaker 1:Buddhism is in Japan as a specific school of Buddhism, but it's a. It's more than that in the in the history of Buddhist thought and culture. What a lot of people know about Buddhism is that there was a Buddha who lived in India two and a half thousand years ago. But in the tradition itself, the, the, that historical Buddha, is just one Buddha among an infinite number of Buddhas. It's it's.
Speaker 1:Even he himself was very clear. He didn't come up with any other stuff. He saw into the true nature of reality and then, as a result, could see that other people had come before him to also had this, this vision of the true nature of reality. So there's, over time in the Buddhist tradition, lots of other Buddhas have been, have been written about and talked about, and in particularly East Asia, one Buddha became a sort of central focus of people's attention, and that was a Buddha named Amitabha who, in the stories, exists in his own purified Buddha realm, a certain number of billions of light years away in the West.
Speaker 1:And this is going back to my comments earlier today about. You don't have to believe this literally, right, right, you can't jump in a rocket and go west from the earth and find this Pure Land, but, but, but the the. The stories are that he created this Pure Land, which is sort of an idealized practice place where usually it's after you pass away you get reborn in this land and you can immediately become enlightened, and then usually you actually come back here to this world after you become enlightened and help other people become enlightened. So this becomes a particular school of thought within Buddhism and then it becomes its own school in Japan.
Speaker 2:I've always wondered this and I should probably know this. So the different depictions of the Buddha that we see in statues, you know most of them. If you say to someone, what does Buddha look like, they're going to see this well fed guy with his belly and if you're, you want to have lock.
Speaker 1:You rub it and that kind of thing. That's not the Buddha, that's not the.
Speaker 2:Buddha. Then there's the starving Buddha, I think, and so they're different. So can you talk a little bit about how different cultural understandings feed into those various depictions and why you think certain depictions have prevailed more than others, in the West, for example?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I mean, it's just like white Jesus, right, jesus was not a, you know, was not Scandinavian. But you know, a lot of people in Northern Europe and America have this idea in their heads that Jesus is, you know, blonde and blue-eyed right Six-pack ass.
Speaker 2:Am I going to get in trouble for that? That's just the depiction.
Speaker 1:Or he looks like Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1:And that's because, as Christianity moved into different places, people represented Jesus in their own image. That's kind of what people do. Similar thing happens in the Buddhist tradition. In fact, for a very long period of time after the historical Buddha passed away, they didn't represent him in human form at all. He was usually represented by symbols like the dharma wheel or other symbols like that.
Speaker 1:But then Buddhism became, it started to spread across the Indian subcontinent and interacted with Greek culture, and so some of the earliest statues that we have of the Buddha have a lot of similarity to Greek statues, because the Greeks had a tradition, an artistic tradition, of making statues of important people. And then that just keeps happening, right, it keeps spreading. In addition to the Buddha being represented as a person in statue form or whatever, a lot of his disciples get statues made of them or representations of them as well, and so those disciples get spread out across the different parts of the Buddhist world. And then within the Buddhist stories there's also semi-magical beings like Bodhisattvas that are talked about, and so then they get represented in art and then oftentimes those figures end up interacting with other cultural figures in other parts of the world. So the fat, happy Buddha, for example is sort of a conflation of one of the Buddhist disciples and a local Chinese folk hero who was a figure of luck, particularly for children.
Speaker 1:And so that image incorporates both oh I'm sorry and also a future Buddha. So it's sort of this incorporation of many different kinds of stories into one particular image, which is why he remembers it. Belly for good luck.
Speaker 2:Interesting. That makes more sense, kind of almost like an intellectually I'm not going to call it an intellectually lazy way of our society looking at it. But most of the time when you go to a Thai restaurant it seems like every Thai restaurant I've ever been to they're all buying their Buddha statues from the same supplier because it's the same version, right?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and different cultures are going to have more of a focus and in most Thai contexts they're going to have. This is the icon of the Buddha that means the most to them. Here at the Dharma Bomb Temple what did I say? There's a couple of statues down there for different bodhisattvas, three different bodhisattvas, and if you're not part of the tradition, you might look at those and be like, oh, they're all Buddhas, but they're actually just different figures within the tradition.
