Epiosde 7: Host Julia Sagebien interviews Mushim Patricia Ikeda (4/9/26)

Host Julia Sagbien interviews Mushim Patricia Ikeda.   Mushim is a Buddhist teacher, poet, author, social justice activist, and mother based in Oakland, California. She teaches at the East Bay Meditation Center, where she leads the award-winning yearlong mindfulness program for social change agents, Practice in Transformative Action. Mushim is the recipient of the Gil A. Lopez Award for a peacemaker of color from the Association for Dispute Resolution of Northern California, and the recipient of an honorary doctor of sacred theology degree from the Starr King School for the Ministry. She has been featured in two documentary films: “Between the Lines” (on Asian American women poets) and “Standing on Faith: Women and the New Religious Activism in America,” distributed by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:04

Good evening everyone. Good morning. Good night. Whatever it is, wherever you are. I am absolutely delighted to welcome all of you to a new episode of New Horizons in Engage Buddhism. Today we have someone that I have not really known for a long time and don't know personally, but I have been reading a lot on what she does, and I'm very impressed and very excited to be able to bring her on the show so she can talk to us about the very interesting work that she has been doing for years and the kind of work that many of us are working with in our own communities. Um Patricia Dikera is a mindfulist and Buddhist teacher, justice, activist, author, diversity, equity, inclusion consultant, poet, and mother. Um she comes from a Zen Buddhist tradition uh where she once was telling me she took these renounced renunciant lay monastic vows that sounds really extreme. Um and she is the core teacher of the East Bay Meditation Center that we're gonna hear a lot about. And it's a place that is known for its radical inclusivity. And Mushin's article, I vow not to burn out. It was written for mindful activists and it went viral. It was published in uh Lion's Roar, and it actually had a quote that I found would be a really good way for us to begin, which is samsara is burning down all of our houses. We need a path of radical transformation, and there's no question in my mind that the bodhisattva path is it. So, welcome, Mushin, and let's uh begin by having you lead us on a short meditation, and then we will go on into the interview. Welcome, Mushin.

SPEAKER_04 2:11

Thank you so very much, and thank you, Sangha. If you'd like, let's begin with simply taking three mindful breaths together. For some people, awareness of the breath might be uncomfortable, in which case you don't need to do it. And we do have some uh hand and arm movements that go along with it, which I learned from my spiritual brother John W. Ellis IV, Master John Ellis of the Ananda Martial Arts and Fitness Academy here in Oakland, California in the United States. So if you like, um I'm starting with at my waist, but since you can't see it, pretend this is my waist. Put the hands, palms up if you like. Okay, so and and as we're breathing in, we're lifting this up through the entire uh torso up to the top of the head, and then as we breathe out, lightly pressing down as though there are columns of air underneath each hand. All right, here we go. So hands, palms up near the waist, breathing in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out. Breathing in, breathing out. Now allowing the breath to become normal, whatever that is for you, and resting a moment in whatever your present moment experience is. And I'll invite the bell of mindfulness gently three times.

SPEAKER_03 5:08

Thank you, Machine, for bringing us all to the same place. Um before we launch into talking about the eSpace Center, let's talk a little bit about you. Let's talk a little bit about your life and your process and being um an Asian American and being a Buddhist. And uh you were the person that should suggest that I interview Sharon Su, Dr. Sharon Su. And that was extraordinary. It was a very interesting um interview where we really talked about uh it's kind of like when Americans uh teach tango, and then you bring an Argentinian and they're going, but I am an Argentinian, okay? But this is what I did when I was three years old. My grandmother does it. Um so please tell us a little bit about yourself and your path.

SPEAKER_04 6:00

Thank you very much. I was born in 1954 in Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States. That's right in the American Midwest. And I'm a third generation Japanese American. The word for that is sansei. San means three, so third generation. And Japanese Americans count generations as Asian Americans by the first generation, the Issei are the immigrants. So that's all four of my grandparents came from Japan. My parents were Nisei. They were American citizens born in the United States. The second generation, I am the third generation Sansei, and my son is Yonsei or fourth generation. And I do come from a Buddhist family on my mom's side in Hawaii. My maternal grandfather was a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner, and they had a mixed marriage because my grandma, his wife, was a Jodo Shinshu, a Shin Buddhist. And they raised their, began raising their children, my mom and her siblings, um, as Buddhists. However, everything was cut short when World War II, Pearl Harbor, the attack on Pearl Harbor happened, all of the Buddhist temples, their Japanese language school were closed down. Some of the Buddhist priests in Hawaii were arrested. They, I think they all were arrested, some of them in their robes. They couldn't even have time to bring along a spare change of clothing. And so for my mother, her Buddhist education was cut short. However, it the Dharma always traveled, I would say, in our family, in that my mother was kind, compassionate, fair-minded. She had a lot of equanimity, and she was also a very strong woman. She would never have called herself a feminist. However, she was very gifted in science and in math. And so she became one of the first women pharmacists in the United States. So, in a certain way, I became interested in the Buddhist path through poetry. When I was reading that as an undergraduate at Oberlin College in Ohio, and thereafter through the work of uh beat poet Gary Snyder, and then through translations of Chinese uh Tang dynasty poets, done by my poetry mentor, Professor David Young, who passed recently. So the Dharma entered my life through kind of underground streams and some overground streams, and then it all resulted in my turning towards the Buddhist path and taking bodhisattva vows and precepts in Toronto with Koreans and Master Samu Sinem in 1983.

