New Horizons in Engaged Buddhism
Podcast host Julia Sagebien interviews prominent engaged Buddhist thought-leaders about their lives, their aspirations, and their views on how Buddhist values and social action can help heal the world. This podcast is organized by the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy.
New Horizons in Engaged Buddhism
Episode 10: Host Julia Sagbien interviews Joshin Byrnes
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In this tenth episode in the New Horizons in Engaged Buddhism series, host Julia Sagebien interviews Joshin Byrnes. Joshin is a Zen priest and teacher at Bread Loaf Mountain Zen Community in Middlebury, Vermont, a hub of community-engaged practice with direct service programs that include an active daily drop-in center called Gather and transitional supported housing at The Grove. He holds street retreats and bearing witness practices across the country, informed by decades of experience in HIV/AIDS activism—including work with AIDS Action Committee in Boston and the San Francisco AIDS Foundation—as well as leadership at community-based philanthropic organizations, including The Vermont Community Foundation and the Santa Fe Community Foundation. Before founding Bread Loaf Mountain, he served as president, vice abbot, and chaplaincy training director at Upaya Zen Center. Earlier in life, he studied philosophy and theology as a member of the Dominican Order, a social-justice oriented Catholic community, and trained as a musician and musicologist.
So, welcome once again to an episode of New Horizons in Engage Buddhism. My name is Julia Sajbian, and this is the last uh presentation that we're gonna have for season one. We're still working on the possibility of season two, but we're not necessarily clear. And I am absolutely delighted to have the opportunity to interview someone whose experience of a lot of what we talked about is a form of what will you call it, radical intimacy or something was the word that he used, radical intimacy.
SPEAKER_03I think we talked dangerous intimacy. Dangerous, dangerous.
SPEAKER_00In in the sense that, you know, we all talk about everything that we might do for other people and so on and so forth. But at what distance? At what distance? And one of the reasons that I think this is very much a befitting way to end season one is because our guest today, Joshin Burns, really has brought in to his life, he lives the world of service, and he has a great sense of humor so he doesn't get too full of himself, which, as we all know, is extraordinarily important. Um, Joshin is a Zen priest, and he is the teacher at Bretloaf Mountain Center, Zen Community in Middlebury, Vermont, and he works as part of a hub of community at Bretloaf Mountain, um, where what they think about is no barriers. They have a temple that has no barriers, where the measure of a community is his capacity to care. And I was very impressed by the definition of the mission of Brett Love Mountain. Our mission is to transform suffering into wisdom. That's what we're all trying to do. And compassion by bringing people together from different life experiences to develop understanding and belonging, including those who feel marginalized, alienated, or isolated due to economic status, age, ability, health, or identity. This is how we realize the oneness of life. Perhaps we have thought of engaged Buddhism as having to do with the needs of other people. However, more and more it's becoming our own very need. Our need for community, a need for trust, a need for a place to cry, a need for a place to laugh, and a need for a place to feel we're cared for, and we have the agency to care for somebody else. So I am going to introduce you to Joshin, and we're gonna talk a little bit about his past. But what I really asked him to do was that to pretend he was writing a screenplay where he had to describe all the people that he works with, whether they're working as volunteers, as and priests, as anything, or people who actually are, I don't know what you call them, and you wouldn't call them clients, but community members, I imagine, in your various um communities and also in the street retreats that he actually conducts. Well, that being said, Joshin, welcome.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I'm so glad you've been doing this project. It's been wonderful to listen to your interviews. Really great. And I love your sense of humor as well.
SPEAKER_00It is helpful.
SPEAKER_03We've already laughed a lot, which is fantastic.
SPEAKER_00We just get to know each other and we know, oh, yeah, we'll have to play. We'll have to play. Um, that being said, can you tell us a little bit about your past, about how you came from being whomever you were in the environment that you grew up in right before you become a Zen practitioner? Tell us a little bit about where you came from.