Speaker 2:How do you think educators like myself, those of us in particularly who work in the K-12 education, should think about the lessons of Buddhism, taking into consideration, obviously, the separation of church and state? And I'll pause on that question to give a pitch for or comment on two things that Jeff, who's also been on this podcast, has been working on. First, he started the first Buddhist fraternity at San Diego State, a co-ed fraternity, and the second thing is he always comes to me and says, hey, when you retire, can you help me open a Buddhist-inspired charter school. And so it's not really why I'm asking this question, but it may be I may be asking for a friend. What are the lessons? Do you think that educators and families and people in general who are charged with the sacred responsibility of raising the next generation, that we could be reflecting on?
Speaker 1:That's a great question and I feel like I should have a good answer, since I have a kid. But I'm probably doing a terrible job of raising a Buddhist kid. But I will say when you do retire and you start that Buddhist charter school, there's actually a Buddhist high school in Hawaii, in Honolulu I think. It's called the Pacific Academy. They've been around for a long time so they probably have publicly funded.
Speaker 2:That I'm not so sure that's, I think, one of the key things. Right, yeah, that.
Speaker 1:I'm not so sure. It might just be a private school.
Speaker 1:But I know, but you know. That is to say that you know a Buddhism has been around for two and a half thousand years. So you've got to figure that Buddhists have figured out how to raise children Right, because if they don't know how to raise children, then Buddhism dies out right. So I think within the tradition you're going to find examples of people doing Buddhist education and informing their education with Buddhist values in different ways. I know there's a lot of mindfulness programs that are trying to get mindfulness meditation into schools. I have really mixed feelings about that. How come? Well, for a couple of reasons. One, because you know, I think that meditation can be really, really powerful. I think that meditation really can rewire your brain if you pursue it.
Speaker 2:I'm still trying to work on that. I gave up.
Speaker 1:And which can be really great. But I also think that, you know, children's brains are literally still developing, and so I have questions about what it means to rewire a brain that hasn't fully developed right, and I'm not a neuroscientist or a child development psychologist or whatever, so that's not my area of expertise. It's just, I think, a question that I think people who are doing this stuff should really think about. Then there's this other whole other political pedagogy thing of you know. Why are we expecting children to be quiet?
Speaker 1:and you know well behaved and you know they're kids, right. So there's a whole bunch of stuff there that I think is not necessarily a bad thing. But these questions about child development and whatnot, that I think people should just sort of think to you before they're like oh everyone should meditate and it's totally fine. So there's that, personally, I think for the K through 12, I think you know the more like Buddhist values would be relevant and less controversial.
Speaker 2:Like I do no harm. Yeah, it's hard to argue against that, it's hard to argue against that.
Speaker 1:Or you know, interdependence is a big issue. The pandemic sucked. I think we can all agree with that. But I do remember having this feeling of like. You know, the whole world is going through this moment where you can't argue against how we're interconnected. Right, a disease popped up in one corner of the world and within three months it was everywhere and you couldn't leave your house. The world is interconnected and that's a pretty fundamental aspect of Buddhist philosophy. So interjecting that kind of thinking into curriculum for younger people doesn't seem like a controversial idea to me. You know other ideas like do no harm or generally being compassionate, and all that kind of stuff. You know, yeah.
Speaker 2:Why would that be a problem On the topic when you? I'd never thought about the mindfulness question quite that way in terms of brain development with students, but I do. When you mentioned that about. You know this idea that kids should just be quiet, sit there and be peaceful, when that might not even be their nature, nor should they be that way at that age. I remember a teacher who's no longer a teacher with us but we got really into the mindfulness thing and so she got one of those. She got a singing bowl kind of a thing and the wooden mallet and she would yell at the kids that this is time to that, this is mindfulness. Time Be quiet, this is mindfulness. I remember talking to one of the students coming out of that. These are middle school kids. He said yeah, you know we hate this meditation thing. She always yells at us to meditate. So the irony was not lost on the yeah.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, there's also a lot of in the Buddha's text. There's a lot of metaphors that are used to describe the Buddha and one of the most common ones is the Buddha is a doctor, meaning that he's prescribing medicine to people who are sick, and everybody gets a different kind of medicine right. And the analogy I always tell my students is like if you went to the doctor you know with, with a sore wrist and the doctor was like, oh, it's brain cancer. Yeah, you would find a new doctor. Yeah, right, like you know, or at least get a second opinion. So there's this sense that I think some people have of like you know meditation work for me, or you know X worked for me. Everybody needs to do it Right, exactly the same way. And that's just not true. You know, some people really respond to certain practices and other people don't, and that's fine, because you know whatever it is that is is keeping you from. You know, enlightenment, or whatever the case might be, is unique to you.