SPEAKER_03 9:16

And it's it's sort of interesting. It's like your poetry was almost like a way to express the sensitivity of being a Buddhist in the world. You know, that kind of world that that is and isn't. That uh what is it that the Japanese, the shadow world, I have a name for it, I can't recall right now. Um tell me a little bit about your life in Toronto when you took these radical vows, and I believe you had a son then already, right?

SPEAKER_04 9:44

No.

SPEAKER_03 9:45

No, okay. So you went from radical vows, then you got pregnant. Now that was really radical.

SPEAKER_04 9:50

Yes. Because I had no money as a result of the radical renunciation vows. So then I was a poverty-stricken single Buddhist mother. What the heck? Uh my original teacher was Korean Zen master Samu Sinim. He started his first temple in Toronto in Canada, and then I was part of the founding of the first daughter temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So my training was uh divided between mostly in Ann Arbor, Michigan, since I'm a citizen of the United States. And occasionally I would take the train and go up to Toronto to work on Samu Sinem's uh Buddhist journal that he started, which was called Spring Win. I'm a very good typist. I'm trained as a secretary. So I learned word processing on one of the first Apple computers, and that's how we produced that first issue of Spring Win Win, probably around 1984.

SPEAKER_03 10:57

And when you came back to America at some point, at some point, you begin to do DEI, DEI work, which is probably what we call it now, but in some ways, uh those of us of a certain age where, at least in my case, I am extremely grateful that I hit the beginning of that wave because it allowed me to get educated, which it would have been very difficult for a family like mine, also being immigrant, to be able to have the funds to allow me to get educated. So, what kind of work did you do within universities, corporations? How did you're a Buddhist, you have a background, you have poor, you have a child, but you decide to begin to work in this field. Um, will you tell us a little bit about what informed your work in that field?

SPEAKER_04 11:52

Like so many things, it chose me, and I am a product of the civil rights movement in the United States, of the women's movement, of the gay liberation movement, of the Asian American liberation movement, of black power, of all of these radical movements for equity, for dignity, for um for liberty. And I was pretty much minding my own business and raising my kid here in Oakland, California, and lying pretty low, I was doing some practice, but I didn't really want to put my child into uh into daycare. I wanted to raise him myself since he was my only one. And then I began to be freed up a little bit when he was getting ready to go into kindergarten. So around that time, which would be like 1999-2000, I was very much involved with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. I wrote a column for them on Buddhist practice as family practice for 10 years. So that's 40 columns because we were a quarterly hard-copied journal. And I was very involved with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and so I was invited around, I don't know, 1999, 2000, I think, to be on a panel for Chakya Dita, daughters of the Buddha International Organization. And they were holding their yearly conference at the Pitzer College complex in Los Angeles, California, in the United States. And so I was, they invited me and they said, Oh, we want you to be on a panel of Asian American and Asian women Buddhists at this uh uh multi-day gathering conference of for Shakya Dita uh daughters of the Buddha. And I thought, well, okay, that's kind of weird. Um, however, all right, I will, I just said, okay, I'll I'll do it. And then it turned kind of fortunately, unfortunately, anyway, it turned into a bit of a drama because the person who had invited me, who was then uh the secretary of Shakyadita, and herself, a university professor, an American citizen, highly educated, PhD, um was talking to me on the phone and saying, I was saying, well, you know, why do we have to say Asian American Buddhist women and Asian, why do we have to have a special panel since Buddhism comes from Asia? Like, just help me to understand this. And she said, Oh, don't worry, don't worry, calm down, calm down. We've got Asian American women Buddhists coming to this conference from all over. We have Asian American women Buddhists coming from Thailand and from Japan and from India. And I said, I'm so confused. Do you mean Asian American women who traveled to those other countries? And someone's furrowing their brow here, and now they're coming back for this conference because they're working abroad. And there was this silence, and I realized she did not know that Asian Americans are American citizens. And this is how Asian Americans usually experience racism as being regarded as perpetual foreigners, no matter how many generations our families have been born in the United States. Yes, when ICE sees us now, we shall be deported and snatched up. And it was at that moment, it was a moment that radicalized me because, as I said, I've been pretty quiet. You know, I've just been raising my kid and trying to be a good mother. And at that moment, I just thought, I've had enough. I don't want to have to prove my citizenship one more time. I was born in Cleveland, Ohio. I've never been to Japan. My parents were born in the United States. I think the only time they'd ever been to Japan was when my father was drafted in World War II and into the U.S. Army. You get the picture. And I decided I had had enough. And I began to take a stand politically to say Asian American Buddhists are American citizens. We are born in the United States. Our backgrounds may vary. Some of us come from Buddhist families, some of us do not. I mean, some of us do not. Mine was kind of mixed in that my grandparents in Hawaii were Buddhist, but my mother and father in Ohio did not espouse any particular religion. And I wanted to be a voice to stand up and say, as has been uh written by Professor Funi Shu in Lion's Roar about Asian American Buddhists, we've always been here.

