Vanessa Sasson: In the last years of me engaging with these stories, I’ve come to realize everything is in them. And so sometimes what is so complicated to understand philosophically, it’s really clear when you tell a story. We engage with stories in really easy ways, and they get imprinted on our psyche and we go back to them and we tell them again and we tell them again. And there’s something magical about the transformative power of a beautiful story when it gives us the mess. So you can have all this philosophy about renunciation, ordination, but when you tell a story about renunciation, you feel the complexity of it without somebody having to spell it out to you in complicated jargon.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Vanessa Sasson. Vanessa is a professor of Religious Studies at Marianopolis College. Her new novel, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women, is an imaginative retelling of the first Buddhist women’s request for ordination. Building on years of research, the novel follows a group of women as they travel through the forest together seeking full access to the Buddha’s teachings. In my conversation with Vanessa, we talk about what we can learn from the first Buddhist women’s resilience, how contemporary women monastics understand this story, why she first started writing fiction, and the role of mythology in the Buddhist world. So here’s my conversation with Vanessa Sasson.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with scholar Vanessa Sasson. Hi, Vanessa. It’s great to be with you. 

Vanessa Sasson: Hi, it’s so nice to be with you as well. Thank you for having me. 

James Shaheen:  And very good to meet you finally. So, Vanessa, we’re here to talk about your new novel, The Gathering: A Story of the First Buddhist Women. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it? And in particular, what inspired you to write it as a novel?

Vanessa Sasson: Yeah, so there’s a lot to that question. The story itself, I think it might help if I tell a little bit of what the story is about because not everybody is as familiar with it as some of us in the field are. The story is the first women who want to ask the Buddha for permission to join the order. And so we know that there are Buddhist nuns today, and we almost could take it for granted that there are Buddhist nuns all over the world. But their story of how they became nuns is actually a really complicated story, and in some ways rather painful. So if you look at the literature, the story of the Buddha is that he’s a prince in a palace. I think most of your listeners are going to know this. One day he has this vision of suffering and realizes that he wants to leave the palace and go and find the answer to suffering that he’s not able to find at home. And so he makes this great valiant departure and he walks away from the worldly life and he kind of charges into the forest where he lets go of everything and begins to practice and to try to figure out what is this answer that he’s looking for in his mind.

It’s very evasive in the literature what he’s looking for, but he’s looking for something profound, something that is going to free him. And the tradition tells us that for years he floats around the forest trying to figure out what this answer is and tries all kinds of techniques until one day something magical like this reflection of inner vastness happens to him that we don’t quite understand what it is. And so a lot of Buddhism is probably trying to capture what that moment was, but the story just tells us that it happens. And whatever this magical thing is that happens, he achieves it and he becomes completely and totally free.

And the idea is that this is a cosmic event. This is a social event. The whole universe is excited about his achievement. And so everyone notices that something really profound has happened. And people hear about it, and so the tradition is that—this is years after he left the palace, but rumors begin that he’s achieved something spectacular.

And so slowly the men from the palace that he left behind start wandering into the forest one at a time, one here, one there, individuals just going into the forest saying, “Whatever it is that you figured out, can I practice with you?” And so this becomes this quest to request ordination, to sit beside this man, this Buddha, this supreme being of the tradition’s imagination, and try to learn this evasive thing that he found.

And every time someone makes that request, and there’s all kinds of men that make this request, right? And you even have somebody like Angulimala, who’s one of the most famous characters of the Buddhist imagination, who’s a serial killer. Every time someone approaches him, in almost all cases, he’ll say something very, very simple to the effect of just “Come,” and so there’s this open invitation, this welcoming of just “Come sit with me and I will show you what I’ve done.”

And so this is how the early tradition imagines the building up of the first sangha, the first community. And so these men sit with the Buddha one after another and they create this kind of community that he will slowly build rules around and he’ll orchestrate and he’ll discipline and he’ll create a sangha. And so slowly we have this organic process of building a community.

The trick in the literature is that one day the women want to do the same. And so Tricycle actually, you guys did an excerpt of the book a while back and you came up with the best title. And I wish that that was the title that I thought we called it “When Women Showed Up,” and I was like, “Oh, that’s the title.” It was such a smart title, but it was that moment where the women want to try for the same thing. And so the story is that the women who are left behind, who are living in the palace, they one day wake up and they say, “Well, why don’t we try it too?” And this is headed by the very famous kind of leader of the women, the queen of the kingdom, Mahapajapati Gotami. And so she’s the one to make the call. And so she decides, “I’m going to go and ask him if I can do this too.”

And then we have this bizarre thing that happens in the literature where the text tells us that all these women showed up to stand with her. And we don’t know how that happened, so in my head I’m imagining this kind of gossip thread that has kind of spilled through the palace and everyone finds out, and so she leaves the palace. And there are 500 other women who have just kind of woken up and heard the news. And so there’s this very excited energy that I can imagine as they say, “Well, she’s going, so I think I’ll go too.” And so these women depart together, which is really an amazing thing and is very different from how the men’s community is formed. The men’s community is formed with individuals kind of showing up one at a time. But the women’s community arrives already formed in some ways, and the women’s community, if you look at the details of the sources, are from all walks of life.

So one of the texts that really inspired me for this is a text called the Therigatha. And it’s this beautiful book of really, really old Buddhist poetry. It’s about 2,000 years old. And we think it was actually produced by women, because the voices sound like women’s voices. And each poem in there tells us a different story about women’s lives.

And so you hear about women who joined what I call the Gathering, these women who showed up one after another. Some of them are queens and princesses and women of nobility, and some of them are homeless widows by the side of the road and some of them are courtesans and some of them are prostitutes. And so we get all these different kinds of women that kind of gather behind Mahapajapati Gotami and say, “Let’s go.”

And this is really quite radical because in a world like ancient India where everything is stratified and there’s so much hierarchy and there’s so many divisions, these women broke that so that you have homeless widows walking with queens and prostitutes and courtesans, and they came from different kingdoms. Some of those kingdoms were at war with Kapilavastu.

And so all these different women from all these different backgrounds decide to walk together and to go ask the Buddha the same question that the Buddha has been asked hundreds of times, hoping, I imagine, that he will say yes. But the devastating reality of the narrative that we have received from the tradition is that they go to see him, and he says something really evasive that none of us really knows what to do with where he basically says, “Maybe don’t ask the question.” And so it was this story of women being so eager and excited and being so radical in their collective vision of how they were going to organize themselves that really wanted me to imagine the story.

I had to imagine it. I had to tell the story. But it’s not a story with a super happy ending, so it was a complicated book to write, but it was a story I really wanted to write, which is why I wrote it.

James Shaheen: Well, that was so nicely put. That’s an excellent description of the book you’ve written. One question that forms the core of the book is how the Buddha could have said no the first time he is asked. So how have you come to understand this question? 

Vanessa Sasson: It’s a really hard question. I wrestled with that question for a long time because these women, they arrive and they’ve left home. And this is really important for the narrative is that there’s an understanding in ancient Indian traditions that when you take the path of renunciation, you leave home, you make this decision to leave home, to leave your world behind, you can’t just suddenly the moment it doesn’t go well go, “Oh, this was too hard. I’m going to go home now.” That’s not the idea. It’s supposed to be hard.

And so these women have done something really, really hard and very courageous. And they’ve left home and they’ve made this request. So they’re kind of in a limbo, like a bardo of some kind because they don’t belong anywhere anymore. They’ve left. And he must know this. And so they’ve arrived at his doorstep, basically, and they’re asking him, “Can we enter your world? Will you welcome us to practice with you?” So they have, even though they’re choosing a life of what we call religious homelessness in the literature, they’re still asking for some kind of home, a place that is going to welcome them so that they have a place to go to practice, to learn, to have teachings. This is what they’re looking for.

And he gives this really evasive question, and he does it in all the literature because we have multiple vinayas and in every vinaya there’s something really evasive about his response where he doesn’t quite say no, but he definitely does not say yes. He kind of skirts the issue. And this leaves the women nowhere. And that’s really, really hard about the story. So I’ve struggled with that question for a long time. Why did he do that? 

James Shaheen: You know, amazingly but perhaps not surprisingly, the question of women’s ordination is very much still alive in communities of women monastics around the world.

Vanessa Sasson: Absolutely.

James Shaheen: So what did you learn from talking with women monastics about the story of the first Buddhist women? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, I mean there’s more to the story than this moment. We can go back to how it keeps evolving because it doesn’t stop there. So he’s evasive about his answer. He doesn’t give them a yes or a no, and what’s quite remarkable about these women is he gives them this evasive answer and he walks away and then they do something completely out of character, I think, in some ways with what the literature would have normally presented, but they just follow him and ask again.

They didn’t take no for an answer, which is really quite amazing. And he said this evasive no three times, and three is usually that lucky charm, and once you’re at three, it’s really I’m not welcoming you into the community. And then they just follow him and they ask again, and he finally says yes, but with strings attached.

So, I think the details of that story, the fact that he doesn’t say yes, he kind of says no, and they follow him to the next round and ask again shows me something about them being just courageous and smart and determined and refusing to accept the boundaries that they are being met with and that Buddhist women around the world are met with in monastic communities.

It’s different in every monastic community, so it’s not a one-size-fits-all answer to this. But the question of ordination for women is really complicated in a number of contexts. In some parts of the Buddhist world, ordination has never been given. So that’s the Himalayan traditions generally, just until last year. We just saw the first ordination of Himalayan women in human history happen last year. So that was a really exciting transformation of the story. In other parts of the Buddhist world, women have had access to ordination and lost it. And then in other parts of the world, women have ordination, but they’re bound by these regulations and these extra rules that really put them at a disadvantage.

So there’s a lot of difficulty at living a monastic life as a woman. And my experience has been, with this story and with the monastic women I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with over the years, that this story really resonates because it’s so familiar. Not just resonates like “This is our heritage story.” That too. But it resonates like, “Yeah, it was like that then. And it’s still like that.” The story hasn’t really changed in some ways. And so it feels very much like familiar territory for a lot of people who engage with the story. 

James Shaheen: Right, even when they do ordain, there’s often blowback. It’s still not an easy thing to do. You know, at one point in the novel, the narrator reflects, “We did not become as free as we hoped we might be, or as free as I thought we should be.” So there are many layers of freedom at play here. Can you say more about how these women negotiate the tensions between social freedom and ultimate liberation?

Vanessa Sasson: That’s a really important question. In some ways, my answer is samsara. I’ve been going back to that word a lot in the process of writing this book. If we go back to the story, what happens to the women in the early texts is they go back and they ask again for ordination, which, as I said, I think is a really courageous and kind of rule-defying move on their part.

And they do something even more courageous in that moment. In the Vinaya, which is the monastic rules where we get this story in part, there’s this wonderful detail that I really latched onto. And that is that when they go ask the first time and the Buddha is very evasive, the text doesn’t tell us that Mahapajapati Gotami is wearing robes and it doesn’t tell us that she has a shaved head. It just says that she goes and she asks. When she leads the women after he’s said no three times and they wander through the forest and they get to him again to the next place where he’s gone and they stand and they wait for the Buddha to notice them, which is, that alone, to me is a really powerful moment, this moment of the women’s silence and of their waiting. There’s something really powerful about them standing there and just waiting, like they’re going to wait until someone sees them properly. And so they’re standing at the edge of wherever the Buddha is in Vesali, and they’re waiting quietly.

And finally it’s not the Buddha but it’s Ananda who notices them. And Ananda goes to see Mahapajapati Gotami, and the text says he sees that she’s wearing robes that are dust-stained, that her face has tears on it, and that her head is shaved. And it didn’t say that before. And so there’s a real question of when did she choose to shave her head? When did that happen? And so maybe she had her head shaved before, but the text doesn’t tell us that. We know that it’s shaved now. And so there’s room in there, I think, for us to imagine the possibility that they were even more radical than I’m imagining, that maybe they thought, “Well, he didn’t say no, even if he didn’t say yes.”

And so they were going to take on renunciation even if they don’t get received by a community. And so they really are breaking these boundaries and saying, “We need this for ourselves,” but it’s such a difficult journey for them. So they have to just break one wall after another. And they don’t know if the wall they’re going to break is going to break them and what will happen to them socially if they take matters into their own hands. They’re ostensibly defying the Buddha, which is a really difficult story to tell in certain Buddhist circles. But they seem to do that. And then they present themselves again. And then when they ask, he finally says, “OK, I will see you.” But again, it’s such a fraught road to get to that final destination of ordination. It’s just not going to come easy. 

James Shaheen: Likewise, a lot of women have to challenge their teachers. I remember Rita Gross was told to stop complaining. And she said, “I can deal with samsara, old age, sickness, and death, but I can’t deal with the challenges that you’re presenting.” You know, that was a pretty clever way for her to navigate that particular exchange. But you also explore the many different types of freedom that the women are seeking and making the journey to ordain: freedom from hierarchy, from familial bonds, that’s a big one, from guilt, from shame. Some join the gathering as an escape from a life full of suffering while others join for companionship or even for food. Can you say more about these different motivations? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, this is what’s so beautiful about the literature, and I think all of this is reflected like a mirror into the present moment because you see the same thing today is that the literature tells us about these women. They don’t all have these kinds of pure spiritual motivations. They get idealized by the tradition as time goes on. There’s no question about that. And they all become these perfected characters of the Buddhist imagination. But when you look at the Therigatha and its commentaries, you see so many of these women join what I call the Gathering, join this idea of entering the Buddhist sangha, not necessarily because they want spiritual freedom. Some do. Like Mahapajapati Gotami, I think she’s the embodiment of that spiritual ideal. But then you have the homeless widow by the side of the road.

So this one character in the Therigatha, her name is Chanda, and I’ve thought about her quite a lot. She’s just this homeless widow by the side of the road, and she sees the women and Patachara walking past her. And she says, “If I go with you, will you feed me?” And the women say yes, and she says, “OK, I’m coming.” And so it’s not always the loftiest of ideals. Some women are escaping brothels, and some women are escaping courtesan houses and bad husbands, and there’s one character in the Therigatha who puts a noose around her neck, and just as she’s about to pull it, she hears the Buddhist teaching and she thinks, “Oh, maybe I won’t do this.”

And so you have these women who are coming out of all kinds of situations and backgrounds and realities, and they’re not always doing this for some pure intention. They’re doing it because they need a way out. And monastic community can offer that in certain cases. And I think we see that today as well. I don’t know that everyone who becomes a monk or a nun today is always doing it for the highest ideal. Sometimes it’s to get out of their parents’ home or to get out of marriage or to get out of poverty or to get an education. So there’s a lot of things that feel like the story is still the same. It’s still hard. Life has not been cleaned up. We haven’t figured everything out. Monastic life is also still complicated, and we hit walls all the time. Rita Gross’s walls that she was facing are not that different from the walls that we see in the Therigatha that the women are banging up against and trying to figure out how to free themselves from.

James Shaheen: You know, while the novel weaves together the stories of many women in the Therigatha, it centers on Vimala, a prostitute who joins the gathering of women to escape her life at a brothel. How did you decide on Vimala as the central narrator of the book?

Vanessa Sasson: I sat with the Therigatha for a long time. I kept leafing through it, going back to it, and returning to it. It sat next to my bed for a few years while I was preparing this book. And so I kept looking at the different characters and trying to think, who’s going to be my narrator? Who’s going to do this for me? And whose voice can I imagine? Vimala was really interesting because she has so little information about her, which is part of what I really needed to be able to do this. I realized that I needed to have a background character. So this was a bit of a literary move more than it is some Buddhist academic move, but I was thinking from a literary perspective, I needed someone whose voice was not prominent in the tradition so that there weren’t a lot of expectations. about her because I kept thinking of Mahapajapati Gotami. She was an obvious one to tell the story. She’s at the forefront of the story, but she’s such an important character in so many women’s experiences and so many Buddhist minds. I couldn’t imagine taking on her voice. It felt like I was trespassing.

So then I thought about Patachara. And again, she’s such a big person for so many people’s imagination that I thought again I’m trespassing into someone’s life, and I don’t know if I can do that. And Patachara’s experience of suffering is so pronounced, I didn’t know if I could understand it, if I could imagine or if I had the courage to imagine the kind of suffering she was forced to endure.

So I had to find somebody whose suffering was not so elaborate that I couldn’t touch it and yet whose story was not so anchored in the tradition that it was going to bother a lot of readers because they have a different experience of who they think that character is. That was a lot of the literary decision making that went into it.

And then when I came across her, I found her so audacious. She’s standing at the door with all of her beauty, summoning men in with. She’s basically naked, just going, “Do you dare come to me?” And there was something about her that I thought was just fabulous but also broken, and I thought, “I can understand that.” So I thought, “OK, let’s do this together.”

James Shaheen: Vimala’s story also demonstrates the familiarity of suffering. It can be difficult to imagine an alternative when we’re so stuck in our own habits and stories. So how did the women help each other to imagine and actually enact different possible futures?

Vanessa Sasson: That’s a beautiful question. I think the great thing about this story is that the women did it together. That’s what I find so beautiful is that these women, they couldn’t have done it on their own. I mean, society wouldn’t have allowed it, first of all. The husbands and the temple priests and the brothel owners would have pulled them back. And so the only way they were going to have strength to pull this off was as a community. And I think that’s true so often. When you march, like if you go to a women’s march today, and I think this is like the first women’s march, it’s so exciting to be surrounded and to think, “OK, we will do this.” The “I will do this” is very isolating and you’re risking so much, and it’s very hard to ask an individual to risk so much. But if you’re standing with a group and you do it together, a lot more is possible. And I think that’s what this story tells us. When the men go, they go as individuals, one at a time. Sometimes two people will go together, like two friends, like Sariputta and Mahamoggallana. They go together, and they have an agreement to do it together.

But most of the men are going by themselves. The women go as a group. And I think that’s what helps them imagine because their world is not giving them much imagination for this. The world of ancient India, there were the Jains and they actually had a monastic women’s community before the Buddhists, but I don’t know how prominent they were, and I don’t know if it was something that visibly you would see every day as you’re walking down the street. And so for most people, I don’t think that imagination would have been there that we can really be free. We can really do something different and radical with our lives.

That’s hard to imagine even today for many of us. We just kind of follow the world that’s kind of under our feet. And yet when you’re with a group of women who are imagining something together, you lean on their shoulders and you do it as a group, I think it’s so much more possible then. So I think that’s how they did it.

James Shaheen: Well, this question may also have some contemporary resonance. As the group of women travel through different towns, they’re met with mixed reception. What do you think was so threatening or dangerous about a community of women trying to get free?

Vanessa Sasson: Well, you’re risking social disturbance. You’re risking roles having to shift, power structures having to change, hierarchies having to reorganize themselves. I think you change a lot that way. It’s a disruption, and disruption is difficult. So I can imagine that in some places, it would be exciting to see a group of people saying they’re doing something different and they’re going to try for something else. That could be really exciting to see, but it could also be really threatening and really scary to have a group of people saying, “We’re going to change the system. We’re going to try to do something else with our lives.” How do you respond to something like that? I can imagine this being very hard for a lot of people.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, in some of the cases like with Vimala, certainly she was considered somebody else’s property, so it was considered a kind of theft to even leave. So you write, “To leave the home was to disrupt the way things had always been, to threaten cosmic harmony, to destroy the social bonds that kept everyone else afloat. These women broke all those promises and challenged every expectation the moment they walked out the door.” 

Vanessa Sasson: Yeah, I think that’s what it is. You’re changing something, and change is hard. It’s inescapable, but it’s hard. 

James Shaheen: You also say of the community of women, “They were a community of female renunciants who had renounced before they even knew if they were allowed.” How have you come to understand renunciation in the process of writing this book, and what is it that the women are renouncing? 

Vanessa Sasson: I think renunciation is actually really profound, and I think it’s something that I’m learning over time. I don’t think it’s something that I learned just once. I think when I was younger, I would have thought that renunciation is this very clear setup of either householder or renunciant, kind of like how certain binaries are created in Buddhist literature where you’re either a monk or you’re a householder. And that’s really simplistic, and it’s really a kind of black and white narrative. But the more I spend time thinking about renunciation, the more I think there is something much more nuanced about what the question of renunciation is.

So I think socially, there is a request, I think, in a lot of communities that the renunciation is to be welcomed. So these women are hoping that the Buddha will give them a spiritual home, even if they’ve renounced an actual home. I think that paradox is important, and I don’t think it’s a contradiction. To renounce but to be left in the middle of nowhere in the wild, very few people are going to have the capacity to meet that. I don’t know that renunciation is supposed to be so radically individual that you’re just supposed to hang in the middle of nowhere with no one supporting you. I think the reason there’s monastic sanghas is because you can renounce some things, but you need to be held still.

And so I don’t think of renunciation as as radical as I think I understood it in my 20s when I was first engaging with this literature where I thought it’s this kind of radical departure and you need no one. I’m completely on my own, I’m independent and individual. It’s very young, and it’s understandable and it’s idealistic, but I don’t think it’s true. I think even in renunciation, there’s a question of community and there’s a question of companionship and friendship and love and support that I don’t know that we’ve always had the language for in Buddhist studies or in Buddhist communities, but I think it’s really important. These communities were not individuals standing alone. They were together. And they were trying to renounce something else. They weren’t necessarily trying to renounce people. 

James Shaheen: Right, I think of this and I think this notion when we’re young that we’re going to go off on our own just affirms our worst tendencies, our hyper-individualistic bent, rather than actually the challenges in community. But a central component of renunciation is the tension between family obligations and the path to awakening. Can you tell us a bit about how this plays out in the story of the Buddha’s wife, Yasodhara? How does she navigate this balance seeking ordination? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, so this is where I think Buddhism is actually extremely skilled and sophisticated is the story of Yasodhara and of all of these women who are leaving home, it’s complicated for them to leave home. Their renunciation and the Buddha’s renunciation, and there’s so many stories like this all through Buddhist literature, renunciation is a complicated ideal. Because when you do it socially, when you leave your home and your family obligations, you are disrupting everything. And so when somebody chooses a monastic life, there is a lot of loss for the family. They’re losing a worker. They’re losing someone who will take care of their parents in their old age. They’re losing potential grandchildren. There’s a lot of loss that happens with this. And even if you’re excited and proud of your child for having such a dedicated life, I’m sure that for most families, it’s still complicated to watch your child walk away and join a different family and a different community life.

So I think renunciation creates a disturbance in society that you’re constantly having to renegotiate. And you see it in the Buddha’s life story where he leaves home and he disturbs everybody. And this is the genius of Buddhist storytelling is they tell you that he’s disturbed everyone. They don’t give you this story where he thinks, Oh, I’m going to leave home and go live in the forest. And everybody goes, “Wonderful, we’re so proud of you.” That’s not the story.

James Shaheen: He’s supposed to be the king, the next king.

Vanessa Sasson: Right, he’s hurt everybody. And so he’s upset his father who expected him to take the throne, so now his father is stuck without somebody to take care of the throne. The royal subjects, the citizens, they’ve just lost their prince. Mahapajapati has lost her son. Yasodhara loses her husband. Rahula, who is just born, has lost his father. Kantaka, who’s this horse, this fabulous white majestic horse who loves the future Buddha, who loves the prince, he loses the prince too and he dies of heartbreak. So you have just this fantastic storytelling that happens in the literature where they tell you of one heartbreak after another. They don’t tell you everybody’s happy he becomes the Buddha. They tell you how sad everyone is to lose the prince. And to me, this is sophisticated, this is intelligent, this is telling you that yes, renunciation is a very profound, tricky thing to accomplish, and it means different things at different times in your life. It is going to upset everything around you, and it’s not going to be easy, and you’re going to cause suffering in the midst of you seeking your freedom for suffering. And that, to me, is the genius of these stories. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know it always makes me think of The Pilgrim’s Progress because I believe if I remember correctly he tears himself away from the family, and it’s a terrible scene, and it reminds me of that, although this is a little more elegant, frankly, in the telling, although the emotion of the scene is very real.

Vanessa Sasson: Oh, the emotion is terrible. There’s a scene in a Sanskrit text in the Mahavastu where Mahapajapati has cried so much that her eyes are covered with scales from all her tears. I mean, they really don’t pull their punches. They really let you feel the loss of this person that they all loved and that they all expected things from and who had responsibilities that he owed. And he broke the social contract. And the tradition stays with that story. They don’t say, “Oh, it didn’t matter.” They stay with the story, and all the beautiful early storytellers, they spend time telling you about the loss as it’s experienced by all of these different characters. Yasodhara’s loss is devastating and angry and accusatory, and she goes to see the chariot driver and she says, “How could you let him leave? Didn’t you tell him about me?” This is such a poignant moment in the biography of her to say, “How could you let this happen? I’m here. He’s not supposed to go. He has responsibilities to me.”

So when the tradition creates stories like this, it’s telling you this is a hard decision and it’s going to break a lot of things. There’s no way to be in samsara. That’s why I started this by saying that has been my word for the last few years. At the end of the day, samsara is always a little bit broken and not quite right. And I don’t know that we can get it right. I think the literature tells us it’s going to be a mess. And it is a mess. 

James Shaheen: We can’t quite fix it.

Vanessa Sasson: No, and so when these women leave, they’re having this aspiration and then they’re met with a new mess because samsara is ever present. That’s my only way of understanding this literature is that we were always in a space of things being not quite right because our greed and our hatred and our desire are fueling 90 percent of what we do, and so we hurt each other all the time. And so they want to create a sangha, and then that sangha is not quite what they had hoped for. 

James Shaheen: Right, you mentioned the messiness, so can you say a bit more about the messiness of community? 

Vanessa Sasson: If we pick up the thread of the story, when they go to see the Buddha and he finally sees them, Ananda notices that their heads are shaved and they’re crying. They don’t tell us why the women are crying. Are they crying because they’re so happy they finally reach the Buddha again? Or are they crying because they’re frightened that he might say no again? They don’t tell us. But there’s a well of emotion in these women. This matters to them for whatever reason, and for each one probably a different reason, but there’s emotion in this moment. This matters. They’re not just saying, “I want to do this because I want to get out of something.” They’ve come to a point now where the request is heavy.

And so finally, the Buddha—and in the text, it’s terrible. I had to actually soften the Buddha’s behavior and change it a little bit because I couldn’t live with how harsh some of this literature is because in the literature, he does not even go to meet the women. He does not even talk to Mahapajapati, his stepmother, directly. And I thought that I can’t recreate that myself. So I adjusted some of the story for my own kind of temperament. But the women are told in the Vinaya that they will get ordination, but they get conditions and these eight conditions or these eight heavy rules as they’re often translated, the garudhammas, have been a really difficult part of Buddhist history ever since.

And people have been discussing and debating them for 2,500 years, more or less, depending on where you want to place where the story begins. The eight rules are basically no matter what your situation, no matter how senior you are, you must always be inferior to a monk. And so the first of the eight rules is if a monk has been ordained one day and a woman has been ordained a hundred years, she must bow to him. And the seven subsequent rules are more of the same but in different technical color. And so you have these eight rules that basically determine that, OK, women can be ordained. They’ve finally made it into this community and they’ll have a spot. They won’t be alone in the forest by themselves, but they have to always accept that the monks are going to be above them.

And that’s a tough message to get out of an ancient text. I mean, every religious tradition has this kind of a narrative somewhere in its history and in its current reality. But it’s still very hard to digest this kind of unapologetic demand: if you want to be part of the community, you have to understand where your place is, and your place is not beside the monks, it’s behind them.

And monastic communities have been negotiating this story ever since. Do we have to still abide by this? Do we agree? Do we not agree? Do we want to? Do we not want to? This has been a big question for monastic communities ever since that was established whenever we want to decide that story was established.

James Shaheen: Right. So, what have you learned from talking with contemporary monastics about these eight rules? How do women monastics negotiate these today? 

Vanessa Sasson: Well, it’s different in every community, and I think it’s different for every monastic. I spent a summer years ago in Sri Lanka asking that very question. I did a whole research project on trying to understand what women’s relationship was to these rules and to the question of higher ordination. Every woman I spoke to had a different answer for me. For some women, of course, the Buddha would say this and this is the right thing and he said it, therefore I accept it. A lot more women were much more nuanced in their answers and said, “Well, we have the rules, so we have to follow them, but maybe one day it will change or there’s aspiration for it to be complicated or different one day.” Other women rejected it completely and said we were going to have full ordination and we’re not going to abide by these rules, and that’s the end of it, and it’s just a question of time before everybody figures it out. So you have a real spectrum of responses. There’s no one-size-fits-all on the answer to this question.

But what is consistent is that women have to think about this question—monastics generally and male monastics as well. They have to decide as communities, not just as individuals, how are they going to engage with nuns when they meet them? Will they require this rule or will they not require this rule? And what you will find in contemporary communities often is that there’s a lot of nuance in mini gestures or microgestures that most of us wouldn’t notice but that are forms of communication, a kind of nonverbal body language. So I’ve been told by many monastics that if they’re not in a formal setting, a monk will say that if they’re not in a formal setting and they meet a nun that they really admire or that they know of or they know is older than them in ordination, they will bow to them first.

And so there are these micro moments that happen that are really small that we might not see, but then in formal settings, they might feel like they cannot do that. So I think there’s a really wide range. Buddhist women in different countries have very different circumstances. And so it’s different everywhere, but the story is part of what it is to be a monastic. So the story is present; it’s just the response to it is varied. 

James Shaheen: Yeah, people have said, I’ve heard them say, why don’t they just strike it on their own? But then they lose the support of their community and the financial support of the sangha, and it’s not easy, you know. Just doing that is maybe brave, but it’s not easy.

Vanessa Sasson: Well, also, in a way, it’s a very Western kind of response to things. I think we have a very disposable worldview. I think it’s a very contemporary idea of just if you don’t like something, throw it away. And I think that works in some people’s idea of Buddhism. They think, “Oh, Buddhism is about renunciation. Just throw things away.” But I think things are actually more complicated than that. So renunciation is not about throwing things away. I think it’s a transformation of a relationship. And that’s what I meant that the idea that was once binary in my head has become something much more nuanced. It’s not about me throwing my family away. You can’t throw your family away, you’re not supposed to dispose of each other. But is there a transformation of the relationship where you don’t feel as bound? Can you care for people regardless of who they are in your life and not because of who they are in your life? That’s something that doesn’t necessarily show in your behavior in a way that is obvious to other people, but I do think it’s an inner transformation and an inner reckoning with something more profound about renunciation. I do think you can renounce a lot without anyone seeing anything, without it being a big show, but I don’t think it’s about disposing. And I think sometimes we think that, right? You can dispose of the Buddhist sangha if you don’t like it. You can dispose of this. You can dispose. It’s not about disposing.

James Shaheen: Right, yeah, how often do we hear people say, “I’m out of here”?

Vanessa Sasson: Exactly.

James Shaheen: So throughout the novel, you also explore the role of stories, myths, and legends in shaping how we interpret the world and what we imagine is possible. Can you say more about the power of myths within the Buddhist world and within the world of this particular story? How does hearing other stories help the women to process their own? 

Vanessa Sasson: I am a fan of storytelling. I think stories are wonderful. So as a scholar of the tradition, when I came up into the field of academia, storytelling was not something that many people gave any credence to. This was something for old women by the fire. You didn’t take stories and narrative that seriously. What is interesting for scholars is philology and textual critical analysis and philosophy. These are the things that are kind of the highbrow of academia. What we didn’t do very much is give any time or attention to storytelling, because I think we thought it was like what you do for children.

But in the last years of me engaging with these stories, I’ve come to realize everything is in them. And so sometimes what is so complicated to understand philosophically, It’s really clear when you tell a story that we engage with stories in really easy ways and that they get imprinted on our psyche and we go back to them and we tell them again and we tell them again. And there’s something magical about the transformative power of a beautiful story when it gives us the mess. So you can have all this philosophy about renunciation, ordination, but when you tell a story about renunciation, you feel the complexity of it without somebody having to spell it out to you in complicated jargon.

So I think having these stories, telling these stories, we’re engaging with the tradition in really sophisticated ways sometimes. But we haven’t allowed ourselves to recognize that. When you go to most Buddhist communities, people tell stories. People have always told stories. I see it with my students. If I’m giving them philosophical statements or theory, half of their eyes glaze over and I know they’re thinking about what they did last night or wishing they could look at their phone. But the moment I start telling them a story, I see the change. I see that all of a sudden they look at me differently and they’re listening and their heads are cocked to the side a little bit and they put the phone down and they stare at me and I see the wheels are starting to turn in ways that I lost them a moment before. And so I know this is true. I know that we respond as human beings to stories and that sometimes that’s the best vehicle for us to get to the next stage of our lives. 

James Shaheen: So how did you start writing fiction? 

Vanessa Sasson: That was the first question you asked me, so now we’re finally there. I’ve been writing as a scholar and I’ve been doing academia for 25 years now, more or less, and I’ve enjoyed it immensely. And I’ve had a great time in my field, truly. But I did get to a point where I felt like it was a repetitive act, and I felt like there was a kind of style to writing as an academic that’s very formulaic. It’s an important style, and you want to be able to master it so that you can convey things with precision. This is not to beat this down and say it’s not a good system or methodology. I don’t think that’s the case. But it’s repetitive. And there was a point at which I’d gotten to a point where I thought, “Is this all I know how to do? Is this the only way I know how to write or express myself or raise my questions?” And so there was certainly an existential personal question for me of just, What else can I do? How else can I express myself and engage with this literature? And then there’s other questions of Is this like the only way that this literature should be dealt with?

I knew that I loved stories and that I wanted to engage with stories, but as a scholar you’re not supposed to be the storyteller. So the only time we’re allowed to be storytellers is in the classroom. That’s when it’s allowed, and so we can all tell our stories in the classroom. But the moment the class ends, we have to get very serious in our writing.

But there’s something so alive and evocative about being with the stories. And so I went through a lot of questions about whether it was time to open the door to try something new for all kinds of reasons: for my own personal transformation, for my engagement with the literature, to fall in love with the literature again.

You kind of get a distance from the literature as a scholar sometimes because you’re so used to looking at it as your object that you’re in charge of studying, and there’s some control issues with that and all kinds of bizarre emotions that emerge. But if you let yourself become a storyteller, all of that goes away and you’re supposed to fall in love again, or you can’t write it. And I wanted to fall in love again. I mean, this was the literature that I loved as a graduate student that made me start this journey in the first place. And I felt as though there was a little bit of losing my way with my relationship with these stories. So there was a lot of that that was happening. There was a call to enjoy and not just be a professional all the time, to have the privilege of saying “I’ve had all this wonderful time as a scholar, I can do this and what a shame if I don’t.”

But then there were also political reasons for why I did what I did. The world of scholarship is very narrow. We talk to ourselves, we talk to each other, and I think that a lot of the time, what we work on doesn’t always move beyond our boundaries. And so there was also a desire to truly engage with the question of What do I do with this privilege of an education that I have? Is there more that I can do with what I have? So the question that I’ve found myself thinking about was if I had a responsibility to do something more in all seriousness. I was wondering if there was more that I do. I have all of this access to education, to literature. I’ve been thinking about this material for so long. Do I have a responsibility to do more with what I have? And so to reach outwards, which is a scary thing to do, because as a scholar, you get used to your small little network that becomes safe: I know how to do this, but maybe I should do a bit more. And all of those things were at play for me when I thought, “Let me try to do this.”