SPEAKER_03Right before, like the night before?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, what were you doing? I saw you.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. No, well, um, life is funny, you know. Um, I grew up in Brooklyn, very poor, working class, Catholic, Italian, Irish family. Um, and uh figured out pretty early on I was a gay kid and always felt like a little bit of an outsider from the society that I lived in. But those Brooklyn years were actually really formative years for me in many ways, not only spiritually, because I I think I found some kind of refuge in Catholicism, oddly enough. Um but also because I learned a lot about community and family living in this um ethnic Brooklyn working class community. Like we had each other's backs. That was the experience. We just had each other's backs. And that stayed with me. Um later on, you know, part of it was trying to figure out. This was the 1980s now, so that late 70s and 80s, trying to figure out what it meant to be gay and then the society that we lived in then. Um and being Catholic, I had the very helpful out of joining the monastery as an option. So I went to a Benedictine monastery for two years when I was 19 to 21, and there got introduced to contemplative practice, which I really, really valued and appreciated, um, studied philosophy. Um, I was kind of escaping um Brooklyn in many ways. Uh, and then I joined a religious order called the Dominicans and took vows with them on uh until 1986, I believe, when I was about 26 years old. I met my partner there actually in the Dominicans. We're still together 44 years later. Um so it gave me many gifts. But one of the things I did in the Dominicans a lot was um, you know, the Catholics, there are branches of Catholicism that are very focused on the social teachings of Jesus and social justice, and I really cut my teeth on social justice with them. Um different kinds of activism, service projects, working in marginalized communities, and I really loved that work while I studied theology and trained to be a priest. But then I had a big like aha moment in a theology class where I realized I I couldn't represent the theology. Um I didn't believe it uh in my heart, even though I could preach it, which was a little scary moment actually, of realizing I could say something in a convincing way that I actually didn't believe inside myself. And that was a little moment of truth for me where I thought, this is dangerous. I can't live this kind of a lie. So I bailed out and uh my partner Bernie and I left. I became then a very devout atheist for a long time, and I went to graduate school for a while, and then started, this was in now the late 80s, I became an act up activist in New York, uh, where I was in graduate school, and then eventually transitioned into AIDS work, where I did that for 15 years on both coasts, and then um in about I can't remember what year, maybe 2000, I switched out of AIDS work into community philanthropy, where I worked with nonprofits and donors to make magic happen in communities. Um through that I maintained my atheism, but I then hit a classic midlife crisis moment, um loss of meaning in my life, feeling really pretty burned out, crispy, fragile, brittle. My relationship got in trouble through all. My partner and I had adopted three children from the foster care system, and they all had early trauma and a range of disabilities, and I was just way overextended. This like altruism that I had just went pathological, and it was a kind of pathological altruism, like, I'm gonna save the world. And of course, you can't save the whole world, right? You know. So um, so anyway, I went to a therapist and he was like, I think you need to reclaim your contemplative life. Like, I think you lost something when you left Catholicism. And so that sent me on a bit of a journey through yogic practice. I started, I looked east because I thought I had burned the bridge to the west. Um I I turned east, and there I eventually discovered, you know, at five o'clock in the morning before the kids got up, um, mindfulness practice, vipassana practice, reading a lot of books, um, starting my day with a regular practice. And eventually I found my way uh to Zen through actually hearing about Bernie Glassman's work. So maybe I can just say, pause there for a minute and just kind of say something about that moment of encounter. So I was working, I was the CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation, which is a statewide community foundation that puts organizations together, and it was like my first week on the job. And um the chair, the head of the Ben and Jerry's Foundation came to meet me, and that was a gentleman named Chuck Leaf, who some of you may know. Chuck eventually became the president of Naropa University. But anyway, Chuck was on the board of the Ben and Jerry's Foundation and on the board of Bernie Glassman's Grayston Foundation. And I was searching for a spiritual path, and I had tried Zen out, but it was a little too uptight, uh, a little too mean, it seemed to me. It wasn't warm. And I, you know, I'm I grew up in an Italian Brooklyn neighborhood. I needed warmth. And um and I didn't find it in my first encounter with Zen. But then Chuck said to me, you gotta learn here about this guy, a Jewish guy from Brighton Beach, who's taking Zen and turning it into a bakery uh that hires the unemployable. They don't hire people to make brownies, they make brownies in order to hire people. And I thought, oh, that's my path. It just clicked into focus. And so I did a deep dive into Zen, tried to learn about Bernie's work. Bernie didn't have a center at that point, and I still needed to work anyway, still had kids at home. So I wound up taking a job at the Santa Fe Community Foundation, a CEO job over there, which I took because I heard about Upaya Zen Center, which was started by Joan Halifax Roshi, who was one of Bernie's successors, and I thought, oh, there's a place for me to practice. So I made the shift, I started practice. I came to Zen very formal Zen practice and very late, only in 2009. Um, but I dove in kind of full-body plunge and lived at the Zen Center. I eventually left conventional work. I um became the president, vice abbot, and chaplaincy director at Upaya Zen Center and did my training there. Um uh and then in 2017, when I went through what we call Dharma Transmission, um, became authorized as a teacher. Uh, I then started Breadloaf Mountains and community. So that's kind of the arc.
SPEAKER_00It's interesting when you talked about how scary it is to know that you can sound incredibly convincing speaking about profound things like the Dharma, but actually not really A, understand them and might be, might really not quite get it. And I used to call that karaoke dharma. And I refused to teach for a couple of years until I felt that I wasn't doing karaoke dharma because I couldn't stand it. It's like I can be very convincing, but oh my god, do I really know what it means? Um, so I I highly I highly respect that sentiment. So here we are in Breadloaf Mountain. Um, first of all, why don't you describe it to us? Show us your world. As I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast, and the the podcast will actually not become visual. But what we can do is as you show us your place, you can describe it so that the people who only won't have image and actually get to hear it, get to see it. So Joshin is gonna take us through the place that he has created along with the other people that work with him. However, I do want you to think to realize that like many of the things that Joshin has described already, he's kind of like uh your friend uh Diken, you know, the friend that uh yeah, you guys are hub people.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's interesting.