SPEAKER_03 17:34

It's interesting because this reminds me the day that in Canada, which is where I live most of the time, the law was passed for gay marriage. It was the first time in my life I realized I had lived in apartheid and I didn't know it. It never occurred to me that I was not a citizen with full rights until that day. It's like, duh.

SPEAKER_04 17:59

Well, yes, precisely. And it's that that kind of um, I don't know what we would call it, since it's always been that way. It's the water in which we swim as fish, and then to suddenly have that moment of saying, I'm not being treated as as an equal, that is an awakening moment.

SPEAKER_03 18:23

Indeed, indeed. I would like to move on now to your work with the East Bay Meditation Center. One of the things I read um was a little bit about your the way you went about, and we talked about it in our pre-interview conversation, the way you went about deciding what the center was about. The notion of doing a gap analysis and realizing that you could have, as you called it, radical inclusivity, a collaboration of others. I love that, a collaboration of others. Can you um describe what how you went about discovering the need and coming up with programming and an identity that allowed you to really truly serve those others?

SPEAKER_04 19:14

Yes. East Bay Meditation Center, which is located physically here in Oakland, California, in the United States, was on paper as an as a US 501c3 religious nonprofit church for many years, uh, for even like eight years, incorporated under the name East Bay Dharma Center. And during that time, they were doing some fundraising, they didn't have a brick and mortar or a rental place. Uh, they were on paper trying to figure out who they were and what their mission and vision would be. And during that time, I was invited to be on the board of directors a couple of times, and I said no. Y'all don't even have a place to meet, and you do not have a mission and a vision to be something other than somewhere in the East Bay in California, in the Bay Area, which could be Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrido, Alameda, Richmond. This is, they're a bunch of different um incorporated cities in what we call the East Bay region of California. So I said, I said, no, I'm not going to work for free, go away. And finally they came to me a third time, and at that time they were getting ready to rent a one-room uh storefront on Broadway in downtown Oakland that had two wheelchair accessible uh restrooms and a tiny office, and was on public transit routes, so accessible to people who are low-income, people with disabilities, and said, Okay, how about now? And I said, now the conditions are met, and uh I will be happy to be on the um on the board of directors of what we now call the Ispe Meditation Center. So we went from being the Dharma Center to Meditation Center, which, even though we are Buddhist-based, we also include uh teachers who teach from indigenous and other wisdom traditions, primarily Buddhist and including indigenous and other wisdom traditions. So again, more inclusivity, more opportunity for learning across different spiritual cultures, and yet boundaried in a certain way so that we can go deeper within the. Container we created. We opened our doors to this one room rented storefront in downtown Oakland in January of 2007 in honor at the same time as Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday was being celebrated. That was not by mistake. And that was our statement that we conceived of ourselves as we refined it when we finally opened our doors, that our primary mission and vision is to extend a special welcome to people interested in the Dharma who are black indigenous people of color, number one, multi-heritage or mixed-race folks, members of the queer LGBTQI, Two Spirit Community, and also people with disabilities, chronic illness, and chronic pain. So, of course, we are open to all. Again, we're a church in the federal way of classifying or nonprofits in the United States. And we our mission is to especially serve those communities that included many people who were really interested in mindfulness, vipassana meditation, in dharma, and who had gone to some of the many, many other Buddhist groups in the Bay Area and found, oh my gosh, I'm the only person of color here. Oh, I'm the only person in a wheelchair here, or I tried to get in because I was in a wheelchair, but I couldn't even get in through the door because there was no wheelchair ramp. And so we were founded to include uh primarily to primarily address the needs of people who have been, as the term goes, othered.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

Okay. So how exactly do you run your programs in the center? Do people meet in different rooms? Do they meet together? Do they have separate classes? Are there specific teachers that teach in different communities? How do you how do you work this um giant beehive of opportunities?