James Shaheen: Well, it’s pretty amazing. It’s a wonderful read. It really is. I so enjoyed having some of the women from the Therigatha or from the canon fleshed out and made real to me in ways that I really hadn’t thought about. And it’s amazing how similar some situations are today to how they were then. But I have one last question for you, Vanessa, if you don’t mind. The story is replete with jewels, prophetic dreams, tree goddesses, and the supernatural, not to mention the Buddha’s extraordinary perfumed chamber, which I really liked. This may come as a surprise to readers who think of Buddhism as an austere or even sterile tradition. So can you say more about the role of what you call the fabulous in the Buddhist world?

Vanessa Sasson: Yes. I love this question, and I’m so glad you asked it. I think we have appropriated or we have engaged with Buddhism in the West a little bit like what I was saying with scholarship, that we’ve put philosophy and philology on these kind of pedestals, that this is what real Buddhism is about, and that the renunciation is that binary renunciation and this almost like an extremely ascetic understanding of Buddhism. And it makes us almost feel bad all the time: all the things you have to let go of and all the ways you have to release yourself. And when I look at Buddhist literature, I don’t see that. What I see is gods playing in the sky and dropping giant flowers from the heavens and conch shells blaring and jewels.

I mean, just one of the most amazing descriptions, if you ever get a chance to look at some of the literature about the Mahabodhi tree. This is the tree that the Buddha achieves awakening under, and there are so many stories of him walking slowly toward this tree, and the path is lighting up like charms scintillating all around him. It’s like you can imagine each step the world gets brighter as he walks towards this tree. This is in our earliest literature. And then the tree itself is exploding with jewels and beauty and treasures, and the gods are all floating above the tree singing with excitement, “He’s coming. The moment is about to happen. He’s about to become the Buddha.” And so you have this joy, this celestial joy and excitement. The whole universe is excited that he’s going to become the Buddha.

And the literature is filled with this kind of imagery, and it’s beautiful, and it’s enthusiastic, and it’s joyful. It’s not dark. It’s not austere and individualistic. Everything is communal in Buddhist literature. He’s never alone wherever he goes. When he achieves awakening, all the gods are like watching in anticipation. The spirits and all kinds of things are waiting with bated breath. When’s it going to happen? I mean, it’s just these wonderful images of Buddhism that are festive and beautiful and shiny and fabulous. And I don’t know how we allowed ourselves to skip past all those descriptions. It’s like we read past them over and over again and yet they’re on every page of every Buddhist text. There’s this extraordinary abundance in a tradition that is actually speaking about renunciation. And that’s again going back to that sophistication that I was saying I see in the stories of this capacity to hold renunciation and beautiful cosmic celestial abundance at the same time.

And what better way to understand that than to have a visual, to see this tree and to see everyone excited about him achieving awakening? It’s not a dark, austere, difficult tradition in much of the literature. There are obviously exceptions to every rule, but I think we need to spend a little bit more time enjoying the beauty of these Buddhist stories and these Buddhist texts. And I don’t know why we don’t.

I mean, I remember coming across Yasodhara’s story more seriously and realizing that it’s so romantic. Why does no one talk about the Buddha’s relationship with Yasodhara as a deeply romantic tragedy? They were married for lifetimes, and then he leaves her in his last life. I mean, it’s made for an opera. And somehow we’ve bypassed it and just turned it into something really quite serious. And I understand why we’ve done that on some fronts, but I think we have robbed ourselves of some of the beauty that the tradition has to offer. And I tried to tap into a little bit of that in the book, and I feel like I didn’t even come close to what most of the texts do. So I just kind of popped in a little bit of it, but I hope some of that comes through, because that’s important to me. 

James Shaheen: Well, it definitely does. Vanessa, thanks so much for joining. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Gathering, available now. Thanks again, Vanessa.

Vanessa Sasson: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Vanessa Sasson. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Lama Rod Owens: Do I have agency to choose my relationship to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions? Can I hold space for what arises, and can I move from reactivity to responsiveness? And for me, that’s inner freedom. And that’s what meditation practice is cultivating is that inner agency to choose how to be in relationship to whatever arises.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Lama Rod Owens. Lama Rod is an author, activist, and authorized lama in the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. In his new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors, he draws from the bodhisattva tradition to rethink the relationship between social liberation and ultimate freedom. In the process, he pulls from the wisdom of the Old Saints of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements. In my conversation with Lama Rod, we talk about why he believes that the apocalypse is an opportunity for awakening, the power of connecting with our ancestors and unseen beings, why the New Saint is not necessarily a good person, and how fierceness can be a form of awakened care. Plus, he reads a prayer from his new book. So here’s my conversation with Lama Rod Owens.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with Lama Rod Owens. Hi, Lama Rod. It’s great to be with you.

Lama Rod Owens: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on. 

James Shaheen: We’re happy to have you on. So we’re here to talk about your new book, The New Saints: From Broken Hearts to Spiritual Warriors. So to start, I’ll ask you what we always ask. Can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Lama Rod Owens: Right, yeah. I think the first thing that I feel compelled to say about the book is that it’s a very different book than what you may be used to. And I think people will say, “Oh, this is a dharma book,” and then they get their hands on it and then after the first chapter or the prologue will say, “Oh, what did I get myself into? Can I return this book?”

But The New Saints really started coming to me right after my last book was published, which was Love and Rage. That came out right in the summer of the quarantine in 2020, of course, and afterwards, the murder of George Floyd. And then that’s what made the book so popular, you know, it’s just dealing with anger and activism.

But in that kind of renewed period of activism and organizing around Black lives, I really started asking myself these same questions that I ask myself when things happen collectively, like what is my role here? What am I supposed to do as a dharma teacher, as a person in this collective? And so this idea for a guide, a manual of sorts, started really coming through, and an articulation of the bodhisattva tradition was what I got really strongly.

I needed to talk about what it meant to be good, to do good things, to try to get free, and to try to help others get free, but I couldn’t just tell the same old stories again about the bodhisattva. I couldn’t go back into all that mythology that many people know from the tradition. So I said that there has to be something new. And so, of course, this phrase “the New Saints” really came afterwards. Like what does it mean to be a saint? And how can I take this ideal and really reinterpret it so it actually is about what’s happening in the world right now? It’s really about the contemporary experience of people in bodies, in the relative, in a world that seems to be really on the edge of something catastrophic. How can I write this in a way that helps people to not just manage what was coming up for them around fear and anxiety but really give people something that they can really work with in order to bring about a different future.

James Shaheen: Very well said. With these crises, it can be so easy to slip into apocalyptic thinking. But you suggest that we are not experiencing the end of the world, but rather, quote, the end of some provocative and desperately enduring lies we have told ourselves. Can you tell us more about how you’ve come to view the idea of apocalypse?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think we misinterpret the meaning of the word apocalypse. I think when people are talking about apocalypse, what they’re actually talking about is Armageddon, like armed conflict, war, global war, destruction of communities, and so forth.

That’s what people are really thinking about. But when we talk about apocalypse, apocalypse is rooted within the study of theology, and the root meaning of apocalypse, I think coming out of the Greek, is really about unveiling, awakening. It’s the energy, the action of pulling back the curtains and letting the light shine in. And if you’re so accustomed to the dark, the light will be a little hard to deal with. And I think that’s what’s happening. The truth is being revealed, and we’ve been living in a kind of dark delusion for a very long time. And so for me, having said all of that, I think the apocalypse is about coming back into balance. But that rebalancing feels really painful.

James Shaheen: It’s an interesting take on apocalypse, and it’s one that I think makes sense. You also talk of our present crisis as a time of spiritual warfare as much as it is one of political and social warfare. So can you tell us what you mean by spiritual warfare, and how is this a spiritual crisis?

Lama Rod Owens: That phrase, spiritual warfare, was something I really had a lot of anxiety around including in the text. And that’s something that up until now I would never actually use publicly. But for me, I can get really wrapped up in the political and social aspect of struggle in terms of systems and institutions that create harm. But because of my practice and because of my ancestry and just my natural inclination, I’ve been very concerned with the unseen and the impact that the unseen world is having on us and vice versa. And when I talk about the unseen world, I’m talking about this experience of ancestors and deities and spirits and formless beings who are still connected to this world and who I believe are impacting us in ways that we’re not extremely conscious of, but there are those of us who are. And so for me, spiritual warfare is really about how do I use awareness and love and clarity to bring a situation back into balance? And how do I develop a sensitivity to understand that I have to work between both the form world, the world of phenomena, and as well as the formless world in order to create the change that I most wish to see in the world?

James Shaheen: You know, you anticipated my next question because you suggest there are beings in the unseen world who want us to be free. I really like that idea—it’s a comfort too. So what does it look like to ally with our ancestors and unseen beings?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, interestingly enough, this idea came from my study of anti-slavery abolition and how abolition was very deeply connected to spiritualism, to the spiritualist movement that was really beginning to happen in the northeast in New York, Boston, New York, some in the Midwest, also in Europe, where particularly radical Quakers were getting involved in seances and talking to the dead and working with mediums, and that became a huge cultural phenomenon.

But what also began to reveal itself was that there were these beings in the unseen world, people who had passed on, who were actually really concerned with ending slavery. And they began to speak through these mediums and really began to inform the anti-slavery abolition work. From there, I was like, yeah, of course, freedom is really about working between these two realms. So when I talk about the unseen world, for me, I instantly think about my ancestors, these beings who are connected to me in some way, not necessarily by blood or genetics but beings who have chosen a kind of affinity with me based upon some shared characteristic. We’re members of the same communities, identity locations, of course, actual blood familial beings as well. And they choose us as partners to support us in doing the work of liberation because anything that we do to get free or to heal from trauma and from woundedness is also helping to free them because we share this kind of karmic, energetic relationship. And so when I connect consciously to my ancestors, I’m really connecting into a really powerful resource. And for me personally, that’s transformed my practice and my work around the work of spiritual liberation. 

James Shaheen: So with that help, you put forth the notion of the New Saint. So what is a New Saint?

Lama Rod Owens: The New Saint is just a rethinking of what it means to be a bodhisattva right now with a particular focus on relative justice and its relationship to ultimate liberation, with a focus on identity, so not bypassing the relative but working skillfully with the relative. It is phrased and wrapped in language that I wanted to appeal to young people. I wanted it to appeal to people who aren’t necessarily Buddhist identified, but who care about the world and who are interested in spirituality but maybe have never felt like the spiritual paths that they’ve explored really offered a clear insight into the integration of social and ultimate liberation together.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think you are reaching young people because it was the young people in the office who said, “James, you’ve really got to read this book, you’ve really got to read this book.” I have so many books to read. And I said, “OK, I’ll read it.” And I’m glad they did. So in describing the New Saint, you draw not only from Buddhist understandings of the bodhisattva but also from the Old Saints who have influenced your path, among them the organizers and activists Fannie Lou Hamer and Audre Lorde. Can you tell us about how you draw together the lineages of Tibetan Buddhism and Black liberation movements in developing the New Saint?

Lama Rod Owens: I think for me, the social liberators and ultimate liberators are actually two sides of the same coin, and I think that, for instance, these great activists and organizers like Fannie Lou Hamer, I think they were deeply connected to an ultimate expression, to what they consider the divine, and they were pointing people back to that experience through the work of organizing folks and bringing awareness to systemic injustice. And I think that’s the same thing for Harriet Tubman, for instance, who I identify also as a bodhisattva who chose to incarnate as a Black enslaved woman in order to teach us what freedom actually really means and what it looks like and who was also just deeply connected to what we can call the ultimate source or the essence or to the divine or to the sacred. When I think about my teachers and my tradition and the people that I’ve studied in Tibetan Buddhism, the great saints from India and Tibet and so forth, I just feel like these beings in many ways were emanating as people like Harriet Tubman and Fannie Lou Hamer and Sojourner Truth or Malcolm X or Dr. King and Audre Lorde. At this point, I don’t see any difference between the Tibetan saints and these social activist saints in Black liberation. They cared about people, and they wanted people to be free. That’s it. 

James Shaheen: You say something that at first sounds provocative, but really it makes sense: you suggest that the New Saint is not a good person. So what’s the difference between being a good person and actually practicing goodness?

Lama Rod Owens: I think it’s important just to get really clear about what goodness is because I think that goodness can become an identity location where people just kind of stick themselves, and if you stick yourself in a place of just being a good person, it becomes really difficult to see where you’re not practicing goodness, where you’re actually creating harm. And I think that goodness can be really quite performative, particularly now in the age of social media. You can create a social media page that makes you look really good and can lead people to think whatever you want about how you’re showing up.

But for me, goodness is something that I’m choosing second to second. It’s not something that I’m just at and planted in. When I talk about choosing goodness in the moment or in the second, I’m saying that I’m choosing the reduction of harm and violence for myself and against others moment to moment. And that has to be active, conscious engagement, and so it becomes more like a process, a continuum, a verb. It’s something that’s always being negotiated. It’s always being discerned. It’s never a place that I just go to and say, “This is it.” Every second is different. So I’m making different choices and understanding how to reduce harm in the moment.

James Shaheen: You say the work of the new saint is the liberation of all beings and phenomena. So how do you understand freedom, and how does freedom differ from, say, justice?

Lama Rod Owens: You know, as I was writing the book, I really began to understand that I’m much more into freedom than justice. And for me, justice feels like a stopping place like happiness can feel like a stopping place in our practice. You can get right into these things, into happiness, into equity, into justice and say, “OK, this is it.” But we’re still in this experience of delusion that we call samsara that in The New Saints I called the carceral state, which is this experience of delusion of not being clear about what’s happening and who I am.

So freedom is like, let’s disrupt, let’s transcend all the roots, all the causes and conditions of suffering, and to return back to remembering who we are so we don’t have to do this reality thing anymore, we don’t get lost in this cyclical experience that we can relate to as The Matrix as a cultural phenomenon, but overall, this carceral state, which binds us through delusion, and we’re policed by fear and doubt and so many other things as well. So to transcend everything is my understanding of freedom, to transcend duality and binaries, to return back to a simple state of being where we just are. We are.

James Shaheen: You just mentioned justice as a stopping point, and you wrote something that really resonated with me, but I don’t want it to be misunderstood, so maybe you can explain it a little bit. It’s not that we don’t care about justice, but you write, “We must give up on the idea of justice and commit to liberation, as some of our ideas about justice are not about complete liberation but the illusion of universal comfort for all beings.” I thought that was very interesting.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, so again, my goal, my agenda, which I think is the same agenda of Buddhism, is to actually transcend all of this, this whole cycle, and if you go for that, if you go for the goal of ultimate liberation, all this stuff is going to happen regardless. Justice is going to happen. Happiness, joy, comfort will actually happen as well as we’re moving towards ultimate freedom.

So don’t just aim for that. Aim for the very top, for ultimate liberation, and you’re going to get everything. So if you go for everything, you’re going to get everything. But I know going for happiness feels a lot easier, or going for justice seems much more doable. But I’m asking people to think much more expansively about the nature of existence itself, which, again, is what Buddhism is always asking us to do.

James Shaheen: You know, you write that your first experiences of freedom came in church when you learned about Jesus and about the Exodus story. How did those experiences shape how you think about freedom and abolition and spiritual abolition in particular?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, these were the earliest examples of freedom that I had growing up. I’m a Black man who grew up in North Georgia in a small Black community, I grew up in the Black church. My mother is a United Methodist minister, so these stories were quite potent for me and for a lot of Black folks growing up in this country. These are the stories my ancestors were given and offered and were allowed to study and think about.

My ancestors deeply identified with Jewish people, with the ancient Hebrews who were being held by Egypt, and the Exodus, when God delivered the Jewish people from captivity into wandering for forty years until they found Canaan. My ancestors were praying to be delivered out of slavery, just like the Jews were. And that, for me, of course, is the foundation of liberation theology, and that became so important for me in terms of really forming my understanding of spiritual freedom, spiritual abolition, that in that way, everyone who is not free will be set free.

And it takes work, it takes prayer, it takes this work of connecting to the unseen, it takes trust and devotion and the sacred or the divine. But if we can do that, then we will get free. And I still believe that. Even as a practicing Buddhist, this is a core belief: If I trust and have devotion in emptiness, which I often describe as God, or an expression of God, then I will get free. It just feels like an attunement to how things actually are.

James Shaheen: Right. You say the work of the New Saint happens on multiple levels: outer, inner, secret, and super secret. So what does freedom look like on each of these levels, and how do these levels inform and support each other?

Lama Rod Owens: This outer, inner, secret, and super secret comes right out of Tantric Buddhism or these levels of knowing and understanding. I wanted people to understand that there are layers here to this. Ultimately, yes, it is the experience of being beyond dualism. But in the body, in the relative, it’s going to look different ways.

So outer freedom is like, what does it look like to live in a culture, in a society where I have agency to make choices about the resources that I need? Do I have agency to make choices about my body? Do I have access to the other resources that I need to be well, like food, clothing, medicine, and so forth? Do I have autonomy to choose my path that feels appropriate for me, or is that dictated by other people and communities? So outer freedom is this relative freedom where we have the agency to make choices about what we need.

And then you start talking about inner freedom, and that begins to move into our experience of body and mind. Do I have agency to choose my relationship to sensation, to thoughts, to emotions? Can I hold space for what arises, and can I move from reactivity to responsiveness? And for me, that’s inner freedom. And that’s what meditation practice is cultivating is that inner agency to choose how to be in relationship to whatever arises in my experience.

And then you get into secret. Of course, that secret freedom is actually connecting to the state of freedom itself, which is emptiness and space and energy, connecting to that fundamental experience because that’s where we arise from. That is the nature of our minds and consciousness.

And then, of course, the super secret experience is like yeah, then we return back completely to this experience. So the secret and super secret are really about remembering who we are. It’s remembrance. I’ve gotten distracted through delusion, and I’ve gotten really attached to form, and now, I am actually letting go of form, letting form dissolve back into emptiness, and letting the sense of self dissolve back into this nature of mind itself, and I just abide. And that’s what I’m trying to get to: that simple abiding in a state beyond duality. 

James Shaheen: You know, if you ask somebody, “Do you want to be free?,” everybody will say “Yes, I want to be free,” but you describe what you call liberation pessimism. So why are we afraid of getting free?

Lama Rod Owens: I mean, when you start really wanting to get free, you start understanding that you’re going to have to leave everything behind. And even in this moment, I think about Harriet Tubman, who escaped slavery, who left the plantation. And for me, that act of saying, “You know what, I’m going to be free regardless of if I die doing it or not,” I think that’s what really scares people. It’s like, what’s beyond this choice of getting free?

Because I know what everything else is. I’m in the world, I have this identity, I’m a part of things, I have stuff I like, but when you tell me that freedom is really the real goal, are you asking me to give up all this? And what I am actually saying is that no, I’m not asking you to give up anything. I’m asking you to transform your relationship to things, to actually remember that there is space and choice and agency in how I relate to everything. And if I can let go of the fixation, then I can reinvest energy and practice into this experience of who I really am, which is an expression of emptiness and space and energy.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, another challenge in getting free is the loneliness of the work. So how have you learned to work with loneliness, and what does it mean to you to choose aloneness?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. I think when you choose freedom, it’s a choice that a lot of people aren’t making, and that really has come out of my personal experience, where I feel like I’ve been really misunderstood by people who care for me because I’ve chosen to work towards ultimate freedom, and that seems really foreign to people. Of course, one of those earlier decisions around getting free was entering a three-year retreat, which everyone thought I was like completely out of it. You know, my family thought I was joining a cult.

James Shaheen: I like your take on cults.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, well, in a way I was actually joining a cult. But people just didn’t get it, like why would you do something like that? And I would say because I want to get free. So that’s the loneliness of a lot of spiritual practice, because you’re doing something a lot of people aren’t doing. Even if you’re in community, even if you’re in sangha and so forth, there’s still a level of loneliness. Because yeah, we’re working together, we’re practicing together, we’re supporting each other, but we still have individual experiences that can feel really isolating, and we are asked to hold that and in these moments of isolation to still understand that we’re still connected, we’re still part of things, but this has to be a personal experience because we individually have to consent to the work of liberation.

It’s not a collective thing. It’s not just like getting a bunch of people together and saying, “OK, raise your hand if you’re ready to get free,” and you’re like, “I’m not going to raise my hand. I’ll just let them assume my hand is raised.” That’s not, that’s not how this works, you know, like we all have to say yes. And then those of us who say yes can form community together to support one another. But if some people are saying “Yes, or,” and if some people are saying, “Well, I don’t know,” then that’s going to create a kind of conflict that I think we see so much in our spiritual communities. But we haven’t been able to name that this is the core of the conflict, that people actually have different agendas being here.

James Shaheen: Right, you invoke Dorothy Day’s concept of spiritual loneliness as the long loneliness. So what are the particular challenges of spiritual loneliness, as well as its opportunities? I mean, I know sangha is a great thing, but even so, within sangha in the effort to get free, it can still be lonely. 

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, Dorothy Day has been an extremely important impact person who has deeply influenced my work as a former member of the Catholic Worker Movement. Being in the movement shapes so much of this work. But it really moved me when she wrote about the long loneliness, which was the name of one of her books, and she talked about this often, this solitariness, this aloneness. And so much of that for her was about doubt, like am I actually doing the right thing? Is this what God is calling me to do? But for me, when I work with the long loneliness in my practice, for me, it’s like, yeah, this is a path of developing a deep intimacy with my own experience, and that gets real isolating because I’m trying to figure out exactly what this experience is, sometimes out of the context of groups and communities. I have to know myself, and that means I have to sit with myself. And in meditation, I’m sitting with everything that arises, and that can be really exhausting and really isolating.

But more and more, if we really commit to this kind of work, then we feel the same way I have, that you begin to experience a really profound, intimate connection with all beings. I would go further and say a connection to all phenomena. And so at this point, yes, I can feel the loneliness, I can feel the aloneness that I choose, but I have never felt so connected to all beings at the same time, and both of those experiences I think happen and will continue to happen up until we reach the threshold of ultimate enlightenment. And then of course you cross the threshold, and you just let go of this illusion that you are separate to begin with.

James Shaheen: Right, you say that spiritual loneliness means that you’re touching into the formless expression of love, which takes you out of a linear timeline. Can you say more about this? What does it look like to be taken out of linear time? I just interviewed Jenny Odell, the artist and writer who wrote Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock, and she very much responds to this notion of linear time.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, well, time is just a concept. I know we hear that all the time, but for me, when I touch into this nonlinear nature of time, it’s really this continuum is dissolved, and the boundaries between the past and the present and the future all just kind of get dissolved, which is really our consciousness. Once we let go of this kind of fixation to the sense of self, then we expand back into the boundless consciousness, which knows no limits, no time zones, no time limits or anything, and you’re experiencing everything at once. Time is something that we’re creating, and when we get really in tune into emptiness, it all dissolves. The sense of self that we’re still clinging to is disrupted.

James Shaheen: Right. We think of time as this incremental sort of commodified quantity that can be bought and sold, says Jenny Odell, and I think you’re along those same lines. One of the things I really liked is you refer to the New Saint’s magic, which depends on two practices, the expression of awakened care and the development of our capacity to disrupt habitual reactivity. So to start, can you walk us through what you mean by awakened care?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Awakened care is my experience of bodhicitta. I would say bodhicitta is the magic of the bodhisattva, but we would traditionally define bodhicitta as the awakened heart-mind. So it’s this view of deep connectedness, deep empathy, that we’re doing the work of liberation not just for ourselves but for all beings. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free. For me, that’s the expression of bodhichitta.

But when I began to think about this in terms of the New Saint and this kind of reinterpretation of the whole tradition, I began asking myself, what is my actual felt experience of bodhicitta, more than just awakened mind, more than this altruism that we’re told to cultivate. And so the first thing I felt was love, this deep acceptance, this deep holding space for everything but also this wish for everyone and everything to be free. So that’s the first thing I felt.

I also experienced compassion, which is like tuning into the suffering of both ourselves and the world and actually committing to freeing ourselves and others from suffering. For me, compassion is the action. I am doing this to get free from the causes and conditions of suffering because everyone’s suffering and no one wants to suffer.

And of course, the other piece of this is joy. I feel deep joy for having the capacity to choose benefiting beings through my practice. I’m overwhelmed by that, and there’s deep gratitude in that joy as well. And of course, everything is based in emptiness, so we have the capacity for all of this to happen because of the profound potential of emptiness in space.

And so when all of this is streamed together or braided together, it begins to awaken care, a deep, profound care, the kind of care that says, “Yeah, I’m going to do everything that I can to get free because I care that much for myself and for others.”

An important point here too is that I have to care for myself enough to want to get free to begin with. And a lot of us aren’t there either. Some of us really don’t believe that we deserve to be free from suffering.

James Shaheen: I think that’s pretty common.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, and I know I had to get clear about that, too. Not only did I have to choose freedom, I had to understand that I deserve to be free. But that’s the first magic, this awakened care, which is an expression of bodhicitta. Of course, the second magic is moving from reactivity to responsiveness, which is what we’re trying to do in our meditation practice: to name and notice what arises and then choose how to be in relationship to what arises, to accept and then to respond not just habitually react.

James Shaheen: You know, Lama Rod, I have to say that when people pick up a dharma book, they’re not going to expect to read about Paris Is Burning or the television series Pose, although one of the actors in Pose, she is a dharma practitioner.

Lama Rod Owens: Angelica Ross, yeah, Angelica is definitely a practitioner. Well, there may be others who are practicing from that show that we’re not aware of.

James Shaheen: Oh really? Well, I wasn’t aware of that. But they also don’t expect to hear about fierceness, but you liken it to the wrathful expressions of Tantric Buddhism. It’s very playful and fun but also meaningful. And these are the most powerful forms of compassion. So how do you practice fierceness as a form of care?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, fierceness is an expression of wrath from Tibetan Buddhism. Wrath is an expression of profound, direct compassion. It has nothing to do with anger. I think that’s the misinterpretation of wrath outside of the tradition. Wrath is saying “This is what needs to be done, and this is what I’m going to do regardless of the impact,” but not necessarily the impact because practicing compassion in this really clear way will free people, but wrath means that there are consequences in terms of my relationship to other folks. And that’s what you’re risking.

If you say something that you know needs to be said to someone, then the risk is that that person may hate you. And that’s coming from personal experience as someone who’s been the recipient of wrath. You know, I have really struggled with feeling like I have survived some type of harm because it’s something that I am desperately trying to hide but needs to be revealed in order for me to experience some freedom.

And of course, that’s going to be met with resentment: How dare you name this? But of course, my experience has been so much more freedom and openness from having that named without my consent, but in a way, if you’re in a relationship with a teacher, then you’re consenting to that kind of dharma transmission. I work with teachers because they tell me the truth about who I am, and they point me in the direction I need to be going. And so I consent to truth being revealed about where I’m stuck even though it hurts like hell.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I’ve been nailed by my teachers plenty of times.

Lama Rod Owens: Oh, yeah, a good teacher has to do that. A good teacher isn’t there to make you feel comfortable. Again, the teacher is supposed to be helping you get free. That doesn’t mean I like it. But it means that I consent to it because I know that this is the only way.

Of course, you know, I feel that in my community. In the Black, gay, queer, gender-expansive community, there’s a fierceness, and that fierceness is really about surviving. It’s wanting individuals to survive, it’s wanting us as a collective to survive, so we go directly to the work that needs to be done. We say what we need to say, we do what we need to do, because that’s what we have to work with in order to disrupt the impact of really systemic violence and transhistorical trauma. We have to get clear and cut through it, even though it hurts.

James Shaheen: Again, that fierceness is evident in Paris Is Burning and in Pose, and I was happy that you brought those into it because as silly as it might sound when you look at it, that’s precisely what it is, fierceness. But you write that awakened care can cause us to lose a sense of agency so that we’re swept up in the agenda of the liberation of all beings and things. Can you say more about the loss of agency at play? How is it that we surrender to the agenda of liberation?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, you know, I talk about Toni Cade Bambara in that section. It’s a kind of profound awakening of something really avodic* and profound, and that’s how I understand care. It’s avodic*, it’s profound, it’s dynamic, and what I’m trying to do is really, when I say lose myself, I’m trying to dissolve the sense of self in this awakened care, and that’s going to get me into a quicker, more direct relationship with the essence or with emptiness itself. And I think in a way, we can describe that as the cultivation of virtue.

So we practice goodness, and that becomes a kind of pattern where we’re choosing how to reduce harm moment to moment, and that becomes a habit. We’re just attuned to choosing what’s reducing harm, and that for me is another way that we get swept up. We’re reprogramming ourselves to choose what is conducive to liberation. And I want to get lost in that so that everything I do becomes an expression of goodness and therefore an expression of virtue.

James Shaheen: I think the phrase you were looking for is I think wanting to make revolution irresistible.

Lama Rod Owens: Irresistible. Yes. Irresistible revolution. That’s what Toni Cade Bambara was always doing was to make this irresistible liberation like it’s the sweetest, most important thing that we could ever be doing, and it just becomes what we do and who we are. And over time, I think that’s what happens.

James Shaheen: You know, I think of the loss of agency in this sense too as if we’re losing ourselves or getting out of our own way in a very positive way. One stream of awakened care is love, and you describe love as a form of surrender and profound acceptance. Can you say more about love as a loss of agency?

Lama Rod Owens: Well, love is this kind of radical acceptance, as Tara Brach talks about in her work. For me, I realized that it’s hard to change when you haven’t really told the truth about what’s actually happening. And so this first expression of love is actually allowing ourselves to hold space for everything that’s arising. It’s just like this is it. This is how it is. I don’t have to like this. I just have to name it and notice it.

I think what keeps us from doing that really profound radical loving is heartbreak. When I start telling the truth about how things really are, then my heart is going to break because I have been so concerned with telling myself narratives about how I want things to be in order to feel good about what’s happening. So you let go of that and say, “This is it. This is what’s happening,” and my heart breaks, which is just the experience of having to touch into this deep disappointment. Once I start doing that, then there’s an honesty that awakens, and that profound holding becomes a love. This is what’s happening, and therefore, I can make a choice to change what needs to change now because I’m not lost in these delusions and narratives about how I think things are. I know how things are now. It creates a deeper intimacy with all phenomena, all beings, because you’re with the truth now, and you know that the truth is that everything and everyone deserves to be free.

James Shaheen: I mentioned love, but another stream is joy, and you write that for a long time you didn’t believe you had a right to joy, just like you didn’t have a right to beauty. So how have you reclaimed your capacity for joy, and how do you see it as essential to liberation work?

Lama Rod Owens: I think joy is a natural expression of our minds. I think joy is an experience that can connect us to this ultimate experience of bliss. I don’t think that we can actually experience bliss in the body, but I think that is the state of our minds. When we’ve transcended all dualities, bliss is the state, but joy points me back as an experience that I can feel.

And we need to connect to joy to hold the difficulty of the work of getting free. I tell stories in that section too just about how joy is used as a tool to help people do really intense social change work. We talked about agency, and the agency here, too, is that once you get connected to how things really are, it’s really hard to go back. You know, it’s hard to choose delusion once you have done the work to get clear.

James Shaheen: Yeah, delusion is wrecked for you.

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, it’s just like, no. It’s like you’ve been driving a Hyundai your whole life and then you find yourself in a Mercedes and you’re like, why would I go back to a Hyundai? This is not to badmouth Hyundai but just to use as an example. It’s like you upgrade. You’re like, OK, I get this.

James Shaheen: So you also say that you never felt like you had a right to beauty, so part of the work of the New Saint is reclaiming beauty while also disrupting capitalism and overconsumption. So can you tell us a bit about what you call the Four Sweet Liberations?

Lama Rod Owens: That’s one of my favorite chapters. That chapter really came out of my deep love for André Leon Talley, who was a fashion editor and journalist, for many years one of the most recognized Black gay men in the fashion world, the only Black man in the fashion world for many years. And he’s someone that I deeply loved. But he passed away about two years ago, and I wanted to help people to understand what he offered me as a dharma practitioner. I considered him a teacher. I never met him in life, but he was teaching me about beauty, and this is where it gets confusing. He wasn’t teaching me to buy expensive things, but he was actually teaching me that beauty was always accessible as an experience, that I didn’t need to accumulate something. I needed to allow myself to surrender to being moved and opened by experiences, and that’s what I mean about connecting to beauty. I didn’t believe I had a right to experience the energy of beauty.

But in this whole chapter, beauty becomes one of these sweet liberations, along with leisure, opulence, and pleasure, these things that traditionally in Buddhist circles, we’re pushing away. We’re saying, “Oh, these are poisons, we’re not going to deal with these.”

But when we start talking about more tantric treatment of these energies, these are energies that are happening inside of me, so I want to be in relationship to these energies, and I want to embody these energies in order to open up these doors to emptiness itself through the practice of sympathetic joy, which is experiencing something pleasurable and then wishing that everyone was experiencing this. So it’s not just about me accumulating and holding on to really great experiences. It’s about me giving away the good stuff every time I get it, thinking about the collective, and that more and more decenters the sense of self and opens up the experience of space and emptiness. This is what the Sweet Liberations are trying to do.

They’re grounded in Black queer and gender-expansive life and culture. I talk about Pose and, of course, Paris Is Burning quite a bit. I wanted to write this chapter for people like me from my community, who feel like there’s no space for them in contemporary convert Buddhist spaces right now. This is for me a way that I’ve opened the door. This is a practice that comes, I think, directly out of Tantric Buddhism, working with energy and embodying this energy to connect to emptiness itself. And we can use our culture to do that. Our culture is full of wisdom that we can use to experience these higher states of freedom.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you talk about using the language of the people you’re speaking with, and I think that’s very much what you did. After all, the Buddha spoke in the idiom of the day. Back to beauty for a second, like love, you also describe it as an act of surrender, letting your guard down and expanding into the experience of the sublime. So how can beauty help us access the sublime or transcendent?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, I think it’s the way that we’re surrendering. We’re letting go of—well, I’ll just speak for myself. I’m letting go of the ways in which I’m protecting myself and guarding myself. I’m allowing myself to expand. And when I say allowing myself to expand, I’m actually letting go of the sense of who I think I am and then beginning to experience and touch into the actual expression of spaciousness. And when I do that, things get more fluid and more inviting. The world becomes less antagonistic, less rigid, less sharp. It becomes more translucent for me when I’m surrendering and opening.

And that is the experience of the sublime. That translucent fluidity really is about connecting to this ultimate experience of emptiness itself. But again, it’s not about materialism. You know, I talk about wanting a BMW. That’s something I’ve struggled with for years, and I’m like, well, I’m not trying to look good, I’m not trying to portray a certain image, and I realized I’m just trying to feel valued. Luxury things function to make us feel valued and seen and appreciated. And so instead of accumulating this stuff, which I can’t afford, I just connect to the energetic expression so that energetic expression begins to feed the sense of deep self-worth. And of course that self-worth is about me wanting not to suffer and wanting to actually experience ultimate liberation.

James Shaheen: OK, so let’s go a step further and talk about desire and pleasure. You say that yearning is the first step in touching the divine. So how have you learned to work with and channel yearning?

Lama Rod Owens: You have to want something. You have to want to get free. Desire or yearning is the last thing we give up before ultimate enlightenment. That yearning for enlightenment is going to take us to the threshold. And to go beyond that threshold, we let go of wanting to get free, which I think will be a really hard choice to make. But I am learning and training myself to yearn for what is about freedom and liberation and fluidity and movement, not to continue yearning for the things that are about creating rigidity and separateness or aloneness necessarily in a way that feels like suffering.

