The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

The post The Other Dr. Ambedkar appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

 The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong
By Gyalo Thondup and Anne Thurston
PublicAffairs; April 2015
301 pp.; $27.99 (Cloth)

In the winter of 2001, I lived in the foothills of the Himalayas in the Darjeeling District of India, while studying under the Kagyu lama Bokar Rinpoche. Every night I looked out across the valley, with my one-year-old son and his father, to the town of Kalimpong as its electricity cut out. With so little to measure or mark our days, this became a kind of event, something we anticipated. The only thing I knew then about Kalimpong was that its egg noodles were fresh, delicious, and famous. But just how famous, I had no idea.

As it turns out, most residents of Kalimpong were also unaware of their noodles’ origins. Only when Gyalo Thondup, the Dalai Lama’s older brother, took up a more permanent residence there in 1999, did his identity as the noodle maker become known. And yet even with the publication of his memoirs, The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, Thondup remains a fiercely private man. Given his position as a political attaché, it’s evident that his skillful tact has been exactly what’s allowed him to serve the people of Tibet for so many decades.

It is a sense of duty and honor that has inspired Thondup to put his experience in pursuing Tibetan visibility and diplomacy to the page. He does so despite his anticipation of controversy and criticism from all sides—“Tibetans, Chinese, Indians, Americans, the CIA.” But, as he claims throughout the book, in the face of impossible decisions, he has always made those he thinks best for Tibet.

Thondup, who was born in in Amdo in 1929, has led a rich and intriguing life. The resulting memoir is part cosmopolitan spy novel and part heartbreaking tale of an uprooted, often-betrayed refugee.

“Of the five male siblings who lived to adulthood, Gyalo Thondup alone did not become a monk,” writes coauthor Anne F. Thurston in the introduction. “Instead . . . he was groomed to serve his brother on matters of the state.” This education began in earnest in 1945, when Thondup was sent to China to study, but not before making his way to India first. At the twilight of British rule, Calcutta was a thriving, modern city, in which the teenage Thondup, coming from rural, religious, and insulated Tibet, was exposed to not only Charlie Chaplin movies and five-star hotels but also paved streets, telephones, and steam engines. Thondup’s travels convinced him that secular education was essential for Tibet’s survival.

He went on to live in China for the next several years, where he learned the language, befriended then-president Chiang Kai-shek, and immersed himself in 5,000 years of Chinese history, which verified that Tibet had never been considered part of the “motherland,” as the communists would soon claim. From there, Thondup and his Chinese wife, Zhu Dan, would live, among other places, in Taiwan, San Francisco, Hong Kong, and Darjeeling, where his wife eventually established the still-operating Tibetan Refugee Self Help Center. In 1952, they bought a small plot of land in Kalimpong, just outside of Darjeeling and not far from the Tibetan border, and in 1980, the couple opened the noodle factory that’s been running ever since, throughout Thondup’s extensive work abroad and even after Zhu Dan’s death in 1986.

After the Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959, the two brothers collaborated on what became their first press conference, one that Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru never wanted to happen. Their goal had been to publicly refute Chinese propaganda and to declare Tibet a sovereign nation. It was then that the Dalai Lama stated, “wherever I am, accompanied by my government, the Tibetan people recognize us as the government of Tibet.” With this establishment of the Government-in-Exile, Thondup was formally appointed foreign minister, and he began seeking international support.

Behind the scenes and unbeknownst to his younger brother, Thondup coordinated with the CIA, doing so well into the 1960s. The clandestine organization trained a small but steady stream of Tibetans—volunteer resistance fighters—in Colorado, the Western Pacific, and eventually in Mustang, Nepal. At the time, Thondup believed that the US wanted to help the Tibetan people. It was this work, however, that would become one of Thondup’s biggest regrets. In later years, he came to realize the US was more concerned with “stirring up trouble” between India and China. Thondup now thinks that the uprisings, given “paltry support” by the CIA, only caused more deaths.

A diplomat to the end, Thondup recalls his life as a series of political events—an understandable impulse, but one that often results in less of a story than a history lesson. More often than not, Thondup’s determination to “set the record straight” insulates his account from more heartfelt, subjective truths—the complicated kind wrought with emotion and tricks of memory, but blessed with the details and insights that resonate with meaning.