Speaker 2:And I think that seeing celebrities who jump on the meditation bandwagon and social media influencers who talk about it and they go oh, the top 50 wealthiest people in the world you know we've done a study and 98% of them meditate every day or I think that does a disservice. First of all, it's probably not true. Second of all, it makes it seem like, ah, this is, as you were mentioning earlier, an individualistic type of thing. You know, if you just drink your wheatgrass juice and you meditate, you're going to be Jeff Bezos or whatever, and it's not how it works, it's not how it works.
Speaker 2:You know, and it's interesting in that context. I think in California in particular, we probably in more liberal pockets of California can delve deeper into things like that in our schools mindfulness and yoga and things like that Then you might be able to do in other parts of the country for better for worse. I don't know where I come down completely on that, yeah.
Speaker 1:I feel the same way. You know, my kid, a couple of years ago, when she was still in an elementary school, you know, came home and, like you know, we're doing yoga and I was like, ah, you're doing yoga. And like you know that that academics out on my brain is like why are you doing yoga? Like let the kids go outside and play.
Speaker 2:On the other hand.
Speaker 1:you know, she learned how to stretch her body in good ways, and that's probably keeping her healthy, so it's not a bad thing.
Speaker 2:So I want to pivot a little bit and just to give a little historical context. The reason that you and I came to know each other and I've been very grateful for for getting to know you in the past almost two years now is that your dear brother, eric, passed away in 2022. It'll be next month, february and so, in that process towards the end, you came to San Diego and, for some reason that I still can't figure out, eric put me down as a, as a good person to talk to, and so we we struck up a friendship that I've been great, very grateful, and also with your extended family. You know, I think it goes without saying that losing a sibling at a young age is is challenging, and every way we can think about. In a lot of ways, we haven't thought about it unless it happened to us. Has your experience with Buddhism helped or has it informed the way you're working through Eric's passing and, if so, how?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, I was as you were think, as you were talking, I was thinking it's actually the other way. I feel as though my brother's passing is actually informed, my work more. You know, as you said, losing, losing a sibling, sucked, you know, hands down. Losing my brother was the hardest thing I ever had to go through, no question about it. And this, this is actually one of the sometimes this is the limitation right of philosophy and religion. You know, you, you learn things about. You know, in Buddhism, suffering gets inevitable, everything changes, but when you're in the middle of grief, you don't want to hear that, because those are abstract ideas till they're not right, right exactly.
Speaker 1:You know, but in a, in a, I think, in a real way, the. The two big sort of takeaways I get from that experience was was first, you know, not just losing, losing my brother, but going through that process of the end where he was, you know, really sick and in the hospital and hospice and all of that. That was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. And that is actually sort of reassuring now because it's like moving forward, I've already done the hardest thing I've ever had to do. So, you know, whatever I have to do tomorrow at work or, you know, with family or whatever, I've already done the hardest thing. So everything else sort of becomes. It kind of got a reset.
Speaker 1:You know, there was a period in early on in the grief process where a lot of people will say this about grief, right. There's a period where it's like nothing really matters, right, and I kind of settled into that for a long time until I sort of realized like, oh, things matter, they just matter in a different way, right? So this goes back to a story that one of Eric's co-worker friends said at his memorial service. Remember Monica was talking about how, as a manager, eric would always say something when they were working on a project. You know we're not saving babies and that like comes up in my brain as like a mantra all the time that work, you know people.
Speaker 2:We work in a bank. This is IT security.
Speaker 1:We're not saving babies, and so that comes up to me all the time, you know, as people come in and you just the other. Just the other day someone came in and you know was stressing about something and I was, you know, patiently listening and was like you know, we're not saving babies, like this is it's going to be okay, like this is not that difficult of a thing. So that's part of it. Another part of it is the work that I do at the Institute. You know, we were a small graduate school in a Buddhist seminary, which means that some of our students go off to get PhDs, but most of our students are going to become a temple priests or ministers or Buddhist chaplains, and the chaplains are going to work in, you know, hospitals and prisons and sometimes even the military. And so for the last I don't know 15 years that I've been doing this, I've worked with a lot of students. They write master's theses about, you know. You know applying Buddhist ideas to the work that they're going to do.