But I am yearning for the benefits of freedom. And I can yearn more for that because the more I yearn and the more I practice, the more I begin to experience what freedom is, and so I know that this is what I should be focusing on: not the rigidity, not all this other stuff, but this experience of getting open and clear and translucent and fluid. That’s it. And so I just start yearning for it. In the same way that we yearn for our bad habits, we can start yearning for these experiences of liberation.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you say one important practice of yearning is prayer. So first, can you tell us a little bit about the experiences of prayer you encountered growing up in church? How did these experiences shape you, and how have you returned to them? Because I found it very interesting that Buddhism allowed you to return to this.

Lama Rod Owens: Yes. Buddhism gave me permission to embrace the value and the importance of my ancestry, primarily because I was trained by Tibetans, not necessarily by Westerners. So my teachers were Tibetan, and I saw how they incorporated their ancestry and culture into the practice of dharma, which has given rise to Tibetan Buddhism. And I said, “I want to do the same for my ancestry,” because for much of my life I felt a little ashamed of having descended from enslaved people.

I felt a lot of shame around that, and I think Tibetans gave me permission to understand that I am only here because of the practice, particularly the prayers, the spiritual practices of my ancestors, and that transformed my relationship to ancestry.

I grew up in a culture of prayer in the Black church, and that prayer was rooted in the reality that we were not free, that there was a lot more to do before we experienced real freedom in this culture. That yearning to be free was on the one hand beautiful, but over time, it just felt too heavy. I was tired of yearning. I wanted to do. I wanted to actually do the things to get free, which led me into the study and embodiment of really quite radical social movements like the Catholic Worker Movement and Black Power Movement.

So the yearning for me turned into a yearning for social liberation. When I came into dharma and started practicing dharma in my 20s, that yearning was returned back to this yearning of just ultimately wanting everything to be free, not just Black people, not just queer people, but everyone, including the people who created harm and violence for us. Everyone needs to be free from suffering and delusion.

And so that yearning is what I begin to channel into my prayers and my praying with deities and rituals and ceremonies and so forth. My primary goal in doing everything is wanting people to be free, and my primary prayer is that everyone get free.

James Shaheen: You know, it was interesting, you talked about at one point, with all this praying, we’re still not free. So it left a bad taste in your mouth and you walked away from prayer. I thought it was a really beautiful thing that through Buddhism, you were able to come back to it. That was really moving to me. But listeners may be surprised to hear a lama talk of God so much. So how do you understand and relate to God?

Lama Rod Owens: You know what, one of my agendas in writing the book, like a sub-agenda, was really speaking to Christians because Christianity is one of my root practices as well. Being here in the South, I’m in Atlanta, and there’s this culture of people really trying to integrate Christianity and Buddhism, and I’ve come to a place where I understand this integration a lot more than I did as a younger person. And so I wanted to really offer this tool of integration for people. And it’s been done before. Thich Nhat Hanh did it. But I wanted to again offer this more contemporary integration.

But my other agenda too was to really give context to the rise of Christian nationalism that’s really impacting our country right now. And I wanted people to understand that it’s not the theology itself, it’s people. I wanted people to really have a clearer understanding of what God was from my perspective, which is that God is the expression of emptiness, space, and energy, and that Jesus was an embodiment of emptiness, just like our tulkus and rinpoches in Tibetan Buddhism. There’s no difference for me.

I wanted to offer something that could help heal many of us who were leaving the church with a lot of trauma, that God is actually this expression of liberation, not this expression of criticism and hate and exclusion, that God is always present as this experience of emptiness and space, which we can experience as deep acceptance or love. But I think it’s important for me as a teacher to really disclose how I’ve been deeply influenced by multiple spiritual and religious paths, not just dharma or Buddhism, and I think when I talk about young people, which is whom I wrote the text to, I think a lot of young people are really interested in integration of multiple paths.

James Shaheen: Well, certainly you do that. I mean, your core seems to be Buddhist, but yet it is shaped and informed by the other traditions that you come from. You know, you mentioned Christian nationalism, and in contrast to the emphasis on masculinity in really any form of nationalism, you describe sacred masculinity as an awakened state of masculinity freed from patriarchy. So what does this look like, and how have you come to work with the dualities of what you call the sacred mother and the sacred father?

Lama Rod Owens: That was so important for me to do in this work was to unbind masculinity from patriarchy, because for me, again, this is about balance. When I talk about sacred duality, for me, it’s rooted within the Heart Sutra of form and emptiness. It’s form and emptiness, that balance. And when I talk about the mother or the feminine, the mother or the feminine cannot exist without a balance of the masculine or the father.

Of course, systemic patriarchy has really informed or repainted the masculine as this expression of dominance. And so I am attempting to actually extract masculinity and reclaim it as a sacred masculinity that’s not about dominance. This is about balance. You can get deeper into these kinds of energetic expressions of the masculine. For me, the masculine is how am I connected into the sacred balance with the feminine, with the mother, not to dominate, but to balance, to hold, to see myself as the mother, as I’m embodying this kind of energy as the masculine or as the expression of the father.

And so for me, masculinity is about fluidity and movement and openness. It’s about structure as well. I equate sacred masculinity with form and emptiness with the sacred feminine or the mother. It’s easy to get confused about form. Form can get rigid without relationship with the feminine or with emptiness itself.

James Shaheen: We’re running out of time, so I want to ask one more question because there’s a whole chapter on it in which you discuss the complexities of devotion practices, particularly in the context of abuses of power within your own lineage. So can you tell us about your relationship with the Karmapa and how it has changed over time?

Lama Rod Owens: Yeah, of course, my relationship to the Karmapa is that he’s the head of my school of Tibetan Buddhism, the Karma Kamtsang, or the Karma Kagyu school in Tibetan Buddhism. I’ve been with the Karmapa quite a bit over the years, both in India and here in the United States. The Karmapa was the first teacher that I felt devotion toward. That’s the first time I felt devotion, and I couldn’t explain it. I just felt it as a deep falling in love with, a deep recognition that this person is the most important person in my life, an old relationship, really, that was starting over again. It was so familiar.

I wrote about my relationship to my root teacher, Lama Norlha Rinpoche, in my last book, Love and Rage, really trying to get at the conflict or the tension between devotion and calling out harmful behavior. But I don’t think I went deep enough in that work. And so coming back to the Karmapa, I was like, OK, I have to break through into this layer of helping people, particularly people outside of devotional traditions, to really understand the tension that arises when we are committed to someone as a source of liberation and someone who we consider enlightened but also who has done things that created harm for people and how this kind of enlightened nature can live alongside acts of harm and really trying to unpack that and really getting into some psychotherapy work, thinking about the shadow, thinking about one’s relationship to ego and how the ego, the sense of self, is important even for an enlightened being to stay close to because the ego is how we communicate. There’s no teaching and transmission that could happen if ego was completely erased. In a teacher’s experience, there would be no interaction. I couldn’t even register this person. So we choose to stay in a relationship to the ego, which is a risk.

James Shaheen: Actually, one of the things that came through in that chapter for me was not so much an idealization. It was more that you were getting at his humanity. 

Lama Rod Owens: Which is a risk.

James Shaheen: Yeah. To close, I wonder if you’d be willing to read a prayer from the book.

Lama Rod Owens: Let me just pull that up on my screen.

I evoke all those beings and sources of refuge who have ever loved me to come sit with me because it is now that I feel most alone. I evoke the Blessed Mother, the Sacred Father, the Spirits of Light, the essence of wisdom, my teachers and elders, the communities who have always caught me when I have fallen, the ancestors who have never stopped holding me, all the elements including the sacred earth who helped me to stand, and silence that wraps me in a space to be with my heart, and I call upon my own innate compassion.

To all those I have evoked, I offer my grief and what seems like my perpetual mourning in this body. I offer my fear, my numbness, and my inability to dream beyond shutting down. Most of all, I offer my fatigue. I am tired.

Today, precious earth, let me lie upon you and be reminded of my body and my heart. I want many things, but I need only one thing now: to give up to you what I cannot hold. I pray that I evolve past my belief that my pain is mine alone to carry. To my sources of refuge who have been evoked, you have taught me repeatedly that this is not the truth.

You have taught me that it is not my pain but our pain. You remind me that my worship of isolation is not conducive to my liberation. I want to be free, and so I offer to you what I struggle to hold right now knowing that you are only here to share this heaviness with me and to love me.

I am afraid of the world. I am afraid of people. I am afraid of what I must do to survive in the world. Even these fears, I offer to my sources of refuge. Today, my precious sources of refuge, in your love, offer me rest. In your love, never abandon me. In your love, haunt all others who feel lonely and tired. Please continue to haunt me in this life, in death, and into all my lives to come until one day I become a source of refuge for other beings. Yet it is also my prayer to become a source of refuge for beings right now in this life. May I and all others in this realm and beyond be blessed forever. I dedicate this labor to my descendants who will one day lead me into my ancestorhood.

James Shaheen: Lama Rod, thanks so much for joining. It’s been a great pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The New Saints, available now. Thanks again.

Lama Rod Owens: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Michael Imperioli. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Michael Imperioli: The goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to go next door or something. But I do think meditation can definitely help your focus. So I think art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing on stage, be it sitting down, writing, acting a scene, you know, the more focused you are, the more in the moment you are in responding in the moment to what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening, interacting with others, the better. And I definitely think meditation can help that.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard actor Michael Imperioli. Michael is best known for playing Christopher Moltisanti on The Sopranos and Dominic Di Grasso on The White Lotus. Offscreen, though, he’s a committed Buddhist practitioner. I first met Michael back in 2009 shortly after he came to Buddhism, and it’s been a pleasure to watch how his practice has deepened over the years. In my conversation with Michael, we talk about how he first came to Buddhism, what The White Lotus has taught him about craving and dissatisfaction, the dangers of instrumentalization of Buddhist practice, and whether he believes that liberation is possible in this lifetime. So here’s my conversation with Michael Imperioli.

James Shaheen: OK, I’m here with actor Michael Imperioli. Hi, Michael. It’s great to be with you.

Michael Imperioli: Hi, James. Thanks for having me. 

James Shaheen: You’re best known as an actor, of course, most recently in White Lotus and famously in The Sopranos. For our listeners, they may not know that you’re also a devoted Buddhist practitioner. First, I’d just like to ask, did you have a religious upbringing of any kind?

Michael Imperioli: Roman Catholic. My dad is still very devout. I didn’t go to Catholic school, but one day a week there was like a religious school after school at the church and we would go there so we could go through the sacraments like communion and then confirmation when I got a little older. To me it was more of a cultural thing than it was really a spiritual thing—for me, I mean. It’s different from my dad.

James Shaheen: So how did you first come to Buddhism?

Michael Imperioli: Well, when I was in my late teens, I started reading Jack Kerouac, who knew an awful lot about Buddhism. I mean, if you read his poems, they’re poems, but in The Scripture of the Golden Eternity, you really see the depth of knowledge he had about dharma and then reverted to Catholicism towards the end of his life, though. I was very curious about it through his writing, and I bought a copy of the Diamond Sutra at St. Mark’s Books, which used to be in the East Village on St. Mark’s Place. And I really couldn’t penetrate it. And it was pretty much the sutra, not a lot of commentary. I still have the copy of it, actually. I’ve managed to keep it all these years. I really could not make heads or tails out of it. So Buddhism kind of stayed in the back of my mind somewhere till much later, I guess 2007, my wife and I started going to Jewel Heart, which was in Tribeca at the time, and Gelek Rinpoche was teaching there. And that was the first time we went to a Buddhist teaching. And he was really our first teacher. 

James Shaheen: So how long did you stay with Jewel Heart? Did you stay with Gelek Rinpoche until he passed away?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, we went to teachings of his, and I lived in Detroit for a year and his other son is in Ann Arbor. So I would go to teachings on the weekend and sometimes would have lunch with him and spend time with him. He was a really great influence. And just a good human being and a really good teacher. And we were also going to teachings of a lot of other Tibetan Buddhist lamas, and didn’t wind up taking refuge till shortly after that with Garchen Rinpoche, after we had met him.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I remember Gelek Rinpoche’s place on St. John’s Lane, hidden away there, and it’s now the Village Zendo. They rented that space.

Michael Imperioli: It was funny, because when my wife and I first walked in there, we realized we had both been in there in the ’80s, before we knew each other, when it was Madame Rosa’s, which was a very decadent late night nightclub.

James Shaheen: I remember that. Yeah. You’ve come a long way.

Michael Imperioli: No mud, no lotus, as they say, right? There’s a good example of it.

James Shaheen: Absolutely. But I’ve heard you say that you came to Buddhism during the height of your success really. You say that something was missing. I’m curious because I always ask this question because I have to think about it sometimes myself. What was missing?

Michael Imperioli: Maybe it’s not so much what was missing, but there was no kind of satisfaction necessarily in the success that came. You know, I spent my late teens and twenties really only pursuing acting, basically. I mean, I didn’t do anything else. I barely traveled. I was in New York. I did every job I could. Becoming a  success really meant something to me, to be honest, not just working, I’ll be honest, you know, I really wanted a certain degree of success. I was driven towards that. And when that did come, both on a professional level, even a financial level, and I had at that time a family and kids and friends, many, many wonderful things that did bring some happiness.

There still was like, you realize that that wasn’t an end unto itself, that whatever achievement that was. And I just felt Intuitively that it was on a spiritual level, there was a wisdom maybe that was lacking, you know. Just doing another successful TV show or winning an Academy Award or something if that were to happen that obviously that’s not the answer or the end to something like that. Although if you’re pursuing acting as your life’s kind of passion, you’d think that would be, but it’s not.

So I started exploring a lot of different spiritual paths actually before Buddhism, not really committing to any reading books and going to a few meetings, seeing different people and going to a few centers. Like I would read stuff like Krishnamurti, and when I was reading the book, it made a lot of sense and it kind of touched me. Then the book would be over and I just felt, OK, now what? It wasn’t really a connection to him per se, to his teachings, like a direct connection to it, or a practice per se to implement into your daily life. And then when we kind of stumbled into Jewel Heart and Buddhism, I saw the potential for a path and a practice.

James Shaheen: So, you know, you mentioned your ambition, your desire to succeed in your career as an actor, and I remember many years ago, almost fifteen years ago, you sat on a panel with Gelek Rinpoche and Philip Glass, and I remember Philip saying that the very qualities that made him a success professionally were the same that he applied to his practice: attention, focus, discipline, creativity, among others. Has that been the same for you? I understand ambition is a tricky word, but the skills that you developed.

Michael Imperioli: No, I mean, ambition has a negative connotation in some ways, right? It can, but listen, to succeed at anything, let alone an art form or something, you need a lot of tenacity and perseverance and discipline and passion and creativity. A lot of those are positive qualities, you know, admirable qualities. So yes, I agree. I agree with Philip on that. Practicing Buddhism takes a lot of discipline. And it takes a lot of perseverance, and commitment, and creativity in a lot of ways, and open mindedness, and honesty. That makes a lot of sense. I’m glad you brought that up.

James Shaheen: You know, I met you after that panel that you were on with Philip and Gelek so many years ago, and I interviewed you in 2009, and the interview was pretty short. I’ve been listening to you on other podcasts, and it’s pretty amazing nearly fifteen years later to hear you talk about your practice with such commitment and depth now. So I was just thinking it helps me to see change in others that I often miss in myself. Do you ever feel that way? Because sometimes I don’t see the practice working. I’m not aware of it so much. I do it and I’m not so aware of it. And then looking back at that interview from 2009, you were a few years in, I believe.

Michael Imperioli: Barely.

James Shaheen: Yeah. And listening to you now, it’s like a world of difference. You know, that didn’t have to happen, but it happened. I guess you were karmically inclined, as they say, but do you ever see it in others when you don’t see it in yourself?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah. Well, especially my wife, you know, because we’re both, we got into it together. We practice together. We talk about it a lot. We go to teachings together and it’s a big part of our lives and I see it in her. She’s a very committed—she would hate me saying this—devout Buddhist and is very knowledgeable, much more than I am. God, would she be so angry that I’m saying this, but she reads countless Buddhist texts. And when I say change, I see it in simple ways about, like, when somebody annoys you, you have an awareness that somebody’s annoying you. When you behave in a way that you really shouldn’t have or felt was letting the afflictive emotion of anger or something get the best of you, seeing that and realizing, either making amends and realizing that’s not what you want to do and not doing it the next time it happens, or finding a way. In those very simple ways, I really see the practice. I mean, I see the discipline she has and the commitment to it. That’s very clear. But in those little ways, those day-to-day ways, I see it. And it’s very inspiring to me to see the changes.

James Shaheen: And so what sort of changes do you see in yourself, in your own life, in your own day-to-day?

Michael Imperioli: You know, I find that more positive people kind of come into my life. Kinder people, generous people, compassionate people. I found that to be true. And that’s amazing. Ultimately, the practice is, right, bringing awareness to your existence, right, to your minute to minute, second by second, day to day life, bringing some awareness of, OK, what am I doing in this moment, what am I thinking? I went for most of my life kind of justifying my emotions, my reactions: “Well, I did this because they did this and that’s logical. She jumped in front of me or took too long in the line in front of me at the coffee shop, and now I’m angry.” We can justify, and that’s fine, those emotions all the time, but you’ll be stuck there. You know, those things don’t go away. But yeah, somehow I found more positive people coming into my life.

James Shaheen: You know, I wonder, you mentioned that more compassionate and generous people come into your life. Do you think it’s also that you’re more aware of their compassion and generosity? That you’re more likely to see it?

Michael Imperioli: No, I know it.

James Shaheen: Just that that’s what you’re putting out and that’s what you’re receiving back. 

Michael Imperioli: I don’t know if that’s what I’m putting out, but maybe that’s what I’m seeking out. And by generous, I don’t mean financially. I mean, generosity of spirit and time. 

James Shaheen: I’m thinking in terms of dana, the Buddhist virtue of generosity.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course.

James Shaheen: Yeah, so often I think about Buddhist practice and becoming a kinder, more compassionate person. I mean, I don’t think that’s a modest goal. I don’t think becoming a better person, a better husband, a better family member and so forth, I don’t think those are modest goals. That’s the bare bones of life. You know, I mean, you can have somebody practicing forever and then snap waiting in line, yelling at the cashier or something like that. So I don’t think that’s a modest goal, but. You know, more recently, I’m, this has been on my mind, and so I’ll ask you. Anne Klein, she’s a scholar and a Dzogchen practitioner and herself a Lama. She said she was recently challenged by her Dzogchen teacher when he asked her, do you have confidence that you can achieve liberation in this lifetime? Do you ever go there or does it seem too lofty? Personally, I’m a little bit shy about going there, although my teachers do. So here we’ve got this big.

Big idea, you know, and I’m nowhere close to it. I’m still focused on not snapping at my partner or the people I work with. And I consider it a victory when I have the intelligence and poise to make a decision not to be that way. And yet, sometimes I go back to Anne Klein’s teacher’s question, do I believe I can be free? Does that ever come up for you?

Michael Imperioli: I agree with you, by the way, that that’s not a modest aspiration, right? Working with those afflictive emotions, becoming aware of them. I think liberation is possible in this lifetime, but it takes an awful amount of commitment. I’m confident that it’s possible. I’m not confident that I’m going to get there, but I don’t really think about it that much. You know, it’s like, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche said something, it’s in that documentary, I think, Crazy Wisdom, where he asked his sangha at one point, “You become enlightened. Then what?”

He kind of likens it to like you being present at your own funeral. The idea of you with this ego mind becoming enlightened, you know, they’re kind of conflicting things because enlightenment’s the opposite of that. So he’s almost saying you can’t really have yourself and your ego and be enlightened. He’s basically saying it’s not this better version of you. It’s not Clark Kent becoming Superman. It’s something else. One of the mahasiddhas I think said something like, “I’m not impressed with people who can perform miraculous deeds like drawing water out of the wall or turning the ceiling into the floor, something like that, but liberate one negative emotion, and that’s a miraculous deed.”

James Shaheen: I think it was Maezumi Roshi who said, “What are you so concerned about enlightenment for? What if you don’t like it?”

Michael Imperioli: That’s great.

James Shaheen: I always keep that in mind because on the other hand, sometimes I dismiss it too categorically. And I sometimes want to remember the possibility of being free is there, but I don’t dare hold forth on it or assume that this is going to happen. So on the note of negative emotions, you play Dominic Di Grasso on the White Lotus, and he seems like a case study in dissatisfaction, addiction, regret. Dominic can’t prevent the mistakes he has to make, although he pays for them in cash, and that’s both funny and at the same time, somewhat poignant. And it feels like fate, you know, phenomena just sort of unfolding. And yet practice is an opportunity to intervene. Most people won’t come to the practice. And I know you’re conversant with The 37 practices of the Bodhisattva. How do you think of that in terms of the bodhisattva vow?

Michael Imperioli: You know, the bodhisattva vow is a really big commitment. It really is.

James Shaheen: Kind of like enlightenment, you know?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, but it’s like you’re committing to, you know, because maybe when you first hear about Buddhism, you kind of think, oh, there’s a way to reach some heaven, basically, nirvana or something where all the suffering is gone or something. And then you take a bodhisattva vow and you realize, well, whatever that is, you’re not going to get there until everybody else gets there to some degree, and you’re hanging out for everyone else. But I think what the White Lotus really shows is those habitual tendencies that become so ingrained, both through your own, I guess, karmic imprints from if you believe in past lives, or just genetic in your DNA, or the learned behaviors that you saw in your younger years, you saw your parents or your family behaving in certain ways, or the culture you were in. And that those things can really stay with a person and stay in a family unless something kind of cataclysmic or some kind of light bulb goes off, or both, maybe at the same time.

I think the White Lotus, why it’s interesting to me, it’s like, here you have very, very rich people in the most opulent, luxurious, god realms surroundings. And they’re all miserable, pretty much.

James Shaheen: You know, an Italian friend of mine told me that that place is flooded with tourism right now.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, it is. It’s booked for years in advance. You know, because those things, although when you don’t have those things, you think this would really make me happy if I could live like this, if I could. travel first class and stay in the best hotels. And there you have a story of these people who actually do that and are not really very happy. There’s momentary happiness and there’s fleeting pleasures, but yet there’s some dissatisfaction that’s just not being satisfied.

James Shaheen: Right. There’s an interesting experiment I did when I was much, much younger, I found this apartment in New York, which was no mean feat at the time. And I really loved it. I had a view of the Hudson river and I was thrilled and I was excited because it even had a window in the bathroom, which in New York isn’t guaranteed by any means. And I remember thinking, I wonder how long before I take this for granted. I wasn’t yet a Buddhist, I didn’t have a practice. But it occurred to me, we fall for it every time. We think just this will make me happy. And in White Lotus, it’s really clear that’s at play. And what I said to myself is, I fall for it every time.

Michael Imperioli: How long did it take before you took it for granted?

James Shaheen: Oh, I think it must’ve been about six weeks. And all of a sudden I was in a mood again. You know, I thought, I don’t care about that window. I don’t care about the Hudson River. I got lucky to get this place, but I’m going to move. I stayed there for several years, but it’s like that. But when I see the character you played, it’s interesting because it’d be easy for me to hate him if I didn’t also identify with him. He wants his wife back, and yet he’s in the throes of this addiction and he can’t help himself and he can’t help his son. And it was for me such an accurate description of the samsara that we all live in. And again, I thought practice can interrupt that. It’s a possibility anyway.

Michael Imperioli: It is a possibility, but it’s even with practice, those ingrained behaviors, especially addiction, they’re very hard. Pema Chödrön talks a lot about how the path, a lot of it is one step forward, two steps back. And then maybe you go one step forward and it’s only one step back and you should rejoice in the fact that today it was only one step back. Like that’s progress.Especially things like addiction, like sex addiction and food addiction are very different than drug addiction or alcohol because you have to eat. You just have to find healthy ways to eat in ways that are not going to make you sick or make you die or whatever. And sex as well. I mean, most people are not going to become celibate. You want to integrate it into your life as a healthy element. And those things are tricky because they’re not just about abstaining really. Those things are a little tricky. And there’s a lot of gray area around them. I think practice can help because to really practice Buddhism in my point of view, it really requires real honesty with yourself. You really have to kind of have a bold, honest view of your own mind and your shtick and your things in many ways that people uncover through psychotherapy with psychologists and psychiatrists and things like that, but in a bit of a different way, in a very day-to-day way, sometimes a mundane way, but you really have to make a commitment to being honest with yourself. And that’s sometimes very hard.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, I found sangha and of course a teacher are essential in being honest with myself. You know how a teacher can say something that cuts right through your fabrications. That’s always an amazing thing. I remember once I was harping on something and my teacher looked at me and said, “Why do you care so much?” And all of a sudden it shattered. You know, I was sitting there seeing myself, this repetitive person harping on the same thing. And I had to really consider, Why do I care so much? But the practice is interesting in relationship with others and with the teacher, without which I don’t think I’d have made any headway at all.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, same for me. I don’t think it really exists outside of that.

James Shaheen: No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. And also breaking habits, whether it’s an addiction or anything else. the support of others I found essential. But just one more question about the character you played, Dom, because he’s a very nuanced character actually, he’s not just a shit, he’s also somebody who wants his family. Did it give you any insight into the nature of craving or dissatisfaction?

Michael Imperioli: You know, I was definitely familiar with that kind of pursuit of pleasure. And then the feeling of regret after when there’s something that you know is bad for you or that you know is wrong, but you’re kind of drawn to it, and then it’s like a hangover he’s experiencing that when he wakes up in the morning and then there’s two girls in the room and he probably went to bed smash drunk and was feeling kind of good and then woke up and it’s just like, “Oh my God, what did I do? And what did we do?” And, you know, that thing that was so pleasurable the night before that seemed so pleasurable now has turned to shit.

James Shaheen: Despair.

Michael Imperioli: Despair. You know, because the nature, as they say in the dharma, the nature of these things is not inherently real. I like pizza, but if I ate two pizza pies, I’d be hating life. You know what I mean? So the pizza is not, you can’t say it’s inherently pleasurable because it could also cause a lot of pain. It’s interdependence, right? Our relationships to it and how we relate to everything.

James Shaheen: Of course, until tomorrow, when you want pizza again, that’s the cycle. And then maybe you’ll eat three because it’s progressive desire.

Michael Imperioli: Exactly. 

James Shaheen: So Michael, in addition to being an actor, you’re also a musician. Can you tell us a bit about your band Zopa?

Michael Imperioli: Zopa’s an indie rock trio that was formed in 2006, and then we took a hiatus when I moved in 2013 for about seven, eight years. And then two and a half years ago, we started playing again. I play guitar and sing some of the songs, and it’s a very collaborative group. We’re influenced by some of the New York bands from the ’70s like Television and The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and Patti Smith and people like that and then also a lot of ’80s post punk like The Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen and ’90s bands like Nirvana and the Smashing Pumpkins and My Bloody Valentine and stuff like that.

James Shaheen: Some of your songs include traditional Tibetan chants. So how do you bring together these chants with this sort of post-punk indie rock?

Michael Imperioli: There had been over the years some Buddhist themes in the songs. And then we have a new song and the verses, there’s two verse sections and they’re the seven-line prayer of Guru Rinpoche in Tibetan. You know, it just made sense. There’s something cool about playing it live or people listening to it. Those mantras and prayers have a certain frequency and resonance that might touch people in some positive ways.

James Shaheen: Yeah, that’s a very direct example of how your practice finds its way into your work, but more generally, how does practice influence or shape, if it does, your artistic endeavors, whether acting or playing music?

Michael Imperioli: I think it, you know, meditation can, and I don’t really like talking about this because I really only know meditation through my practice, through Buddhism. I don’t really know meditation as a thing that’s separate from Buddhism. And the goal of Buddhism is not to make you a better actor. That’s like taking a Ferrari to go next door or something, you know what I mean?

James Shaheen: People do it.

Michael Imperioli: People do it. But I do think meditation can definitely help your focus. I think art demands a certain intensity of focus and concentration, be it performing on stage, as an actor, as a musician, be it sitting down, writing, acting a scene, you know, the more focused you are in the moment, the more in the moment you are in responding in the moment to what’s happening in your mind and what’s happening, interacting with others, the better. And I definitely think meditation can help that.

James Shaheen: So in other words, it kind of sounds like to me it’s an ancillary and unasked for benefit, but you point out something very interesting and important, I think, the instrumentalization of our practice in order to get something. And any of us can fall into that, but I likewise see my meditation practice, I cannot see it outside of my practice, and the wanting, the wanting, the wanting that tugs at me at the back of my mind is something I become aware of, not good or bad, I’m just aware of it. So I really appreciate that. And I like the Ferrari analogy.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, because it’s like that Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche thing saying it’s kind of like being present at your own funeral. You’re not doing this. These teachings and a teacher and the fact that this tradition, which goes back 2,500 years or whatever is still in the world, that there’s still a lineage and a connection to that wisdom and those teachings, it’s so unbelievably precious that to kind of, like you said, instrumentalize it for some worldly purpose really is kind of counter to it.

James Shaheen: Right.

Michael Imperioli: You know, Listen, if you’re really making a commitment to practice, at some point there’ll be shifts in everything, right? In the way you interact with the world and the way you perceive the world. Maybe. Little ones. 

James Shaheen: Yes, I don’t know if you ever read Huckleberry Finn, but I was a huge fan when I was a kid and he does get to show up at his own funeral. They think he’s dead and they have a funeral and they say all of the typically hypocritical things.

Michael Imperioli: That was really great. I read about a father who did that, who faked his own death and had his funeral and then showed up at the funeral a couple of months ago, I think in America.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, there was a guy in the West Village who was thought to have died and it was a rumor, but a group of people went out to the pier to sort of memorialize him. And I said, “Well, what’s the source of this?” And the source was somebody who was marginal, but they had a funeral for him. And one day he showed up and everybody disliked him again after they said all these nice things. 

Michael Imperioli: All these really nice things.

James Shaheen: So the name of your band is also your dharma name, Zopa. So when did you receive the name?

Michael Imperioli: Well, the original name of the band was La Dolce Vita after the Fellini movie. But I never quite really liked that name. And then when we took that hiatus or right before we took that hiatus, we decided to change the name, which I think was good. When I took refuge with Garchen Rinpoche. I got the name Konchok Zopa Sonam. So Zopa is patience in Tibetan. And the day I took refuge, he said, “Patience is the key to your practice because when you lose your patience, you lose your love.” That’s what he said to me. And at the time, I was still very new to Buddhism. You know, I took that as a very Hallmark card kind of pithy nugget, you know what I mean? Like, oh, yeah, of course, you lose your patience, you lose your love.

James Shaheen: Kind of like lovingkindness. The first time I heard lovingkindness, I had a similar reaction.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, like, of course, that makes sense, but I didn’t really take it into heart, really. And years later, I forget what happened, but I was like, “OK, the day you took refuge with him, he said this to you. So maybe you should give it a little bit more importance than you ever had. Maybe you should really look into that, about patience being the key to your practice. And since I had that thought about it, I started to just take it more seriously, to really focus on that as much as I can, or as much as my awareness allows me to. Again, Trungpa Rinpoche said something very interesting about patience. He said if you’re a dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. It’s not just something you do out of, because you want to be kind or something like that. If you’re a committed dharma practitioner, patience is an obligation. Not only that, but it’s always an opportunity to practice. When you feel yourself becoming impatient, if you can become aware and choose to bring some patience into the situation, these little annoyances become opportunities for practice.

James Shaheen: Does patience find its way into your work and your process?

Michael Imperioli: Being on a set can be long hours, a movie set, a TV set, 14-hour days, and sometimes it’s very chaotic, depending on who’s running the set. Depending on that person’s temperament and ability, you know, a set can be tumultuous and chaotic, or it can be kind of efficient and, and kind of calm. And as an actor, sometimes you’re going to some difficult places emotionally. You need to find a lot of anger. You need to find a lot of sorrow. And you need to have some concentration and all this chaos is going around. And it’s very easy to have done that many times, but practice definitely can make the experience of being on a set and working on a set all day a lot more pleasurable in a way and easier. I don’t mean easier in making the work easier, but just if you realize it’s going to take time, people are doing their best and bring some patience to it, it can really help.

James Shaheen: I think about your playing impatient characters, so I wonder what role patience plays in playing impatient characters. And I think of something Mingyur Rinpoche instructed his students to do, and one of them was feel sad without being sad. And that kind of made me think of acting there. So be impatient without being impatient. So you’re playing this character. Are you really impatient or are you patiently playing out impatience?

Michael Imperioli: Well, you know, you understand being impatient so then you can play it in the situation. As you understand, it’s when your awareness shifts from something wider to something really, really narrow. And it just becomes about that grasping thing about whatever desire it is to be satisfied, right? I want that person to stop paying in pennies because it’s taking 20 minutes and I want to buy my soda and get out of here.

James Shaheen: You mean when they take out the little purse and start counting out the pennies?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah. That’s a great opportunity to practice patience, right? Because in your justification, you could say, “Well, this person should know, doesn’t this person care that there’s five people waiting?” You know what I mean?

James Shaheen: “Don’t they know I’m here and I need to go?”

Michael Imperioli: Don’t they know I’m here? Of course. So there’s lots of good opportunities for practice and to see your own aggression. And I don’t mean aggression necessarily in a violent way, but sometimes ambition can be aggressive. Sometimes, like you said, being in line in the store, there’s an aggressive quality to that. Why is that person taking 20 minutes buying that stupid thing and asking all those questions?

I keep going back to Trungpa. There’s a scene in that movie, Crazy Wisdom, I guess it’s early ’70s, maybe late ’60s, because it’s around the Vietnam War, maybe right after. And someone asked him about aggression in society. And he said, “I want to talk about the aggression in this room.”

James Shaheen: Right, and get to know it really well. You know, we recently had Meredith Monk on the show, and she said that a lot of our artistic practice is waiting, back to patience, and trying to get out of the way. Does this resonate with you and how you think about the creative process?

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, well, especially on a movie set, you spend most of the time waiting. But even more, like if you’re writing. So when I’m writing, say I’m on a project that I’m writing and it’s going to take a few months or something like that, and you set up a schedule: I’m going to write Monday through Friday from 10 to 3. Chances are you’re not going to be literally writing fingers on the keyboard for five hours. And there might be a big chunk of that time where nothing’s happening, and you’re not really waiting for inspiration because you can’t wait for inspiration because you’ll probably wait forever. But you have to trust that there’s some kind of other process going on subconsciously and that the mind knows that those hours that you’re there, there is some kind of alignment that you’re in tune with. the story, the character, somehow, even if you’re not actively writing about or actively imagining it, somehow the consciousness knows that that period of time is related to that. You have to trust that. There’s a lot of waiting involved in that. Is she a Buddhist? I didn’t know that. 

James Shaheen: Yes, she is. She is a Buddhist. I believe Trungpa was her teacher many years ago, and she continues her practice now. She is very fond of Pema Chodron. And we spoke with her over the years. She’s been in the magazine several times.

Michael Imperioli: Oh, that’s cool.

James Shaheen: Yeah, she is. But, you know, during the pandemic, you started teaching meditation. So how did you make the decision to start teaching? And how has teaching changed your own practice? Earlier, I asked you about the bodhisattva vow and sometimes the impossibility of reaching people who simply aren’t turning toward the dharma, but here you are with people who are turning toward the dharma. That must be a joy.

Michael Imperioli: Yeah, it was interesting. I got onto Instagram right before the pandemic, like months before. And, you know, I would just really post other artists that inspire me and authors and musicians and filmmakers, actors, and I would post some Buddhist stuff. There’s a few great Instagram pages that I constantly send on my stories. And a lot of people started writing to me asking me how to meditate because they knew I was a Buddhist, because during the pandemic, people were very, they had a lot of time on their hands, they had a lot of anxiety and fear, and they felt that meditation could help.