SPEAKER_04 24:26

Well, not too giant, and and we're now trying to emerge from the global COVID-19 pandemic, where of course everything had to go on Zoom. So we're in a recovery process. However, between 2007 and 2020, when we went into uh lockdown here in California for the global pandemic, so in those years we developed a way of operating which was that we have identity-based practice groups and on different evenings. And so what we call our LGBTQI Two Spirit Group calls themselves the alphabet sangha because new letters are being added on all the time, and so they didn't want to have to change their name of the practice group. So they're the alphabet sangha. These days they meet every Tuesday evening. The people of color, now called the BIPOC EBMC Sangha, meets every Thursday evening. There uh the group for people with disabilities, chronic illness, chronic pain meets Sunday evenings. That's everybody, every mind sangha. And then there's a group that's open to all, social justice centered called the Maha Sangha Practice Group, and that meets on Fridays. So that leaves Mondays and Wednesdays open for general classes and programming, as well as Saturdays and Sundays during the days for half day or full-day retreats and other kinds of other kinds of programs. And that's the way that we've been able to accommodate different needs of different parts of our Sangha, as well as provide an overall umbrella container that encourages communication across these different identity-based groups.

SPEAKER_03 26:37

One of the things that you mentioned in our um earlier conversation is that the platinum rule for diversity is to have people in positions of leadership that look like the people that you want to present the dharma to in terms of identity, whatever their identity is. So the the part of the conundrum is a timing conundrum because it takes time to train teachers. You actually have to walk the path, and that is not instant. At the same time, the need is now. How have you worked with that?

SPEAKER_04 27:15

That's a really good question, and I'll just back up a little bit and say the platinum rule, as I've learned it in diversity, equity, inclusion work, is actually to recognize the golden rule, what's usually called the golden rule, is to treat others as you yourself wish to be treated. However, others may not be like us. So look, we can notch it up to the platinum rule, which is to treat others as they wish to be treated, as they wish to be treated. For instance, as an Asian American, as someone trained in Koreans, it's not usually considered connective to look someone right in the eyes, depending on their age, their status. It could be very, very rude. So usually you kind of look down a little bit. And uh, however, there might be situations in which your peers are of equal age or equal status, and you might look into the other person's eyes. That would be only one tiny detail on treating others as they wish to be treated, how so that they can feel seen, heard, recognized, and be treated with dignity. What you're talking about is also very important, and that is as a diversity, equity, inclusion consultant operating mainly in Buddhist and educational groups, as well as some nonprofits who are incorporating mindfulness into their work, such as I had one client who run a women's shelter in New York City for women who have been experiencing or are experiencing domestic violence. And the counselors working with these women, mostly women, and mostly women with children, and mostly disabled women with children, wanted to get some advice from me, some consultation with me on disability access-informed mindfulness meditation instructions. And so this is something that's been developed through East Bay Meditation Center and how we're uh how we're training and raising kind of our next generation of Buddhist teachers has been in a number of ways. Number one, I would say we recognize that real life experience combined with some level of Dharma practice and meditation practice, that is going to be so valuable. And it by doing leadership development among the leaders, because we attract so many justice activists and they're executive directors and uh public speakers. I mean, they are not shy, underdeveloped people. And to invite them in to say, what has your Dharma experience been? San Francisco Zen Center has a custom of inviting peer dharma talks that are called, I forget, something about the way, sharing the way, something like that talks, in which you say, This is how the Dharma has manifested for me in my experience, my lived experience. And I would say that that is the doorway through which we've invited people to come forward in leadership, and then also we've, of course, encouraged them to, we created a culture of encouraging people to go on retreat, to make time, to go deeper in their practice, to go deeper in their study, and different people are in different situations, so some people have more time than others. However, we're almost 20 years old, and people they naturally will go deeper. They will if they're surrounded and given that support. We've also had several year-long and now half-year and one some two-year training programs that have encouraged people to develop qualities of spiritual leadership and dharma leadership that are informed by justice principles as well as the as well as the principles of equity, diversity, and inclusion. And that's how we've developed East Bay Meditation Center.

SPEAKER_03 32:02

You know, it makes me think of uh really truly applying Zen mind beginner's mind. All your beginners are Buddha. And if you can see them as such, you can bring them along no matter who they are.

SPEAKER_04 32:15

I certainly hope so. As you know, Shunriyu Suzuki Roshi, who is the founder of San Francisco Zen Center, very famously said and has been quoted, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few.