Recognizing that “setting the record straight” is not so simple, Thurston, who coauthored the best-selling The Private Life of Chairman Mao, notes how her point of view occasionally differs from Thondup’s. For instance, Thondup maintains that his father was poisoned in 1947, in a power struggle among Lhasa aristocracy. In her afterword, Thurston casts some doubt on this version of the story, noting that the Dalai Lama himself remains unconvinced of any foul play. Yet precisely because Thurston expresses her skepticism only in the afterword, the logic and lucidity of Thondup’s voice are preserved. The combination of their perspectives makes for a compelling metanarrative on the inherent paradoxes of autobiography, one that ultimately enhances Thondup’s exploration of Tibet’s history.

In the final paragraph of this autobiography, one of the most poignant moments of the book, Gyalo Thondup recounts a recent meeting with the Dalai Lama, who implores him to stay healthy—and alive. “We have to return home together,” the spiritual leader, soon to turn 80, tells his big brother. The implication is that if they keep holding out, they will accomplish what everyone knows is unlikely, at least in their lifetime: a return to Tibet, together.

The post The Dalai Lama’s Big Brother appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The incomparable loftiness of the monk figure—placid and disinterested, having renounced desire—leads many to think of Buddhism as a religion detached from all worldly concerns, especially those of economy. But Buddhism has always addressed a continuum of human flourishing and good, creating what has been referred to as an “economy of salvation.” Metaphors of economy—even of debt—abound in Buddhist texts, and in many ways Buddhism came to be fundamentally shaped by economic conditions and considerations of the era in which it originated.

Depending on material support from moneylenders, the Buddhist establishment from its outset did not seek to hamper the business that made it possible. Devout merchants (setthi) and householders (gahapatis)—controllers of property, moneylenders, often even usurers—were the primary supporters of the early monastic community. Giving material support (amisa dana) to the monkhood thus ranks in Buddhist doctrine as the most effective way for laypeople to generate positive karma, even above following the five moral precepts that define the Buddhist way of life. Out of a concern for its own survival, Buddhism could not condemn the acquisition of wealth, but it could provide principles for its dispensation—namely, giving and generosity (dana). To these ends, the Buddha celebrated wealth creation alongside a call for its redistribution.

The New Market Economy

In order to understand the subtleties of Buddhism’s approach to wealth accumulation, poverty, and debt, we must first have some understanding of the market economy from which it arose. The introduction of the widespread use of coinage to India just a few decades prior to the Buddha’s birth around 500 BCE disrupted existing social orders and also inspired a philosophical renaissance driven by spiritual dropouts like the Buddha, who sought to respond to the new economy.

One of the Buddha’s most poignant accounts of worldly life speaks to the social alienation inherent to economic competition and the accumulation of private property. It remains pertinent to this day:

Seeing people floundering
     like fish in small puddles,
     competing with one another —
               as I saw this,
               fear came into me.
     The world was entirely
               without substance.
     All the directions
                                    were knocked out of line.
     Wanting a haven for myself,
     I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.
     Seeing nothing in the end
     but competition,
     I felt discontent.
              —Sutta Nipata 4.15, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Widespread use of currency led to a flattening of reality that rendered all goods and services commensurable, nourishing a tendency toward abstraction for which we owe much of our philosophical inheritance today—from Pythagoras in Greece, to Confucius in China, to the Buddha in India. The reformulation of economic relations brought about by monetization triggered previously unheard of levels of social mobility, and mobility’s attendant individualism.

The Buddha skillfully encouraged some of the new social values that emerged from these economic changes. For example, he encouraged the individualism that subverted family structures (monks were “home-leavers”). But he also sought to undermine other emerging values associated with psychological states that fuel the acquisition of capital: desire and greed. The Buddha condemned acquisitiveness at the same time he supported capital accumulation, specifically for its potential to create and multiply merit through generosity. In this way, Buddhism advocated a “Middle Way,” the simultaneous negation of the extremes of asceticism and indulgence. Spiritual health and material well-being were, in the words of economist E. F. Schumacher, natural allies.

The Buddha diverged from other religious thinkers in his embrace of the new market economy. Confucians in China and Brahmans in India strongly resisted this economy, denouncing the economic activities of businessmen and merchants as threats to the moral order of society.

Perhaps the Buddha embraced the new market economy in part because it supported his rejection of the Brahmans’ mythical justifications for the stratification of caste. Rather than speaking about caste, the Buddha spoke instead of economic class, the new social order, which was divided into six categories: very wealthy, wealthy, faring well, faring poorly, poor, and destitute. Such disparities are inevitable in a society organized by the market economy. The establishment of the monkhood, which presented a new, radical kind of freedom, enabled its constituents to stand outside caste and, in theory, outside the market economy altogether.