So I would write back to people, very simple meditation instructions, people I didn’t know, you know, just fans writing in, and I would direct message people. It started happening a lot. So I was like, maybe I should just make a video and then people could just watch it rather than me typing in these things all the time. And I tried to do it on Instagram Live and it was a real disaster. And then somebody wrote to me and said, “Do you need tech help?” He said, “I work for Second City in Chicago and we do these Zoom webinars. And maybe that’s what you should do.” And then I wrote to my teacher and explained I’m on Instagram and a lot of people are asking me for meditation instruction.

And I said, “Should I do this as a class?” At the time, it was completely secular. Nothing about Buddhism, just calm abiding meditation. He said, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. You should do it.” And I found this, he was very young, I think he was only 25 at the time, Nick Solideo, who wasn’t a Buddhist or anything, but he was a fan of mine.

He said, “I could help you do this Zoom webinar. You can promote it on Instagram, but then people have to sign up. It takes a little more effort than just tuning into Instagram. They sign up and you do it.” And I said OK. And I started paying him to do this and we started in the pandemic. And a few weeks later he wrote back, he said to me, “I don’t want to be paid for this because he saw people were writing in that it was helping them,” and he said, “I don’t want to be paid for this.”

And I said, “Well, that’s really sweet and cool.” So we started doing it and I’d have like a question and answer thing. A lot of the questions were about Buddhism, particularly karma. Karma was a big thing they were asking about. And some other things about Buddhism. And I wrote to my teacher and I said, “You know, a lot of the students are asking about Buddhism. What do I do?” And he said, “If you talk about it, just keep the focus on the mind.” And he said, “Remember, Buddha is not the name of a man, it’s the name of mind.” So I’m not a dharma teacher by any means. It’s more like I’m a student maybe that’s been around longer. And my wife does it with me now. We really only try to, we’ll read some excerpts of sutras or other teachers and commentaries and stuff. but really only try to talk about my own practice and how I’ve implemented the practice in my life. I’m not a dharma teacher by any and in fact most of the time in pretty much every class I encourage people if they are interested in this to find a teacher from an authentic lineage. I offer some suggestions. But I also just say if you really are, you don’t have to, you could certainly meditate and not be a Buddhist and not study dharma, not take vows, refuge vows or anything. But if it does call to you, this tradition is alive and available, and really to find a teacher is critical if you want to follow that.

James Shaheen: Right. You know, it doesn’t surprise me that this began during the pandemic. We began airing live teachings during the pandemic and thousands came when we put Pema Chödrön up. 30,000 people watched. So it was pretty amazing. And tough as that was, it was an opportunity to do what we do. And it sounds like you did something very similar.

Michael Imperioli: And the class is still going on now, three years later. And a bunch of the people have become Buddhists. And some even have taken refuge with Garchen Rinpoche and other lamas too, which is pretty cool.

James Shaheen: What is the URL that our listeners can go to if they want to listen?

Michael Imperioli: They’re all archived on YouTube as well. But the website, if you follow me on Instagram, I promote the class and put up the sign-in link the day before. So on Instagram, it’s realmichaelimperioli. Speaking about 30, 000 people, we all talk about technology and how we’re afraid of it and how the negative, that’s one of the amazing things about technology is 30,000 people, many of whom might never had heard the words of Pema Chödrön or attended a Buddhist teaching or something like that and because of technology there they are, and that’s a good thing, right?

James Shaheen: Yeah, likewise we use social media to disseminate the teachings. We do the best we can in a pretty troubled world, I would say. But one last question. You’re a public figure, people notice you walking around, they know who you are and I think of the eight worldly winds two of which are praise and blame. How do you navigate the praise and blame? Because if you’re in the public eye, it’s got to even be more intensely present.

Michael Imperioli: You know, for a lot of people seeing someone famous or someone from a movie or TV show, especially a movie TV show that they liked a lot, for them, it’s a special kind of moment that makes them kind of happy, at least for that two minutes or something like that. So I try to focus on that. It’s like I’m not making them happy. It’s like their perception of the situation is what’s doing it. And if you can walk around town and people get happy because they see you, that’s very positive, right? And I also try to say  to remember that it’s their projection of whatever they’re responding to. It’s not my innate qualities per se. They’re seeing a lot of different things. They’re seeing a character. They’re seeing an idea of an actor. They’re seeing there’s a lot wrapped up in life. So I try to stick to the positive qualities of that.

James Shaheen: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time. I appreciate it. It’s been fifteen years. But it’s great to see you again.

Michael Imperioli: You know, that first time we met, I’ll never forget that one simple thing that Gelek Rinpoche said. You know, because people were talking about creativity, they were talking about lots of different things, and Gelek said, if you’re not becoming a kinder, nicer person, all of this is just blah, blah, blah at the end of the day.

James Shaheen: Well, that’s a great way to end. Thank you, Michael. It’s been a pleasure. 

Michael Imperioli: Thank you. See you. 

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Michael Imperioli. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

Jane Hirshfield: There’s always the intention of questioning, perhaps, which is you say to each moment, “Who are you?” And I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being: not to have my first impulse be to assert something but to have my first impulse be to ask something.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Jane Hirshfield. Jane is a poet, essayist, and translator, as well as a Tricycle contributing editor. Her new book, The Asking: New and Selected Poems, invites readers to resist fixity and certainty and instead to dwell in not-knowing. In our conversation, we talk about the questions she’s been asking recently, why she views poetry as an antidote to despair, and how she sees the relationship between her poetry and her Zen practice. Plus, she reads a few poems from her new collection. So here’s my conversation with Jane.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with poet Jane Hirshfield. Hi, Jane. It’s great to be with you.

Jane Hirshfield: It’s wonderful to be talking with you again.

James Shaheen: So Jane, we’re here to talk about your new book of poetry, The Asking: New and Selected Poems. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the collection and what inspired you to put it together?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, what inspired me to put it together was my editor at Knopf sending me an email saying, “Jane, you’re turning 70, and I think it’s about time you had a ‘New and Selected Poems’ out.” And I had said no something like five times before that, so I lost my excuse, which was I had thought it would be premature, and I could no longer claim it would be premature.

It’s an odd thing. Artists love having a big retrospective at a museum, and most poets really want a “New and Selected.” But I’ve always been a little reluctant to sum myself up in any way, and you can’t help but feel when you put together a book with fifty years of your own poems in it, there’s a little worry that it might be a tombstone volume. I’m quite happy that a little earlier this summer, I went off and wrote a bunch of new poems, and so I know that there is a future after The Asking. But maybe you wanted to know more about the book itself and less about the process.

James Shaheen: I do want to know about the book. The collection is called The Asking, and questions have been a central theme of your work, and they’re at the heart of the new collection. So what are some of the questions you’ve been asking lately?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, that’s a wonderful thing to ask, and lately and the book are two different questions. You know, I always title my books last, so first you put it together and then you see what’s in it. And as you have also noticed, questioning has always been important to me. And that goes back to—well, it probably goes back to childhood because I was always asking questions in childhood, but as a practice issue, it goes back to my very first week of Zen practice when I was a guest student. Actually, my second week.

I was a guest student at Page Street. My first week I was a guest student at Tassajara Monastery. And there was a guest student tea. Soto Zen is not Rinzai Zen. One doesn’t work with koans as the main focus of meditation. Stories are told and thought about, but it’s not the central practice. And nonetheless, the teacher suggested it’s a good idea for you to always have a question in your practice. And over the years, that central practice question has evolved. For a very long time, it was a question that I actually ended up writing about in a special section for Tricycle, which is What is the emotional life of a Buddha? So I looked at that question for many years until I felt that I had saturated myself in it and come up with my own answer to that, which is what’s held in the essay. And then I had to find a new question. And so the new question of the last quite a few years is one that is I think widely shared, which is, “How can I be of service?”

I look at this world from the perspective of someone who, when I was young, just starting adulthood, the very first Earth Day took place in 1970. And I thought it was going to be attended to. You know, we had seen the first picture of the whole earth. We understood in 1970 about the crisis of the biosphere, about extinctions.The science of climate change has evolved a great deal since then, but we really understood since far before 1970 that the fossil fuel economy was not good for living beings, not good for us in terms of the economics of it, not good for us in terms of the environmental damage of it, not good for us in terms of our relationship to our sources of happiness, our sources of resilience, of taking care of things, as if this Earth and our lives were not disposable.

And so over the decades, I entered in great hope that this was all going to be addressed, and disappointments have been endless. And so in recent years, my question has been How can I serve? How can I help? What can I do? How can I add my one molecule to the tiller of change?

James Shaheen: Right, in one of your poems, I sense some frustration. You’re admonishing us, all of us, including yourself, not to pretend that we didn’t know.

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, yes, yes. Should I read the poem? That’s a pretty central poem.

James Shaheen: Sure.

Jane Hirshfield: So that poem is “Let Them Not Say,” and I wrote it in 2014 as a poem about the crisis of the biosphere and climate. And when I wrote it, it frightened me and I felt it had worked to do, and I didn’t just send it out to be published anywhere. I held onto it because it felt to me like a poem that wanted to do some real work. And as it turned out, it ended up going out from the Academy of American Poets on their Poem-a-Day, which goes to many, many, hundreds and thousands of people now, on the day of the last president’s inauguration, so January 20th, 2017. And so a poem which began as an environmental poem became also a political poem. It’s a poem looking from the point of view of the future, which will look at us and know what we did or didn’t do.

“Let Them Not Say”

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

The poem is hoping to make itself incomprehensible. If the poem were fully heard and acted upon, someone reading it two hundred years from now, should say, “What was she so worried about? Why was she so worried?” I hope it is a poem that will become meaningless for having been written.

James Shaheen: Well, thank you. That was lovely and chilling, and we warm ourselves to it.

Jane Hirshfield: Well we do. You know, I fly in airplanes, I turn my lights on. I am complicit.

James Shaheen: Yeah. So you write from your earliest work, you have investigated justice. It’s always been a concern in your poetry. So how do you understand justice? I’ve often thought about this because in Buddhism I try to understand where the parallel is to our own sense of justice in the Western cultural sphere. So what is the relationship between justice and asking?

Jane Hirshfield: Well, justice is one name for the paramitas, for the world going rightly or wisely, however you want to translate the paramitas or the eightfold path. Justice to me is what things look like when each of us recognizes our inseparability from the whole, and each of us is able to live inside some sense that that is actually how we are enacting our social contract with one another, our compact of coexistence, not only with human beings but with all beings, with the planet itself. You know, I love that a very few countries have begun to give the environment legal standing as if it were a person in their justice systems.

A river needs justice. A human being needs justice. Even a mosquito has its own sense of justice, I imagine. And sometimes these things are at odds, and always it is difficult. It is just difficult. Perhaps the closest we can come to actual justice is to say we tried our best, that we are always aware that we did not enough, and we are always trying to do better.

It has to do with dignity. It has to do with equity. I think often these days of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and how if a person does not feel safe, is not housed, is not fed, they cannot act in ways that allow the next levels of the hierarchy to come into being because they are frightened or they are angry.

So taking care of our most basic needs in a way where you don’t have the 0.1 percent having so much more than any human being or family could ever need and then so many people homeless on the streets of San Francisco or New York or Los Angeles, that’s something about justice.

There’s a piece which people can find if they look for it. The title is “Justice for Windows,” and it was published in Virginia Quarterly Review, and it talks about the different systems and understandings and evolution of justice, including the Buddhist system of justice, which seems to me to actually be karma, that Buddhism doesn’t have Western retributive or even restorative justice. Buddhism has the idea of karma as how justice works in our lives, and I tend to think of karma in a way that has less to do with future lives and more to do with this very moment. If I behave badly, I feel the stab of that immediately. I don’t need to be reborn as a spider.

James Shaheen: You mentioned people are frightened and angry, and that probably describes all of us, to some extent anyway, and I wonder what you see as the role of the poet and what you call failures of justice and compassion.

Jane Hirshfield: Poetry can be used in many ways for many purposes. You know, I don’t want to pretend it is completely an act which always includes interconnection and empathy and all of the values that those on the path of practice are trying to raise in one another and in ourselves. There are war poems. There are angry poems. There are silly poems, which might be more neutral. But for me, when I look at how poems work in our lives, I see in their very fabric there is empathy and interconnection. The very act of entering another person’s language and hearing it inside yourself as if it was your own is an act of permeability and a recalibrating sense of we are not separate from one another.

And similarly, inside a poem, all of the devices of poetry, the sound devices, the music, the landscape of metaphor, and how we take in an image. If you read a line about a mountain, you cannot understand the mountain without becoming it for an instant within yourself or becoming the creature walking on the mountain and feeling that steepness in your legs and seeing the sharpness or smoothness of the surfaces or seeing the many beings who are inhabiting the mountain with you.

And so simply to actually participate in any work of art is to lower the barricades between yourself and other beings. And so poetry, by its own fabric of what it is and how it works is already, I choose to believe, is an act that moves the psyche towards the values of practice, the hopes of practice, the vows of practice.

Then within particular poems, for me, I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, every poem I write is an act of trying to discover a larger and changed and new way of seeing in the face of the evidence and experience of existence. And so many poems are written when I feel inadequate to some event. So for example, the poem that I read at the start, “Let Them Not Say,” that was written out of grief and the sense of my own impotence before the disaster that we are all witnessing more and more, 2014 until now. I mean, you today in New York are in the extraordinary heat emergency, which has been in this country and in the world going forth all summer this year. Everywhere people are experiencing unprecedented heat spells lasting longer temperatures, higher health conditions more perilous.

And we look at this, and the question is, “What can I do?” Because I am a poet, I can do a few things. My daily practice for many years was to take some political action every single day having nothing to do with being a poet: donations, sending letters, sending postcards. For the moment, I’ve pretty much settled on postcards, helping people register to vote or encouraging people to vote. But then sometimes I get to do something as myself, not just as one more set of hands pitching in in a way more intimate than the donation I might also be making. And when I’m doing it as myself, this is what I am. I’m a poet. I’m not a union organizer. I’m not a giver of speeches or recorder of TikToks. And so what I can do then is write a poem and make that poem available and say that poem when the opportunity arises and hope that because the poem changed me first, that it might help change someone else once it’s been written.

I write them to change myself. I write them to see more clearly, largely, compassionately, less from the small self and more from the large self. And so those changes are in the poem because they are why it became a poem in the first place, and perhaps someone else reading the poem will go through the same experience and move, for instance, from anger or incomprehension to compassion.

James Shaheen: You’ve written about writing poetry as an antidote to despair. So I think of that from your personal point of view. That’s really wonderful. I think it has a like effect on the people who read it. Certainly when I read your collection, it worked in that way. Without diminishing the sense of urgency, the despair was somewhat attenuated with this call to action, and I found that very important. But while poetry is often marginalized in our culture, although there remains a strong interest in it, it really does ripple out in unexpected ways. I was in Shakespeare in the park a few days ago and watched Hamlet, and it’s like the English language’s greatest hits. Nearly every line is a proverb, and I thought, whether people look at this or not or listen to this or not, the ripple effect of that poetry has shaped the language itself. So I wonder sometimes how you think of that ripple effect. Whether people read it or not, it does have an effect. I hope that inspires and encourages you.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, it does, and also I’ve always loved something that T. S. Eliot said, which was that it doesn’t matter who writes the great poems, only that they be written. And so I take great solace from the lines that other people write. As a poet, if you’ve written one line which actually outlasts your life and goes on helping people, that’s pretty extraordinary. Maybe I will; maybe I won’t. I’ll never know about it. But I do remember so clearly when September 11th happened, two poems circulated so widely. One was Auden and the other was Adam Zagajewski.

And those poems, people needed poems in those moments. And the poems were there to serve. And that is the point of poetry: to be there, yes, for the people who read a poem every day or every week or pick up a book once a month perhaps or find individual poems in the pages of Tricycle and other journals, and every once in a while one truly reaches them and then they copy it down or they give it to another person. But every person, I believe, at the moments of greatest change and greatest crisis, they are thirsty for a sentence or two which will companion them and help them find their way through the tunnel. And so poems are almost always read at funerals and memorial services, and poems are almost always read at weddings.

And again, to be unseemingly personal about it, Tricycle published a wedding poem that I wrote. A friend was on their way to France to another friend’s wedding and asked me if I could suggest a poem, and I looked and looked and looked at all of the usual suspect wedding poems, and I was quite dissatisfied with all of them. I finally gave him a poem by e. e. cummings and said, “I think this is the best that I can find for you. You might want to change this one word.”

Having done that and having thought I had discharged my responsibility to this request, I then started thinking, Why am I so dissatisfied with all of these poems? What is it that makes me feel they’re not right? Because people have been reading them at weddings for a long time. And you know, it usually had something to do with either it was for too specific an occasion, you know, written for one particular couple and one particular occasion, or they seemed to me poems better said by one beloved to the other beloved and not by a member of the witnessing friends and family.

And then I, being me, had the question, Well, what would a wedding poem look like? What do I think would make one that worked? And I sat down to my great surprise and wrote one and gave it to him, and he loved it and he read it at the wedding. And then it sat in a drawer quietly steeping, because it’s not a regular lyric poem. It’s different. It’s a ceremonial poem. It’s a ritual. And it might have sat in that bottom drawer forever, except Tricycle had for a while, on the inside back cover you were offering things having to do with rituals, and I was asked if I had something to suggest and I said, “Well, you know, this poem is completely non-Buddhist. There’s nothing dharma, you know, explicit about it, but it certainly is a ritual. Would you like it?” And I gave it to you, and it started getting read at weddings all over after that and now has become itself one of the usual suspect wedding poems. It’s quite extraordinary.

James Shaheen: Well, like the wedding poems, some of your poems read like imagined rituals or liturgies like “Spell to Be Said Before Sleep” or “Invocation.” So I’m curious, how do you think about poetry in relation to ritual and prayer, and are there any Zen rituals that inspire your poetry?

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, that second question. I’ll answer the first one and then I’ll try to have my unconscious be working on the second one. So a poem is very much akin to a ritual for a rite of passage. I’ve been very interested in rites of passage ever since I took an anthropology course in high school and read, a man named Turner wrote a book called The Ritual Process, and that was kind of a life-changing book for me, not least because it talks about how in any rite of passage, there is a moment when a person is no longer the old self and not yet the new self. They are in a state of threshold of liminality, and that idea has informed my life ever since.

And I think that perhaps the strongest experience of liminality I have ever known in my own life was a Buddhist rite of passage, so I am getting to the second part of your question, which was when you go to Tassajara, to the monastery, when you go to enter to stay there as a practicing student, you do what in my era was five days of what’s called tangaryo. Tangaryo is a ritualized reenactment of the earlier practice of a monk would simply arrive at the monastery gate and sit outside until taken in.

So there is no form. When you are in the zendo sitting your five days of tangaryo, the only requirement is that you not leave. You stay on your zafu. There are no defined meditation periods unless it’s an hour when the rest of the sangha is also in the zendo for meditation. But for long hours in the middle of the day, there’s no kinhin, there’s no walking meditation. There’s nothing but you sitting there, and you are so much no one that the year that I was there, they were doing construction projects in the zendo while we were sitting there. You just didn’t count. You were no one and nothing. And it was physically for me almost unbearable because I don’t have a body that was actually meant to sit with its legs crossed. I never have, even from childhood. And so in all my years in the monastery, I was there for three years and I don’t think I sat more than three periods of zazen when I wasn’t in pain. Always, there were pain issues.

But I adored the experience of being no one. It just felt, this is a paradoxical thing to say, it felt such a deeply human thing to not be Jane, to just be this ignored intention, the intention to manage to stay to practice. And so of course that was informing and life-changing.

And part of what I was informed of by the ritual of tangaryo, and also seven-day sesshins, which were equally quite difficult for this body that was determined to stay on the zafu and wasn’t built for that, I learned that pain doesn’t matter so much, no matter how hard it is, that you can survive it.

In any period of zazen, part of what is being learned is that whatever your experience is, you can simply stay with it. You need not run away. You need not be frightened. You need not reject it. Your only job is to stay on the meditation cushion and be with it and notice that eventually something will change because something always changes.

And I think that was a very good instruction to me for practice, for leading my emotional life ever going forward, and for what it is that I am interested in as a poet, which is to not turn away from anything.

There is a famous sentence from the Roman poet Terence, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I think sitting on the zafu and seeing who visits and who you are in all of those hours and weeks and months and years from when I was 21 years old and arrived at Tassajara until now, this is identical to the practice of writing poetry, which is that you see what arises, and you notice if there’s anything you might want to do to help what arises unfold into something larger and deeper.

And so there’s always the intention of questioning perhaps, which is you say to each moment, “Who are you?” You say to yourself, “Who am I?” You say to each other person that you meet, “Are you a Buddha? What is your teaching? What is this teaching?” And I find that a really helpful way to go through my minutes and hours and days as a human being: not to have my first impulse be to assert something but to have my first impulse be to ask something.

James Shaheen: You often write about approaching something you haven’t looked at closely before or something you’ve taken for granted, and sometimes the result is destabilizing. It causes us as readers to look again at what we think we know. Whether it’s a leaf, a frozen egg, or a cat on a shelf. Suddenly the common occurrence becomes unfamiliar. And I was wondering if you could say something more about the process of defamiliarization.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, I think that is one way that poetry is very much like the awareness that comes with practice, which is—we could name it perhaps Suzuki Roshi’s beginner’s mind—that you are always hoping to be inside whatever moment it is you find yourself inside of as if it were new to you, as if you didn’t know what it is, as if you weren’t able to think about making your grocery list while you’re washing the dishes.

Just to be in this moment is always to see it newly and freshly, and that is the goal of practice, and that is the goal of writing a poem. If I see nothing new, if I see nothing unfamiliar, if I make no discovery, there’s no poem to be written. And so every poem makes some kind of a recalibration of my understanding of experience.

If you are reading it on the page, it’s because I saw something I hadn’t seen before, and then when I look at the poem after it’s written, I think, “Oh, maybe somebody else will find this interesting also.” And so then I will publish the poem.

James Shaheen: That is what the effect of “Two Kerosene Lanterns” had on me. I love that poem because I thought I was familiar with that. Maybe I was familiar with one aspect, and that became a habit, and I was no longer able to see anything else. So why don’t you read that poem for us? Because there’s a perspectival shift that really all of a sudden it’s from the view of the cat.

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, and I will add that for me, there was a real question which led to that poem. So first, actual experience happened. I’m describing something which very much did happen. And after it happened, what I thought was, when something like what’s described in the poem occurs, why do we not only close our eyes, we actually put our hands over our eyes? It’s perfectly useless. You know, it’s not as though broken glass was going to come flying up into my eyes where I was located. And we do this for emotional crises also. We literally put our hands over our eyes and I was thinking, what is that? And that became this poem.

“Two Kerosene Lanterns”

The cat walks the narrow shelf beneath the window
where many delicate things are arranged—polished ammonites,
a dried starfish, three turtle netsuke,
a few curls of birch bark, two long-unused kerosene lanterns. 

As if on their own, two hands fly up to cover the person’s face,
to cover the eyes already closed. 

The crash, as it must, arrives. 

The hands lower slowly.
The cat sits on the floor in the room’s middle, calmly licking one paw. 

The law of cats is simple: one arrangement becomes another. 

People are strange. 

James Shaheen: I love that.

Jane Hirshfield: Thank you. So my question about why was I covering my eyes becomes the cat. Cats are very good practitioners of, you know, things change. And, of course, that kerosene lantern is the same lantern as was in the earlier poem, the kerosene burning in “Let Them Not Say,” and those go back to when I was at Tassajara. It was before the era of solar panels and batteries, and we all lived by kerosene light for three years. And so kerosene lamps have stayed with me. If I swiveled my computer, I could show you the lamp. It’s still right over my shoulder.

James Shaheen: It didn’t break.

Jane Hirshfield: Something else did.

James Shaheen: About breaking up the familiar, it also happens at the level of syntax and grammar, and I guess we often find this in poetry, but sometimes in reading your poetry, in fact, you did a short interview with us that’s in the August issue. You dropped verbs and initially the managing editor and I said, “Wait a second. This has been dropped. A word has been dropped.” And then we realized, “Oh, she’s doing this several times.” What was unfamiliar and jarring sort of developed its own rhythm, and we looked at things a little bit differently. So what can you say about dropping those verbs, say, and all of a sudden we’re forced to pay closer attention?

Jane Hirshfield: I think you might’ve just answered your own question. It is all about attention. It is all about distillation. So often when I teach poetry, one of the things that I tell my students is for every moment of your reader’s attention, you must give them more than the moment of their life that they have given you.

Part of it is you have to, by using language with more concentration and distillation to it, you are inviting people to give you that attention, which you then must repay more than amply. There’s a cowboy saying of putting ten pounds of rice into a five-pound sack. And, you know, in cowboy context, I think that’s meant to be an insult. But in practice context, it’s high praise.

And the other thing, of course, is that no act of communication is one-sided. It always is a collaboration of two. And if you say everything, if you spell everything out, you become incredibly tedious, and people tune out. Nobody likes to be lectured at. Nobody likes not to be left to draw some conclusions of their own.

And so I leave gaps in my poems all the time because I trust you to fill them in. I trust the intelligence and fullness of the reader, of the listener, to bring themselves into this collaborative conversation you’re making, whether it’s in a podcast or in a poem on a page. You get to do your own part, and I rely on you doing your own part.

James Shaheen: It seems like you also sometimes trust the earth itself to fill in those gaps in the poems. Is that crazy or what?

Jane Hirshfield: No, that’s so poetically said. I’m very impressed. Yeah, we do. One of my lifelong abiding support teachings has been, again, something I heard very early in my entrance time to Zen practice, which was the suggestion that Buddhist practice rests on a tripod: great effort, great faith, which I think can be translated as great trust, and great doubt. And the idea of those being the three legs that one works with has been really central to me.

Don’t-know mind, as we all first heard, I think, from the Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn, it is no different from the Romantic English poet Keats talking about negative capability: if someone is going to be an artist, they must be willing to live without irritable reaching towards fact and reason. That was Keats’s phrasing of it. And I think abiding in uncertainty, abiding in doubt, questioning everything is central, but equally central is the trust that you will not fall into an abyss if you surrender your certainty.

Certainty makes me at least at great risk of arrogance and wrong-headedness. I’m quite worried about people who are utterly certain that they’re right because people who are certain that they’re right will do terrible things in the service of their certainty, whereas people who have a little doubt—What if I’m wrong?—then there is some possibility that we will not do terrible things because we believe in the rightness of our cause, because we believe that ends justify means. No. Means are our lives. Means are the moments of our lives. How we treat one another in any moment must be the embodiment of whatever it is we hope for, wish for, but perhaps are not so certain of. I could be wrong about all of this.

James Shaheen: What you make me think about when I’m caught in my habitual way of thinking, I usually think I’m right and I’m usually pretty unhappy and very inflexible. But that brings something up. You talked about living in the wilderness in your early days of Zen practice. You mentioned the lanterns. You had no electricity. I think you had to fetch your own water. There was no heat. And being a Californian myself originally, I know how cold and damp those nights can be. And you invite it after a while, the discomfort. You look forward not masochistically but with curiosity about what that discomfort is. And because you were talking about certainty, I wonder about the discomfort of sitting with an unanswered question, that doubt that you talk about. How can we learn—I mean, I don’t want to be comfortable with it necessarily because that might defeat the purpose, but there is a discomfort. We naturally as people reach for answers. Sometimes I wonder, how do we then just sit with it?

Jane Hirshfield: How I have come to feel about all of the difficult emotions, and amongst them is not only the discomfort of uncertainty and doubt, but also, to me, the two excruciating difficult emotions are anxiety and embarrassment or shame. They are almost unbearable. And what I realized at some point was this is information we need to have. It is useful information. Evolution made us social creatures, beings who need to know when we have transgressed. If you are not able to feel discomfort, to feel anxiety, to feel embarrassment, how would you know that you weren’t following the eightfold path with great fidelity?

Another sentence I remember from those days was the teaching that the reason to follow all the Buddhist vows, the prohibitory vows, not abuse the senses, not abuse sexuality, don’t kill somebody, don’t take what isn’t given, and, my favorite one for its complexity, don’t possess anything, not even the dharma. I love that one. The teaching was, if you do any of those things, you’re going to spend your time on the cushion being disturbed by them. And so being disturbed is information we need because it tells us that we might want to do something differently going forward. It’s useful information. All the negative emotions and all the positive emotions are useful information. They’re also, of course, the very texture and fabric of our lives.

A favorite poem, not by me, but one I co-translated for the collection, The Ink Dark Moon, is a poem by the thousand-year-ago woman poet Izumi Shikibu at the Heian court in Japan. And what she said was, “Although the wind blows terribly here, the moonlight also leaks between the roof planks of this ruined house.” And that was a life-changing poem for me to read. When I went to translate it with my co-translator, I had all the words.

I knew something was there, but I knew I didn’t understand what I was meant to be taking from the data my co-translator had given me. And it took me a week to figure it out. And then when I figured it out, I understood what it is saying is if you live in a house which is impermeable to the cold winds and storms and difficulties of this world, you will also wall yourself off from the moonlight, from everything you want, from awakening, from enlightenment, from the fullness of love, whatever the moonlight might stand for to you.

You don’t get part of a human life without feeling all of it. You don’t get to love without knowing that you are going to lose the one you love or they will lose you. It is inevitable. This is how our lives unfold. And so it really led to what you were describing a little while ago, this feeling of saying yes to the difficult, affirming the difficult. Poem after poem after poem in the book is me finding my way to that again because you don’t get to solve these questions once. They will come back to us all of our lives.

James Shaheen: What I really love about the Shikibu poem is that the house has to be ruined in order for the moonlight to get in. And also it reminds me of Leonard Cohen talking about the cracks are where the light gets in. It’s a similar kind of sensibility.

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, almost the same image.

James Shaheen: Yeah, and I’m sure he read the poem, at some point anyway.

Jane Hirshfield: Oh, I wonder. I’d have to look at when he composed that song versus when The Ink Dark Moon was published. I don’t know offhand what year he wrote that particular song. It was late though, so maybe so. On the other hand, all these truths are available for anyone to find.

James Shaheen: Before I ask you to read a few poems, I just wanna ask you about one line that I remember you said. I couldn’t find it online, and so maybe I’ve got it wrong. You tell me if I do, but when I read your book, this latest collection, I’m not thinking about Zen. I’m not thinking about Buddhism, and I remember your one saying that in the end, there is no Zen; there’s just life. Is that right?

Jane Hirshfield: I believe you. I don’t remember most things I’ve ever said, but that sounds like me because I’ve always felt that any human truth has to be available whether you have a particular vocabulary description of it or not. If there is truth in Zen, it must be available to people who live in places where they never would’ve heard the word “Zen” or any of the dharma teachings. If there is truth in the dharma, it is a human truth, and it can be found.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Jane. So to close, would you be willing to read a couple of poems from the new collection? The first would be “Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me,” and the other is “Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting.”

Jane Hirshfield: Yes, I’m delighted to do that. And the first poem, the last line of it is where the book found its title. I tend to write a poem every New Year’s day. They don’t all see print. This one did.

“Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain to Me”

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, 
fractured? 

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands. 

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shuffling its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles. 

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.
Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light. 

For years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question. 

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised. 

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For years, each day, something. 

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, 
bewilder. 

Today, I woke without answer. 

The day answers, unpockets a thought as though from a friend— 

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet       didn’t it give you the asking 

“Each Morning Calls Us to Praise This World That Is Fleeting”

Each morning
waking
amidst the not-ever-before,
dressing inside the not-ever-again. 

Under sunlight or cloud,
brushing the hair. 

Not yet arrived
at the end-crimped finish,
drinking coffee
and buttering toast. 

Permitted to slip into coat, into shoes,
I go out,
I count myself part, 

carrying only
a weightless shadow,
whose each corner joins and departs
from the shadows of others. 

Mortal, alive among others
equally fragile. 

And with luck—
for days even, sometimes—
this luxury, this extra gift: 

able to even forget it.

James Shaheen: Jane, thank you so much. It’s been a real pleasure.

Jane Hirshfield: Well, thank you. I have always loved any chance I’ve had to do anything with you and the Tricycle community. I so appreciate this conversation, James. Thank you.

James Shaheen: Thank you, Jane. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of The Asking: New and Selected Poems, available now. Thanks again, Jane.

Jane Hirshfield: Take care.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Jane Hirshfield. To read an interview with Jane in the August issue of Tricycle, visit tricycle.org/magazine. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and The Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. When Anne Klein first read that everyone, including her, was already a buddha, she was so shocked that she put down the book she was reading. Now, as a Dzogchen teacher, she continues to grapple with the relationship between our buddhahood and our humanity. In her new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky, she takes up the question of what it actually means for each of us to be a buddha, as well as what happens to our humanity when we seek awakening. In today’s episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Anne to discuss how she has come to understand buddhahood, the difference between wholeness and perfection, and why she believes that we are all backlit by completeness.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and teacher Anne Klein. Hi, Anne. It’s great to be with you. Hi, James.

Anne C. Klein: Hi James. It’s great to be with you too.

James Shaheen: So Anne, we’re here to talk about your new book, Being Human and a Buddha Too: Longchenpa’s Sevenfold Mind Training for a Sunlit Sky. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Anne C. Klein: Well, several things inspired me to write it. One was that in 2007, Adzom Paylo Rinpoche taught it, and it was my first acquaintance with this. It apparently is not taught that often. At least it hasn’t been in the West in my knowledge. So I really enjoyed it. It’s short, it’s clear, it gives you things to do that are rewarding. And I had an opportunity to discuss it with him. And I got to hear firsthand from the perspective of his being really a great Dzogchen master is what a tremendous foundation this is for one’s practice.

And then I reached back to kind of a koan that I’ve been just kind of chewing over since almost high school when I first heard this idea that you somehow were a buddha, which sounded insane and yet a very compelling statement. So a little bit in the book is occasional reflections on kind of my own process with looking at that statement and making sense out of it. And of course, it’s absolutely pivotal to Dzogchen, and, in fact, Adzom Rinpoche emphasizes it a lot. Even to a new student, he just sits them down and says, “Do you think you could be a buddha in this lifetime?” And it’s kind of a wake-up call, like, do I think that? And if I don’t, why not? And if I do, really? So these are things that were on my mind that I really wanted to bring forth in some way, and it felt like this was the way to do it.

Also, the theme of wholeness is something I’ve been reflecting on a good bit. I wrote a short story called “A Vow of Wholeness,” which, for me, really was a vow to really try to explore the wholeness that the traditions tell us is there. What does that mean to an ordinary human being? Because I’m clearly a human being, but there’s a buddha too that’s actually not separate in some way that I wanted to explore. I would say it’s been a continuing exploration. So for me, this book was a way to pull these things together and also to launch the House of Adzom series. It’s the first book that has a significant portion from Adzom Rinpoche, who is by all accounts really one of the great Dzogchen masters of this time in Tibet. So it just kind of came together.

James Shaheen: So we’ll get to Adzom Rinpoche and Jigme Lingpa and Longchenpa further on, but you write that Dzogchen understands all paths to move toward a natural state of wholeness like “rivers seeking their ocean or pained and promising humans like ourselves contending with something at once utterly foreign and also inseparably intimate with our human being.” Can you say more about this state of wholeness?