SPEAKER_00You're very hub-like. You manage to have everything, you know, you connect with the people, with the money, with the people, with the needs, with the people, with the vocation. And then you kind of keep all these kind of uh uh concentric circles of care happening.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, interesting. And Dyken and I share a very poignant moment actually together, uh, where uh the day after the day Bernie Glassman died, um I went down uh to his home and uh we uh washed Bernie's body and uh clothed, dressed him together.
SPEAKER_00And that's because I'll tell you.
SPEAKER_03It's a very touching moment. And I have deep respect for Dyken's work. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Amazing guy. Okay.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so maybe for sure. Let me explain that. The the vision I always had was to fully integrate all these things that we often hold separate, like the meditation hall, and meditation happens in one part of our lives, and then we go to another part of our lives and we do quote-unquote service uh to others, and you know, there's giving over there, and there's work over there, and there's family over there, and we live these kind of um often disconnected parts of our lives. And in particular in Zen, it always bothered me a bit, actually, that we think that practice is the time only on the cushion. And the Zen teachings are really clear about this. Practice is your life, practice is all of life, it's all of life. So I thought, well, maybe we can manifest all of life right here. So our campus, we have a campus that has a at the center of it. I'll take you into it. In the center of it is a um meditation hall that looks fairly traditional. And in fact, on our altar, the all our temple equipment, in fact, came from Bernie Glassman's uh temple. Um his wife Eve gave it to us to hold and steward uh after he died.
SPEAKER_00And on our listeners, the walls are very white, the place is impeccably clean, there's a lot of wood, and it's very elegantly and simply arranged.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, so very zen in that way. There's an aesthetic. Uh, we think beauty is an important part of um a dignifying quality of life. And um, and so here on our altar, we have our Buddhas facing each other because we draw on the second chapter of the Lotus Sutra, actually, a Buddha and a Buddha. Buddha bows to Buddha, that Buddha is only manifesting as Buddha when Buddha is in relationship with other Buddhas. So this is the heart of Community Zen for us. Um and so that sits on our altar. I I wrote an article about this in Lion's Roar, if you ever want to look it up, about the day that we made this shift, which is a moment where I was just crushed by yet another war breaking out somewhere in the world. And I thought, if our practice doesn't teach us how to look each other in the eye and face each other, then we're screwed. You know, like that's what practice has to teach us. How do we look at each other and be in each other's company? And so that's when we changed the Buddhas in this direction. So this is our meditation hall, very simple. But where I was, just right through this tiny threshold, is our drop-in center called Gather. And here we practice, our practice is to open the door and to welcome everyone under every and any condition of life. Um, so people come in all day long, some go to Middlebury College, some uh are elderly people, many are living uh outside or homeless underneath the bridge or in the woods in the area, many live in um mental health housing in town. What maybe everyone has in common is they really want to reconnect with other people. They've felt alienated, they've felt lonely, they've felt left out. And we're just creating a welcoming space for the spiritual practice of hanging out. We think of that as a spiritual practice, like just hanging out with each other. And it feels to me like we can't make any progress toward putting our fractured world back together until we really want to be with each other. And how do we learn to be with each other? By being with each other. And you get interested in each other and you become invested in each other's well-being. And so that's what we're doing at Gather. So people come in, um, they don't have to be sober, they don't have to be clean. We have showers, laundry, always lots and lots of food, and a very big table. People always gather around the table. Um we think of this coffee area as the second altar of Redloaf Mountain. Um, and we treat the coffee maker just like we treat the incense box on the altar, uh, which is we hold it with two hands, we see it uh as a dignifying part of our practice together. It brings us together. And then there's a little warming kitchen in this parts. This gets a lot, a lot of use every day. And then a lovely room over here that is um recovery meetings or people who want some, just want to talk quietly because something's happened in their life, or they want to come and be alone and read a book. This is all available to them as well. And so then so I mentioned to you that the meditation hall is right in the center, and that's by design. And so on the other side of the meditation hall is this long corridor, and this has um, you'll see there's our Han and the old Zen block of wood we use to call people to meditation. But down this hallway are bedrooms, laundry, and a crafts room. And then right next door, we also bought the property right on the other side of those windows right there, and that is an apartment complex with four units in it that can house, some of them are two-bedroom units, and there we provide um supported transitional housing to people coming out of prison, people coming out of homelessness, and people coming out of domestic violence situations. So, right now we have um a guy uh living upstairs who spent seven years inside. He's transitioning back into the community, um, and he's learning kind of how to do that after being inside for a long time. We have a woman and a and a one-year-old baby who got out of an unsafe situation and domestic violence living there, and we have a woman who's now been stably housed for a couple years after a long period of homelessness. And um we try to integrate all of this, like this is all of life. This is Zen. We don't privilege one part of this over any other part, it is all kind of equal, and we try to put it all in kind of one vibe, you know. Um and the the vibe is kind of um we bring our caring attention to all of it. That's that's what we're trying. To do.
SPEAKER_00Who's your staff if there is such a thing? Or your volunteers or your fellow Zen practitioners?