Can Buddhist Teachings Move Us Toward Jubilee?

The accumulation of wealth among urban merchants and moneylenders, scorned by the then dominant Brahmans, was a boon to the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, which relied on the generosity of the laity for material support as well as the spread of Buddhist ideas along trade routes. This upwardly mobile class found in Buddhism a justification for its economic activities and new lifestyle. By giving to the monks, the laity performed acts of dana, or generosity, a fundamental tenet of Buddhism. Serving as “fields of merit,” the monks provided an opportunity for laypeople to practice generosity, the first “perfection,” and the basis of all other perfections, leading to enlightenment. Importantly, the amount of merit generated by such transactions was determined by the recipient’s level of virtue and not the benefactor’s, forming a holy alliance between the monkhood and the laity that, at least within the performance of dana, condoned the benefactor’s methods of accumulation. This alliance was furthered by the Buddha’s injunction forbidding those with debt from joining the monastic order, by which the indebted would effectively default.

So instead of challenging the accumulation of wealth, Buddhism critiques the social structures that perpetuate poverty and the unwholesome states of mind that contribute to the suffering of self and others. This is admirable enough, but still leaves quite a bit for Buddhist socialists and Buddhists committed to Jubilee to wrestle with.

Buddhism has historically taken a permissive approach to economic relations. It might be the only world religion that does not formally condemn usury. And being wealthy in and of itself has been taken as a sign of good karma. Yet there remains much in the Buddhist canon that can enrich our thoughts on debt and wealth distribution.

The Ina ­Sutta, the Buddha’s “Discourse on Debt,” praises ananasukha, the pleasure of being debtless. Conversely, it also links indebtedness directly to bondage and, ultimately, suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhism:

Poverty is suffering in the world. . . Getting into debt is suffering in the world. . . Interest payment is suffering in the world. . . Being served notice is suffering in the world. . . Being hounded is suffering in the world. . . Bondage is suffering in the world. . . . When a poor, destitute, penniless person, being hounded, does not pay, he is put into bondage. For one who partakes of sensuality [a layperson], bondage is suffering in the world.

Buddhist texts make ample use of metaphors of debt and exchange to confer spiritual advice, both a sign of the times and a winning bet made by the Buddha on the future hegemony of the monetary economy. At the end of the Ina Sutta, the Buddha goes as far as to use freedom from debt as a metaphor for nirvana (liberation from samsara, the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma):

[Knowledge in the total ending of the fetters of becoming] is the highest knowledge
that, the happiness unexcelled.
     Sorrowless,
     dustless,
     at rest,
that
          is release from debt.

For Jubilee, perhaps the most instructive concept in Buddhist thought is that of karmic debt, for which financial debt is often used as a metaphor, as it is in these final lines. Born as humans, we all have karmic debt, the first one being to our parents, who brought us into this world, raised us, fed us, and guided us. This debt extends to all our benefactors—teachers, friends, and anyone else who has acted with our well-being in mind. But this is not a debt that can be easily repaid. For such an infinite debt, no material compensation is sufficient. In fact, the only way to repay such a debt is to become enlightened ourselves and endow others with the conditions for enlightenment. Thus, according to the Kataññu Sutta, we become debtless:

But, O monks, one who . . . encourages his ignorant parents, settles and establishes them in wisdom—such a one, O monks, does enough for his parents: he repays them and more than repays them for what they have done.

In other words, recognizing our true debts establishes the basis for the discernment of contrived debts, and thus any kind of resistance against them. This old Buddhist idea is freshly relevant in the context of contemporary efforts to build a debt resistance movement. In fact, it sounds surprisingly similar to the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. “To the financial establishment of the world,” the manual reads, “we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing.” It continues:

To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we withhold from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect.

Repaying Our Karmic Debts

In the Buddhist approach to debt, wealth can be accumulated, but only so that it can in turn be given away to those to whom we are truly, karmically indebted. Production and multiplication of merit-creating wealth is thus a noble determination. One who acquires lavish wealth, the Buddha said, should provide for the pleasure and satisfaction of himself, his loved ones, and his associates, and also for priests and contemplatives.