Anne C. Klein: So a state of wholeness is one of the great central symbols of Dzogchen, for example, the vast ocean. There are waves that are catastrophic, there are little ripples, there are changes in color, there is water crashing on the shore, but it’s all unquestionably ocean. The ocean is whole. I think that’s one of the reasons humans love to look at the ocean and the sky because somehow the sense of the usual sorts of “me,” “that” sort of dissolves just naturally, or I would say it softens. There’s still some kind of subject object sensibility there, maybe, but it softens. And there’s something about that that I think as a species we fall in love with. We love that vastness. And it’s a very intimate connection at that time, and it’s radically different experientially from looking at a computer or looking at cars or most of the things that we look at most of the time. So I feel like it’s actually a very deep yearning to have this. Some people might use other words. They might use the word beauty, for example, or heartfelt. And all of these sensibilities seem to be nourished in an experience of wholeness.

James Shaheen: In fact, you say that we are backlit by wholeness, and this is already accessible to each of us yet the book also describes a very highly structured path of practice. This may seem paradoxical: If we are already whole, then why do we need such structured and specific practice? And how do you understand the relationship between wholeness and the path of practice?

Anne C. Klein: It’s the central paradox of the path, not only in Dzogchen, but I think it’s particularly vivid in Dzogchen. You’re a Buddha. We’re told this from the beginning. You also don’t understand that. How can that be? How could that which is utterly perfect, the ground of everything, the real realm, the dharmadhatu? That is whole, and everything arises in it. Everything arises in your experience also. Your experience is in some sense the expanse in which everything arises. This is not an esoteric thing. You’re happy, you’re sad, but it’s all part of the domain of your experience. Or if you look at something, anything, this computer, my thermos, can you separate your knowing consciousness, the knower, from the thing you’re looking at? 

James Shaheen: I don’t think so.

Anne C. Klein: You’re shaking your head. Most of my students who never heard anything about Buddhism, I’ll bring this up very early sometimes, and they’re all like, “No, I don’t think so.” And that’s an extremely important recognition, because that’s where wholeness lies. And perhaps one of the reasons we love to look at the sky, the ocean, mountains, is that we get a sense of unfettered, unelaborated as they say, I like to say free of frills. The moment can be a portal to the wholeness that’s there. So this is some of the ways that I think of it.

So really, to come into wholeness is greatly advancing that process. Looking at the mind, in very particular ways, the mind can do anything, it is of infinite variety. And that’s kind of important to see. This kind of wholeness is the ultimate creative space. Everything arises in it, never leaves it. So practices like we have in the seven mind trainings, for example, will call on us to actually think about certain things like impermanence. It helps open our radar to flux and change and lightens up a little bit our projection on things and desire for things, especially “me,” “mine,” to be permanent, feel that they are permanent. And then it takes us through various kinds of permutations using vivid imagery, using the imagination, allowing things to rise in fullness of color and drama and emotion and then dissolve. It’s seeing that kind of process over and over and over again in daily practice that really opens up to the wholeness, the ground that is actually always there and never shaken, and nothing ever happens to it. But a lot of stuff happens in some sense, and we can’t ignore that. Maybe that’s the important thing to say: life is not just looking at the sky. The sky has clouds; the ocean has waves. Wholeness without arisings in it wouldn’t be wholeness; it would be some kind of exclusive zone. So it’s partly to really reckon with that experientially.

James Shaheen: One of the ways I looked at it was you have this wonderful description of yourself as a young woman, and you serendipitously stumbled into that state of wholeness or connection with it, and the way I look at it is yes, I think most people have an experience like that. And then we wonder, how does one cultivate a state of mind in which that is more likely to happen, in which that connection can be strengthened so we can come back to it more easily. That’s one of the ways I looked at it. Even as children sometimes we dip into that state. We don’t know what it is. But I understood the practice as recognizing that and connecting with that. Yet you say that wholeness and connection are central to our existence, but we rarely live as if they are. Can you say more about what you call our unwieldy sense of separateness? How does separateness cause our suffering, and why is it so easy to get stuck there—in other words, not find our way back or not even recognize that we’re already whole?

Anne C. Klein: Very simple question, of course. So this separateness operates on many levels, just the sense of hey, look over there, the birds are over there, right away, there’s there. And once there’s a there, there’s a here. So the dualism, the sense of separateness, the sense of two-ness gets more and more reinforced. There’s a you and a me; already the stage is set; there’s separateness. Of course, sometimes there’s connection also. One of the reasons I think that connection of many kinds is such a blessing is because it does soften our terrible sense of aloneness. So we don’t want to be alone, we don’t really want to be separate. In a way that makes us feel a stranger in the world in one sense or another, which happens a lot. It’s the cause of the greatest divisions in our society as these separations grow more powerful, and there’s tremendous suffering just because somebody looks a little different or thinks a little different, and suddenly, they’re your enemy, and you have to spend your whole life fighting.

But even more than that, in a way, what I’m thinking of is a separateness from one’s own experience. Just on a very simple level, most of us most of the time don’t really know how we feel and what we feel. We’re in our heads a lot. Being in the head keeps us active and lively. But without being also in the body, you really don’t know what you feel. You don’t feel things in your head. You know things in your head, and one of the things that I discovered, to my great surprise, but now I think it’s very common, is how frequently one confuses thinking with feeling. And that comes up a lot. Some people honestly don’t know the difference. So you’ll say, “How does that feel to you?” And they’ll say, “Well, it’s a nice day.” They’ll describe some kind of describable thing, but it doesn’t tell you or them anything about how one feels. So part of practice, it seems to me, is to really get in touch with what one is feeling. So mindfulness practice does that, practices where you feel you’re encountering a special being, which is very common in Mahayana, especially Tibetan style practices, traditional practices of cultivating equanimity, for example. “Oh, I’m equanimous,” most people will say. Well, watch yourself through the day. Or even the classic example of bringing to mind someone you really like. Notice what that feels like. Not get caught up in why you like them and so on, the story, but how does it feel? Is your body more or less relaxed? Is your breathing more or less deep? Or whatever it might be. Then think of somebody you really don’t like. How does that feel? One reason Dzogchen values certain of these practices is that they do bring us into closer contact with our own experience. And that’s essential because the experience, ultimately of our nature, is the most intimate experience there is. And we usually need practice to discover what we’re experiencing,

James Shaheen: We’re talking in part about relationships, how we relate to ourselves and to others, and at the same time, you say, while there’s this completeness, this wholeness, it’s not the same as sameness. It doesn’t erase the difference. So how does Dzogchen honor and celebrate the vast diversity and variety of human experience while also acknowledging completeness, wholeness, because you always hear people say something that has now become cliche, “we are all one” and so forth. And yet, there’s this infinite variety, not only to the many selves that we are but the many other things, the many other phenomena. You mentioned the clouds in the sky, the waves in the ocean. They’re there, and that’s where the tension often arises.

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, and we think that difference then is the last word, and it blinds us to the wholeness, and yet a great line from a Dzogchen text, “Because there are many, there is one.” Wholeness is not a dead expanse with nothing in it. Wholeness is the open space in which everything occurs, which is boundless, which is unlimited, and in which anything can occur without in any way leaving that state of state, place, unnameable, unthingable wholeness. And this is actually very central to Longchenpa’s approach, that nothing ever leaves this state. It’s like, well, again, the waves in the ocean. They never leave the ocean. The clouds never leave the sky. They arise there, they dissolve into it, they don’t disrupt it. And in some ways, the more clouds and lightning and thunder and rainbows and birds that you can see in the sky, the more you can appreciate its openness and its boundlessness. So it is often said that for a pretty developed practitioner, not so immediately, the more activated your mind can be, in a certain sense, the more you can see, “Yeah, but that wholeness is not getting disrupted.” So it’s very important to recognize that variety is like the blossoming of wholeness and creativity. One of the great Dzogchen tantras is called Kunjed Gyalpo, which is translated as the all-creating majesty, that which actually is the source of everything. And its greatness is there, its majesticness is there. The chen of Dzogchen, dzog meaning perfect or complete, chen literally just meaning great, means it’s great because there’s nothing outside of it. Nothing. Not your worst enemy, not your worst fears. It’s all a wave in the ocean.

James Shaheen: Right, in fact, you refer to Dzogchen’s radical inclusivity. So in that wholeness, there’s this inclusivity. So you say that in Dzogchen, there is no barrier between ordinary and awakened conditions, and humans and buddhas are simply different ways of arising from the general ground of being. Can you say more about this? What does it actually mean for there to be no barrier between ordinary and awakened?

Anne C. Klein: At different levels, it means different things. So at the very ground of everything, there is not yet any division into human/buddha. In other words, there’s something there that’s not really anything but nonetheless from which everything comes forth. Longchenpa says this in exquisite poetry over and over and over again. And that’s really kind of as deep as we can get into our nature or our existence. And then an ocean can divide, and at some point, something happens that’s part of the ocean’s process, the Earth has moved in a certain way or a dam has built up or something has happened, and the streams go in different directions, and one goes through the mountains, and one goes through valleys and they’re like completely different. But there’s still ocean actually. But one forgets. We forget. We are so entranced by the objects of our senses that we think they’re separate from our senses and not part of the sensory awareness arena that is associated with our senses. They’re arising right there. They’re not outside our ocean of experience ever.

James Shaheen: Again, we come back to the no separation between the knower and the known. It’s something I’ve talked to Ken McLeod about. And likewise, the sense of separation, negative sense of separation, in which we feel lonely and cast out and at odds with the world is not to be confused with variety or extraordinary diversity of experience. You write that only a wisp separates buddhas and humans, and it is this sensed separation from our birthright of wholeness that causes pain. So what does it mean for us to be just barely separated from buddhas? And why does this cause us so much pain?

Anne C. Klein: Oh, where to start. So this wisp is not even a wisp, really. It’s not really anything. But for us, there’s a collapsing of attention and a collapsing even of a sense of existence into the moment of this wave, this conversation, this piece of food, this is what there is. And somehow we forget about everything else that actually makes this possible. You know, even if we think of it in terms of dependent arising, which is famous throughout Buddhism, as we know, the food we eat connects us back to the beginning of time. We don’t think about that. We lose that openness. But you don’t have to lose it. I mean, it’s not easy not to lose it. But one can meet practitioners and just being around them, it’s quite clear that you’re never losing it. It’s all the play of clouds in the sky. It’s all the waves in the ocean. It’s all unfurling within one’s own intimate expanse, and intimate and vast are commingling. And that’s also very important: very intimate and it’s also infinitely vast, and we tend to get stuck in one or the other.

James Shaheen: You note that when you first read that everyone, including you, was already a Buddha, you were so shocked that you put down the book you were reading. What was so shocking to you then, and how have you come to understand that statement now?

Anne C. Klein: Well, really? I’m a Buddha? I mean, I can barely get through the day.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I have a hard time with that too.

Anne C. Klein: On the one hand, it seemed ridiculous. But I put the book down, I didn’t throw it away, because I guess on some inchoate level that maybe over the decades is getting a little less inchoate, it rang true. If I look back, there was something compelling about it. In one of my classes at Rice I did, it was a small class, and I did something that I’d never done before. We had been doing exercises together of various kinds. And I asked them to sit in pairs and say, one person to the other, “You’re perfect.” And right away, one student said, “I can’t possibly say that to anyone, and I don’t want them to say it to me, because I know that’s not true.” And she had her religious faith had taught her that and she was just not going. I said, Okay, you don’t have to believe it’s true. What you’re really just doing is giving this person an opportunity to feel whatever it is they feel. So then afterwards, I asked them, “Well, what happened?” And the two things that I remember, one, this is a Rice class, so undergraduates, and one student said, “How can I be perfect? I didn’t turn my last paper in on time.” And how to explain that that’s not the dimension making mistakes is not a violation of the kind of completeness or perfection. It’s being talked about here. And I think that’s hard to communicate. And then somebody else said, “What did you feel?” He said, “I found it very healing to be given this kind of positive reflection,” which from the perspective of really all the Buddhist traditions is also true. I think it’s very challenging to consider how close whatever you want to call it, but wholeness, pure awareness awakening might be. And I think it’s hard for at least two reasons. One is that it’s very, very poignant to feel this is so close, and yet I can’t get it. It’s just hard to believe.

James Shaheen: Yeah, you know, one of the things that I found helpful is that often I see Dzogchen translated as the Great Perfection, and to say completeness is easier for me. If someone says, “Are you perfect?,” I feel the same discomfort. If someone says, “Are you complete?,” I think, “Well, how could I not be?” Complete is much easier for me to understand. So a central question you raise is what actually happens to our humanity when we seek awakening. In particular, do we lose or amplify our humanness in the process? How do you understand our humanness and how it changes in the process of recognizing our buddhahood?

Anne C. Klein: I would say it becomes fuller and even more human. I’m remembering Barbara Walters. A long, long time ago, she interviewed the Dalai Lama, and she said something like, “I think he’s the most human person I’ve ever met.” When I think of my teachers, for example, they’re totally human. Why? Because they’re not defended against you. You know, they will look at you with complete acceptance in a certain way, which doesn’t mean that everything you’re doing is right in some other sense. You know, you come into their presence, and they’re all there for you. They will laugh with you, they will cry with you, they will hear you, they will be sensitive. They’re just interacting in a completely intimate way. You’re not a stranger. And that’s optimally human. I think the Sufis talk about being a real human being, and I think this is the kind of thing that is meant.

James Shaheen: I’m trying to remember, I think maybe it was in The Brothers Karamazov, where the saint is expected to remain preserved when he dies. But in fact, he stinks to high heaven, and in that we’re supposed to say he was intensely human, in other words, which was a really wonderful thing to read. But you ask, “Are we humans practicing to be buddhas? Are we buddhas masquerading as humans?”

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, it’s actually the latter. And to come to see that in one’s own experience from any angle a little bit is just very helpful. It’s OK. It’s terrible. But there is some okayness right there in everything. That’s hard. It’s hard to remain in touch with that short of full awakening. Anyway, I feel thinking about it this way and that way that it is just really true. And therefore it’s worth sitting and sitting and sitting through whatever you have to sit through, living through whatever you have to live through, with that in mind, that actually anything could finally open that wisp and dissolve it.

James Shaheen: One way this plays out is the relationship between what Dzogchen calls the ordinary mind and the wisdom mind. So first, what is the ordinary mind?

Anne C. Klein: The mind that laughs and cries and sees things as over there. It’s pretty much everything of our ordinary mind. Reactive, habitually programmed.

James Shaheen: Maybe the clouds and the waves that don’t know they’re part of the ocean.

Anne C. Klein: Yeah, probably. That’s good.

James Shaheen: So in Dzogchen teachings, it’s said that if we can’t relax, then we will always be in ordinary thought. This may seem paradoxical given the rigor of some of the practices associated with the mind trainings. So what role does relaxation play in awakening and helping us to access the wisdom mind? Because relaxing is no mean feat.

Anne C. Klein: Indeed, relaxing plays a huge role. And we see that in what I’m calling the pith practices of Jigme Lingpa all these different words for relaxing, being at ease, being settled, not being pulled or tethered in any direction. It’s extremely important. And anticipating sometimes when we do really, really, really vigorous exercise, you go skiing for the whole day, and then you’re in a hot tub, there’s a way in which, finally, we’re just finished, we just can’t do anymore. And there’s relaxation. So maybe that addresses the seeming paradox.

Thought is actually effort in the way that Dzogchen is talking about it. After going through a series of practices and getting used to various aspects of ease and relaxation and wholeness and so on and you’re ready to maybe sit in that state of wholeness, there will be thoughts. That’s kind of an efforting. If we watch ourselves very carefully, which is partly what those five pith practices are about, we notice, which usually we don’t, compared to being in total ease for the ordinary mind, there’s something a little bit effortful when thought arises. If your body is very quiet, you might feel it somewhere in your body. Your shoulder just tenses a little or your mouth just does something. We wouldn’t consider effort normally, but it’s something that has a quality of constriction, a quality of construction, which ease does not have, which wholeness does not have. So the ocean isn’t tense about all the waves, you know, which way are they going to go and who’s going to reach shore first. There’s really nothing but the waves and the fluid and the movement, and it doesn’t contradict things happening, but there can be much arising even in that state of openness, but we don’t clutch onto it.

James Shaheen: It’s interesting just about relaxation. My discovery when I was much younger, there were a lot of people to be taken care of who were ill, and that would mean many sleepless nights. And there would come a point when there was no option but to relax because of the exhaustion. And sometimes I look at the practice as a way to relax without having to be up ten days in a row. And so it’s very interesting. I love the way you talk about relaxation. But we’ve mentioned a few names that our listeners may need a little bit of help with. You structure the book around Longchenpa’s sevenfold mind trading and Jigme Lingpa’s commentaries on the trainings. So first, could you give us a brief introduction to these two teachers? Who were they, and how did you first come to their writings and teachings?

Anne C. Klein: So Longchen, whose name means vast expanse, Longchenpa lived in the 1300s, and he is to this day regarded as the unparalleled architect and conveyor of the richness of the Dzogchen traditions. He compiled Dzogchen materials going back to at least the way Tibetans unveil the story to the eighth century. Certainly scholars would say it’s from the 10th or 11th century. You already have traditions known as heart essence, Dzogchen traditions. Longchenpa then writes a big text called the Nyingthig Yabshi, the Fourfold Heart Essence. And he brings together all of these earlier teachings, and he writes his own commentaries on them, and then he writes the Seven Treasures, among his most famous writings. Interestingly enough, he talks about the seven trainings—if you only read a few texts, he says in some place, make sure this is one of them, because this has everything in it.

So Longchenpa, his poetry, his philosophy, there’s kind of nothing like it. That’s how Tibetans regard the tradition. And I think that hasn’t paled in Dzogchen’s coming to the West. So Longchenpa is the great one, and there are many myths about his origins. He has a story that takes him back to the earliest beginnings of Buddhism in Tibet. Longchenpa, at the end of his life, he spent some of his life in Bhutan, he came to Samye Chimpu, a very important place where Guru Rinpoche gathered his first twenty-five disciples. Yeshe Tsogyal visited there. Everybody who was anybody visited there, practiced there.

Jigme Lingpa also practiced there. And in one of his retreats, he has a vision of Longchenpa. He sees the wisdom body of Longchenpa. And he receives the full empowerment, permission to teach and really the full mind of Longchenpa. And after that, he begins to teach. From the perspective of the lineage and tradition there, even though they’re separated by a few centuries, Jigme Lingpa absorbs all that Longchenpa represents and is, and he comes forth with his own revelation called the Heart Essence of the Vast Expanse, the Longchen Nyingthig, the Heart Essence of Longchenpa, who is the whole of Dzogchen up to that time. And when I first visited Samye Chimpu on a pilgrimage, and I happened to meet someone who said, “You know, a great lama has just come here, and you could go see him,” and that’s when we met Adzom Rinpoche, who was then identified by his cousin who read a litany of his previous incarnations, one of which was Jigme Lingpa. but that was a very heart-stirring moment. He became my teacher from that time, that formed a tremendous connection, which fortunately continues.

James Shaheen: We can go into them in more depth, but briefly, what are the seven mind trainings? And what do they aim to cultivate in a practitioner because the seven mind trainings of Longchenpa are really later what Jigme Lingpa and Adzom Rinpoche are sort of building on, is that right?

Anne C. Klein: Yes, that’s right. And it goes back even further than that. The seven categories come from an ancient tantra, which actually lists these. At the last minute, Wisdom asked me to ask Rinpoche if he would write something praising the book, and he sent a poem about the book and the seven trainings, and I would like to read two verses.

“When you mind-train to discern mind and its nature,
all untoward thoughts hanging on to self
are finally free in their own ground. I have no doubt.
Naturally seeing reality is astounding. I’m amazed.

Practicing just this way, dissolve your ideas
into their ground, the frill-free Sheer Form (dharmakaya).
Let the uncontrived, incalculable way things are,
wholly free of contrivance, be a rich, serene stillness.”

So I would say that that describes what they do. These seven trainings begin with training in impermanence. Mind training is a very important genre from India, and this mind training is therefore part of that genre. And yet, it has some unusual features, especially in the way that Jigme Lingpa unfolds it. All Longchenpa says really is to learn to recognize that whatever you see, there’s outer, inner, and secret impermanence. There’s changes in weather, changes in leaves. The flux of your thoughts as a kind of subtle impermanence. And Jigme Lingpa creates these vignettes, especially in the first three, and to my knowledge, and I’ve asked around other people who have read more widely in lojong mind training than I have, this is unusual. He creates a vignette where you imagine that you find yourself somewhere, you have no idea where you are, you have no idea how you got there, you’re alone, the wind is blowing. It’s kind of horrific. It’s existential aloneness writ large. And these people come by and they say, “Hey, we’re going to go look for a jewel, you want to come with us?” And he says, “Yeah, OK.” And they go, and of course, it’s a harrowing journey. The waves of this ocean, which represent samsara, are frightful. And finally, they’re just in a little rickety boat. The oars break. He’s terrified. “Oh, my God, I’m going to die. I’m never going to see my family again,” this horrific fear. The boat breaks. He’s really on the edge of death.

Just at that moment, Guru Rinpoche, who, of course, is the constellation—when I talk about this in general, I say to just imagine an orb of light. And Guru Rinpoche says, “You’ve really been a fool. You thought that life was about getting some kind of jewel, something you would call the jewel. You’ve risked your life for nothing. And you’ve never thought of impermanence. And here you are, you’re on the cusp of death, and you are just desperate and desperate.” And then somehow something cracks and light comes forth from Guru Rinpoche. You melt into light, your mind becomes one with Rinpoche, you have realized your completeness, your wholeness just like that, and you’re free. You’re free from samsara.

So this kind of vignette is, to my knowledge, not part of mind training. One of the things that if we look at it closely, as I describe, it really takes you through all nine vehicles from the beginning of the path to the end. The ancient ones famously divided the entire corpus of the teaching into nine vehicles, but we can reduce that to sutra, tantra, and Dzogchen. The worry in thinking about impermanence is sutra. The encounter with a deity and melting into a deity is tantra,  very simple creation and completion phases, dissolving into space. Then Jigme Lingpa says, “Now let all of this go, you’ve been through all that, and give up all thoughts of the past, present, and future. Relax, be open, and just be aware of movement and stillness.”

And that potentially, over time, really opens to Dzogchen’s understanding. There’s movement and there’s stillness. Maybe they aren’t contradictions. Maybe they don’t disrupt a wholeness of which they are, of course, a part. And yet, there is movement and stillness, and wholeness remains. It’s all there. Jigme Lingpa says that to move through all nine vehicles in one sitting is a great practice, which I think is another way of saying buddhahood is not so far away. And I think in Zen they also have statements like that.

James Shaheen: You’ve just told a story, and you have talked in the book about imagination, and many of the trainings rely on imaginative practices, and as you write, “Is it possible to attain something we have not imagined?” So can you say something about the role of imagination in these practices? How do the mind trainings ask us to imagine possibilities beyond our habitual range of experience?

Anne C. Klein: Well, they do ask us to do that, and the very fact that you can somehow imagine it maybe shows the infinite scope of the mind. Imagining isn’t the same as being. There’s a movement. I call it a movement from seeing to being. Imagination can expand the horizon that we live in. Imagination is a natural human expression of creativity. Little children imagine. We imagine all the time. We imagine in ways we don’t know that we’re imagining. We imagine that we’re real. We imagine that we’re permanent. But that is not what is meant here. It’s important to distinguish between daydreaming and what we could think of as a trained imagination. I’m training myself to think about impermanence. I’m training myself to feel that, hey, this isn’t flesh, this isn’t light. Now that may be easy, or it may take time, or it may be both. It may be easy, and it may get even more powerful over time. We have a mind. We have imagination. And meditation is a full-being process. It’s not just in the head, although it may stay there for a long time. But it’s really not. It’s a full-body process. A lot of imagination has to do with reimagining, reexperiencing one’s body to imagine it as light. I mean, there are many practices where buddhas melt into you and you melt into buddhas and then into space and over and over again, and I think this is a way of helping one to imagine and feel into this no-boundaryness between being ordinary and being human. They flow into each other. That is, over and again, there are infinite practices that one way or another ask us to imagine that, and I think that that has the potential even neurologically to shift how we experience things over time.

James Shaheen: In addition to the focus on imagination, some of the later mind trainings focus on the body. Can you say something more about bodily practices of the later mind trainings? How do they facilitate deeper meditative experiences like bliss, clarity, and nonconceptuality?

Anne C. Klein: Thank you for asking that. This is so important. This is the seventh mind training, so it’s a kind of culmination. And really, it is a tantric practice. It is the basis of what are called the channeling wind practices, which are really part of the very esoteric corpus of Tibetan practice. How do they help us? They help us go deeper into the body. The ordinary mind lives more or less on the surface of the body. This practice invites us to go right into the center, to the heart center, to the central channel, which is the most sacred secret sanctum of the body. It is said to be suffused with wisdom, only wisdom actually permeates the entire body. That means our body is a resource for accessing wisdom, because the wisdom there is most accessible through the heart. And the heart is the center of the vertical rise of the central channel, which in ordinary life, I mean, nobody ever told me to pay attention to my central channel. But we do think about the spine and sitting straight, which in a way is very much related. I would just say it’s a way to get more deeply into the body, which will yield a more subtle type of experience. I can feel my hand moving, but to go deep inside whatever movement might be, there is stillness or maybe there’s space there. And we find places to rest in the body. In Zen, Zen calls it the dantian. Tibetans call it the mdo, where the three main channels meet deep in the navel. So this is part of tantric physiology, and it’s really the deepest place to settle in the body. So when we’re learning to relax, we settle into the deep belly, and that also primes us to be more quiet than usual. And that quiet allows more clarity, which allows us finally to rest in a state of bliss, as you mentioned, and clarity. Bliss is naturally part of our physiology, and it’s understood to just naturally emerge when the conditions are right. And posture is one way for the conditions to be right, and that’s why posture is very important. All of the traditions emphasize sitting straight, at the very least, because that allows a flow of energies through the body, and ultimately the mind is always moving through energy. So the way the energy moves in the body very much affects the mind. When the energy is more subtle, the mind is more subtle. So we go into the body and find subtlety there and wisdom.

James Shaheen: You mentioned nonconceptuality, and in that embodiment, that very deep embodiment, it seems to be where knower and known disappear.

Anne C. Klein: Exactly. Exactly, it’s so important. The more esoteric you get in the Buddhist tradition, the more important the body becomes. These practices that are intimated here in the seventh training are really a portal and maybe more than a portal to the kinds of practices that certain Tibetan practitioners will develop enormous expertise over the years, and really, they just move differently.

James Shaheen: I was really interested in the question of agency and surrender as opposed to submission. It is interesting that we’ve talked a few times about serendipitously dropping into a state. It can happen to anyone. And then of course, there’s the surrender to these trainings in order to deepen and cultivate our inclination toward that state. Can you say something about surrender and how that differs from submission?

Anne C. Klein: Maybe the surrender is what allows the tremendous flow, which makes agency really creative, expressive of our fullness, whereas submission is a state of constriction. You’re submitting to someone else. Surrender is like letting go of everything that obscures authentic agency, and that serendipitous falling into a state is really important, and very poignant is that I do believe people fall into it all the time. For example, in psychotherapy, one might fall into it. But the therapist, a Western-trained therapist, won’t know to point that out, and it’s usually so fleeting and makes so little sense in the context in which you are occupying your life at that time. You don’t get paid more for having such an experience. It doesn’t go on your CV. In a sense, it has no meaning in public life until someone who really has it emerges and you realize this is the most meaningful thing. What’s so important is for somebody to point it out. Or even maybe if you read about it in a book, when you notice it, you know, “Oh, hey, let me hang here for a minute.” Hang there for a minute literally is very significant. Usually, we just bounce off and say, “Oh, that was weird,” but just stay there a little bit, because that will imprint it for you, and then it will be something of a resource. It’s a really important point.

James Shaheen: Sometimes we find ourselves without even realizing it so willfully trying to make something happen and we’re so utterly defeated that surrender comes as a very sweet experience. I lost, and I can relax. I get to relax now. OK, well, Anne, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, please be sure to pick up a copy of Being Human and a Buddha Too, available now. Thanks so much, Anne.

Anne C. Klein: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Anne Klein. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. When Tenzin Dickie was growing up in exile in India, she didn’t have access to works by Tibetan writers. Now, as an editor and translator, she is working to create and elevate the stories she wished she had had as a young writer. Her new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, is the first anthology of modern Tibetan nonfiction and features essays from 22 Tibetan writers from around the world. Taken as a whole, the collection offers an intimate and powerful portrait of modern Tibetan life and what it means to live in exile. In today’s episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Dickie to discuss the history of the Tibetan essay, why she views exile as a kind of bardo, and how modern Tibetan writers are continually recreating the Tibetan nation.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and translator Tenzin Dickie. Hi, Dickie. It’s great to be with you.

Tenzin Dickie: Hi, James, thank you so much for having me here.

James Shaheen: Oh, it’s a pleasure. So Dickie, we’re here to talk about your new book, The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, which is the first anthology of modern Tibetan nonfiction. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the book and how it came together?

Tenzin Dickie: Sure. The simplest answer is really just that I wanted a book like this. I looked around, and I knew all these writers. I was very good friends with some of them. It felt like it was a possible project to do this and to pull it together and to have this book exist as a real thing for Tibetans and for others. The other part of this is I had actually just been working on an anthology of modern Tibetan fiction, Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet. So I was finishing that book, and I thought, well, what should I do next? It seemed like a natural follow-up to then work on a book of nonfiction, of personal essays. I’ve always loved the essay as a form. I love the personal essay for how intimate and how powerful it can be. So that’s how this came about.

James Shaheen: The essays are all wonderful. They vary in length. I was especially happy to see Ann Tashi Slater in there, one of our contributors. So that was wonderful to see. So in the introduction to the book, you share your first experience trying to write an essay as a middle schooler, and your brother said to you that an essay has to be true. How have you come to understand this statement, and, to turn your own question back on you, why does it matter if writing is true?

Tenzin Dickie: Well, it matters because we can tell when something is true, can’t we? We feel it. It speaks to us. We can feel its power. We can feel it affect us. You know when someone is writing something that changed them. When you are reading it, it changes you too. The best thing about an essay, especially if the writer has deeply crafted and mined and just put their whole heart and soul and artistry into it, is that it feels like a very true thing, and as you are reading, it’s a truth for both the writer and the reader. The essay as a genre, I was completely unfamiliar with then. I just simply didn’t know. His description of the essay as a piece of writing that is true, as a description of the essay, it still holds. It holds for me. I think it holds for other people. And the thing is when I was working on this book and when I was working on the essay, I wanted to know more about the essay. I started thinking about the Tibetan essay, and one of the things that I came across was the idea of the act of truth. That’s something from Buddhist literature, satyakriya, satyavajana. So the act of truth as an idea I thought was just a really good framing for the essay in general.

James Shaheen: So what is an act of truth or satyakriya, and how does it create reality?

Tenzin Dickie: The act of truth is a Buddhist idea in Sanskrit called the satyakriya, which is basically a declaration of truth. It’s almost like an oath or a statement of truth that enacts itself, that creates itself into being. It’s almost like a speech act in the sense that what is being said, it’s not just an expression, it’s also action. Perhaps the best way to talk more about it is to talk about how Buddhist literature talks about acts of truth.

James Shaheen: That’s what I was going to ask you. In the book you share two Jataka tales, or stories about the Buddha’s earlier incarnations before he was the Buddha, that center on acts of truth. Can you walk us through these stories and what they’ve taught you?

Tenzin Dickie: Sure. So yes, we see instances of acts of truth in the Jataka tales. But there’s actually also a specific act of truth that’s very associated with the Buddha. So this is the Prince Siddhartha before he becomes the Buddha when he is leaving his palace to go off into the forest on his six-year enlightenment journey. So one of the first steps is he cuts his hair, and then he holds the locks and he throws them into the air and he says, “If I’m going to become the Buddha, may these just stay in the air and not fall.” And indeed, the locks stay in the air, and they do not fall on the ground. The whole idea is this is an act of truth that anticipates and enacts the truth, which is that Siddhartha will become the Buddha.

In the Jataka tales, one of the stories is about a woman who goes to a teaching of the Buddha, and she becomes so entranced by the teachings that she’s completely neglecting her child who’s beside her. He goes off, and of course, this is India, there are plenty of snakes, one of them bites the child, and now the child has been poisoned and is in mortal danger. So now the distraught parents, the mother and the father, are trying to look for a way to save him. A monk says to them the way to save this child is through acts of truth. So the parents start one by one. The father goes, “By the truth that I’ve never seen a monk who was not a scoundrel, may this boy live,” and the power of his words, the truth of his words indeed have a medicinal effect. Power starts withdrawing from the boy’s body. Now his legs are free of poison. And now it’s the mother’s turn, and she says, “By the truth that I have never loved my husband, may the child live,” and the poison starts to withdraw from the boy’s body. So now only the upper part of his body is still filled with poison. The remainder of his body is free. So now the monk starts, and he says, “By the truth that I’ve never believed a word of the dharma and thought it only to be nonsense, may this boy live.” Lo and behold, the child is now completely free of poison. These are truths that cost something. They’re expensive truths. It costs something to express them, to say them.

James Shaheen: You have to wonder how they’ll go about their business now.

Tenzin Dickie: Exactly. So the point of the act of truth is that it works. The truth has this enormous power that no one can deny. So thinking of the essay as an act of truth has so much resonance for me because especially when it’s a deeply personal essay, that can often cost the writer something, something to say, something to express that has so much power. The word has so much power. Writing has so much power.

James Shaheen: So you say this act of truth, in this case, in the form of an essay, changes both the writer and the reader. So how do essays transform their readers and their writers? And how were you changed by writing and reading the essays in the book?

Tenzin Dickie: When we were growing up in exile in India, if you wanted Tibetan essays, if you wanted Tibetan stories, we couldn’t find them. Working on this book, it was a very special experience for me. Some of the essayists in this book I had read before, like one of the essayists, Jamyang Norbu, who’s renowned for his essays, I deeply admire and love. He’s the person that Tibetans think about when they think of an essayist. So his work I knew, but a lot of the other writers in this book, I actually did not know of them as essayists. I had read other genres by them. I had read poetry, I had read short stories, but not really essays. So it felt very special being able to read their essays and of course to have the freedom and authority, which they were kind enough to give me, to edit and to work on these. And then the other part of it actually felt like I was privy to this hidden Tibetan history. Just to give you an example,  the very first essay that the book begins with is “Nation of Two” by Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, which talks about her growing up in India and Nepal as a young girl. This is a time when Tibet in exile is still settling itself. And the thing is of that period, of that earlier, unsettled period—and this is all still recent history, by the way, of course—but of that period, there’s really not much written, there’s not much out there that you can read. So her essay, the essay by Tenzing Sonam about his early days in Kumbum, the essay by Pema Tsewang Shastri of that first experience of coming across, and there are other essays in here of crossing. There’s Gedun Rabsal’s, there’s Dhondup Tashi Rekjong’s of that first arrival in India. I mean, they’re almost like secret histories.

There’s so much that is unsaid and hidden about the Tibetan exile experience, so much that I think we are only now beginning to excavate and appreciate. And the thing is, it needs to be written now because all of that memory will be erased. So if we don’t record them now, they will just be lost. It was kind of incredible for me to read these essays and to really learn what our parents went through, that older generation, the first settlers in exile, what they went through. It makes me appreciate all the more their enormous achievement in creating this vibrant Tibetan exile.

James Shaheen: One of the things that it did for me is allow me to witness this emergent group of Tibetan writers. And one of the things that struck me about Tsering Wangmo’s story in the beginning is she goes to movies with her mother, and they’re watching stories that are not their own. And in fact, her mother resists the ending of one love story saying, “Oh, that’s not possible.” So in this book, you have stories coming from Tibetans themselves rather than stories that belong to others. That was interesting to me.