Speaker 1:And it was all like you said, it was all abstract. And then, all of a sudden, it wasn't, and not long before my brother went to the hospital, we had a student. I guess it was before COVID, who wrote a thesis about being a hospital chaplain and he wrote about the hospital industrial complex and how hospitals are, you know how of a bureaucracy and it can be really difficult to navigate and you know, in all the sort of politics within US healthcare and all that kind of stuff. It was a brilliant thesis and he was like, oh, this is really interesting. But again it was totally abstract. And then I, you know, came down here two years ago, tried to get in to see your brother and it's the hospital industry complex and it was like oh and who are you and how can you prove that you're a relative?
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly, and meeting the social worker who comes in, who has a completely different vibe than the doctor, than the nurses and the hospital administrator and all these people, while I'm going through the worst thing in my life, right, and it's overwhelming and it's totally confusing, and I was like, oh, what we do really matters at the Institute because we're preparing students to go out into the world and be with people on the worst day of their life.
Speaker 1:That's not work I can do, like I know myself and I know my limits. I know what I'm good at. I'm good at replying to those emails and signing the checks and occasionally writing a book, but I'm not good at the pastoral aspect of being with people who are truly suffering, and so part of what I think I went there was this sort of realization of like, oh, what I'm doing really matters and even if what I'm doing is sort of behind the scenes, I'm not the one. I don't teach our students how to be good pastoral leaders. I don't teach our students how to be good teachers. I teach them about this abstract, dry history and philosophy. But as an institution, my colleagues are brilliant and our students are going out and they are saving babies down the line and they are saving babies?
Speaker 1:yeah, exactly, so it's sort of a humbling. It was like a big reset in my thinking about my work.
Speaker 2:And, knowing Eric, he's laughing about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's true, Cause he's like hey see, I tricked you.
Speaker 2:You thought I thought your work wasn't important, but I wanted to show you, through the roundabout way, that really you do have an impact.
Speaker 1:He's like ha ha ha ha, yeah, you know, it's funny. When he was before he got sick I never really thought that you know. But most people in my family don't know, don't know what I do, like they don't really understand. You know I don't come from a big academic. You know like a lot of scholars have academic families.
Speaker 2:You're just the guy with a doctorate and they're like, hey, cool, everyone's saying that's interesting. What do you do again?
Speaker 1:You know I wrote the book and my mom's. Like they give you an advance.
Speaker 2:No, no, that's not how it works. She's like because you know when Oprah wrote her book. Do you think we can get you on the Oprah Club with this?
Speaker 1:So yeah, I never really like thought that my brother was you know I sort of put him in that same category, but when he was in the hospital, you know I would be visiting him and he would like spontaneously tell people. Oh yeah, my brother, he studies religion, he'll be here to help me out, he'll know what's going on and I'm like you were paying attention the whole time. Yeah, that sounds like that sounds.
Speaker 2:I have this story that I shared at his memorial service and I think it encapsulates who he was, that idea of just not taking life too seriously. He obviously took it seriously and the important things right Parenting more than anything, right, his two beautiful daughters. But we were out, he and I went camping out in the desert and a couple of things about that trip were interesting. One is he forgot his tent, which for a veteran camper was kind of odd. But anyway, he was going through a lot of stuff in his life and he was distracted. So we get out there and I've got a one man tent. He's got no tent and I'm like sorry, man, I'm not sharing my tent with you. So he just beds down on the ground outside, puts his head in a rock and goes to sleep.
Speaker 2:But at some point in the night I woke up and I looked over at the mountain and there was just the strangest green laser beam going from the top of the mountain to the desert floor. I'm looking at this thing going. This is like UFO country. I'm thinking there's nothing out here. So anyway, I wake him up and I go hey, dude, look at this, look at this. We're looking and the funny thing is we took photos of it and it never showed up. So but he's looking at it and he goes, yeah, and I go, but Eric, this could be a UFO sighting.
Speaker 2:And he's like, yeah, and so anyway, he went back to sleep and the next day we were talking about it and he was just kind of totally non-plussed by the whole thing.