SPEAKER_03So we're not staffed. So we have no paid staff. I mean, I do get a small living stipend as the guiding teacher, but I do the fundraising. I do the kind of property management. I work with one of my students who's local to coordinate, gather volunteers. We don't call them volunteers actually. We call them friends. Everybody here is a friend. And then we have residents. We have one long-term resident, but we have other residents who come for periods of time, three months, six months, a year, two years. And depending on their skill set, they take on different responsibilities and tasks for periods of time. And then our local Sangha are timekeepers from we have meditation seven days a week. Many homeless people come to meditation here actually, first thing in the morning. That and a good cup of coffee and get to use the bathroom. And yeah, so we have people who have lived outside who offer to come and cook, who do help us with cleaning sometimes. One guy who uh we met, we had an encampment in our backyard last summer, and a couple of the people from the encampment, it all fell apart. It was a very interesting process. I can tell that story at some point because we brought council process to the encampment. But we had an encampment in our backyard, and um one of the guys who lived in the encampment still lives outside. He's comes to Sishin with us, he's come on two street retreats with me, and he comes to meditation every single day.
SPEAKER_00Wow.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, comes to our documentary.
SPEAKER_00Almost like a boundary-less community where the practice is encouraged within what people can, and and nobody is almost, though there is a process that leads towards sanity, there's no hierarchy.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, you have to have some hierarchy, like I have to decide like how much money we need, and of course, of course, of course, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean more like you're not uh you know wearing a white coat and and you're like doctor, you know, and No, no, no.
SPEAKER_03So that's really important. We never treat people as a client. There are no, we don't ask people their diagnoses, there's we accept people completely as they are, however they identify themselves. We never probe into um um what kind of uh yeah, how they've been labeled. We do we do not care how they've been labeled by others. And that took some time for people to trust. Like, don't you need to know that I qualify for food stamps or I qualify for you know HUD housing? But like, that doesn't matter. You're welcomed here regardless. And people have relaxed as they come to realize that because they're not seen as their diagnosis. We don't force that identity onto them, they can be free.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, you know, two things occur to me that when I teach meditation instruction, the number one instruction for the new instructors is when somebody walks into the room, it's the first time in their life where they're not judged. Yeah, that's who do that, they will understand meditation. And the second one is when I was in college, I did a uh residency at a state hospital where my graduate project was to think about uh the way that the staff labeled everybody, and it became kind of a mediated relationship through the diagnosis. And we were actually uh looking at the the staff themselves and the way that you can use the system to create distance.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Um, it was overwhelmingly interesting. The sad part, yes, I was very much supporting the transition of people who did not have to be sheltered and warehoused, but we didn't provide them a place to be, like in New York these days, the homeless situation. And you realize these folks should be somewhere where they're cared for. You know, and unfortunately, there are places such as yours where they can be cared for without being boxed, which kills you anyhow.
SPEAKER_03Do you know what I think uh this is interesting? You said that kind of distancing thing. So that's one of the dynamics we play with here. So we try to reduce as much as possible the difference between somebody who comes here to volunteer and somebody who comes here as a guest. And the reason for that is, you know, listen, I'm I'm a big fan of volunteers and helpers and people doing things. But as a Zen practice, um we're trying to minimize and ultimately eliminate those things that distinguish us from one another so that we can see into, we can reflect into each other and know and understand the oneness of life, the interconnected nature of our lives. And so we, you know, there's something about helping culture. This is where we talked about dangerous intimacy, you know, right? So many of us will love to go volunteer in places, and we do it one day a week or one day a month, and we've done good charitable work, and that's great. I don't want to um dissuade anybody from doing that, but I think as Zen practitioners, there's like another step, you know, like if we think of that as a concentric circle toward full um boundless inclusion or something like that, that we can even let go of the helper and helped dualism and begin to explore what it's like to let go of our helper identities. That's a big gather is not really a service for homeless people in many ways. It's a service to those of us who have gotten very used to having positions of priva of privilege and power in society, um, where we've wrapped our identity about being one of the good guys who's out to change the world and help the world. Uh it's like great. And, and who are you beyond helper? Who are you when you're really just one with the person right across from you? Where you're a Buddha and a Buddha. Uh nothing more and nothing less than that. So sometimes this mindset we have is that, you know, I'm so privileged, I have so much, I'm highly educated, I'm middle class, I have money, I have skills, I should go help somebody. Great. And sometimes that um becomes a barrier, and it's a way we maintain safety and that little bit of distance from each other so that we can feel kind of safe in our identity. And I think these practices bring us into the danger of intimacy. You know, it should feel like something is at risk. What is that thing that is at risk when we let go of those identities, you know? Um, and that's ego there, right? That that's the edge that we're trying to explore, letting go of. Um, and it's scary for people. It's really scary. Shouldn't there be a more of a boundary here, you know? Uh just an example is how often do we, as nice, good people doing good things in the world, sit down and listen to someone who's really suffering, and we get to ask them all the questions about their life. Oh, how did that happen to you? Oh, you know, that must be very, very sad. Oh, I'm really sorry that happened, you know. Uh, where we never put any of our own vulnerability on the table. We put our pity, we put our sympathy, but very little of ourselves gets in there. And part of what Gather is experimenting with as a Zen practice, we're not a social service organization, but as a Zen practice is how we become more and more embedded in each other's lives. So it's important for us that this isn't a one-off experience, that we're open multiple days a week, we come back over, just like Zen training. Every day you come back and you do the same thing again and again and again, 10,000 times, because in that process you're letting go of something, and that's what the gather practice is. It's really very much like temple training in a Zen monastery.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And tell me something. How all of a sudden you're on the streets doing your street retreats. How many have you done? Where? Who comes to be with you? Are different places different? Is it different to do it in Memphis than it is to do it in San Francisco? What's it like?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, good. And by the way, this whole project is born out of my street retreat practice. So, you know, the three tenets of a Zen Peacemaker are not knowing, bearing witness, and then naturally emerging action out of not knowing and bearing witness. And so this is what emerged out of street bearing witness on to life on the streets. Um that said, I've done maybe 35 or 40 street retreats all over the country. Um, I was in New York last month, Manhattan. I'll be in San Francisco in December for Rohatsu. I do the Rahatsu Sishin out on the streets. Rahatsu is um the Mahayanists, many of the Mahayana schools celebrate the Buddha's awakening the first week of December. In Zen tradition, we do eight days of silent retreat, Sashin. I take people out on the streets for those eight days. So we are in practice for um eight solid days um living on the sidewalks.