SPEAKER_03 32:34

Yes, yes. And you know, to follow the you were talking about opportunities. I think that one of the things that uh remains to be understood is in you know, in traditional Asian communities, uh the lay community is very generous, right? And we're having in America what I've always seen to be a class problem. It's a class problem. We don't understand that some people just don't have the time and the means. If you're uh you know your typical uh working class person earning minimum wage, if you're trying to keep a family together, you're probably working two jobs. You don't have time, you don't have money. And somehow or other when we um tend to take care, you know, work with donors, we of course are trying to make sure our centers and so on stay alive, but we need to find ways to go bigger. Um to to find ways where no matter who you are, especially if you're poor, like most of the communities that you serve, you don't have to invent stuff, you can figure it out, you can get there.

SPEAKER_04 33:55

Um, definitely I agree with that. And once again, if we're talking about diversity, equity, and inclusion, equity also indicates socioeconomic and class equity so that we can provide access not only to basic services that people need, also including opportunities for spiritual practice and going deeper in whatever our path may be.

SPEAKER_03 34:29

I'm gonna ask you one more question and then I'm gonna open it to questions because there's some very interesting people in the audience. And I would love for them to have an opportunity to interact with you. Who is the parent zeitgeist of ICE, of Christian nationalists, of um intolerance specifically affected your Dharma community? For example, in many of the communities that I'm familiar with, us white boomers, so to speak, are scratching our heads about what to do about to help others. But what about if the other is you and you feel you can get arrested? I mean, some of our com some of the people in Chicago here, for example, um Iranian students were were terrified that they were you know, it's it's not just uh that you're an illegal immigrant, but that they might get rid of you because they don't like your status. Um how has your community maintained its sanity in the last few months?

SPEAKER_04 35:46

Today is in April of 2026 to put a timestamp on what will be this recording. And I would say that my community at East Bay Meditation Center is, of course, struggling. We're struggling economically, we're struggling in terms of physical and mental health, and that having been said, I do a lot of or fair amount of multi-faith work, so I hope that I'm not offending anyone at this point. I am Buddhist, so I'll just say um the Dharma for me taking refuge in the Dharma, in the Buddha Dharma, the teachings of Buddhism, it provides the it provides the refuge, it provides the foundation for physical, mental, and spiritual wellness and wholeness that is needed during these times of multiple stressors. I myself was extremely impacted by the anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. And I was talking to my, I was zooming with my therapist, had to go onto Zoom with her, and she is white, and I was saying, I was saying, I'm losing mobility because I'm not leaving this apartment. I'm afraid to go out and even walk around the block because Asian Americans are being thrown onto subway tracks and killed and assaulted with knives and so forth while waiting for people, you know, the buses at the bus stops. Uh, that kind of thing was happening. I think there was a woman in New York in the early part of the pandemic. She was Asian uh descent and she was just minding her own business, waiting at a bus stop, and two people came up and set her on fire. So um, so I was saying to my therapist, I'm afraid to go out. And she said, Well, you know, you have to go out. It would be good for your health. Maybe, maybe just go out and and walk around the block. And I think you'd probably be safe enough. And I said, I just read last week that there was an Asian-looking woman my age who was thrown down on the subway tracks. In, I don't know, maybe it was even San Francisco, but run over uh with an oncoming subway training. And my therapist had said, stay inside.

SPEAKER_03 38:54

Stay inside.

SPEAKER_04 38:56

And uh and I live with my adult son, and he's he's always been very easygoing about, I mean, you know, we come and go, we're free people, we're adults. He's a middle-aged guy. However, after that started, the way we were affected is that even if I went out to mail a letter at the corner post uh office post box, postal box, he said, you always have to take your phone and it always has to be on, and we have to always be able to be in contact with one another at every moment. So this is only this is a personal story, and I can share it with you because it's my story. Now we're going to multiply that across the many identity categories of people that comprise my spiritual community who are targeted for oppression and for violence, for disrespect for being killed in hate crimes, across these different identity categories, and we can begin to feel the weight of the impact on our communities as well as uh it's it is it is multidimensional, and it is um it does result in trauma, which as we know can then kind of embed itself in us and proceed for generations.

SPEAKER_03 40:30

Before I pass you on to the questions, I can't help myself, but could you tell the story about your four-year-old son and the question he asked you about the flowers being trampled?