Speaker 2:He just was like and I'm thinking we've been visited by creatures from another, and so he really just he thought about the things that were essential, and it wasn't essential to even buy long pants, so he just wore shorts and he found a line of work where they would pay him well for wearing shorts and that was just his thing. And so I know we all miss him, but his legacy lives on in his daughters. But we also in a small way some of the folks listening to this will recognize that at Albert Einstein Academy we established the Eric C Mitchell Scholarship and we honor students every year at graduation with scholarships that are funded by philanthropic donations in his name, and so hopefully that they're really it's really it's not just the kids with the highest grades, it's really students who embody the principles of being caring and kind and giving, and so I'll definitely put that also in the show notes Earlier, when I was talking about Pure Land Buddhism, and you go to the Pure Land, you get enlightened.
Speaker 1:You come back here metaphorically. That's the thing Like my brother's living on in some other way, Like he's part of him is gone, but he's still around through these memories and through what, the work that you're doing, which is wonderful, it's absolutely wonderful, and I know when he passed away, we did a.
Speaker 2:I think it's a transfer of merit. And then there was some period of time that we kind of I mean, we're always gonna think of him, about him but a period of time when it was most important for us to be thinking of him, and I think it was that transitional part. Right, I don't know the names for any of these things, but I know that when my father passed away 12 years ago, jeff was instrumental in helping me through that as well. Just that piece. So, yeah, we'll definitely have that in the show notes so that if anybody wants to donate.
Speaker 2:You've been very generous with your time. You and I could chat forever and ever. We'll have to do a 2.0, definitely of this. But I wanted to see, before I ask my last question to you, of you, is there anything that you'd like to include that we haven't touched on today? Some ideas that are rattling around in your brain, some question that I didn't ask, or I half asked, or you are like this guy doesn't know what he's talking about, and I really want to say this yeah, all of it, all of it.
Speaker 1:We don't have any idea what you're talking about.
Speaker 2:It's good. That isn't humility and kindness. Aren't humility and kindness two of the principles?
Speaker 1:No, that's a big misunderstanding. When you're a Buddhist, you become super arrogant, you become arrogant.
Speaker 2:You tell people at cocktail parties that you hate religion. Right.
Speaker 1:No, thank you very much. It's been a pleasure to have these conversations.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we'll definitely link your book as well. And we're gonna work.
Speaker 1:Oprah will get it in no time.
Speaker 2:Oprah will get it. We're working on getting you an audio version. We'll see if the academic publishers are amenable to that. I'd be happy to record it for free. But I can't say any of the Japanese surnames so I need a little bit of training. But it's been a real pleasure chatting with you and also hearing your. I'm not gonna call it a speech because it was more like it was a dialogue. It was a community dialogue prior. But I want to end with this. You're given the opportunity because you come from such a well-funded academic institution. They give you a blank check and they say hey, you get to design a billboard for the side of, on the side of the freeway in the Bay Area I don't know if that's, it's not the 405, whatever that is up there, the one or whatever one of the freeways. People are driving by at 70 miles an hour. They only have a few seconds to look at it. What does your billboard say about what you believe in and what you think the world should know about that?
Speaker 1:Pay attention. That's it Pay attention. It sounds like I thought about this, but I actually haven't. That's good.
Speaker 2:Well, it's cause I didn't. You know what that's proof of You've never listened to my podcast. I ask every guest that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I was as a, as a, as a as a as you were talking, I was envisioning being on the freeway, and there's actually a one of those digital billboards on the freeway near my house.
Speaker 2:Would they tell you whether, conditions or whatever. Well, it's like a series of ads, yeah.
Speaker 1:Like, like, my eye always catches it right before it changes to the next thing. So I'm always like, well, I missed whatever that was.
Speaker 1:And then the next one is you know that Shun-Yun thing with the Chinese. So I I'm sort of thinking about like how, how quickly you just miss things as you're, as you're driving down the freeway, and yeah, you know, I think paying attention is it like a big part of you know, not just I mean, I can make a Buddhist argument for this Like like being attentive to what's actually happening is certainly, you know, seeing the world as it is is a big part of Buddhism. But even apart from that, you know, like you were talking about Eric and what was essential and what mattered, like pay attention to what matters, just pay attention to what you're doing and how you're being in the world. I think is the the first step.
Speaker 2:I think that's an apropos way to end today's conversation. Thank you so much, Scott.
Speaker 1:Thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2:Thank you for listening to the Superintendent's Hangout. You can follow me on Twitter at DVS1970. Please be sure to share this show with friends and family on social media and in the real world. Thank you to Brad Bacchial for editing and production assistance and to Tina Royster for scheduling and logistics. Thanks for hanging out and have a great day.