SPEAKER_00Um you have sleeping bags, uh, boxes, do you have anything?
SPEAKER_03We find we we look for cardboard. Cardboard? Cardboard. Yeah, some I I sometimes bring a plastic tarp because of the rain or something like that. But anyway, I've been New York, Boston, Rutland, Vermont, um uh Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Nashville, Tennessee, um Santa Fe, New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago. Um, and I'll I'll go anywhere, actually.
SPEAKER_00Um people invite you or you decide to go somewhere?
SPEAKER_03I just decide to go. And then I invite people to come with me. And there's a structure, you know, Zen likes structures. So there is a structure. There's a way the day begins and ends, but largely we're practicing with the three seals, with um uh sign aimlessness, signlessness, and emptiness. We wander, we're just wandering without much identity, without being helpers.
SPEAKER_00Individually or in group? Always in group, always in group, about seven, eight?
SPEAKER_03The um two, three. I I I've twice made the mistake of bringing 14. That's too many. Yeah. So New York last month was 14. Um, and um, but I usually try to keep it to eight maximum.
SPEAKER_00Um you're not overwhelming as a group.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, a number of things. One is it's very hard to process the experience with that many people. Second is we're a big strain on soup kitchens where we go get food, and I don't want to strain, so we often wait to be the end of the line. Um, and we can put a big strain uh on places. We never sleep in shelters, uh we always sleep outside because we don't want to take up beds.
SPEAKER_00But we go out of men, women, old, young, white, black, Hispanic, everybody.
SPEAKER_03Queer, straight, straight, hands, you name it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Okay.
SPEAKER_03And um, this is a practice that Bernie Glassman started. It kind of like a living call on practice in a way. You just drop in, um, and you're a little disoriented by it because you have all these assumptions. You have all this knowing, you know, you think you know what it's all about. For me, a lot of the process is when I go out there, the first day is always about my outrage at the systems that allow this to happen. I always, this 40 street retreats in, I still have to deal with those feelings. You know, like how could it be that we live in a city, in a, in a country that has its first trillionaire, and this many people living in abject poverty on our streets and shit and in squalor? Like, how do we allow that? So I have to, I confront a lot of you know, my values, my assumptions, my biases, who the bad guys are, who the good guys are, who the perpetrators, victims, bystanders. I'm doing all this stuff in my head. And it's really helpful to see all of that, you know, and to ultimately recognize, you know, the emptiness of it all, really. Um that doesn't mean your heart isn't broken, it still breaks, you know, you still come to the end of that retreat and and you get to go home. And you leave people behind. And you have to grapple with the truth of that, you know, and our complicitness in it all.
SPEAKER_00I did a lot of Cuba work, and I am Cuban, right? And uh I would always remind my Canadian colleagues, because I'm a uh mostly Canadian, but also American uh academic, that the difference between them and the Cubans is that they could leave. The Cubans couldn't, and they have to be so different, so, so careful because they don't understand the conditions in which people have to remain. And maybe they had a great time drinking rum and dancing, but they're staying and they're not drinking rum and dancing all day. And it it's that kind of communing and understanding the pain of being almost trapped in a situation for which you probably not necessarily created.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and in some vast way, through all our ancient twisted karma, we are also responsible for all of it. Right? We we can't deny that either. This is not someone else's problem, it's not someone else's suffering, it's ours, and it's our collective opportunity to awaken. Um and I really believe that. Um and and that's what I'm trying to open up in myself when I'm out on the streets.
SPEAKER_00Um it's interesting because you do bring and then you bring it home by living in it. It's almost like, well, I don't stay in it, but they can come with me.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Well, I there's always this kind of thing I often describe the end of street retreat, is for many people, it's like the toothpaste comes out of the tube, you know, like you can never put it back in. Once you plunge into that setting, into those conditions, and you're bearing witness, opening yourself, grokking, becoming one with that situation as best we can, um, you will never see the streets in the same way again. Uh, you'll you it's very hard after that to actually just walk by somebody who's begging and not notice them like we used to before. Uh and you feel the tug and the sorrow of that. Uh and that begins to cultivate kind of the awakening spirit in us, you know? Like, I want a better world for everyone, including those folks.