Buddhist monasteries for a long time accomplished a kind of redistribution of wealth, supporting mendicants who owned nothing. They also invested in local economies, providing an alternative to local moneylenders. In later years, however, some monasteries (such as in Medieval China) started making high-interest loans and meddling with debtors’ contracts. A Burmese proverb characterizes Buddhist economic excess succinctly: “The pagoda is finished and the country is ruined.”

As greed—the motor of capital accumulation and, in Buddhism, one of the three “poisons” that binds beings to the wheel of samsara—became institutionalized in the new social order, the Buddha edged out a place in society where greed’s opposite, generosity, could flourish.

While the production and multiplication of wealth creates conditions for merit in the form of virtuous giving, greed annihilates merit. The Buddha said that even if one could transform one single mountain into two mountains of solid gold, it would still not provide complete and lasting satisfaction of a single person’s wants. Such is the unlimited nature of desire. From the Buddhist view, then, capital accumulation does not find its end in capital accumulation, but in its transmutation into merit through generosity. “To have much wealth and ample gold and food, but to enjoy one’s luxuries alone is a cause of one’s downfall,” the Buddha says in the Parabhava Sutta. Wealth is not the enemy of spiritual development; it has an enormous potential to create merit—but not principally from lending, but giving.

For this reason, even to live modestly while retaining great wealth is sinful. In the Aputtaka Sutta, the Buddha speaks of a moneylender who “ate broken rice and pickle brine” and wore only “hempen cloth,” riding around in a “dilapidated little cart.” Many lives ago, the moneylender had given alms to a contemplative, leading the moneylender to be reborn seven times with great fortune. But in his subsequent lives the moneylender failed to create virtue with his fortunes, passing up many opportunities to generate merit through generosity. For this reason, after the merit generated for seven lifetimes ran out, the moneylender found himself in one of the hell realms.

The Evil of Endless Accumulation

Today’s ultra-wealthy commit this same evil of endless accumulation without redistribution. Moneylending through the financial establishment, effectively indebting others in order to create profits, does not create merit but destroys it. Such a system of debt has helped concentrate 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of 1 percent of its population, while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Debt today encourages the upward distribution of wealth, whereas the Buddha seems to have advocated its downward distribution.

In the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, the Buddha makes clear that charity, and philanthropy especially, is never enough. Giving advice to a king, he says, “Whosoever in your kingdom is poor, to him let wealth be given.” When a king comes to power and neglects this duty, he is faced with social deterioration that can be reversed neither through recourse to charity nor through justice (i.e., brutal punishments): “Thus from goods not being bestowed on the destitute, poverty, stealing, violence, murder, lying, evil-speaking, and immorality grew rife.”

Considering that Buddhist texts tend to concentrate unrelentingly on defilements of the mind as the roots of suffering, this passage is remarkable in that it focuses instead on social and economic injustice as a foundational cause. Here, the ignorance, desire, and hatred of the people—the three poisons—are traced directly back to the failure of the state rather than to their own individual moral failings. When the king attempts to correct social strife by dispensing charity, this produces only more negative results, clearly demonstrating that charity cannot stand in for economic justice. Perhaps most importantly, the Buddha places the responsibility for the material well-being of the poor on the government. There exists no other power capable of enacting any progressive economic policy, including debt forgiveness.

This gets to the problem at the heart of the massive proliferation of personal debt in the United States: the country’s long-term disinvestment in public goods such as higher education, health care, and housing. If wealth, of which there is no shortage, is not shared with the poor in such forms, inequality becomes exacerbated in the form of debt, which increases the burden of poverty in the form of interest.

Vital to Buddhist doctrine is the conviction that all people, regardless of social position, are capable of becoming enlightened, of becoming buddhas. Poverty and the stress it entails, however, can be real barriers to spiritual development. The Buddha recognized that becoming free of worries about our material welfare enables us to develop our potentials. If release from karmic debt is the goal of Buddhist thought and practice, then release from economic debt is its precondition.

“Buddhism and Debt” in Tikkun, Volume 30, no. 1, p. 35. © 2015, Tikkun Magazine. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

The post The Economy of Salvation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Trying to identify an artist’s Zen Buddhist influence is something of a fool’s errand—and perhaps an antithetical one. The religion, after all, has a long, proud tradition of underplaying any overt impact it has on an adherent’s life. Ancient master Hiakajo Roshi famously summed up the practice with a rather spare injunction for students to eat when hungry and sleep when tired. Chan master Linji Yixuan, founder of the Rinzai school, echoes the sentiment in his oft-cited koan “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” Nevertheless, Zen Buddhist artists abound, so it’s tempting to wonder how practice might mingle with craft.