SPEAKER_04 40:40

Yes. So I've tried not to be proselytizing, but too bad. My only child was raised in a Buddhist household, and he was babysat by Robert Aitken Roshi, and he's known all these monks and nuns. We lived for a year at Green Gulch Zen Center in Marin County when he was between one and two. Then we moved here to Oakland, and it was one summer when he was in an art class, an art class in Berkeley. Um, and so uh I drove down there and I parked the car on the street, and we walked hand in hand to where the art class was, and we noticed there were these beautiful flowers that someone or a shopkeeper had planted in one of those squares in the sidewalk. There was a tree, and then someone had and they were just gorgeous, they had just bloomed, they were brightly colored, and and we just exclaimed, oh, how how pretty they are. And so I dropped him off, and then I came back a couple of hours later, and I parked right in that same area, and I went to uh get him from his class. And so we were walking back again hand in hand to where the car was parked, and we saw a group of teenage boys rough housing and and just pushing each other around and and being very uh they weren't being hostile to one another, they they were just boys forcing around, yes. And they came and passed us, and then when we passed where the flowers were, they had trampled on the flowers and broken them all, and they were they were all broken and beginning to die. And my son, who was four, was really angry, and he yelled at me, he was angry at me, and he said, Mom, how could this have happened? You told me everybody has a Buddha inside themselves. That was how I explained the concept of Buddha nature to a preschooler. I said, he said, every you told me everyone, how could they do that? How could they do that? And I stayed quiet, and then we got into the car, and I was driving, and he was in a funk in the back seat, strapped into his car seat, looking very, very angry. And I thought, well, you know, hey, I'm I'm driving, deal with it. And after a while, as we neared getting home, he said in a thoughtful voice, he said, I think those people were not aware of the Buddha inside themselves.

SPEAKER_03 43:47

Thank you. With that, uh, ladies and gentlemen, please, this is your opportunity to ask uh Mushim all kinds of questions or share some of your concerns, some of your stories. And by the way, at the end, Mushim, don't let me forget to make sure that people can reach you somehow to uh uh find a way to reach you. So, questions, comments, please. I know some of the people here, and I know you're smart, and I know you're dealing with all this stuff, so please go for it.

SPEAKER_04 44:19

Thank you. And also, you had suggested earlier I might read a Buddhist poem, and I'm prepared to do that uh as well.

SPEAKER_03 44:27

Okay, good. Good, good, good. Well, have it ready just in case people this is these people who are not shy. Oh, good. Hello, Alice. Please come along.

SPEAKER_01 44:43

Well, I will if uh if Patricia Mushim is Mushim, Patricia is not going to uh read the poem now. Um I had a question. You you described all the different identity groups that meet at the center, and then you said we provide an overall umbrella for these groups. And I wanted to hear more about that. What is the umbrella? What is it, you know, what does it look like? Is it a uh is it the board of directors? Is it, you know, what is there how how does that work, that there's an umbrella that helps them communicate across and all like that?

SPEAKER_04 45:31

That's a very good question. And I'll add on to that that before the pandemic, and we're now trying to make our way back, we also had uh we had groups for uh teenagers, and we had a group for families with young children. I was one of the rotating teachers for that since I have a lot of experience with peppy little kids who are running around and screaming. And I would also tea always team up with my martial arts master friend brother on that one because he's an expert with children and has some himself as well. So we were very good with the children. To answer your question, um East Bay Meditation Center is the umbrella 501c3 for these diverse groups. Because our mission is one of diversity and inclusion. So we recognize that people who identify in different ways may feel most comfortable practicing and doing Dharma discussion or discussion with people who share characteristics of that identity group. I mean, for instance, Asian Americans, that's such that I mean, in a certain way, no one even knows what it is because what we call Asia can be interpreted in so many different ways. However, in terms of the United States, which was formed on the basis of genocide and racism and slavery, um, yeah, it is a meaningful category. And so we might say that we're an umbrella group in terms of the very common concept out of, which is out of many come one. That we recognize the need for, I mean, people with screaming children are probably going to have different needs than people who don't want to hear screaming children and who need who need to have a lot of quiet. Um, and people who have the screaming children may need to have people babysit so then they can go off and have quiet in another room. And by all being together under the umbrella of East Bay Meditation Center, people do form relationships across the different groups. Before the pandemic, through physical proximity, you'd see one group coming out as your group was coming in, we'd see it on our websites, we'd see it in on our newsletter, and we would begin to uh to develop a sense of what was happening in these various groups. Sometimes the Dharma talks would be recorded, or you'd go into the center and you'd see artwork that the children had done. You get the idea, there would be ways of both physically and online recognizing to one another and saying, Hi, we're here. And and and diversity enriches us all.

SPEAKER_01 48:57

Yes. Thank you. That was very helpful.

SPEAKER_03 49:01

Thank you. Alice is here in Chicago with me, and she also works with Brenda, who is in the uh board of directors of the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy and fellow Cymbalian. Brenda, please.

SPEAKER_02 49:17

Thank you, uh, for your presentation. I have a question. Um I've been facilitating a bad for since 2014. And after the pandemic, I went in and from there all the future. My idea my future is to how much people um make you know, for meditating regularly, but they're just not worried to make any particular organization. Do you have any suggestions that should I leave that people be where they are, or should I should I encourage them to become a part of Shabbat?