SPEAKER_00Every time I'm living in Chicago now, and every time I see a Latin American woman, mostly they tend to be old, you know, they look old and maybe they're only 30 something, and they have three children, and they're selling chiclets on the street. The way I look at them is it could be me, it could be my mother, you know, and I've made it into a practice of well, I I'll cross the street. Today I stopped in the bank so I could have some money. And I come and I give them money, and I say hello to the kids, and I check their hands, and I give them a dollar, and it's like, my god, that could be me. Could be my mother.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, I'm kind of channeling Bernie right now, who might say might say, uh, guess what? It is you're child. Yes. And we say it in the Meta Sutta: just as a mother keeps her only child from harm, so will I. You know, it's like, yeah, and this is in the Christian scriptures, it's it's the Beatitudes, it's in the great world religions. This is the theme of all of it. You are it, and it is you.
SPEAKER_00Um and this kind of brings me to a topic you were talking about when I said to you, I'm coming to Vermont, I'd love to come see you, and you say, Come on Saturday. Yes, what do you do Saturday? Why don't you tell us what you do Saturday?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, Saturday is really fun because it's again, I think, another like expression of Zen. Um so we had we open the doors like we do every day, but Saturday is known as Music Day, a community jam session is what it is. Um so people come with all kinds of instruments, fiddles, recorders, guitars, bass, uh ukulele's, you you name it, it shows up, and their voices, and we just start singing songs for hours. And every division disappears. Rich and poor, uh, you know, well and unwell, sober and in recovery, uh, or sober and actively using, like you name it, all those distinctions disappear. And all we're doing is engaging in action together. And it's beautiful, it's creating something beautiful. People love it, they feel like they have the capacity to create a world like this because they are creating a world like this. It's a very embodied experience for them, uh, for all of us. And uh it's great. And at the end of every week, we also do a quick impromptu memorial service where we ask everybody, who are you grieving? Who's lost, who have you lost, who died? And people will share names of people who overdosed, or a great musician that they admired died, or they heard about some war in some part of the world and they're grieving the children that were killed in a school that was bombed in Iran, you know? The whole world comes together. And then uh we sing, uh, you know, may the circle be unbroken. And you know, there's not a dry eye in the house. I mean, people feel the connection to the world in those moments. And I think that's Zen. I think that's the heart of what Zen is about.
SPEAKER_00It's it's redemption through community. Absolutely. Redemption through love, redemption through belonging. And that will be very much what all of us have to learn to do in the coming years. How are we going to provide each other a moment of redemption together?
SPEAKER_03I also think it's a place where people touch their awakened nature, you know, just to use Buddhist language about it. It's like this is enlightenment. This is what Dogen calls practice enlightenment. It's in the doing of it that we understand our enlightenment, you know? Um, it's not some abstract, theoretical, out there mystical fireworks kind of thing. No, it's in the actual fulfillment of the interconnected nature of our ever-changing lives, like to recognize that's what it is and that's what we're in together. And you know, I think that's just an embodied experience of the awakened mind. I love that there's a famous philosopher named Peter Herschak. I don't know if you ever read his book. It's a very, very heady, heady book, like way above my pay grade. Um, but in it, it's a book called Liberating Intimacy. It's like we use this word intimacy in Zen. What is it? How are how do we free the natural intimacy that we've separated ourselves from? He uses jazz as the example, free jazz, which is a bunch of players who start just listening to one another. That's all they're doing. And then their music starts to bounce off against one another. And then before you know it, 30, 40 minutes into it, they're vibing, man. They are in it, they're in the groove. And everybody is their own sound, everybody's improvising, you know, everybody's using their own skills, everybody has their own timbre and style, but they're vibing. That's that's the experience right there. And so that's that's kind of what we're recreating here in the mornings, right? Uh it's just like, okay, let's all get together and sing. And this is our awakened life. You know? And what happens, what happens over time though, let me just say this, because we've been doing gather now for four years, um, very consistently. What happens is people begin to experience um that the community has their back. That's what changes for them. People who felt like nobody in this community cares about me, they don't care if I'm dead or alive, they don't care if they never see me again. They start to feel like I would be missed. You know? Like the community w will catch me if I fall. And I we notice that happening as the years go on.
SPEAKER_00The only thing I can say once again is that I'm happy that you're the last one in the series because it it's about the inescapability, inescapability of our collective and what we can do to make it joyous for everyone by diving into the pain of the others, which is a very strange way to make it happen, but that is the dharma.
SPEAKER_03That is it.
SPEAKER_00That is it.
SPEAKER_03I think the Buddha said something like that, actually, right?
SPEAKER_00I'm sorry, I uh I'll put a copy, I'll put a footnote, I promise, but uh so let's open it up to questions and comments from our small audience here. There will be an audience online as a podcast, but we have our friends here. Um, anybody have anything to contribute, to add, to question? I don't know, Jeff, but it looks like he's wearing a Zen robe, or is he wearing a particularly interest house robe?