After coming of age and attending art school amid India’s independence movement, Gaitonde discovered Buddhism while working as a painter in Mumbai during the 1950s. The Guggenheim New York’s retrospective exhibit, V.S. Gaitonde: Painting as Process, Painting as Life, opened in late October and runs until February 11th. Tricycle spoke with the exhibit’s curator, Sandhini Poddar, herself a practicing Buddhist, about what first interested her in Gaitonde’s work, how Gaitonde conceived of the overlap between Zen and painting, and the significance of the Guggenheim’s effort to expand its collection beyond Western artists.

Describe the first time you saw Gaitonde’s work. For generations my family has been involved in the arts, so I first came across Gaitonde’s work when I was only 4 or 5 years old. Living in Mumbai, we all grew up knowing his name. More recently, in 1998, I saw a series of his works and they really struck me; they stayed with me for a very long time. His work had this amazing abstraction that he was able to convey through light, space, and color. You don’t see that with any other artist from India. There was this simultaneous stillness and imminence in the work. And, of course, I found the colors beautiful. I had a thought in the back of my mind saying, “This work really speaks to and inspires me. I wonder if I can ever do something with it.”

You mentioned that you were struck by the simultaneous stillness and imminence of his work. The description of the exhibit on the Guggenheim’s website implies that there was a connection between Gaitonde’s interest in Zen Buddhism and the development of those features of his work. What do we know about his Buddhist practice and how it influenced his art? We know that he came upon Zen Buddhism while living and working in Mumbai in the late 1950s. He found publications related to Zen Buddhism and it was, for him, foremost an intellectual system that helped guide and inform his life. He continued to speak about Zen all the way up to the 1990s, giving interviews that I found on file at the Museum of Modern Art.

What does he say about Zen in those interviews? Initially, in the 1960s, he talked about how Zen was an important philosophical system that guided him, specifically with regard to his interest in nature. It also helped him cultivate immediacy, spontaneity, concentration, and attention in his work. The influence had to do with creativity deriving from his isolation as an artist—a certain silencing of the mind.

That ethos lends itself to nonrepresentational, abstract art. Do you feel that his interest in Zen pushed him in that direction? I think it accompanied his movement in that direction. It’s really hard to pick out a single impulse or influence, because I don’t think artists work that way. They’re much more osmotic and sponge-like in the way that they pick up ideas and influences from diverse sources.

But Zen certainly is one of the key influences for Gaitonde because it’s one of those threads that binds his practice overall—from 1958, when he turned toward the nonobjective, right until the late 90s when he stopped making art. For the first decade after he attended art school in the 1940s, he was trying different things out. He was veering toward abstraction, but he was still quite committed to the traditions of the figure and of the body, which he inherited from his academic training. For some, philosophy allows their view to be less bogged down by the visual world. For these types of people, art isn’t just about watching cinema or going to the theatre or seeing friends or paying attention to received histories; philosophy enables them to live more abstractly.

You describe a coexistence in his early work of abstraction on the one hand and on the other a commitment to traditional images like the figure of the body. This corresponds with Zen’s paradoxical emphasis on both freedom and structure, spontaneity along with rigorous attention to posture. I think that that is where Zen moves through the body and through the mind into the work. The art is not about depicting Zen. It’s not a representation of a philosophy; it’s rather about internalizing Zen and imbibing it in terms of one’s life decisions, and those life decisions then enable one to make work in a certain way.

You participated in a ten-day meditation retreat back in 2008. Talk about your own interest in Buddhism. On a personal level, Vipassana brought about a very important breaking point in my life—not in a negative sense, in an extremely affirmative sense.

What do you mean by that? It reveals you to you. That’s what I mean by a breaking open. You break yourself open to yourself. And it’s extremely frightening, which is why even though I had wanted to go on retreat since I was a teenager, it took a while for me to actually summon up the courage to go. But after the ten days I realized the experience had had this permanent effect on me: the self-awareness I was able to gain provided this incredible sense of self-reliance. Now even in the most difficult situations I have that meditative space within me.

No matter what your emotions throw up and what the mind throws up you have to realize that this is all very transient. There’s no reason to get attached. Being the observer in that chain of cause and effect is an extremely empowering position. I’ve been able to apply it in my day-to-day life in all kinds of situations—that’s what I mean by the embodiment of a principle or philosophical attitude.