Tenzin Dickie: That’s very true, and I’m so glad you appreciated that. That was part of my motivation in working on this book, to have Tibetans telling their stories that other Tibetans can then read, because that is a precious experience when you can see yourself reflected in writing, in art, in entertainment, in poetry. Otherwise, that lack of reflection, it makes you feel like you’re not there. It makes it hard to reconcile your own existence. So I think that’s what literature gives us.

James Shaheen: Yeah, in other words, you provided the stories that you felt were lacking or the group of you did, which I found interesting. So you write that the Tibetan word for essay, tsom, can also mean to lie or to make up. Can you say more about this interplay between truth and falsehood? How do essays tell the truth by lying? Here, I think of a piece of art by an American artist named Peter Imago, where he says “A True Story Based on Lies.” Why don’t you give us your take on that?

Tenzin Dickie: Sure. You know, people often think that all writers are liars to some extent because you’re always shaping something. So the Tibetan word for the essay, tsom, means to create, to compose, to write, and it also means to make up and literally to lie. It’s a great word for the essay because of its multiple meanings, multiple and opposite meanings. To create and to compose something always means to give a selective version of the truth because you do have to select what you are writing, what you are composing, what you are creating. I don’t actually know how the etymology came about, but in general, there’s really not a lot written about the Tibetan essay as such. I hope that there will be many more.

James Shaheen: In these fabrications, though, nonetheless, a truth, say in this case, the truth of Tibetans in exile, is conveyed.

Tenzin Dickie: Yes, and it’s a truth that if people don’t write their own stories, then we can never know that history. We can never know that experience. And I think especially for Tibetans, we’re a people who so much has been said and written about us, and very often it is not by us. Especially for Tibet and especially for like modern Tibetan history and the Tibetan people now, the truth of Tibet, the truth of Tibetan life, it’s so important and so crucial because of where we are in our history right now and because of all of these different narratives, one of the most damaging of which is the Chinese narrative. And there’s multiple Chinese narratives, which conflict with each other, so it’s all very interesting. One is that Tibet had always been a part of China. Another is that the Chinese came and peacefully liberated Tibet. But all of this makes Tibetan tellings of Tibetan stories all the more important because we have to say what happened to us. I feel like all Tibetan writing, to some extent, becomes witness statements.

James Shaheen: Right, coming away from reading them, each individually is interesting, but collectively, they convey a sense of dislocation and finding one’s way in the world. It’s interesting at one point, someone’s at the border, and they’re asked, “Are you Nepali?” and it raises a whole host of questions for that individual: “Who am I, after all?” It’s really poignant and really conveys the sense of a mixed or lost identity that’s being recovered. So I found that very interesting. In the book, you explore the particular lineage of the Tibetan essay, which you trace back to Dr. Tsewang Pemba. Can you tell us a bit about the history of modern Tibetan literature? How did he impact the trajectory of Tibetan writing?

Tenzin Dickie: I guess I’ll speak very briefly about modern Tibetan literature first. It’s something that we see emerging and growing within the last forty years, beginning with what we often point to as the birth of modern Tibetan literature with the father of modern Tibetan literature, Dhondup Gyal. So it’s something that’s quite recent, comparatively. But the history of Tibetan literature in general, of course, is over a thousand years old. Tibetans have been writing and composing and publishing for centuries, and the literature is vast, diverse, and very rich. But when we come to modern Tibetan literature, it’s something that now we’re looking at the last forty years when Tibetans started writing poems and then stories and essays. Now, with essays, it’s interesting, because when we think of the figures of modern Tibetan literature, people point to Gendun Chopel, who worked in the first half of the 20th century, and then Dhondup Gyal, who worked in the second half. People see the trajectory following from them. I think when people point to the early modern Tibetan essay, “The Narrow Footpath,” by Dhondup Gyal, people think of it as like the first, and it was certainly so influential. Dhondup Gyal, by the way, didn’t really write what we would call personal essays.

The thing is, it turns out that Tsewang Yishey Pemba was writing personal essays in the 40s and the 50s and 60s. He was publishing them in English, actually. He published them in England. And it’s right at the juncture of history because this was after Tibet had been invaded. After Tsewang Pemba and his family had come into exile, he was writing in exile, and his essays were basically recording life in Tibet as it was, life for him and for his family. I understood that, for him, the Tibetan essay was an exercise in recovering the lost land. It was an exercise in recovery. They have to do with memory and the recovery of memory, and in exile that becomes one of the great enterprises, the recovery of memory, because what else do you have? So much has been lost. The whole project then becomes recovering, rebuilding, renewing. We see the destruction of what actually happened to Tibet and with Tibetans because even though he was writing in the 50s and 60s, Tibetans did not know about them. For Tibetans, I think we became aware of Dr. Pemba as a writer posthumously after his work began to be published much more recently in the last five to ten years. We have these genealogies that failed to regenerate, failed to exist because of this break in time that the Chinese imposed on us and its attendant consequences.

James Shaheen: So you talked about recovering the land. Of course, the geopolitical reality right now is that that’s not the case. But is this connecting again to one’s roots in the absence of the physical reality of that land, or does it contain within it the hope of regaining that land physically as well?

Tenzin Dickie: I think if you were to ask any Tibetans, we would say, of course, geopolitically, things are not promising. China being the power that it is, and Tibet being this tiny nation, things look pretty bad and sixty years have gone by. But at the same time, I think for Tibetans, we are very aware that for us, this is an existential issue. It is not an issue that we can ever give up on.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I don’t dismiss the possibility. After all, the Cold War ended, and I never thought that would end. I grew up in it. I always hold out the possibility that geopolitical realities shift and change very dramatically. But today, it feels that this literature is deepening the connection to that land in its absence. Is that fair to say?

Tenzin Dickie: That’s absolutely correct. There is so much Chinese presence inside Tibet that I think for all of us, we’re really living in some kind of exile, both Tibetans outside and Tibetans inside.

James Shaheen: That point is made in one of the stories, living in exile inside Tibet. I wondered if we could go back a little bit further. You also explore the history of Tibetan writing, and you say that one of the earliest pieces of writing from Tibet was a coded message written by a young princess. Can you tell us about Princess Semarkar’s poem and the message it contained? Why is it significant that one of the earliest pieces of Tibetan writing was written in code, and here we come back to the modern reality of Tibet?

Tenzin Dickie: Princess Semarkar is a 7th-century Tibetan princess, the sister of the Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo, who is the great reunifier, the king who created the Tibet that Tibetans think of when we think of Tibet. He is the King Arthur figure of Tibetan history. And the story that we all know about Songtsen Gampo is his deeds, his armies, and his creation of Tibet as we know it. But people don’t really know about Semarkar, who was his sister who he married to one of the neighboring kingdoms, which he later conquered. That nation became part of Tibet. The story about Semarkar is when she was sent off to Shangshung, she was sent as the king of Shangshung’s bride, but she was also sent as a spy for Songtsen. She kept in touch with something through coded messages, and one of these messages in a song in a verse tells Songtsen Gampo basically that her husband cannot be trusted, that he’s refusing to have marital relations with her because he does not want an heir, a Pugyel heir to his Shangshung kingdom. Semarkar passes on this information, this coded message, to her brother, who then sends his army to conquer Shangshung and bring it into this unified Tibetan empire, which then becomes the hallowed Tibet and the Tibet nation that Tibetans think of as their heyday.

The thing that’s so interesting to me about Semarkar’s song is that it is a precipitating incident that triggers this whole chain of events leading to the consolidation of the Tibetan empire. It’s an enormous event in Tibetan history, and growing up, I had no idea about it. Songtsen was so important. Semarkar, I never heard anything about her. So it’s just so cool to know about it, to learn about it, and to know that a woman wrote this communique that was so important and also the idea of this coded message and code being so important not just to Tibetan literary history but also to national and political history. Code is still so important to the Tibetan people, especially for Tibetans living inside Tibet, where there’s so much suppression, oppression, and censorship. A lot of Tibetan writing now, especially inside Tibet, people write poetry, people write short stories. A lot of them are magical realist. Why? All of these have to do with censorship and with political realities because for Tibetan writers, the line between print and prison is very fine. So all of this then means that code becomes very important to the Tibetan writer. It’s very important in their arsenal of tools because they’re often writing with an eye to the censor and trying to see, “What can I get across and still stay on this side of prison?”

James Shaheen: Yeah, that code that Semarkar used has resonance today. So in contrast to Tibetans writing in Tibet, you write that Tibetan writing from the outside can seem like caricature, like trying to shout and reveal the oppression they face. How do Tibetan writers navigate these conflicting demands to perform and conceal?

Tenzin Dickie: Truthfully, that is something that any Tibetan writer, I think, whether inside or outside, faces, how to navigate this line. I keep thinking of this thing that one of the writers, Bhuchung D. Sonam, said. He is a bilingual writer who writes in Tibetan and also in English. What he said was that when he writes in Tibetan, he can write about stupid things. He can write about jokes. He can write about love. He can write about whatever. But somehow when he writes in English, he ends up writing about Tibet, he ends up writing about the issue. I think all of us, especially those of us who grew up in exile, grew up with a sense of huge responsibility for our people, for our community, for the Tibetan nation. There is always that struggle of what am I writing, and who am I writing for? That’s kind of what I meant when I said to some extent all Tibetan writing is a witness statement. But the other part of it is we slowly learn that when we are writing something that we really care about, perhaps it’s even something that you’re confused about and you’re trying to get some clarity or something you care about that you want to voice, whatever it is, if it’s something that you really care about, chances are that the reader will also care about it.

James Shaheen: You write that to write as Tibetans is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation. What does this look like?

Tenzin Dickie: Well, one of the things, especially for Tibetans outside, is that we don’t have access to Tibet land. So what we have access to, what we can reach, what we can read, what we can play with are the other cultural contents of our lives. So for me, in this time and place, Tibetan literature serves as a placeholder almost for the Tibetan nation. I can’t live in Tibet, but I can live inside Tibet literature.

James Shaheen: I’m curious about how all of this shows up in your own life. Can you tell us more about your own path to becoming a writer and translator?

Tenzin Dickie: I’ve always been a reader. I started out reading comics actually. It was actually at my aunt’s house in Nepal in Kathmandu. I was on vacation. My family lived in India. This was a winter that I spent in Kathmandu, and all around me, in her home, all of my cousins spoke Nepali to each other, and obviously outside, it’s a Nepali-speaking community. So there was a lot of language that I didn’t understand. So I would just sort of sit off in a corner with stacks of cartoons, Archie Comics, Tinkle. I would just sit and look at those comics because I couldn’t read. I couldn’t read them yet. I spent two winters in Nepal, and then maybe by the second winter, I was beginning to learn how to read them. That’s how my reading journey really began, I think. I mean, I loved stories, and I became addicted to them. And it was much later, probably in college, that I even really began writing the first thing that I wrote, which was a poem. What inspired me to that piece of writing was a poem by Tenzin Tsundue. He wrote about the rain in Dharamsala. I read that poem. I knew Tsundue, I knew the rain in Dharamsala, and that poem, I think, almost activated something in me, and I went and wrote a poem.

As Buddhists, we go to teachings and we receive empowerments. We receive them, and then the idea is that we’re strengthened, we’re empowered in some way. For me, in that moment, reading “When It Rains in Dharamshala,” it was like receiving an empowerment.

James Shaheen: It rang true to you, and it acted upon you, back to what we were discussing before. You refer to Tibetan literature as written in the bardo, a literature of interrupted continuities, much like modern Tibetan people. So what does it mean to write in the bardo?

Tenzin Dickie: The bardo is this intermediate stage, the stage between life and death, or really, it’s the stage after death and your next life. So it’s that stage of roaming in between destinations, of homelessness, of wandering, but also of possibility. So for Tibetan literature, right now, we’re literally in political bardo, and not just political bardo actually. We’re in territorial bardo. That’s what exile is. It’s a bardo. So Tibetan writing in exile, in the bardo, it’s at a crossroads. But like I said, it is a place of loss. It is a place of pain. But it is also a place of possibility. It is where change can happen. In terms of loss and missed connections and what I mentioned earlier about Tsewang Yishey Pemba, who potentially is the father of the modern Tibetan essay, but actually, who did he influence? Tibetans were not able to read him. And that was all a consequence of Tibetan literature literally being in the bardo, of Tibetans being in this bardo.

But at the same time, we look at Tibetan literature, we look at Tibet today in exile, Tibet in India, and one of the most amazing Tibetan developments has been the development of democracy, the democratization of Tibetan society. If we think of technologies that Tibetans have taken from India, like Buddhism is one technology, and it’s something that’s meant a lot to us and something that we took and then made our own. But actually, the idea of democracy, the practice of democracy, which we also took from India, is another immense technology that’s an achievement of Tibetan bardo, an achievement of Tibetan exile that we hope will sustain our future.

James Shaheen: You know, you describe the genre of traditional Tibetan literature known as terma literature, which are Buddhist texts buried millennia ago and revealed centuries later when conditions were more ripe for the dharma to flourish. So while terma literature is concealed in time, you say that contemporary Tibetan literature is concealed in place. Can you say more about the terma literature tradition and how it helps you understand Tibetan literature today? You talked about Dr. Pemba, his works remained unknown and later became accessible in a sort of terma-like twist, but also it’s different when you talk about something that’s concealed in place.

Tenzin Dickie: So terma literature is literature that we Tibetans think of as literature that figures like Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava and Yeshe Tsogyal, his consort and the Tibetan writer and great heroine figure. So it’s texts that figures like them and others composed and then buried as gifts and presents for a future time. And the idea was these texts were going to be revealed and accessed at a later time when the timing was better, when the people were ready, when the texts could do the work that they were supposed to do. And so over the centuries, Tibetan treasure finders who look for texts recovered these treasures and made them available and accessible to the Tibetan people. So this idea of texts that were ahead of their time, of treasures that were ahead of their time, of ideas that were ahead of their time and then later accessed and disseminated. The sense of terma literature, especially for Tibetans, it’s something that we have always resigned ourselves to but also something that we’ve always prepared for. With the disruptions that happened in 20th-century Tibet, a lot of what was lost then is now slowly being regained. Even if you think of modern Tibetan literature, like Gendun Chopel, who wrote his masterpiece, The Tales of the Cosmopolitan Traveler, that was essentially lost, suppressed, disappeared for all practical purposes, and then sort of later resurfaced in the ’90s, and Tibetan readers and writers were able to read and to learn and to become empowered by that text.

James Shaheen: I’m sorry, it was Thupten Jinpa and Don Lopez who translated that, is that right?

Tenzin Dickie: Yes, that’s right, it was Thupten Jinpa and Don Lopez who translated it in 2014, but for the Tibetan public, it was recovered and published in the 1990s. Before that, it was as if it did not exist. It was like a hidden text.

James Shaheen: It’s like a contemporary terma, so to speak.

Tenzin Dickie: It’s exactly a contemporary terma, and the same thing with Tsewang Pemba’s works.

James Shaheen: So you explore the complexity of exile through the lens of what psychologists term ambiguous loss, or a loss where it is extremely difficult to find closure. So how has this shaped Tibetan writing, and what role does writing play in trying to create a sense of closure?

Tenzin Dickie: So you know how things that are born on the internet are called born digital? Tibetan writing born after 1959, I feel like it’s almost born exile. There’s a lot of pressure. There’s also a lot of possibility. So whether for Tibetan writers writing inside or writing outside, Tibetan writing after 1959, Tibetan writers became bilingual to some extent simply because of their political situation. So I do think there’s a lot more influence of other literatures on Tibetan writing after that period, on modern Tibetan literature, but at the same time, especially, I think, for exiled Tibetan writers, there’s an enforced distance from older Tibetan literature simply because of the fact that we’re born in exile. We grew up in these Tibetan refugee communities that were in the process of settling down, and the first order of business was to worry about survival. Literature and art and all of that came later, so to some extent, those of us born in exile grew up orphaned from our literature. A lot of writers worry about the anxiety of influence. They worry about how to escape influence. I wonder, perhaps, especially for Tibetan writers in exile, in some cases, it’s not the anxiety of influence. It’s almost like the anxiety of lack of influence. It’s like the anxiety of distance in some ways that we are trying to breach and to reconnect. But in a sense, exile defines not just our lives but also our literature. It’s something that we try to bridge.

James Shaheen: Could you help me just to clarify, what exactly do you mean by the anxiety of influence? 

Tenzin Dickie: Well, say, Jamyang Norbu, who is the modern Tibetan essayist, so the writers who deeply influenced him, who he read growing up, who he wanted to emulate, Kipling, Hemingway, Orwell. Jamyang Norbu didn’t read Tsewang Yishey Pemba, and for us, for Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, for me, for Bhuchung D. Sonam, for Tenzin Tsundue, we didn’t read Tsewang Yishey Pemba. We read Jamyang Norbu, but there are Tibetan writers that we’re not able to access because of what exile did to Tibetan literature in some way.

James Shaheen: Yeah, sort of a discontinuous break from the culture.

Tenzin Dickie: You know, even as writers, exile really permeates what we read, and it permeates what we write, even writers from inside, like Woeser, who is writing about this figure, a gar dancer, the Dalai Lama’s gar dancer who learned how to dance gar, and then for the next twenty years, he was in labor camps, and basically all the dance was beaten out of him. It was basically violently stripped away and then destroyed, and he couldn’t even think about getting back to this dance, and not just dance. For him, it had been a way of life, and he couldn’t even conceive of getting back to this because of the trauma that he had suffered and the trauma that was associated with it. It took actually coming to India, visiting the Dalai Lama, and then essentially getting a blessing from him and getting empowered from him and almost commanded to bring back this dance that then Gapon La, the gar dancer, was able to remember and renew all of this dance and not only to then dance it himself but to teach it and to revive this whole continuity of gar dance, which just goes to show that there’s many different forms of exile that Tibetans suffer from. I think we’re all trying to find some accommodation and to find a way to live in samsara in exile and make art at the same time. That’s our act of truth.

James Shaheen: That’s a remarkable story, and I wonder if the writing in this book is a similar effort to connect again, to establish the reality of Tibet again.

Tenzin Dickie: I would say yes. Part of the reason for this book is as simple as saying we’re here, we’re still here, and that we will be here. That’s my hope, and I trust when people read the book and people feel and understand what Tibetans go through, Tibetans from all walks of life, what they go through as they live their daily life with exile as their daily habitat. I hope that it’s an assertion of our identity. It’s an assertion of our existence, and it’s an assertion that we will continue.

James Shaheen: Tenzin Dickie, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, please be sure to pick up a copy of The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays. It’s truly a remarkable book available now. Thanks again, Dickie.

Tenzin Dickie: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Tenzin Dickie. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. In July 1813, a young American couple from Boston arrived in the Buddhist kingdom of Burma to preach the gospel. Although Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Christian evangelism, members of minority religious communities embraced Baptist teachings and practices, reimagining both Buddhism and Christianity in the process. In her new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom, religious studies scholar Alex Kaloyanides explores this history of power and conversion through the lens of sacred objects. Previously Tricycle’s managing editor, Kaloyanides now serves as an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In today’s episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Alex to discuss the religious material culture of 19th-century Burma, what we miss when we study religions solely through their texts, and how her research has shaped how she thinks about religious conflict today.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Alex Kaloyanides, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Alex also once worked as Tricycle‘s managing editor way back when. Hi, Alex. It’s good to see you.

Alex Kaloyanides: It’s so good to see you, James. Thanks for having me.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s a pleasure. So Alex, we’re here to talk about your new book, Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom. So to start, you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Alex Kaloyanides: Sure. The book is a religious history of 19th-century Burma, the Southeast Asian country that we now call Myanmar, and it is a story of the religious change that was happening not just among the mainstream Buddhists. It was the last Buddhist kingdom that was eventually toppled by the British. But it was also a time of increased Christian evangelism because of an American mission that started there in 1813. So the book explores different forms of religious change that happened because of these different things that were going on in the country. And thinking about coming to talk to you, I was thinking a lot of what inspired this book started at Tricycle, where I was really interested in American encounters with Buddhism and the history behind that. And so when I got to go to graduate school to study American religious history and Asian religions, I was trying to think of some kind of project I could do that would please both of my sets of advisors, and I found this story of these really young Americans in their 20s who accidentally end up in Burma and try to establish this Baptist mission there. They’re the first Americans living in a Buddhist country, meeting Buddhist monks, going to Buddhist pagodas, learning local languages. And so I became really interested in this particular story of this mission and the larger changes that were happening in the country at the time.

James Shaheen: Did you learn Burmese?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, I started with Pali and Sanskrit. That’s what I was doing in graduate school. And there were some Pali texts that were from the 19th century that got me into the story of Burmese religions. And then when I started learning more about this history, they hired some guys to come and help me learn some Burmese at Yale as a tutor, and then I got to do some Burmese language training when I was in Burma as well. So I was lucky to do that.

James Shaheen: So you mentioned the American Baptist evangelists who first came to Burma. What was the religious landscape like when they arrived? And can you give us some background on the missionaries themselves?

Alex Kaloyanides: Sure. So this was in the Konbaung dynasty. It was the last dynasty, the last Buddhist kingdom. It started in 1752, and then it went all the way until 1885 when they were toppled by the British Raj. This was a Theravada Buddhist kingdom. There was a lot of support for Buddhist institutions. There were these infamous reformations that were quite dramatic where the king would step in and reform the monastery. But overwhelmingly, the country was a Theravada Buddhist country. When these Baptists arrived—they actually left the United States as Congregationalists, they were at sea, they left Boston, and it took them four months to get over to Asia. Over the course of their travels, they converted to Baptist Christianity. And so by the time they arrived, they were Baptists. They were very committed. It was this young couple, Ann and Adoniram Judson, who ended up being these founding missionaries.

This is 1813, so this is the early republic. There were people still alive who had fought in the Revolutionary War. It was a Calvinist form of Protestant Christianity, so these missionaries probably never even saw pictures of Jesus when they left due to the concern about the problems of trying to depict Jesus or the saints. So they leave this rather austere world of the early republic, the Northeast, and they end up in Burma, and it’s this land with these towering pagodas covered in gold, lots of monastics, pagodas that were filled with families coming and doing devotional work. And so they were shocked. Before they even landed ashore, they were writing these letters home and in their diaries about how overwhelmed they were by the religious life. And at first they thought this was just a sort of generic heathendom. They had learned some things about Buddhism, but they didn’t know much. And so they just thought this was a dark land where Christianity needed to spread, and so they had a lot to learn when they showed up.

James Shaheen: So you mentioned that the Burmese Buddhists largely resisted Baptist evangelism in the beginning, whereas minority communities tended to embrace it. That’s where they had more luck. They didn’t have the success that they imagined but among marginalized populations, they did have some success. Can you say more about this dynamic of why Christianity resonated more with the minority religious groups?

Alex Kaloyanides: The Baptists were really interested at first in mainstream Burmese culture. They learned Burmese and they learned Pali and they met the monks, but they had very little success. I suggest in the book that the Buddhist identity of the mainstream culture probably became even more pronounced over this period. But there were these minority communities, especially the communities known as the Karen, the Kachin, and the Chin, who became quickly very interested in Baptist Christianity. And they converted in large numbers. Even today, Burma, which is largely Buddhist still, the second largest religion is Baptist Christianity because of this history. And so the minority groups were interested for a variety of reasons.

Scholarship on this beforehand, colonial-era scholarship, was like, “Oh, these people were uneducated and superstitious, so they just sort of bought the stories the missionaries were telling them.” And then later historians, postcolonial historians, looked at the material reasons why minority marginalized communities would want to learn English or associate with white foreigners and so on. But I found problems with both of these angles, mostly because the Karen community that I actually met and reading the archival materials, these people were really taken with Christianity in a way that was not just a strategic way to gain socioeconomic power or something. They were interested in alternative ideas about salvation, a God who had the power to forgive sins rather than having to endure the consequences of your actions, the way they interpreted karma. They were really interested in the figure of Jesus, and they were taken with the Bible itself as this object. There were these stories in these communities about a lost book that would soon be returned to them because many of them did not have a written language at the time when the Baptists arrived. So they had a whole range of reasons to be really interested in Baptist Christianity.

James Shaheen: So this notion that they were simply trying to leverage this conversion to gain power, or that they were simply illiterate, that may be part of the picture. But it’s much more interesting when we think of whether it was true religious conversion, is that right?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, it’s a question of what does it really mean. For the Baptists, it was a true heart conversion that they were interested in. They would put these people through the long period of really trying to show they were sincere. There are a lot of debates about what conversion really was. And it’s true that these people, their economic situations changed, and then when the British started coming, access to English language and Western disciplines and social networks did have a material effect on their lives. But I don’t think that’s the whole story. People all over the country, including the Americans who had arrived, were rethinking their world and salvation and other worlds and everything.

James Shaheen: Right. We’ll talk a little bit more about the book later. But I just want to make clear that your research tells you that this notion of a lost book was really a 19th-century idea. This did not trace back into the depths of Karen history or anything.

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, it’s hard. All our records date to after the Baptists arrived, and one thing I did was I collected as many histories as I could and tried to think about the oral histories that might have preceded it. But as you see this story being told and retold, even today, it’s still told, you can see the marks of this engagement with the Baptists. So I think that part of the story was this community reinterpreting their own relationship to Christian conversion and the changing religious landscape in Burma.

James Shaheen: You also discuss the ways that American Baptist Christianity was transformed by its encounters with Buddhism. We normally think they bring Christianity, and it’s this sort of static thing that stops and doesn’t continue to change, but it was transformed by encounters with Buddhism and other Burmese religious traditions. So can you tell us more about this transformation, which is surprising, because it’s not the typical narrative.

Alex Kaloyanides: I think for the missionaries, they were rethinking a lot of things. And so by living in this new landscape and having to translate all of these ideas of the Gospels, of Jesus, of salvation, and translating them into local languages, they rethought them, and they were affected by the Buddhist traditions and other traditions they encountered but largely Buddhism. In Buddhism, the missionaries encountered these Buddhist leaders who had a lot of great responses to their arguments. The Buddhists said, “Listen, we’ve got this ethical system that is wonderful, that you can admire, and we have this really rich history of understanding these very historical figures” and so on. And so the Baptists themselves had to reinterpret and retranslate and reunderstand their own Christianity. They didn’t just go for a little while the way sometimes we think of missionaries today. They lived there. They left their family, they said goodbye to their parents, “I’ll never see you again,” and they lived there. Even Adoniram Judson, for example, when he started teaching, he wore Buddhist robes. It’s hard to find a lot of evidence, but from some of the evidence, I found he would wear maroon robes and embody a kind of Buddhist monk to give Christian teachings. And so the whole culture around them really shaped the way that they were describing Christianity and understanding their own relationship to it, and then later on their converts really changed the way Baptist Christianity looked. Nowadays, you will go to Christian spaces, and there are a lot of things that will maybe remind you of Buddhist spaces, like the way their artwork is displayed or so on. And so the cultural setting, I think, had a big impact on these Americans. 

James Shaheen: That’s interesting. I just want to quote you from the book. You write “This book shows that Burma was not a simple country of unified Buddhists defending themselves against a monolithic Western enemy but rather a place of entangled empires and reimagined religious worlds.” So can you talk to us a little bit about this statement? What do you mean by reimagined religious worlds?

Alex Kaloyanides: The way people often will describe it when they want to give a sort of simple history is that there was Burmese Buddhism, and it was so strong and had been there for so long, and then the British come and they have to fight off the British, and the triumph of Buddhism in the face of encroaching Western empire, and then you’ve got these busybody missionaries on the fringes. But actually the missionaries, through their schools that became really influential and through other activities, became a part of this culture, and you have not just the British Empire that we’re all so familiar with, but also the Burmese themselves were a large empire with its own history of expansion and religious domination. And then the Americans, of course, as America becomes stronger and stronger over the course of the 19th century, it has its own form of imperialism. And so as this is all happening, there are new ways of thinking about the world. For example, the missionaries were some of the first people to bring globes or telescopes into the country. And so you’d have these itinerant preachers trotting around with their globes, and you’d have these monks or these queens who would want to say, “Oh, let me look through that telescope.” Their cosmology beforehand had been Mount Meru in the center of a flat world. So getting this opportunity to debate the Christians, even if they had no interest in conversion, that kind of religious debate and thinking about what Christianity was, how Buddhism was distinct, and why this was important in terms of the independence of the kingdom, and then for others too, these marginalized communities who’ve never even had a script before the Baptists come up. Now, they’re learning to read things in their local languages, looking at maps with parts of the world written in these languages, and so it was this place where the worlds both mundane and supermundane were being reimagined.

James Shaheen: So you’ve discussed books, telescopes, globes, all of these material objects, so let’s talk about that. Throughout the book, you explore these dynamics of power through the study of religious material culture. So can you say more about what it means to study religion through the lens of material culture, as opposed to texts?

Alex Kaloyanides: There still are a lot of texts that I had to read, and I was doing a lot of work in archives here in the United States, and in Burma, Myanmar, and then also eventually in England. And even though I was reading so many texts and thinking about these abstract ideas, there were all these objects that became really important. Like you said before, the Bible and the story of the lost book, the object of the Bible. When the Baptists first introduced the printing press, in 1816, you’ve got all these pamphlets. There are these manuscripts, these beautiful Burmese manuscripts known as the Kammavaca, these Buddhist manuscripts that are then being circulated, and all of these objects. So every time I was trying to do an investigation of these stories, all these objects became important. The pagoda itself, this famous Burmese Buddhist structure, was in almost every report I found of these missionaries early on. So these objects were kind of pressing at me.

When I was finally able to do some fieldwork with Baptists in Burma, I found all these really strange portraits of Jesus and these early missionaries. And so I realized that the way to tell this story was actually through these objects, because in a lot of ways, the official chronicles from the kingdom do not address the Christians. They don’t address either the Americans or the converting communities. They kind of leave that story out. And similarly, the Baptist writings back home were sometimes dismissive of Buddhist theories. But when you look at the objects themselves, you see how entangled these communities were and how they were reasserting different kinds of identities. So it became an object study. You’ll laugh because originally, I wanted to call the book Objects of Conversion, Relics of Resistance. I know you’re an expert cover line writer. They said it’s too long. But it really is, like you said, a material culture study.

James Shaheen: You write that the material dimensions of religion can often be overlooked. As you know, our educations are pretty text oriented. So what are we missing when we think about Buddhism only through written texts? You discovered yourself that the story was incomplete. What do we miss when we overlook what you’re referring to as material culture?

Alex Kaloyanides: Well, the first thing we miss is the way that so many parts of society who are not literate have engaged with the Buddhist tradition. Texts for so long have been the possessions of a very small elite minority, monastics and so on. And so there is a way that if we focus too much on texts, canonical texts, commentaries, scriptures, we start to think that we are seeing a bigger picture than we really are because they were really the production of a very educated people with a lot of royal resources, and so I think the material culture turn in the academy really was first as a way of how can we talk about what other people have done. And that’s I think its biggest contribution. But then I also think it’s reminding us that we are these embodied people. Even though we’re looking at each other through a screen and so on, it’s like we are these embodied people. You and I have been on retreat together. Those things are not just about the text of a dharma talk, but the whole experience of those spaces. So to try to understand what Buddhism was like at different times or what Christianity was like for people in different times and places, it’s really telling to focus on some of the different sensory experiences of those traditions.

James Shaheen: So you also emphasize how material objects can help us better understand the religious lives of members of marginalized communities who did not leave behind many written records, let alone a book. What have you learned from the objects that these communities did leave behind?

Alex Kaloyanides: Well, they left different things behind, of course. We have textiles, different objects, and we even have records of what they did with foreign objects. For example, all of these print pamphlets that the Baptists would circulate. And some of them people would treat very preciously, and some of them they would cut up into earrings, so you would have these communities where people would turn them into kind of amulets. There’s a story I tell in the book where this Karen community has a special box all wrapped up, and the Baptists show up and they say, “Oh, we’re so glad you’re here. Can you read this object for us? It’s in English,” and so they say, “OK,” and they carefully unwrap this object, and inside, it’s just this business card, or a Book of Common Prayer. They have these kinds of stories where they turned out to be what the Americans considered more mundane objects but were actually quite powerful for the communities that came to possess them.

James Shaheen: I love the earring story and the business cards wrapped up in all of this cloth that shows itself to be an address in London.

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, exactly.

James Shaheen: So you write that these objects often bumped up against the familiar stories that have been told about the religious history of Burma. So what are some of the things that surprised you about the objects you came across? And how did they resist easy or familiar narratives?

Alex Kaloyanides: Well, the first actual physical object that I found was this Buddhist manuscript. It’s a Pali language manuscript called the Kammavaca, and it comes from the Pali canon, but it’s excerpts for monastic rituals. And the first one that I found was in the Brown University library that was donated by a missionary. But then I started to find more and more copies at the Yale University Art Gallery and the American Baptist Historical Society, more and more copies. It’s this beautiful lacquered manuscript, sometimes made with gold or pearl, silver, beautiful manuscript. What I began to notice about this manuscript was not just that it was carefully preserving ancient scriptures and ritual formulas, but it had all these illustrations on them. And some of the oldest ones had these beautiful designs, flora and fauna, geometry, really interesting designs. But later on, especially toward the end of the 19th century, the same manuscript used for the same rituals that they’ve been trying to do the same way for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years, the manuscript itself changed. Not the text. But in the margins, all of a sudden, you have these spirit creatures who emerge carrying weapons. They’ve got swords and so on. They become a kind of belligerent presence in these manuscripts. So then I realized something’s happening with these objects beyond just ordination rituals, that there was a way that these objects were seen as conscripted into Burmese war efforts to defend themselves against the British, and a way that they were imbued with a certain kind of power to defend a Burmese independence. And so if you just look at the texts themselves and not the material qualities or the artwork or the surrounding stuff that happens in the margins of these texts, sometimes we miss the power they had and the reason they were produced in such a way or ended up circulating outside of the country.

James Shaheen: So you write that both Theravada Buddhism and Baptist Christianity place special import on holy objects, as worldly materials “can mediate a relationship with a central figure who is absent from this world.” So can you walk us through the role of religious media in each of these traditions?

Alex Kaloyanides: This history is also the first time that Baptist Christianity and Theravada Buddhism came together in one place. I was thinking about what is distinctive about both of those traditions. As your listeners will know, Theravada is distinctive from Mahayana in the sense that you have this understanding that these are things that really happened: the Buddha really lived, and he really did become unbound through nirvana and no longer exists in this world, unlike Mahayana, where there are these other ways where the Buddha can still act in this world, and people can engage with him. Think of the famous Mahayana text, the Lotus Sutra, where the argument is that the Buddha is still able to do things for devotees and they can interact. Theravada does not have that same history. And so in the absence of the Buddha, what do followers do? And so of course, we have relics, which are said to have some of the power, and we have these sort of special objects, pagodas and so on, texts, that have some of the Buddha’s power, anubhava, the power of the Buddha. And so objects themselves become this key place for people to experience the Buddha, still, even after his parinirvana. In Baptist Christianity, because of this Calvinist argument that even picturing heaven was a kind of sin because we were so flawed as humans, we can’t imagine it, and so this real turn away from religious objects also has this challenge. But of course, there’s always been the Bible itself, the Eucharist, and so on, the Holy Spirit, and so I was thinking about how these particular communities with these complicated relationships to the absence. There’s no Jesus to interact with anymore here on Earth. There’s no Buddha anymore here on Earth. Objects themselves become these really powerful figures that both help people point to the teachings of the Buddha, but then they themselves are also powerful in and of themselves. They can help transform the people who are devoted to them.