SPEAKER_03Jeff, wearing a sumway from Vermont.
SPEAKER_02Beautiful down here in Marlborough, Vermont. Thanks for making time for this great talk tonight. Um uh and part of the Vipassana community down here as well. Um, I I came this evening to um to bridge the gap that I feel exists right now between so many communities of faith and the startling uh trillionarific world in which we currently live, um, where we can have uh you know 40% of the population not having enough money for one ER visit and a guy who can buy Mars tomorrow. And and how we allow that to exist, I think, is our responsibility. Not the fact that it does, but how we allow it to. Um I came tonight because I wanted to. Um we've been we've started a small group down here called uh Buddhists for peace. It's not a very clever name, but it's the it's the banner we march with, a very plain banner we march with, and all the rallies down here and trying to create a more just and equitable world. Um I came here for inspiration tonight, and I'll just say I got it. So um the kinds of things that you're doing up in Middlebury. Um, I may I may pay you a visit. I'll wear I'll wear better clothes, I promise. Um but uh let's go on a it's the Vipassana community. We we wear sweats, people. I'm sorry, is what we do.
SPEAKER_01Um that's what I'm wearing.
SPEAKER_02But I mean there is so much to do. And Brattleboro, as you probably know, is a town with tons of its own concerns right now. For those of you who don't live in Vermont, we're one of the places that uh, you know, we have a great deal of issues with housing and security, food insecurity. I mean, one one out of every four Vermonters uses the food bank at least once a year. That's that's Vermont. And Brattleboro just kind of concentrates that because we do have an attempt at a compassionate community, which which brings, I think, some of the some of the issues into more stark relief and hopefully makes it harder to just walk past them and ignore them, but I'm not sure that it does. Um anyway, I just want to say thank thanks for making the time. It's it's it's remarkably inspiring to hear the work you're doing, and I uh I'll uh I might call you up and say how to make that happen down here as well.
SPEAKER_03Please, please, please do. Um, you know, you mentioned this word bridging. I I want to kind of address that a little bit because I think we're trying to do a couple things too. One is I offered a um for two cycles, a two-year-long um kind of exploration of our relationship to money, where we looked at our personal relationship to money, our communal, like as a community locally, our relationship to money and resources, and then structurally and systemically in economic systems. What do we participate in? And over the two years, people do a number of exercises like live on a food stamp budget and uh give money away freely without any strings attached, and it's a whole bunch of things that we do. And part of that is because I'm very concerned about the economic divide. That's really the focus of my kind of teaching. Um, is I uh is just the the wild um economic disparities that that we see and everything that ripples out from that. And I think part of it is we have to come to terms with this part of our lives we rarely talk publicly about. How much money do you have? And where is it? And what do you do with it? You know, we're it's such a private part. It's like more private than our sex lives. And you know, we we don't talk about it. And um and and and there, unless you have a lot of it and then you brag about it. But uh, but if you're very poor, you're kind of ashamed of it, you know. It's just a whole thing. And it's been really interesting to be going through that process with Dharma practitioners about how difficult it is to actually talk about our money histories, um, our lifelong relationship to money, the way it's shaped, the way we see the world, think of the world, the way we divide up the world in our own mind, um, uh who we align ourselves with and who we set ourselves against. It's a really interesting exploration. The second thing, bridging, I would say, is you know, Zen in America is still very, very new as far as Buddhism goes. But I've been concerned about um that, you know, I'll call it the the the Buddhist industrial, the Dharma industrial complex, you know, that we have bought into the economics of our place and even the bad economics, the harmful economics of our place. How often we're selling books and becoming famous and building huge retreat centers that charge $800 or $1,000 for a few days to get away from it all, the kind of co-option of the of the self-help industry, all the self-soothing that's done through these centers, and it's become, you know, an enclave of liberal, elite, high-net worth individuals. And um, okay, it's part of an evolution. What I am hoping for is that there are many more experiments going on, that we take some risk to really try other models than the retreat center model, and we maybe fail brilliantly at them. So we don't do retreats here, we don't charge any money for anything that we do. We don't know that we'll survive. It may not survive. That is kind of irrelevant to me. What I'm interested in is like, can we just try something a little different? Uh, can we elevate some other part of the narrative about who we think we are? And what are we doing when we get together? And so our we named the No Barriers Temple the No Barriers Temple for a reason, because we really want to start reducing all these kind of invisible barriers that Dharma in the West has put in place. And I think this is a major thing for Western convert Buddhists to really be thinking about in a very deep way. And it's, yes, it's about race and it's about gender and stuff, but it's also about money and economics. And that part of the conversation, I think, um, doesn't get elevated uh often enough in our discussions about what we're doing as Dharma practitioners in the West.