This exhibit is part of the Guggenheim’s effort to expand its collection beyond artists from the United States and Europe, which includes its plan to open a satellite museum in Abu Dhabi. It’s a good sign that a major cultural institution in the West is looking outside its predominantly white, male collection, though non-Western artists then receive a platform from what remains a very Western institution. What do you make of that tension? It’s a valid tension because the reason that I’m invested in what’s happening—not just in New York but in Abu Dhabi—is because it’s coming from a new set of politics. If we had a museum originating in India I would want to be very involved with that as well, because we are in the 21st century and need to be global citizens. I think that institutions in the West have been a bit lazy and condescending about only allying themselves with America or Europe through the 20th century.

Having said that, I really do believe in local art histories, languages, and cultural specificities. We’re trying as much as we can to make sure that the future museum in Abu Dhabi is global in that it’s looking at art produced anywhere in the world, but also speaks to an audience apart from those who travel from abroad. We need to make sure that regions like the Middle East, the Gulf, North Africa, and South Asia are well represented not just through the acquisitions but also in exhibitions, public programs, and workshops. I don’t think that this can be accomplished by 2017—it’s a multigenerational project. These attempts to place art, ideas, and communities on an equal footing are very important in light of the social, political, and economic imbalances of the 20th century. The recent past has been so fraught politically that we need culture to provide something aspirational. Culture can be so generative and powerful because it doesn’t follow the same rules. It’s a place of liberation and creativity.

—Max Zahn, Editorial Assistant

More at Tricycle:

The post Zen Moves Through appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1959 the 14^th Dalai Lama fled Tibet to settle in India, where then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru provided him and his followers assistance. Since then, over 150,000 Tibetans have followed in their leader’s footsteps, settling into camps across the country—the biggest democracy in the world. These settlements, like the Tibetan people’s stay in India, were not supposed to last.

In a recent article for The Asian Age, journalist Maura Moynihan writes about the structural crisis now unfolding in the Tibetan-exile world.

The old settlements are disintegrating, filled with poor, often broken families who are frustrated with policies that consign them to isolation and exclusion by prolonging their unsettled legal status.

As China increases military pressure along the India-China border and accelerates conflict in the Himalayan belt, Tibetan refugees are more vulnerable, less welcome and politically radioactive. In an era where there is less room and tolerance for refugees in all of South Asia, approximately 150,000 Tibetans in exile cannot remain stateless refugees much longer. At 54 years, Tibet is second to the Palestinians as the world’s longest unresolved refugee crisis. At this late date, Tibetans in exile want and need citizenship.”

Currently under Indian law, Tibetans are granted RCs, registration cards that categorize them as foreigners—not refugees. This precarious identification affords Tibetans in exile neither refugee status, which would grant them rights under international treaty law, nor legal government representation. As non-citizens, Tibetans cannot own property or register their own businesses.

Not seeking citizenship has, for the most part, been regarded by older Tibetan exiles as necessary for the survival of Tibetan culture and the eventual passage of exiles back into Tibet. This is known as the policy of non-assimilation, and while it may have made sense 50 years ago, it now requires revisiting. If Tibetans are rendered helpless as refugees, what help can they be to Tibetans still in Tibet? “At this late date,” Moynihan argues, “Tibetans with citizenship can do more for the Tibetan cause than impoverished and powerless foreigners.”

Though the case for Indian Citizenship shares many of the same goals as the non-assimilation camp, it will certainly be met with much resistance within the Tibetan exile government. Its head, Lobsang Sangay, maintains that Tibetans must remain refugees in order to serve the Tibetan cause, echoing the position of the previous head, Ven. Samdhong Rinpoche, a renowned scholar and devout monk who was often criticized for his conservative policies.

Conservatism and orthodoxy have long plagued Tibetan governance. Following the death of the 13^th Dalai Lama in the 1930s, conservative forces took power, leading the nation into a long period of stagnation in which social inequality increased. Modernization efforts were abandoned. Ironically enough, this period in which aristocrats exercised inordinate power aligns with that oft-romanticized vision of Tibet, a time when orthodox Buddhist ritual was likely the last solace available to the vast majority of Tibetans. By the time it became clear that the Chinese threat required a concerted response it was too late to modernize the military.