James Shaheen: Yeah, for instance, in Theravada, relics are imbued with a certain power or special meaning. I hadn’t really thought about that in Theravada, that yes, the Buddha is absent, and likewise, in especially Protestant Christianity, Christ is not present, or he’s present, but in a very different way. He’s not physically present. So you lay out four types of sacred objects in Theravada Buddhism that are believed to hold special meaning and power. Can you say more about these objects and the powers they hold?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, there are these four objects. These are the things that are considered things that could have the Buddha’s power called anubhava in Pali: monuments with bodily relics, so things that would have, say, a Buddha’s tooth inside of it, pagodas. Then there are monuments that contain items of use, so a begging bowl, for example. Then there are monuments that are built over sacred texts, or simply the texts themselves. That’s one category. And then the fourth one are monuments with consecrated objects like Buddha images. These are special objects that can still contain the Buddha’s power even in the absence of the Buddha himself.

James Shaheen: So what does that mean, containing the Buddha’s power? The power to help move us toward liberation? Is that typically the power, or is it other kinds of power?

Alex Kaloyanides: It’s been interpreted in the material that I’ve looked at both as a power to remind someone of the Buddha’s teachings, to recommit them to a certain path. But then actually there’s also a less rational or methodical way, not that it’s irrational, but that there’s this overwhelming special power in those places, where someone can get closer to understanding the Buddha’s teachings than they would in other kinds of places and other kinds of settings. So there’s really these extraordinary circumstances. In this presence of the Buddha’s power, one can progress toward enlightenment and have a kind of connection there that would be transformative in a way that other objects do not have the power to do.

James Shaheen: And so those places can also be power places in terms of practice. A certain momentum and history of practice might propel a person forward on the path. Is that right?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah. And there’s also ways that scholars of ritual and sacred space would also argue that there’s something about being in community there, being with other people, that sort of collective effervescence that comes together in those particular spaces that doesn’t happen in other places. There’s something sacred there that is able to move people in new directions.

James Shaheen: So after the introduction, you devote the following chapters to each of the four sacred objects that the missionaries brought, using them as a way to understand the changing religious landscape of 19th-century Burma. So first, you turn to books. Can you tell us a little bit more, you’ve talked about it some, about how books functioned as sacred objects for Baptists, Buddhists, and the minority Karen community?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, the missionaries, when they would write home sometimes or when they would write something official, they would say, “Oh, we’ve really introduced the teachings of the Gospel. People are really feeling God’s presence,” and so they’d be really interested in that part of it. But as I looked through the archives, a lot of times people were asking for Bibles or pamphlets just to actually hold the object themselves, whether or not they were actually interested in the teachings inside of it. So I started to realize that the objects themselves were really interesting, and books especially. Books were the first things often that the missionaries would bring. If they had an audience with the king, for example, like Adoniram Judson was able to do, he tried to figure out, “What was the thing I should bring to this king to ask permission to proselytize?” And he decided upon a Bible. But he ended up wrapping the Bible in this cloth and gold so that it would look like a Burmese book. There was a way that books, because of Burmese book culture, because of the long Buddhist tradition of valuing texts, especially those related to the Pali canon, that there was a way that Christian book culture was able to make sense in a place. Even for people who could not read, they wanted these objects as they saw them as powerful, important objects. So that’s why I start with books.

James Shaheen: Interesting, because it’s not necessarily a physical book itself but the legend or myths surrounding the book, both with the Karen legend of the lost book that you mentioned and the Baptist fantasies of a Sanskrit Bible that move people, just this idea of a book that is nowhere to be found. Can you say more about the mythical and legendary dimensions of these books and the power they held in constructing a romantic notion of the past?

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, so we talked a little bit about the Karen and their legend of the lost book, the idea that they once had language and written language and this esteemed tradition, and then it was lost somehow, and then it would eventually be brought back. They had this story, and then when the Baptists came, the story became reinterpreted to mean that the Baptists themselves were the people meant to return this book to the Karen. There was also a story circulating. Even before the Americans leave for Burma, there’s a story circulating through the British press. There was this missionary, Claudius Buchanan, who published this pamphlet called “Star in the East” that was very popular. In it, he told of how Sanskrit manuscripts, which were being studied by British colonists and scholars in Europe, were starting to reveal the story of Christ, that you could find in these texts tales of a virgin woman who gave birth to a son of a god and so on. And so there was this fantasy that rather than introducing Christianity anew—I mean, Christianity had been in India for a very long time, but still, rather than introducing it anew, that it was already there, that the people were primed, that God’s light had already shown in these corners of the world. I didn’t even hear about this Claudius Buchanan text until reading writings by missionaries like Adoniram Judson, who were so moved by it that then and there, they leave their training in Andover, Massachusetts and decide that they want to go and be a missionary because they get so excited by these ideas. So I was trying to think of what was exciting about the Sanskrit texts and the ways that they might tell interesting histories and what was it about the sort of stories of Bibles and so on and about these new printed objects, about the power of the printing press. What was it about these particular objects that really excited people beyond the sort of messages that they carried?

James Shaheen: Yeah, so you also discuss the ritual surrounding books and how these rituals have often been excluded from the study of Buddhism as a way to construct a “rationalist, and therefore ritual-free, core of Buddhism.” What can we learn from the practices surrounding the books? Because it’s true, we so often ignore, eliminate, or rationalize away ritual.

Alex Kaloyanides: That part of the book I’m engaging with some work by Charles Hallisey and others who have really wanted us to pay way more attention to ritual because a lot of texts, even Pali, for example, is such a language that is chanted by a lot of people who don’t even really know Pali very well. It’s a liturgical language. So they’re using these books as special objects rather than as things that they sit and read quietly in a corner like a Protestant American Bible. And so paying attention to the power these books have had. For example, that Kammavaca text I was talking about. Why was this text circulated? And why was it spread out through the kingdom and moved internationally? What was the importance of certain kinds of rituals for communities beyond really preserving the words of the Buddha?

James Shaheen: Yeah, so why was the Kammavaca so important?

Alex Kaloyanides: First of all, it’s used in the most important monastic ritual, ordination or the establishment of a monastery, so that’s important. But you don’t need a fancy gold-plated text to do that necessarily. So what is it to make it this really beautiful object? And what kind of power does it give it? It gives it a certain kind of status, a donor paying more money for a fancier version of these ritual scripts perhaps enjoys an elevated social status and so on. But there was also a sense that the object itself brought a certain kind of power to the space, and as I was saying before, they start to be painted with these sword-bearing spirits, and so I can’t say for sure, but I had to ask whether they were understood as actually being able to do some work in terms of protecting the kingdom against Western imperialism, Christian evangelism, and so on. There’s a quote I found from Erik Braun’s study of Ledi Sayadaw. Ledi Sayadaw talks about the spirits that are in the air. There’s this idea that when you would use one of these manuscripts, you want one that has these spirits painted on them, and so really attention to a lot of these spirits too, which we find come more and more when we pay attention to ritual, which sometimes we leave out when we’re just paying attention to texts and ideas.

James Shaheen: You mentioned that the spirits started to appear in the margins of the Kammavaca. So why would they appear in the 19th century as the colonialists are arriving?

Alex Kaloyanides: I kind of put this theory out there. We would need some more evidence. But I looked at lots of these manuscripts and all sorts of archives. I think that basically what happened was in the mid-19th century, the penultimate Burmese king, King Mindon, was a big Buddhist reformer, a revivalist, and he established this new royal center in Mandalay. Part of what he was trying to do is unify a kingdom with threatened borders and internal diversity, with different communities, especially some of these large minority communities who were converting to Christianity. One way was by almost mass-producing these ritual texts and adding to them a certain kind of military power. It was a way to strengthen Burmese Buddhism and really make a case for the kingdom to remain independent. He was a successful reformer. Eventually, the kingdom fell. But there was a moment where there was a sense that maybe they could do it. Maybe they could maintain this kingdom in spite of this huge, massive British empire.

James Shaheen: So then these books also functioned as political objects.

Alex Kaloyanides: I think so, yes. And of course, the Bible itself is a political object.

James Shaheen: Right, absolutely. You also examine objects associated with education as a way of understanding the complex visions of new religious worlds, and you write that Christian education became popular in part because of the world-conjuring devices it used: telescopes, globes, maps, magic lanterns, all sorts of things. Can you say more about these objects and how Burmese communities engaged with them? I just like the idea of never having seen a telescope or a map before, and here, all of a sudden, in the same way that missionaries were impressed when they saw these new objects, so the Burmese were equally impressed. How did it change them?

Alex Kaloyanides: That’s exactly it. I first started learning about these objects, really, when I was trying to think about the schools themselves. So the Baptists really failed to convert anyone in the mainstream Buddhists, the Bamar community, but their schools were very successful. So I was thinking about what it was that sent people to the schools. And of course, like we talked about, there were the material reasons, jobs and so on. But there was also this fascination with these particular objects. And I found these accounts from different people, monastic tutors or workers in Yangon, who were really interested in looking through these telescopes. And it wasn’t just globes. There are these things called chrainotropes, these solar models of the universe. They were fascinating, and they would gather large crowds. And sometimes people would carry them, and then they’d write back to their missionary boards and say, “Oh, I just bring this object because it attracts crowds. But don’t worry, that’s not all I do. It’s not just like a magic show. I teach them everything about the Gospel.” But what we could tell from these things is that people really wanted to see these globes. They wanted to look through these telescopes. And I think there was this real curiosity of exploring different worlds, reimagining the one we’re in and the possibilities of what else might be out there.

James Shaheen: I find this whole thing so fascinating, and Adoniram Judson in particular at such a young age deciding to turn his life over to this and confronting this new world and also bringing to it something new. So in addition to promoting modern science, these schools also promoted an idea of religious identity as an individual choice. Yet Burmese communities often challenge this notion, and you demonstrate the ways that religious identity was often quite fluid. Can you say more about what this project has taught you about the fluidity of religious identity?

Alex Kaloyanides: Your readers, of course, have thought about this whole history of world religions and how it’s really not until the 19th century that we even have something we call Buddhism that’s in a list with Christianity and so on. And so the idea that there are these distinct traditions and that people should identify as one or even could convert from one to the other was particular to a certain kind of Western history of Christianity. Missionaries, when they get to Burma and they figure out that this is a form of Buddhism and not just a vague heathenism, they start learning more and more about Buddhism. They start to promote the idea of converting to Christianity, and they’re trying to figure out how to do it. The ideal was that there’s just going to be some itinerant preacher who preaches the gospel so convincingly people convert right away.

That did not work. And so they start needing schools. What happens when they start needing schools is they start needing women and they start needing teachers. Often, it was the missionary women who ran the schools and who were really involved with children and education and local families. They often said the women were even better speakers of local languages. And they would come and they would explore these families and they would realize that for them, their Buddhist identity was this thing that was connected to their families, to their rituals, to ancestors, and so on. And so when you are asking someone to convert, you’re asking them to not only give up a certain kind of affiliation with a local pagoda but a connection to your whole family and also to this whole idea of all this merit that you’ve stored, all the actions you’ve done, this idea that you’ve been storing merit for future lives. This was this big systematic thing that wasn’t something that was just an individual choice the way that we have the idea of this rugged American individualism and that people are just going to pick the religion that fits them the best. This was a very foreign idea for the people that they encountered in Burma.

James Shaheen: So it wasn’t just a matter of private belief or choice the way we typically think about it. So has this influenced how you think about contemporary religious identity? Did you do a lot of thinking about how we relate to religion?

Alex Kaloyanides: To be honest, modern politics makes you think so much about a certain kind of how identity formation can be really based in certain kinds of commitments to community, that it’s not just this individual choice that you’re making in a reasoned way. And so that identity formation is so caught up in all of these larger issues of other forms of identity, of community, of class, of race, of gender, and so on. And so, if anything, it has probably worked the other way. Thinking about religion now and how important it is for different kinds of political agendas and communities and so on made me question what was happening in this 19th-century setting.

James Shaheen: I mean, it would have been impossible if there was this conversion for Christianity itself, or Baptist Christianity in this case, not to transform because otherwise they would have left everything behind. It was more or less incorporated to a preexisting identity as in the case of the Karen.

Alex Kaloyanides: Exactly. Yeah, it’s going to change. I tell the story later in the book about this woman, Marilla Ingalls. She’s really interesting. She was one of the sole female missionaries. But there was a tree on this property that was seen as the abode of these spirits called nats, and she ends up inheriting this property, and she turns this tree into a Christian shrine, where she puts up Biblical verses and so on. But that looks very different than what we’re seeing happening in Christian communities in Wisconsin, where she was from, in the 1870s. So the landscape itself is naturally going to change, what forms of Baptist Christianity that are going to emerge.

James Shaheen: And they got to keep their tree.

Alex Kaloyanides: Exactly.

James Shaheen: So I’m also curious how your study of material culture has changed how you think about religious conflict, both in 19th-century Burma and in the world today. That may be too big a question to ask, but there you are.

Alex Kaloyanides: No, it’s a great question. I’ve been thinking a lot. Actually, I’m doing some new research on natural resources. I started studying the history of the teak industry in Burma, tropical hardwood, and the way that that same king, King Mindon, claimed it was a kind of Buddhist wood to maintain a monopoly over the industry. The British likewise agreed and said, “OK, you do have this natural right because of your Buddhist tradition to this wood” and ended up going into negotiations over some rifles. But anyway, I became really interested in natural resources themselves and the way they have shaped different kinds of Buddhist cultures and traditions. I’m working on this thing with the British Museum right now, this new exhibit that’s opening in the fall called “Myanmar and the World.” I wrote a chapter for their exhibition book on natural resources, where I started to learn new things about rubies and gold and amber and opium because Myanmar is this land of extraordinary natural resources. I’ve been really curious, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with it, but curious about what these particular resources, these gems, these trees, these minerals have done to shape the particular character.

We think of Buddhism in Burma as the golden land because of these golden pagodas. So what is it about these resources? And then there’s also the political history: what has the exploitation of natural resources done to enrich Buddha’s kingdoms, and so on. So that’s where I see this kind of stuff going, because I think there’s a lot to do with objects. It’s more fun. And you know, I was a very bookish person before I worked at Tricycle. Studying Buddhism in college and then coming to Tricycle and working with these beautiful artists and designers and just thinking about this other part of the world of really wonderful objects has kept me interested in looking beyond just the texts and the ideas that had originally drawn me to the study of Asian religions.

James Shaheen: I just have to say I love the book, and I love all of these things that are coming out of it. Most of the book focuses on 19th-century Burma, but in the final chapter, you describe your travels in contemporary Myanmar as Baptist communities celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Judsons’ arrival in Burma, which I find incredible. So can you tell us about your travels and what you learned from contemporary Baptists in Myanmar?

Alex Kaloyanides: Wow, you guys are really doing your homework. So yes, the book is largely 19th century. But in the last chapter, I jumped to the 21st century because when I was doing my research for the book, I had been to Burma once before as an undergraduate when I was studying, I was studying in the Burmese monastery in Bodhgaya, and I got a chance to do independent study in Burma. So I’ve been there once before. I was always interested in Burma after that. But then when I started doing this research and getting into the archives, it happened to coincide with the 200th anniversary of this mission, 2013. So I got some funding to be able to actually join this Baptist tour group. It was a classic tour group. It was on a big bus with some people who’ve never even left their states, nevermind the country, from the US who are traveling. And then there are a lot of people within Baptist communities within Myanmar who were doing these things to celebrate. And it was such a pleasure. I had never really spent much time personally with Baptist communities. I’ve mostly been reading about them in history, in archives, and so on. So getting to spend all this time with these various Baptist communities and travel the country and visit these important sites. So there’s the site of where they established the mission. There’s a site where Adoniram Judson is incarcerated. There’s a site where Ann Judson, his first wife, dies at a young age and then her daughter, Maria, who dies at two, so all of these really heartwrenching stories.

I got this time to go there, and I was going there to do archival research too and do other work. I didn’t really mean to turn it into a chapter. But on this tour, I started finding things that just really struck me, which included these portraits of Jesus and the Judsons, these really striking, colorful portraits, very much like a Warner Solomon Jesus. And then you had the Judsons in this old-timey Edwardian dress. My research has shown they didn’t dress like that there. They were basically brunettes, but one picture even had them as blondes. And so there’s this idea of wanting to see the Judsons, really emphasizing their foreignness, their kind of old-timey historic nature. And so that chapter emerged just from the visual culture. As we were doing this, we’re driving around on this bus, we’re passing these monumental Buddha statues, we’re passing all of this very large Buddhist monumentality, culture, and so on. And so I wanted to think about what it was for these Baptists in Burma today who are largely in these minority groups, what it was to associate with this international image of Christianity, this particular connection with America, with a very white, Anglo-Saxon version of Christianity. And so that’s how that chapter emerged.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I think you’ll remember that there’s a Judson Memorial Church on Washington Square.

Alex Kaloyanides: Yeah, that’s right. I went to some kind of Freud event there once.

James Shaheen: I wonder what the Judsons would think about what goes on in that church now. Tricycle had one of its anniversary celebrations in Judson church. I like to think it came full circle when we Buddhist missionaries occupied their church and had a celebration. Anything else, Alex?

Alex Kaloyanides: No, no, I covered everything. I’m so grateful to talk about all this stuff. It’s really fun.

James Shaheen: It’s so good to see you again. We miss you in the office. It’s been a lot of years, and it’s so wonderful to see how your career has developed. So Alex, thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Baptizing Burma, available now. So thanks again, Alex.

Alex Kaloyanides: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Alex Kaloyanides. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Neil Theise is a professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine and a practicing Zen Buddhist. For the past twenty years, he has been fascinated by the science of complex systems from the infinitesimal level of quantum foam to the vastness of our entire universe. In his new book, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being, Theise provides a comprehensive introduction to complexity theory, outlining its synergies with Buddhist principles and teachings. In today’s episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Neil to discuss his journey to Buddhism, different understandings of consciousness, and how complexity theory can help us navigate the unpredictability of our everyday lives.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Neil Theise, professor of pathology at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Hi, Neil. It’s great to be with you.

Neil Theise: Hi, James. Great to see you again.

James Shaheen: It’s been a while. So Neil, we’re here to talk about your new book, Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being. So to start, can you tell us a little bit about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Neil Theise: Well, I’ve been giving talks on this material for about twenty years. In fact, the very first published version of this stuff was published by Tricycle in 2006. I think you might have heard me giving a zendo talk back then at the Village Zendo perhaps. So I’m a physician scientist. So I do a lot of clinical work that has me sitting at the microscope all day long. I’m a pathologist, so I’m looking at slides of human tissues a lot. Through that, I encountered this artist named Jane Prophet. We were part of an art science dialogue sponsored by the Wellcome Trust in England to see how an artist and a scientist might talk, how they might speak to each other and understand. As I’m telling her about stem cells and how they move through the body potentially and interact with other cells to become tissues and organs, she observed that that was like what’s described in complexity theory of how ants self-organize into colonies and such things. I said, “What’s complexity theory?” She explained it to me. And working with her and a few other people that became this team of interdisciplinary collaborators, I came to understand how complexity theory itself was actually very simple and very powerful. It’s sort of the main theory that came out of the 20th century other than quantum physics and relativity. I think its importance is on par with those, except obviously, those are extremely well known, and there are thousands of books written about each of them. There are very few books written for a general audience about complexity theory.

James Shaheen: So what is complexity theory?

Neil Theise: What complexity theory describes is sort of everything that lies between the infinitesimal world described by quantum mechanics and the vast, infinite world described by relativity. It covers what lies between them, our everyday world, our bodies, the cities around us, the flocks of birds that go by as we’re walking down the street, ecosystems, how bodies are made of cells. So all these different things, most of which we consider to be living things. So complexity is really the science of life. But it goes beyond that, too. And, as I say in the title of the book, and this is partly why I started giving talks about it at the zendo, it’s not only a theory of life, but I think it’s a theory of being, how things come into existence, what’s the meaning of existence, what the functions of existence are.

Back in the early days, I was thinking about stem cells all the time, about how stem cells self-organize according to complexity theory rules in the body, thereby making it a living, adaptive thing. And it became very much like a koan. In fact, the first article I published in Tricycle was in 2003 called “Science as Koan” and discussed this. I was walking down the street in Manhattan, 19th Street, coming to the intersection at Park Avenue. I was so deep in this idea of stem cells forming bodies, and I was starting to realize that I might study this in slides from patients or might study in a laboratory. I started to realize that the thing I was studying was myself, and it became this self-referential thing and very koan-like. And I was standing there contemplating this, and the light changed. People next to me moved across the street, and I couldn’t move my leg because my leg had sort of become a flock of cells and I didn’t know how to direct them. And so that was quite a moment. And then the moment passed, I continued to walk. So this idea is something, a thing, my body, which I feel like I’m in control of, or is it a phenomenon arising from the smaller things, the cells, which I apparently was not in control of? becomes a question.

So I was sitting in the zendo one morning, I was opening the zendo and it was a Thursday morning and no one happened to show up that particular morning. It was me and the altar, and I was sitting there, and instead of following my breath, stem cells, stem cells, the cells moving around my body, I just could not stop thinking about it. And there was a moment where I was sort of deep in this and looked up at the altar opposite across the room and the stick of incense turning into smoke. Is it the stick or the smoke? Is it the body or the cells? Is it the thing or the phenomenon? And at that moment, I was suddenly like, oh, is this what they mean by emptiness of inherent existence? And I took it into interview, dokusan, with my teacher, Enkyo Roshi. I said, “Is this emptiness?” And she said, “Yeah.” And I said, “That’s all?” And she said, “Well, it’s not easy. But no one ever said it wasn’t simple.”

So that sort of led me down a path of well then, are cells a thing? Do they dissolve at a lower level of scale into smaller things? And of course they do. Cells are nothing but self-organizing molecules, biomolecules floating in water, that self-organize into what looks like a cell the way cells self-organize and look like a body, the way bodies self-organize and look like people walking down the street. There’s this flow that’s happening. There’s no one directing the flow. And yet somehow on a crowded New York City street in the morning, none of us are bumping into each other, even though we’re worried about our days, listening to our cell phones, etc. Our bodies are self-organizing into the stream. So this idea of thing versus phenomenon started to unfold. So what about molecules? Are they a fundamental thing? No, they’re just self-organizing atoms. Well, those are just self-organizing subatomic particles, and we go a couple of steps down, and what’s in those steps physicists will argue about, but what they don’t argue about is that at the bottom, it’s not turtles all the way down. It’s not an infinite regress to smaller and smaller things. You get to something called the Planck level, the smallest possible units of space and time, and at that level, you’re talking about the fabric of spacetime itself. And spacetime is an energy-rich field which is constantly popping up into subatomic particles or strings or whatever it is at that lowest level, which usually self-annihilate because they’re antimatter-matter pairings, like an electron, positron, and they just go poof, but sometimes they don’t self-annihilate. And that leaves them to meet each other and interact. And out of those interactions, you get larger subatomic particles, you get atoms, you get molecules, you get the entire universe. So suddenly, the entire universe at different levels of scale looks like it’s made of things. But in fact, there is no thing anywhere to be found. And this is really the emptiness of inherent existence. The entire universe is a complex system that, looked at from one side, one might say the view of samsara or the relative, it looks like we have all these things that are separate from each other. But at the quantum scale, at the level of spacetime, now you’re reaching down towards the absolute, in which there are no separations and everything is merely process, there are no things. And from there, a lot of other parts of Buddhist metaphysics start to unfold. And that became the talk that you first heard.

James Shaheen: And now a book. I have to say that in 171 pages, you certainly packed in a lot. It’s also very, very readable to a layperson like me. I could certainly understand it.

Neil Theise: That’s the best thing I could hear. 

James Shaheen: Before we get back to the substance of the book, how did you come to Buddhism? How did you come to Zen practice?

Neil Theise: So this goes back to when I was a kid. I’m Jewish. My parents are European. My father was born in Germany. His parents were killed in the Holocaust. We lost lots of family members. And  my community growing up was a German synagogue in West Hartford, Connecticut that was really entirely made up of survivors, at least when I was younger. So living in the shadow of the Holocaust, there was this persistent question about how could this happen? And religious practice in our household was very warm, very welcoming. I enjoyed it. It wasn’t a burden. It wasn’t something my parents imposed on us. So I was left with this tension of this devotional practice in a Jewish tradition where I feel like I have this close relationship to a God who cares. And yet this happened. And I didn’t really know how to resolve that until someone gave me, of all things, a copy of The Source by James Michener, who wrote many novels back in the day where he would pick one time and then each chapter would be a different era, maybe over the course of a couple thousand years. And in this book, The Source, it was about the land of the state of Israel and the region around it. There was a chapter about the mystics in the 15th and 16th century. That was the first hint I ever had of mystical religion, mystical practice. And it opened the idea in my head that, oh, there was a way to achieve some kind of unity with the divine that allows you to see things from the divine perspective. So that was the impulse towards mystical practice.

When I got to college, this was always sort of in the back of my mind. I have two degrees. One of them was in religious studies. But a friend in college gave me a copy of Roshi Philip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen, and reading the accounts of awakening experiences, enlightenment experiences that are included in the book, I thought, “This sounds like the stuff I was reading about in medieval Jewish mysticism.” And I thought, OK, Zen is kind of nontheistic, it seemed to me at the time, maybe that’s safe to go train in mystical practice that way, and it won’t conflict with the Jewish stuff. So that’s how I came to Zen. It was through The Three Pillars of Zen. I was so enthusiastic about that book, I was giving it to people, and they started to call it the throw pillows of Zen because I was throwing it around so much.

James Shaheen: Well, you started, as you said, in religious studies as an undergraduate, and you describe your decision to go into medicine as a way to link your scientific interests to your spiritual imperatives, a way to practice tikkun olam, or healing the world. Can you say more about how medicine brought together these aspects of your life?

Neil Theise: Part of this was growing up gay in the ’70s and ’80s. It seemed to me that I did not have a social future because of that. I couldn’t imagine meeting anyone. I was very deeply in the closet until well into medical school. And I thought, I’ll never get married, I’ll never have kids, where will I find meaning if I’m just like an old biblical scholar? I imagined myself leading a very isolated life. And medicine seemed a really straightforward, really clear, really powerful way to find connection to people when my view of myself said that I would not have personal connection. What brought me to that sense that medicine could have meaning, that my scientific practice, my academic practice could have meaning was a religious view. As you said, the Hebrew term is tikkun olam, to repair the world. I saw this as a way to give meaning to my life when I feared that I wouldn’t have other options.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it’s interesting. When I first asked you what brought you to write the book, you anticipated a lot of my questions with an answer that more or less described complexity theory. But one thing I wanted to ask you about is that a distinguishing feature of life’s complexity is that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, which is a central tenet of complexity theory, and interactions give rise to emergent properties. Can you say more about this? What do you mean by emergence?

Neil Theise: Emergence is a technical term, although it’s, again, fairly simple. An example might be what I mentioned before about how people walking down the street, through unconscious processes of perceiving people that are around them that are headed their way, you make these unconscious shifts to where your shoulders are or how your feet are moving. So somehow, out of every individual just reacting to the other people around them, very local, if you were to take a drone up above and look at it, you would see streams of people. Those streams are an emergent phenomenon arising out of the local interactions. None of us are thinking about how do we form an efficient stream of pedestrian flow down the sidewalk. None of us have an idea of that. And yet when you look above, there’s this beautiful, efficient flow. I remember when I was in a garden in Kyoto, and there was this very thick branch of some wisteria that was rising up, and I noticed something moving. When I looked in closer, there were two rows of ants walking up the branch and one row of ants walking down the branch. So food lines of ants like this, for example, are another form of emergence. The ants are just paying attention to each other’s pheromones and maybe some interactions with the physical environment, but no ant is planning a food line. The food line emerges from those local interactions. And then I came home and got off the subway at Delancey and Essex. And there’s a stairway there that’s a bit broader than most subway stairs, and it was rush hour. And what I saw were two lines of people going up the outside and one line of people coming down the middle. And this highlights, again, this is human emergence. But one of the wonders of complexity theory for me is that the simple math that explains how that all happens applies to any group of interacting parts. So cells follow this, ants follow this, humans follow this, molecules follow these rules and give rise to emergence in the same way. The mathematics is the same. It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s funny, when I was reading the book, I thought for a moment of city planners and city planning and how often they fail. It’s a top-down proposition. So it needs to be done lightly and needs to be some feedback along the way. Because if you look at a city like Washington, DC, it was planned in a certain way, and it’s going to be very different from older, more emergent phenomena that are cities.

Neil Theise: Yes, cities are a really nice example. Because you can get tremendous order without planning. So you know, the examples I use, because I’m old. I don’t know what the new examples are in New York City. But back in our day, there were all these Indian restaurants on Sixth Street in the East Village.

James Shaheen: I remember that, and you brought your own wine.

Neil Theise: Right, right, exactly. And why were they there? No one planned it. There was no city planning that said Sixth Street will be for Indian restaurants. I think there still is a flower market on Sixth Avenue in the 20s. Why is that there? That was an emergent phenomenon that rose out of how the sellers of flowers or the owners of Indian restaurants were behaving. And so complexity theory has been used to look at, for example, how businesses interacting with each other, both supporting each other and in competition with each other, it doesn’t matter what the business is, if it’s location-based, they tend to cluster. It enhances the ability of all the businesses to make money. So that’s just a natural phenomenon, an emergent behavior, that arises out of human business people behaviors.

James Shaheen: So you describe complex systems, from the smallest scale to the vastest, as existing on the edge of chaos, rife with unpredictability and unable to be described by a set of predictive equations. So can you say more about what it means to exist on the edge of chaos? And how can complex systems teach us how to adapt to the uncertainty and precarity we face in our everyday lives?

Neil Theise: So everything in science, up until the invention of the computer, you could describe how things behaved in terms of geometry or simple equations. An example I use in the book is water. You can explain the structure of an ice cube by very simple geometric relations of water molecules that are frozen in next to each other. An ice cube takes its form because of how the molecules geometrically relate to each other. It gets a little more complicated if you have flowing water, but we know that water through a narrow channel flows very fast, and water through a wide channel flows very slowly. And you even see this going up different subway system stairs. Narrow stairs, people are moving quickly; wider stairs, people are moving slowly. So It’s not just water molecules. And you can describe that in terms of an equation. Somewhere in the 1970s, I think, something that people probably have heard of even if they might not know what it is, is chaos theory.

For that, you need a special kind of geometry called fractals. And that turned out to explain the repetitive shapes of things like the fluffiness of clouds or the branching of trees or rivers or blood vessels in our bodies. These are structures that no matter how far away you look or how close in you get, it looks exactly the same. You go closer and closer, and you just see the same thing happening over and over again. People have probably heard of fractals or would recognize fractals, these elaborate filigree shapes that as you go in, if you have a computer program that takes you through it, it always looks the same. There’s no sense of scale because it repeats itself. It turns out that the mathematics that was really good for explaining things like the nature of hurricanes and tornadoes and the shapes of trees, how lightning happens. Electrical conduction in the heart is a chaotic system. Computers allowed us to view that because you could describe it with a running program. There’s no single equation. It’s never static. It’s always moving. So it required a computer program that could model it over time. Studying that and studying how that interfaced mathematically with pure order like the other things I described, ice cubes and flow of water, etc., it turned out that between fractal chaos, and perfect order, there was this very narrow zone where something else happened completely different. And that’s the zone of complexity. So that’s why It’s been referred to as life at the edge of chaos. And what they discovered is, mathematically, if you do a computer diagram, you get things that look like living structures. They look biological. And it turns out the math that describes that zone is the math that describes life and how life emerges and adapts and evolves. So complexity really acts as sort of the final stage of mathematical understanding of the existence of the world we see around us everyday.

James Shaheen: I’d be curious, how has studying complexity theory changed how you pay attention to and participate in the world around you? How has that changed how you relate?

Neil Theise: A bunch of things. So first off, walking down the street, there’s simply the wonder of it all. You see a tree, and you can think of it as this object, which is a tree, or equally true, you can think of it as these atoms and molecules and little pockets of energy, of air, water, sunlight, and earth, that are spinning themselves up into what to me looks like a tree. But at the atomic level, it’s so much more than a tree. It’s just this extraordinary, dynamic thing. And that highlights another aspect of the complexity analysis that I emphasize in the book. At this level of scale, you are you and I am me and we’re separate and each of us is bounded by our skin. But at the cellular level, you’re constantly shedding cells off into the environment. That’s a lot of what the dust of our rooms is. It’s the dead cells from the top of your skin. But also we know that we have a microbiome, an equal number of nonhuman cells that compose our body without which we wouldn’t be alive. We can’t be living humans without the bacteria that line our skin, and all of the spaces inside our body. They are all necessary for us to maintain a healthy living human body. And when we turn a doorknob, we leave some of that behind. When we shake hands with someone or kiss them or hug them, we leave some of us behind. And they in turn leave some of them behind. And it’s so real that if you study a household with several people and a cat and a dog, in fact, there’s a single microbiome that everybody shares.

So is it a space that holds this huge microbiome, which sort of condenses on human, cat, and dog islands, or is it a bunch of people in a household? It’s both, obviously. There’s always this duality. Is it a thing or phenomenon, as I said before? At the cellular level, our boundaries are at least as wide as the homes we occupy, the spaces we move through in the day. The tree at the atomic level, us at the atomic level, there is no atom that we haven’t breathed, drunk, or eaten from the planet. So on the one hand, you can see us as these beings that view ourselves as separate walking on the surface of this rock we call Earth. Or you can think of us as the Earth, the Earth’s atoms, taking three-and-a-half billion years to interact with each other to give rise to an aspect of itself. We’re walking, talking Earth. We’re not separate. We are the Earth that has figured out how to communicate with itself. So when you get down to the quantum scale, where we famously found, no, there are no boundaries, nonlocality, everything is within, nothing is separate, then, at the quantum level, our boundary is the whole universe, and we’re simply differentiated aspects within the universe. So complexity reminds me of this. And these are basic Zen insights. These are basic Buddhist insights: that we are part of a seamless whole. So I’m a science geek of the 21st century, so when I hear these concepts being discussed or brought forth in dharma talks, or in Buddhist texts, for example, or in Jewish mystical texts, I remind myself of this. For me, this is useful to understand them. I find myself able sometimes to interpret Dogen when I turn on my complexity brain in ways I can’t understand him when I turn off my complexity brain. And this sense of connection that comes from this means that people die. Living things die, cities die, cultures die. Mass extinction events. It’s another aspect I talk about in the book.

James Shaheen: It’s the darker side of the unpredictability of complexity, the possibility of extinction.

Neil Theise: Exactly. So because of the way things self-organize, you can predict that there will be emergence, but you can’t predict the nature of that emergence, because there’s always a little low level randomness in the system. When you look at a food line of ants, there’s always a few ants out following the line. If you didn’t have them, the colony would have a problem because when that food source runs out, there’d be no ants looking for the new food source. So that low-level randomness is what allows adaptation, what allows you to be truly alive. But that means also because of that randomness, mathematically, you will sometimes stagger out of that zone of complexity either into chaos or into rigid order, and the system collapses. So the thing that makes us able to be adaptive and alive is the thing that guarantees that eventually, the system will collapse. So I keep mentioning the simple rules of complexity. This low-level randomness is one of those rules. If you have too little randomness in the system, you just get a rigid machine-like behavior. There’s no opportunity to change if the environment changes. If you have too much randomness in the system, then you can’t get self-organization. You just have complete disorder.