SPEAKER_02I appreciate you saying that. And I'm really grateful for the conversation on money as well, because I do think about that that kind of elite, that elite core that has the money stashed away somewhere that still is going to bow every morning. And it's and it's it's okay to have that and to alleviate that suffering, but where's that money sitting and with whom is it sitting and what are they doing with that? Are they funding a war in Iran? Are they funding data centers that are taking away energy and water from communities? Are they putting it back in the community? And that's that's something else I think that it's part of the the to say that every every $100 bill had at least some trace of cocaine on it. Um, you know, there's at least some trace of of shadow of war and of war and uh the continuation of hierarchy right now on every dollar bill out there.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, well, one of the things, so I worked in philanthropy for a long time, and one of the systems analysis pieces I have and critique I have of the philanthropic industrial complex is hidden behind the virtue of philanthropy. If you look, the vast majority of philanthropic capital in the United States, which is hundreds of billions a year, goes onto Wall Street in endowments. Really? And so have we ever thought about where all that invested money is in the world and what's it doing in the world? So when I was the CEO of the Vermont Community Foundation, I asked that question. I said, okay, you know, back then we were small, we had like $70 million. I was like, sh where is that $70 million? They said, oh, it's in large cap, small cap, it's invested in this, invested in that. I said, but what where? And we did the analysis. And guess what? Our top like three or four equity holdings were chopping the tops off mountains in Appalachia, was slave-based labor, diamond mining in Botswana, and oil, uh, Royal Dutch Shell in Darfur during a famine. And that those three holdings were larger than our total grants budget for the year. So you tell me what philanthropy is doing in the world, you know, and where is that analysis? We hide behind these virtues, you know. Oh, it's charitable giving. But when an organization has a billion-dollar endowment, that money is doing something in the world. It's active money, and it's often doing an enormous amount of harm. You know, so I think we as Buddhists also have a place in that conversation. I mean, look who's practicing Buddhism in the United States. It's very high net worth individuals, often, not always, but often, who have a lot of influence and power and are trying to live ethically mindful lives. And I think what's happening with our money should be part of that. Sorry, I don't mean to get on my like high horse about it. No, this is like starting.
SPEAKER_02This is great. No, I appreciate that. I appreciate the feedback. I would give the floor to other folks, but this I'm I'm gonna come visit you. This is too important.
SPEAKER_00This is the next wave, and I do hope I'm going to Vermont myself soon, and in September sometime. And I do hope that we have an opportunity to engage in the conversations of um the Tibetans talk about prajna, you know, which is clarity, of being able to understand the environmental, social economic construct that we take as given because it's falling apart. And what's fantastic about something falling apart is that it gives you an opportunity first to see what was there. You know, people immediately want something else, but they haven't examined what's there. Um, for myself, I do think that understanding economics and class, you know, the fact that the current lower classes who are being left out are voting against their own economic interests, it really tells you how confused the situation is. And how it's true the Dharma has become uh that which you must be able to afford. Um, and it's becoming prohibited even for a middle class professional such as myself. So I can't imagine what's going to happen as the situation gets worse and worse and worse for those who don't have assets. If you have liquid assets, you know, if you have real estate or if you have investments, you'll be fine. If you don't, you're out. So let's get radical, let's have radical compassion. A rat what is it? Dangerous intimacy. I'm so excited. I can't wait. Let's do, let's get, let's get risque, let's talk to each other. Let's not do anything, let's talk to each other, let's see how we can inspire each other and and take the conversation further. I do think that Buddha Dharma provides a logic that is so antithetical to capitalism as the as the best that ego can do. That it is our responsibility to begin to talk about a different way, and not because we think we're better, but because we are like everybody else. And if it's not you, it's me, and we're both. So thank you. I'm very excited and very happy. And if indeed we do do uh a season two, I hope it's radical, and I hope it's intimate, and I hope we can take all these discussions further, and maybe the format will be different. Maybe we'll have salons. Who knows? That being said, Joshin, I cannot thank you enough. And I know that this is not possible, but like I left with Dykin, can't you just franchise what you do so then more people do it? Can't you just like let's make more burgers? We have to. What you're doing is so useful, not just for other people, but you make me proud of Zen. If Zen is what you described, I hope I can never be a good enough person to be a Zen practitioner. It's crazy. I am, I am, because no, you actually do it. I do a lot of talking. That's what I do, that's my job. I'm a talking head. You actually get there. But I have to have a talking head, or other people are not gonna hear about you. So hey.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_00Muchas gracias, yes.
SPEAKER_03Uh my friends, thank you. Yeah, and um, yeah, if I came off as too strong, I my apologies.
SPEAKER_00I love it. It was passionate, it was decent, it was direct, and it was dangerous, and it was intimate, and it was radical, and it was loving and full of joy. And if I come see you, I'll bring a guitar. Great, and um thank you to everyone. Thank you, Kandia, for your magnificent work on series one, and yay! And thanks to Seth Sagal from the Buddhist Coalition for Democracy for facilitating all the internal processes of putting the series together. Thanks for Kate, who has use today here and it's been very useful. Leslie Yerman, who's actually been working on the podcast, and I think Leslie too on making these things well known in social media. That being said, I hope that this lifetime and others we can continue being friends.
SPEAKER_03Okay, maybe so.
SPEAKER_00Like, okay, yeah, thank you all.
SPEAKER_03Thank you, Julie.