SPEAKER_04 50:25

That's a really good question. And the way that we have um approached it through East Bay Meditation Center and also through my previous training at the Zen Buddhist temples of Ann Arbor and in Toronto and other Buddhist groups that I've been part of is through encouraging people to get involved, get involved as volunteers. Because then they feel more stake in the organization, and yet at the same time, they have a defined um job that doesn't mean in their minds that they're signing some contract of which I shall be your servant forever, but what if this is a cult kind of fear, which is not unjustified. And so inviting people in to do something that is boundried at the same time is an expression of Dana, of the Buddhist generous giving, and you know, all of the heritage temples, so-called heritage temples in the United States, they have huge numbers of volunteers who are always coming to do gardening, to womp up food, to do cleaning. My cousin, Reverend uh Mary Jiko Nakade, is priest of Daifukuji Soto Zen Mission Temple on the big island of Hawaii. They have one morning a week where they invite temple members to come and clean the temple, and most of the people who turn up are in their 80s, and they're moving giant like tables around and mopping floors, and and my cousin and I agreed, you know, they're the older generation. We can't stand up to them. Geez, they're so energetic, and they're joyful, and then they have snacks with the priest afterward. So that kind of um kind of lower stakes invitation in helps to ease the path. And then people sometimes become super volunteers, Brenda, and they'll say, I'm ready to take responsibility for like developing a whole infrastructure for something or other, or I'm an accountant and I'm going to offer you free accounting services. There, so to have that volunteer path that is very diverse at different levels of involvement is a way for people to develop confidence, to develop relationships, to develop a sense of leadership, and to develop a sense of loyalty to the organization.

SPEAKER_02 53:08

Thank you. Yeah, I've got that. It worked in Atlanta. I've got a couple of people who have gone through the whole uh train Shambhala training. One just started, he's been with me since 2015, and he just started with level one now, so I'm really happy about that. But then I have people all over in Canada and different parts of the country where there are Shambhala centers, but they're not they're not going. For various reasons. One is that they don't see people they've been there and they don't see people like themselves. Uh they didn't feel welcomed. Various reasons. So, but I wanted them to go beyond that.

SPEAKER_04 53:53

Well, there can be things like book clubs, small groups, um, that that can be on Zoom for people who are in different regions. So they might be close enough to get together too as they get to know one another and have coffee. And even if they're not, um, then they can develop relationships that, due to karma, Brenda, have unexpected consequences. I teach um a class series in the fall through East Bay Meditation Center called Path of the Bodhisattva. And we had small groups that were organized by a volunteer on Zoom, and one of those small groups were like, we really like each other, and so we're going to do meet once a month after this program ends on our own recognizance and study the Heart Sutra together, peer-led. And so one of the members of that group, Brenda, had gone on a long back solo backpacking trip, and then was at a train station in Los Angeles, California, waiting to take a train back home and saw a person walking across this vast train station, and it was a member of their Heart Sutra study group that they had only ever seen on Zoom, and recognized this person and called out their name and said, Hi, so-and-so, is this you? And it was that exact moment you can think of that's only a matter of seconds for that person to walk past and for this person not to be looking at their phone and to recognize the person and then to have the courage to call out their name. So all of these kinds of interconnections through book clubs, through sutra study, through nature walks, whatever is the common interest that will bring people together. Food is very good, um, that will bring people together. It, in my point of view as a Buddhist, it creates those seeds of connection and karma, which can manifest almost immediately or maybe not in our lifetimes, however, that have very beneficial deep consequences.

SPEAKER_02 56:09

Thank you. Thank you so much, Michelle.

SPEAKER_04 56:12

Thank you. I see one more hand up, and I don't know if we'll have time for a poem. However, I wonder we will.

SPEAKER_03 56:18

We will have time for a poem because I'm going to give you the last word, but after Harry asks this question, I have just a little bit more. So, Harry, please.

SPEAKER_00 56:29

Let me unmute myself. Aloha, Patricia. Hey Seth, aloha. Uh I'm I'm sitting here in Kohala on the side of the road. I'm friends with Jico. Um, and um I've sat with uh Aiken Roshi in Honolulu back in the 70s, and I know Green Gulch. That's what my main Dharma connection through Green Gulf. So I want to relate to you a quick uh uh thumbnail story of a teaching I received in a living room. Uh Carl and Elaine uh Yoneda. Uh he was Japanese, he uh he ran away from Japan and the and the uh the draft, so he didn't have to fight in uh China. Uh he married a Russian Jew called Elaine. Um the FBI shows up at their door. They have a three-year-old, Tommy Yoneda, mixed Tommy. FBI says, We're taking you to Manzanar. You don't have to go, lady. Elaine says, Oh no, I go with my family. She was one of the few European women in Manzanar in the camp. Um her her husband, Tom, or rather uh Carl, he goes off and serves uh Marine Intelligence as a translator in the Pacific Theater. One of the few. Um Elaine's hair turned white, this Russian Jew, Elaine's hair turned white, protecting little Tommy from the resentful internees she was sharing internment with. It was a real teaching in the universality of animus of our lower nature. Um and it's it's it has stuck with me ever since that the work is on ourselves, and I wanted to share that with you.