Let’s hope that Tibetan politics sheds the long reign of conservatism, which made Tibet so vulnerable to invasion in the first place. It’s refreshing to see new, radical ideas like that of Indian citizenship come onto the scene. The Dalai Lama may have retired and the new government head might don a suit instead of robes, but real change is going to spring from novel ideas like this one.

 A more in-depth version of Moynihan’s recent article appeared in Tibetan Political Review, here.

The post Is Indian Citizenship the Next Step for Tibetans in Exile? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Well, boys and girls, the discussion ain’t over. (As it shouldn’t be.) Soto Zen priest and author James Ishmael Ford has added his voice into the mix of American Buddhist teachers who are remarking on the Joshu Sasaki Roshi sex scandal. Unlike some of the other commentaries, which read with more passion than careful analysis, Ford takes a helpful step backward to look at the American Zen picture as a whole. As he writes, “Sex isn’t the problem.” In his view, the problem is our glamorization of our spiritual teachers, as well as the lack of institutional and personal accountability. He writes,

Zen, as it comes West, is anarchic. Individual teachers have come to this country, or people of American and European birth have traveled to Japan or other East Asian countries that transmit the Zen way in its varieties and with differing credentials have come home and taught, often with at best nominal connections to those East Asian communities.

As a result there are few larger structures here in the West, and while there are some proto-denominational organizations, none has much authority, and, frankly, with few prospects of acquiring such authority. Even if a couple of organizations do jell, I think our cultural proclivities will simply mean those who don’t fit into those structures will leave and set up shop independently.

A dismal portrait, perhaps, but an accurate one. Ford goes on to suggest that each Buddhist community should have published, workable ethical guidelines. And for the teachers who lead those communities? “People who teach Zen,” he says, “have to step up to the plate and accept responsibility.” Easier said than done.

The name of a new Buddhist complex, designed to promote tourism, was unveiled in Sikkim, India, on Tuesday. What’s the name, you ask? The truly original, undeniably innovative, refreshingly imaginative “Buddha Park.” Ah, well. No award for the naming team on that one, although the park does look pretty (photo above). India has been on a big kick lately to capitalize on the Buddhist tourism potential of their country.

This week over at Parabola magazine, there’s a new, short interview with Ram Dass, (aka Richard Alpert of psychedelic pioneering fame), “Grace is Here!” The interviewers were quite taken with him—”After taking our leave of Ram Dass, we were high, intoxicated with his loving presence”—and from what I’ve heard from others, that really is what it’s like to be around him. It’s an interesting interview to read after being sobered by Ford’s remarks about treating our spiritual teachers like human beings, not putting them up on a pedestal as inheritors of some sort of magical wisdom. Still, reading Ram Dass always puts a smile on my face, so if you’re after some warm and fuzzies today head on over to Parabola to read the piece. 

The post Buddha Buzz: Warm and Fuzzy with Ram Dass appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The following poem was submitted by Steve Kohn, a participant in last year’s “In the Footsteps of the Buddha” Tricycle pilgrimage to India. He was inspired to submit the poem upon reading Pico Iyer’s piece in the pilgrimage special section in the Fall 2012 issue of Tricycle.

Pilgrimage

Come be a pilgrim with me.
There is a place of great poverty,       
With here and there
A cow patty of wealth.

Come, take a journey and see
Great hungers feeding ill health
With invisible poisons in water and air.

Clear the dust from your eyes there will be
Devotional practice and spiritual
Fanatical followers of rams, angels, devils, and saints
Engaging in mystical ritual
While practicing taints.

Come be a pilgrim with me
To the stupas by the Washington Mall,
Or the space where those towers used to be.

We needn’t have traveled at all.

© 2008 Steve Kohn

You can find information about the upcoming Tricycle pilgrimages to Tibet’s Mt. Kailash in June and to China in October here.

The post On Pilgrimage appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In this final week’s teaching of Cyndi Lee’s retreat, “May I Live With Ease,” Cyndi discusses how we can turn our normal resistances to our practice into focused exertion. By taking a closer look at our resistances, we can draw motivational energy from them. This process of continually realigning our motivation is the key to cultivating deep and lasting happiness, which is the key to the fourth part of the maitri practice: living with ease.

If you are a Tricycle Supporting or Sustaining Member, you can watch this week’s retreat here. If not, join or upgrade your membership here.

Check out the preview of this week’s retreat below:

The post “Social Awakening: Realizing the Basic Goodness of Society,” an Online Retreat with Acharya Fleet Maull appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.