SPEAKER_04 58:26

Thank you so much. What a precious treasure story. Thank you very much.

SPEAKER_03 58:31

Thank you, Brett. Um, we're close to the end, and I will give Patricia the very last word so we can stay with the spirit of her poetry. But let me just say um one of the things that I was impressed uh by by the article uh that you wrote um in Lion's Roar is that um you actually end it this way. We're all going to need to be braver than some of us have been prepared to be. But brave in a sustainable way, remaining with our children, our families, and our communities. We need to build this new way of living together. How it functions, handles conflicts, makes decisions, peace and love, grieves and plagues. And we can't do that by burning it. So may we all do that. And before I pass the word to Patricia, I just want to invite all of you to join us on April 23rd. Um, at the same time, in the same place, we will send uh a Zoom. So please, if you're interested in following the um New Horizons and Engage Buddhism, simply write to me New Horizons and Engage Buddhism at gmail.com. And I will send you a list of the podcasts and uh telecasts that are coming, and I will let you know um via email what the zoom will be for that session. So, and it's interesting because what Tara um Tara White is gonna be uh Tara Brock is gonna be talking about um is not so much how not to burn out, but the other side of the equation, which is what is stopping us? What would propel us to be more engaged? So it's like the beginning of the question. Uh having said that, Mishim, please share uh with us um your is it dream world? I'll have to think. It has to do with haiku. It has a a certain term which I can't recall, but anyhow, it doesn't matter. Please, Grace is with your poetry.

SPEAKER_04 1:00:57

Thank you. So uh these this comes from a set of poems published in this book, which is called Cascadian Zen, like the Cascadian Mountains, Cascadian Zen, Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now, Volume 1, by a collective in um in Cascadia. And I was I was kind of included, I think I'm here in Oakland. I was asked to submit poetry during the pandemic years by an Asian American editor that they had at the time. And I said, Oh, thank you so much, but you know, I'm not in your watershed, I'm in Oakland. And the editor said, We'll count you in. So that was really nice. I was welcomed in to be an honorary Cascadian watershed member here in Northern California where I live, but a little farther down from the Cascades. And I've been working very slowly on a series of poems called the Heart Sutra Fragment Poems, taking in fragments from the Heart Sutra and through my lived experience as a practitioner. And I hope to finish maybe 12 of them and have them published as a set at some time. That's my goal. But three of them are published in Cascadians and Volume 1. So this is one of them. It's Heart Sutra Fragment 7. And it begins with an epigraph of a translation into English from one of my favorite poets, Italian poet Eugenio Montale, The Prisoner's Dream. And that line translated into English is my dream of you is not yet over. All dharmas are marked with boundlessness. Do not appear or disappear. Do not increase or decrease. At the funeral in the jazz nightclub in Oakland for a civil rights attorney, I recited the Diamond Sutra's last verse. Tonight from memory I hear, like a flash of lightning in a summer storm, foam on a wave, a dewdrop or a dream. So should we look on all conditioned things? It says we should, but I am as yet unable. So today, in the lines on the ground that is always burning, this prayer, Creator of my life, grant me freedom from greed. Give me eyes to see, the radiant mountain, the compassionate sea, have not been dreamed by me alone.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:20

Patricia, before I ask you to dedicate the merits in whichever way you do, can you tell people how to reach you? How can they find you? I know people are going to want more.

SPEAKER_04 1:04:31

Yes, I have a website with a contact feature, www.mushimeikata.com. www.m-usn Sam, H S N Harriet, I-M I K-E-D-A dot com.

SPEAKER_03 1:04:55

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. And more thank yous. That's one for all the various communities, you see. So would you like to lead us in dedicating the merit?

SPEAKER_04 1:05:07

Yes, this is thank you in American Sign Language. And my favorite dedication of merit comes from the dedication of merit chapter in the Bodhichary Vatra, the guide to the Bodhisattva's way of life by the great teacher Shanti Deva. Thus, by the virtue that has collected from all that we have done, may the pain of every living being be completely cleared away.

SPEAKER_03 1:05:41

Thank you. And see you all in our next podcast.