So this little low-level randomness is the key to being able to adapt and change in response to a changing environment. It’s the nature of living things to do this. How they will adapt is unpredictable. That they will adapt is predictable. But because of that low-level randomness, we talked about complexity at the edge of chaos, life at the edge of chaos. Mathematically, with enough time, eventually there will be a random movement that takes you out of that zone of complexity, either into rigid order or complete, chaotic fractal disorder. At that point, there’s a mass extinction event. The thing that makes us alive also means that we will die. There’s no separation of those two things. And so I find that in part consoling. It teaches me to have flexibility of view. At the end of the book, in the afterword, there’s a little bit right just before I end, which is an answer to a young friend of ours, who’s just perpetually angry at my generation for having messed up the world in the way we have. And he lives with this anger and fear all the time in the face of politics, climate change, etc. But I’ve lived or been related to at least two major mass extinctions, the Holocaust, as I mentioned, and growing up as a gay man in New York City during the AIDS crisis. And what I saw is that while everyone experienced the same tragedy, there were those who were able to experience it with greater resilience and weren’t broken by the experience. Complexity theory gives me the tools to foster my resilience. I find it useful that way. It’s a way of surviving things that we’re going through.

James Shaheen: It’s easy for people to mistake what you’re saying for that it’s OK, so I want to put that aside. Clearly, that’s not what you’re saying.

Neil Theise: No.

James Shaheen: But just thinking about during the 80s, early 90s, somebody very, very close to me was dying of AIDS, and he said, “People keep thinking something went wrong, and nothing went wrong. This is it.”

Neil Theise: This is the nature of the world. There is no escaping it. So if there’s no escaping it, then can’t we look for other means? The other imperative from complexity theory, where we haven’t discussed, is consciousness, which is half the book. And because of the structure of the book, I leave the Buddhist stuff and the Jewish mystical stuff and also Hindu mysticism and Kashmir Shaivism until the very end. But where we wind up is the universe, the world is a seamless whole that we are both incredibly unimportant minute pieces of and at the same time, because of the rules of complexity, everything is local, any slight thing one of us does can change everything.

James Shaheen: You do talk about complexity theory in terms of a nonhierarchical organization of the world, and you refer to it as a holarchy. What is holarchy?

Neil Theise: The opposite of hierarchy. So we think of a hierarchy where one thing is above another, and because of the limits of our language, I have to move through the book as I did speaking to you, we can go from cities to people to cells, and that’s a hierarchy. But the fact is that we are each of those levels equally simultaneously. What we see is how we choose to see it, what perspective we pick to see it, but the body as a quantum field, the body as an organization of cells, the body as a part of a city, the body as a single unitary thing, those are all equal and equivalent and happening all the time. The whole is present in all the parts and the parts are present in the entire whole. There’s no one above the other.

James Shaheen: Yeah, before the recording, we were saying it’s an Everything Everywhere All at Once situation. You say, “From this standpoint, every action we take, every decision we make, every thought we have is not truly our own. It is also an integral part of the whole holarchical universe. In this sense, when I raise a glass of water to drink, it is the universe that raises the glass of water.” How does this change how we might live our lives? I mean, it’s very Buddhist to me, pointing to the notion of non-self.

Neil Theise: Of course it is. These concepts will teach no one anything useful because concepts don’t usually change our behavior. But these concepts prove to me as a 20th-century science nerd that contemplative practice, for example, as one type of spiritual practice is a way of coming to experience these things and not simply know them as factoids. I can recite this stuff, but how do I actually experience this stuff? And where that happens to me, for me personally, is either in devotional practice or these days more properly in contemplative practice. So it goads me to find the ways that suit me to experience the ideas rather than simply understand them. A logical scientific understanding of these principles, ultimately, when you’re in the teeth of a mass extinction event, whether it’s your own illness or the illness or troubles of someone you care about or a pandemic, they’re not very helpful. But modes of life that lead you to experience these things are helpful. And knowing that this is the way the world is structured, wouldn’t we want to be able to experience it that way rather than simply know it that way?

James Shaheen: Well, you mentioned consciousness, and since that is really where the book is headed, I’d just like to ask you about that. And maybe the simplest way I can think of to try to get it in a nutshell is that you say that consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of the brain. It is not emergent. It doesn’t emerge from the brain. Rather, the brain functions more like a transducer, like a radio receiving radio waves. Can you say something about that?

Neil Theise: When we say the brain makes our minds, it’s like you could look at the brain, let’s say, with really sophisticated scanning, and you could see our mind arising within it. There’s a bunch of practical reasons why we can’t do that. And the people who study the brain trying to explain mind as an emergent phenomenon of the brain, they do lots of imaging studies of the brain and show that different patterns of imaging correlate with different experiences like seeing something or thinking something or dreaming, etc., etc. They’re never able to say these point to consciousness. They always have to restrict themselves and say they are neural correlates of consciousness, because all you can say is you have this conscious state, and the brain does This at the same time. So saying the brain makes mind to me is like thinking if you open up a radio, you’ll see the Beatles playing a song, when we know that’s not the case. So if that’s not the case for the brain, what’s an alternate?

There’s a logical way we move through this in the book, but where I land is the view that in fact, consciousness is the foundation that underlies existence. There is something below spacetime itself, and that is consciousness, nondual awareness in Hindu or Buddhist terms. And out of this pure awareness, as it becomes aware of itself, it sort of shimmies into a subject-object split. There is no subject and object. There’s no thing viewing another thing in pure awareness. There’s just the awareness. Through that development of subject and object within that awareness, that implies that there has to be separation, and separation happens in dimensions, in space and time and maybe others. And so suddenly, you have spacetime. And then you have everything that arises emanates from space time, as we described, into the known universe along complexity principles. And this matches very well with Buddhist metaphysics, that mind is what creates the world, in which case, the brain is sampling that larger universal mind, that fundamental awareness, the way a radio samples radio waves and turns it into a Neil- or a James-specific consciousness. But that’s about how our brain is an antenna for the universe and samples and then puts it through some algorithm to come out as a Beatles song or a light show in the case of something you do on your laptop or in our case as you or me.

James Shaheen: So it’s fair to say that consciousness is primary or fundamental. It’s what it all comes down to, from your point of view. Is that right? That’s what I got from the book.

Neil Theise: Yes. And, you know, in our culture, we see that as impossible because we live in a materialist worldview, that everything arises from matter. We’ve already seen that no, there’s no material, there’s no matter there that is irreducible. It all turns into process and movement and interaction. I say in one of my talks, everything only looks like a thing. And part of the book is the historical reasons we think that way and the scientific and mathematical reasons why according to contemporary math and science, that is not the case. It just isn’t. So this materialist view that the brain makes mind in this case is a holdover and is more prejudiced, and I’d even say a form of superstition, than it is scientifically logical.

James Shaheen: It sounds to me like you’re having fun describing upsetting the Vienna school and pushing it aside, once and for all, but not once and for all, because it tends to be the view the Vienna school tends to be the view that prevailed. Why don’t you explain what the Vienna school and its ideas that we have adopted actually was and why it survived?

Neil Theise: Around the 19th to the 20th century in the industrial revolution in World War One, the structures that people believed in that helped support and structure European society were falling apart, in particular the churches, but not only. So, there was already this idea that the universe could be described as a machine coming from Copernicus, Newton, etc. And at the same time, the collapse of all these medieval church ideas was happening. And so there was a sense of movement in the turn of the century and certainly past World War One that maybe there was a different view, that metaphysical things could be dismissed. So the Vienna Circle were a group of philosophers and scientists and mathematicians and sociologists who wanted to say that the only stuff that one could study were things that could be demonstrated by empirical science, meaning a subject, a scientist, is examining an object, whatever it is they’re studying, and there’s separation there, and that mathematics could describe the structure of the universe and be proven to do so in a complete and consistent way. This is the world we live in. What’s the ultimate source of truth in our modern society? Even people who are religious, if you don’t ask them in a religious context, they’ll say, “Well, math and science are how you describe reality.” But that turns out not to be the case. Quantum physics completely shattered the idea that you could separate subject and object. We know at the quantum level that how you study something like light, is light a wave or particles? It depends on how you view it, how you study it. What the founding members of quantum physics were clear about is that the conscious observation is what determines the nature of existence in the moment you were studying. So that eliminates empirical science’s being able to separate things out rigidly in terms of subject and object. And work I’ve done and many other people shows that that happens in biology and happens at higher levels of scale. What Gödel did was he showed even more powerfully that mathematics could never explain everything, and mathematics could never be proven to explain everything. There were mathematical truths that are true but could not be proven. And if that’s the case, how do you know that there are truths? Through some kind of intuition. And that intuition opens the door to understanding the world through perceptions that are not mathematically derived and are not based in empirical science. He himself said he expected this to be useful to religion. It wasn’t something he particularly wanted to explore, but he talked about it.

But what he also said was he had thought that this kind of exploration, he’s the greatest logician of all time, basically, and it disappointed him that knowing these things, proving these things, did not relieve his suffering. And he was best friends with Einstein, and clearly Einstein’s profound understandings of the universe not only did not prevent his suffering but did not prevent him causing the suffering of the people around him like his wives and his children. The knowledge of these things isn’t enough. And Gödel talked about people he saw in the past who he thinks had a profound experience like that that changed them. And he longed for that and never experienced it. So again, it comes back to he could have profound intuitions about the realm of mathematics that were beyond the world like nobody else ever had been able to do. But he wasn’t able to transcend in this way, to have intuitions about what the implications of this are for who we are as people, who we are as part of a planet, our cultures, our social systems, etc. So, through him, I’m able to then open the door to say, well, what does Buddhism have to say about this? Insights from contemplative practice? What about Shaivism? What about Hindu mysticism? What about Lurianic Kabbalah? That allows that door to be open thanks to Gödel, and it can be brought into how we model how the universe is structured.

James Shaheen: OK, well, here’s something you come to, looking at these different traditions together. You arrive at a theory of “a holarchical, self-organizing universe that is alive and conscious because it is born from consciousness itself, from nondual pure awareness.” Can you walk us through this nondual pure awareness? What is it, and how does it give rise to the theory of the universe you describe?

Neil Theise: Tibetan Buddhists talk about the mind of clear light. When our minds are stilled and focused in Buddhist practice, we can experience that our minds are part of a larger mind. We can have a direct experience of this. Some people will refer to this as the absolute. I like the mind of clear light that they describe. What’s common amongst all the contemplative methods that I’ve explored, they all talk about its luminosity. This is very prominent in Zen practice, that the universal mind is luminous. And it’s nondual, meaning there are no distinctions. There’s no up or down, there’s no black or white, there’s no alive or dead. Technically, it means there’s no separation of subject and object. But somehow, out of this luminous, nondual awareness, and people who come in contact with it through the contemplative practice often describe it as mind or consciousness or awareness, but it’s the awareness without a subject, without an object. It’s just the awareness. I’m aware of you. And so there’s an awareness here, but there’s also me and there’s also you. What if we were able to reach that space where there’s just the awareness itself? That’s the nondual. As I said, when that gives rise to duality, when awareness starts to become aware of itself, to explore itself, to be curious about itself, immediately separation happens. And that means that there’s got to be space and time, if not separation in other dimensions. And that gives you spacetime. And then our description of the universe as a complex system in which every level of scale is equivalent to every other level of scale, not in a hierarchy, but all simultaneously, the whole universe springs into existence. So that’s what I mean by a complex holarchical universe. And if everything is made of mind, then everything is consciousness. And if the universe is a complex system, then it is also alive. And so the universe is alive and conscious.

James Shaheen: Just to clarify, are you saying that awareness is possible without an object?

Neil Theise: Sure.

James Shaheen: OK, so then you say we ourselves are pure awareness. What does this mean on both a scientific and a spiritual level?

Neil Theise: So, like everything I’ve been talking about, the word we haven’t mentioned is complementarity, which is important in the book. So is light waves or particles? It’s a complementarity. Is a tree atoms or a tree? It’s a complementarity. The image I use in the book to explain this is the classic two faces in profile looking at each other, and the space between them looks like a vase. Is it two faces or a vase? Well, it’s one or the other, but you need both for a complete explanation for a complete understanding. So on the one hand, we are these separate beings, This is real. Samsara is real. Separation is real. Objects exist. But that’s not a complete view of things. The complete view says, No, we are also pure awareness, out of which all of this stuff that looks material arose. So is that it? Are we pure awareness? Is this all nirvana? Is it all perfectly perfect? Yes, that’s true. But It’s like the faces and the vase. Both things are true. I think what Buddhist practice for me, and also this complexity theory study, for me, has taught me to toggle between those. The dance between those things is where I live a more resilient and richer life. It’s not one or the other.

James Shaheen: Neil Theise, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Neil’s new book, Notes on Complexity, available now. Neil, thanks so much.

Neil Theise: Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Neil Theise. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. For the past forty years, Ken McLeod has worked as a translator of Tibetan texts, practices, and rituals. With his new book, The Magic of Vajrayana, McLeod takes a more personal approach, drawing from his own experience to provide readers with a taste of Vajrayana rituals and practices. Through practice instructions, evocative vignettes, and stories from his own life, McLeod offers a practical introduction to many of the rituals that may seem obscure to contemporary Western practitioners, including protector practice and guru yoga. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Ken to discuss how rituals can take us to the edge of the unknown, what we risk when we ignore the presence of gods, and how Vajrayana helps us uncover the clear, empty knowing that is always present in experience.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with writer and teacher Ken McLeod. Hi, Ken. It’s great to be with you.

Ken McLeod: Very nice to be with you, James.

James Shaheen: So Ken, we’re here to talk about your new book, The Magic of Vajrayana. To start, can you tell us about the book and what inspired you to write it?

Ken McLeod: The seed was planted by a friend of mine shortly after Wake Up to Your Life came out in 2001, I think. He pushed me quite hard on it, but I really didn’t feel capable of writing a book on Vajrayana back then. After a few years, he backed off, but the seed had been planted. About five years ago, I realized that I needed to find a place of my own and write a couple of books. The first one was A Trackless Path, and the second one was this one, The Magic of Vajrayana. I needed to write it because I wanted to do whatever I could to pass on what I had had the good fortune to receive in my own training. And that is what this book is: it’s a record of my understanding and, to a certain extent, my experience of the practice of Vajrayana.

James Shaheen: You write that this book is intended for three groups of people: those currently practicing Vajrayana, those interested in practicing Vajrayana, and those whose lives have cracked open, and I would probably count myself in the third group. Can you say more about this last group? What does the book aim to offer to those whose lives have cracked open?

Ken McLeod: Well, some people, whether it’s through force of circumstances or through natural proclivity or something completely unpredictable, find themselves opening to life in a very different way. I’m put in mind of a recent posting and Bari Weiss’s Substack written by Amanda Knox and what epiphany, to use her words, she came to while she was in prison in Italy for a crime that she did not do. It’s really quite profound reading, and I recommend it to your readers.

James Shaheen: Just in case people don’t remember, Amanda Knox was the young American woman living in Italy who was accused of murder, and it became an international news story, and she was finally exonerated, if I remember correctly. Is that right?

Ken McLeod: Completely, all the evidence pointed to an Italian burglar. And there was never any evidence that pointed to her. That’s a very good example of someone’s life cracked open by force of circumstances. When that happens for people, they often feel like they’ve experienced something very profound, very true, but also something that is out of the ordinary or a perspective on the world they never expected to encounter. And so a book such as The Magic of Vajrayana—and there are many other books in other traditions, of course—may serve as a way to show them that what they experienced is not abnormal. There’s nothing wrong with them. And it may, depending on their own proclivities, provide them with a path to enrich and deepen that experience.

James Shaheen: So this book is more personal than your previous work. I talk to you on a regular basis, I know you well, but frankly, when I read it, I was surprised at how personal it was about your own practice and your own path. So how did you first come to Buddhism and to Vajrayana in particular?

Ken McLeod: I did some reading while I was at university, and after I graduated in the ’60s, I took off on a bicycle and crossed Europe and ended up in India. By that point, I was interested in pursuing meditation. There was a mystical component to that. I ended up at Kalu Rinpoche’s monastery in the Darjeeling district and started to study and practice under him and from Kalu Rinpoche received full training in Tibetan Buddhism. It all came together. I wasn’t particularly seeking out Vajrayana. I didn’t even know about it actually. But it is the tradition of Buddhism into which I fell, more by chance than by design, you might say.

James Shaheen: And you taught for many years, and you no longer teach publicly, but you do a lot of translation. I see a lot of your work as translating Vajrayana or Tibetan Buddhism, or Buddhism more generally, into our own idiom. What’s that been like? Or is that an ongoing and never-ending project?

Ken McLeod: Well, it is an ongoing project, and it will end for me when I die. Of course, I’ve always been concerned to express the teachings, as I said, that I’ve been fortunate enough to receive in clear, understandable English, and I’ve taken a kind of Don Quixote approach to translation, I suppose, tilting against various windmills, because I find that the early translations, which relied very heavily on a Victorian vocabulary, have not changed that much, which I think is a great shame. I’m trying to demonstrate through translation how these teachings can be expressed in natural English in a way that people can just take them in. That’s been a very challenging exploration. It took me a long time to find the right vocabulary, the right grammar, and it’s a process in which I continue to refine my work, always with the intention of making it clear and accessible without sacrificing quality or depth of these teachings.

My understanding of translation has changed over the years, and what I see as the translator’s task or the task that I’ve taken on myself is to write the translation in such a way that the person who reads my translation may have an experience which is similar or comparable to the experience that I have when I read the original in Tibetan. I read a piece on the translation of Dr. Zhivago, in which the most popular translation was done very, very quickly. That is, when Dr. Zhivago became available in the West, I think it was in the late ’50s or ’60s, the publishers were very anxious to get it out as quickly as possible, and one person would just read a page and then write what he understood from that page in natural English. That has turned out to be one of the best loved translations because it is in such natural English, even though it isn’t, strictly speaking, word-for-word literal, but it conveys the spirit of the book in a way that even the daughter of the author felt that it was the best translation. I think there’s something to be taken from that. There’s an old joke actually in translation circles. If you were to translate “Row, row, row your boat” from Tibetan into English, it would come out something like “Propel, propel, propel the wooden craft.”

James Shaheen: I remember you telling me that. So let’s take the word Vajrayana. Some of our listeners may not know what Vajrayana means. We might begin with the word vajra itself. What is Vajrayana, and what is a vajra?

Ken McLeod: Vajra is the name of a weapon. It is the thunderbolt associated with the Vedic rain god Indra. The story behind it is that at one point, a pernicious titan, who was deeply protected by magic, had overthrown Indra, and Indra called upon the other gods to help him defeat the titan. They saw that the only way that they could do so because of the magical protection was to come up with a totally new weapon. They prevailed upon a sage, who had been born a sage for seven lives in a row, to give up his life so that they could use his bones to make the weapon. The sage, understanding the situation, agreed. They fashioned a vajra from his bones, and with that, Indra was able to destroy the titan and bring order back into the world. Now, that thunderbolt crops up all over the place. It’s virtually the same thunderbolt that Zeus, the Greek god, holds, and its property is that when deployed as a weapon, it destroys whatever it is thrown at and returns to the hand of the owner unchanged. As such, it is a very suitable metaphor for the clear, empty knowing that is at the heart of I think all Buddhist practice, that when you touch that clear, empty knowing, then whatever afflictions, reactive patterns, confusion, they are dispelled, and nothing changes that clear, empty knowing. So that’s what a vajra is, and vajra is a metaphor for that clear, empty knowing.

The term yana is a word that can be translated either as vehicle or as path. It is something that takes you from one place to another. So this is the path or the vehicle of clear, empty knowing, you might say. The other word that is often used here is tantra. It also is an implicit metaphor. In weaving, you have a thread which runs continuously through the cloth, goes back and forth as it is woven. And that’s the metaphor that is used. You could translate it as continuity, I suppose. This clear, empty knowing is present in every experience in our lives. We aren’t always aware of it or don’t touch it or whatever, but it’s always there. And so the word tantra means the path of that clear, empty knowing which is always present in experience.

James Shaheen: So about this clear, empty knowing, how does Vajrayana practice create the conditions for the shift into clear, empty knowing or at least the awareness of clear, empty knowing if it’s part of all of our experience?

Ken McLeod: Well, that clear, empty knowing is always present. And most people have touched into it at points in their lives. They’re usually fleeting or very temporary and often don’t recognize it as such. Athletes, when they are exerting themselves very strongly, sometimes have the experience of moving into a kind of timeless awareness which they call the zone where they’re able to do the extraordinary things they do, because for them, it seems like time has either slowed down or even stopped. Sometimes people confronted with an accident are able to move into that. Often, people, when someone close to them has experienced a tragedy and they’re just with them, they have the experience of being with that person, not as one but not as two either. In that clear, empty knowing, the separation that we ordinarily experience between subject and object is no longer there. You’re just present in and you might even say you are the world you experience. And as you said, Vajrayana creates the conditions in which we can move into that kind of relationship with the world. We do this through a variety of practices. In fact, Vajrayana is known as having many, many different methods for precipitating, eliciting, stabilizing, uncovering, whatever word you want to use, that clear, empty knowing.

James Shaheen: So in Buddhist terminology, we often hear about the three jewels of the Buddha, dharma, and sangha. You write that the corresponding principles in Vajrayana are the three sources, guru, deity, and protector. Can you walk us through these three sources? How can we build a relationship with them?

Ken McLeod: First, Vajrayana is a late development in Buddhism. We don’t really know how far back Vajrayana goes, but probably to 100 or 200 CE. It may go earlier than that, but we don’t know. But one has to remember that by this time, Buddhism had been around for 600 years, and Vajrayana really flowers, say, from about 500–1200 CE in India. So this is building on a tradition that’s been around for a thousand years. Vajrayana seems to have evolved out of sorcery cults or magical cults and indigenous Indian traditions such as Shaivism. It is such a plethora of religions. So you had a religion devoted to Tara or Avalokitesvara, or Chenrezig or Shiva. All of the tantras were basically Indian religions at one point or another that in the later medieval, say, from 500–1000 CE, just came together in practice. I suspect that because Buddhism had become very institutionalized, people may have left the monasteries, which seemed to focus primarily on ethics—that is, the observance of the monastic code—and philosophy. They may have left those large institutions and sought out people who are really practicing, and that would have been people at the margins of society, such as the sorcerers and magicians, who had all of this magical know-how, and they brought with them their Buddhist training. What Vajrayana actually is is the co-option or appropriation of the contemplative techniques of these sorcery cults for spiritual and mystical purposes, and it is actually quite amazing and quite brilliant when you look at it from that perspective.

So the Buddha, being the epitome of the teacher, became your teacher, your guru, the person with whom you actually studied, and then from there, it evolved very easily into the guru principle; that is, the teacher or teachers that span time and space. The dharma became embodied in your personal deity. That was your yidam deity, a deity that you formed a very deep relationship with through practice, through propitiation, through offerings, through identification. Often these were done in a ritual form, so there’s a heavy reliance on ritual. And then the sangha has traditionally been regarded as that which preserves and protects the teachings from one generation to another. And the sangha in this context has always referred to the monastic sangha not as individual groups. We talk about different sanghas, but that wasn’t how the word was used in India in those days. That role of protecting and continuity was transferred to the protectors, which are another class of deity which are regarded as expressions of awakened activity. They’re often very fierce and powerful forms, a little frightening or intimidating, but also fascinating, and they strike something very deep in many, many people who encounter them.

So in one sense, the three sources or three roots, as they’re often translated, are simply the Vajrayana equivalent of the Buddha, dharma and sangha. But my own teacher, when I took the refuge vow with him, had us recite a refuge prayer which was taking refuge in all six, the guru, the yidams, the Buddha, the dharma, the sangha and the protectors. The function of refuge in whatever tradition you’re doing, you’re defining the orientation of your life. What are you aiming for in your life? So the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha or the guru, deity, and protectors, these are the principles on which you base your life. That’s equivalent to baptism in Christianity, say.

James Shaheen: You were talking about yidams or deities and protector gods. A lot of people who are not familiar with Vajrayana might turn away from that very quickly, thinking, “I don’t believe in gods,” for instance. How do you understand these yidams or these gods, these deities?

Ken McLeod: You’re right that a lot of people find it strange to be talking about gods and deities—or gurus existing through time and space, for that matter. And this, I think, reflects the narrowness of the Western perspective, a narrowness, which has evolved over the last few hundred years, I would say, primarily because of the rise of science as a separate discipline and the pervasiveness of materialism in our society. By materialism, I don’t mean acquisition. I mean the view that the only thing that is real is the world of matter—this is the domain of physics and chemistry and biology, etc.—and that anything else is a product of our imagination. This is not how all of these things have been viewed by other cultures historically. So in that sense, Western culture is somewhat anomalous. But in my own path, I had to work out a relationship. That was an interesting process. In a certain sense, I’ve been very, very fortunate in my life. I’ve received a modern education in mathematics. I hold degrees in mathematics. And then when I ventured into Tibetan Buddhism, I received a pretty traditional education and training in the spiritual practices of this tradition before it was impacted by modernism. I may have been in the last or the second-to-last generation of people to receive that in that form. My teacher, for instance, had quite literally never heard of the Second World War. He had heard rumors about the First World War. He never learned how to use the telephone. I’m talking about the old dial telephones you just held to your ear and spoke. He didn’t know how to use that. He didn’t know what to do with it. He was from a totally different culture, a totally different era. That was quite remarkable, reflecting back now, that I had that good fortune. And so I came to appreciate what you might call premodern perspectives in a very, very different way, that there is a wisdom and an understanding to which I had to open and broaden my own sense of what life is. We have dreams, people have visions, a lot of people have experiences which are “out of the ordinary,” but in other cultures, those would not be regarded as out of the ordinary, but they might be regarded as special and indicative in some way. And so rather than trying to categorize them as an archetype or a psychological symbolism or something that exists in its own right and has its own life, I don’t bring anything to it. I have developed a relationship with a couple of the deities in the Tibetan tradition, and they are present and active in a way in my life that is actually quite difficult to put into words. It’s not succumbing to superstition or belief, which I think are very problematic because that’s how most people think of these things. That is not going to get you anywhere in this practice. You have to move into a much larger framework than that.

James Shaheen: You write, and I’m going to quote you here, “The gods are there. Sooner or later, they demand attention. We ignore them at our peril.” What do we risk when we ignore them?

Ken McLeod: None of us know who or what we actually are. We may have ideas about it. But circumstances in our life reveal that those ideas are either very narrow, or very shallow or at best incomplete, and we’re forced to relate to aspects of life that we hadn’t imagined or thought of. At one point in the retreat, we’d been given a text, which was a rather strange text. It was a propitiation of a deity, which was one of the protectors that we worked with. Then I had a dream, saying, “You need to do this ritual.” And I didn’t pay any attention to it. I’m not describing cause and effect. I’m just describing how these things arise in one’s life. And over the course of the next two or three years, I moved more and more out of balance until I got very, very ill. The way I put it is that my body said, “You can go and get enlightened if you want, Ken. I’m not coming.” And then I realized I had a very serious problem. Towards the end of the second retreat, I asked everybody if they would indulge me, and so we actually did that ritual. Better late than never. One of the things that I’ve seen is that you get indications in various ways that your life is moving out of balance, and sometimes It’s just an odd little thing which seems to have no particular significance. But then maybe a year or two later, you realize, “You know, what I’m experiencing now, that kind of indicated that I was going in this direction, and I didn’t pay any attention to it.” A friend of mine has just written a short story about exactly this, and he’s not practicing in any tradition that I know of, about how an encounter with a man on a trail prefigured a difference between him and his wife that led to a separation.

One of the things that you learn—and I learned from my relationship primarily with my teacher—is to pay attention to these little cues, because often, they’re indicative of something in the same way that dreams can be indicative of something. Now, to many of your listeners, this may sound like superstition, but it isn’t really. It’s learning how to read the world. And it’s not necessarily using or relying on rational cause and effect. Again, I think that’s a very narrow framework. And when you really pay attention, you may actually feel where things are already moving out of balance. As it’s said in Taoism, if you can correct problems when they’re small, they’re relatively easy. They become much more difficult when they become large. I see the theme of balance is something that’s extremely important, particularly in spiritual practice, where if things get out of balance, then you get into really serious trouble.

James Shaheen: You write with regard to protector deity practice that sacrifice is involved, and you write that in practicing Vajrayana, you may have to sacrifice a part or all of your life to practice. What do you mean by that? What are we giving up?

Ken McLeod: I’d like to take a step back here and talk about what Buddhism is about, in my opinion. If we look at the life of the Buddha, he grew up as a prince in a kingdom. He encountered old age, illness and death, which shocked him to his core, and he also encountered a sadhu, a religious mendicant, who seemed to be at peace. To the young man, he couldn’t imagine how you can be at peace in a world shaped by old age, illness, and death. That so puzzled him, that question, that he left his wife and child and his royal position, and embarked on a spiritual quest. Well, that was a sacrifice. And that question, I think, is the heart of Buddhism: How do we live at peace in a world or in a life shaped by old age, illness, and death? It’s actually a nontrivial question. I know people who have sacrificed their family or their children or other things very dear to them for material gains. I’m thinking of one CEO that I coached whose son committed suicide basically because his father was so wrapped up in his business that he didn’t pay enough attention to him. That’s tragic.

As you say, whatever we pursue, we’re going to give up something. And I think we need to take very careful stock of what we do really want in our lives, and what are we prepared to give up to pursue that? Those are very important decisions. For whatever reason, and I don’t have an answer to this, something called to me about spiritual practice, mystical practice. Before I ever encountered Buddhism, I’d read a fair amount in various mystic traditions. So that’s what I chose to pursue. I encountered, as many people do, very, very considerable difficulties in it. Not everybody, but a lot of people. And I don’t regret it. Because in a small way, I feel I’ve come to understand how to be at peace in life shaped by old age, illness, and death.

James Shaheen: Well, back to this idea of sacrifice, which we’re talking about. It also means, you say, to enter mystery, which may turn out to be a nightmare, and you write that sometimes this nightmare is exactly what you need. That’s frightening. Can you say more about that?

Ken McLeod: I think I’ll read from the book if it’s OK with you. “One of the effects of retreat practice was a serious energy imbalance that weakened me physically and mentally for many years. But that was only part of the picture. Stubborn, arrogant, unfeeling in ways that are embarrassing to acknowledge today, contemptuous of a body that I saw simply as a vehicle for mystical pursuit, I thought I knew what I was doing and what was best for me. The protectors did what I had charged them to do: they created the conditions I needed to wake up. They stripped away my health, my sense of capability, my pride, my reliance on intellectual understanding, and my self-respect. They shut down any possibility of intensive retreat practice and cut me off from practicing almost all the methods I had learned. And they exiled me to a small desert town in California called Los Angeles. I was left with no choice. I had to change. I had to find a completely different approach to life and to spiritual practice.”

James Shaheen: That makes me think of something else that you talk about in more specifically protector practice, this idea of submission, which you define as living practice in whatever life brings to you. Can you say more about submission, particularly with regard to protector practice?

Ken McLeod: Well, it’s not really protector practice. It’s really what life brings to you. Again, I want to refer to Amanda Knox. She said it so well. She came to the realization when she was in prison that this was her life. It wasn’t the life she wanted. It was a sad life. But this was her life, and that was that, and she had to figure out a way to make the best use of that life, not the life she wanted to have but didn’t. Eventually she was freed, and so things took a very different turn. But I think it was very remarkable that she submitted to it, not in the sense of giving up but accepting that this was her life. I think it is when we submit to what our life actually is rather than always striving for it to be something different that we come to understand something very profound about being human and about the human condition. In a very different way, I was forced to accept that, OK, this is your life. You have this illness, you have this imbalance, you have these problems, and they’re probably never going to go away. What do I do with that?

I think one of the most important things, at least for me, that it leads to is a humility, that you don’t control your life. Life is what happens to you while you’re preparing for another life. And I think that humility, it’s been very important for me. I don’t take anything in my life for granted anymore. If good fortune comes, I’m grateful for it, but I don’t take it as something that is my due. And if difficulty and pain come, then, well, that is what my life consists of. How can I be in that experience completely? Because it is only by being in such experiences completely that we can find the clear, empty knowing that I referred to earlier. It is our resistance to what is arising in our experience that prevents us from knowing that clear, empty knowing.

James Shaheen: So a lack of humility is a real enemy of practice, and a lot of people resist any of the practices because they feel they’re giving up too much or giving up themselves. So another type of practice that you explore is teacher union practice. You write that when you pray to your teacher, you “go to the edge of what I know and reach out to the unknown,” and though you’re praying to your teacher, you’re reaching out to something far beyond them as a person. You’re reaching out to what you yearn to experience or know. Can you say more about how prayer can bring us to the edge of what we know?

Ken McLeod: The literal translation from Sanskrit is guru yoga, and yoga basically means union. It’s a joining of things. Now, as you know, in the book, I often use music as an analogy, and I’m going to use music here again. When you start studying music, you pick an instrument, say, and you have a teacher. But at some point, if you have some calling or something, you’re going to seek out a teacher that embodies some quality of how you want to play but you don’t know how. So we study with a person because they embody or they have something that we want to know. So how do you form a relationship with what you don’t know? Well, you reach out to it. That’s how you form a relationship. But the first step in that reaching out is to acknowledge very deeply that you don’t know this.

Now, when you’re talking about spiritual knowing, this is stuff that goes to the very, very core of our being. To take what you said a few moments ago, we are experience, but we don’t know that. We conceive of and behave as if we were something that stands apart from experience. So to reach out to that knowing means we have to let go of our sense of self. Letting go of our sense of self is very different from abdicating responsibility, which is what you alluded to in your question. The sense of self stands apart from life, and we view life as interacting. Existential philosophy is based on this. So when you pray to what you don’t know, I’ll put it in the first person here. I don’t know what it is to experience life without the separation of subject object, to use technical terms. I don’t know how to be one with life. And so the first step in that is to acknowledge that I don’t know and to express my yearning for that. Now, at least for me, anyway, if I touch that yearning, it feels very raw and very deep. I can feel even as we’re just talking about her right now that it opens up something very, very deep in me. That’s what practice is about, and that’s how prayer works. You find, or at least I have found, that people often talk about getting their prayers answered. Your prayers are answered through the act of prayer, not from getting something, but through the actual act of prayer because that is where you begin to step out of yourself.

James Shaheen: You write that being free from suffering is to “practice in everything, the simple dictum, ‘There is no enemy.'” What does it mean for there to be no enemy?

Ken McLeod: That way of looking at things came to me when I experienced a very profound shift in the way I experience the world, and I realized that when you’re utterly at peace, then whatever arises, you don’t have to do anything with it. You don’t have to act on it, and you don’t have to push it away. So there I’m really talking about attraction and aversion, which along with indifference make up the three poisons. Now, it was a very short step from there to understanding that when I interact with another person and something in the interaction elicits in me a feeling that I can’t tolerate, I can’t experience, then I will push that whole interaction, and if necessary, the other person, away, because I don’t want to experience that feeling in me. It may be disgust, it may be horror, it may be anything, it may be desire. But I’ll push that away, and that person now becomes an enemy because I’m pushing them away. Why? Because there’s something in me I can’t experience. And that’s why I say there is actually no enemy. If whenever we are confronted with this inclination to push something away, we turn our attention inward, we’re going to find something that’s very difficult for us to experience. And if you make the effort to experience that, then we don’t have to push that person away, and other possibilities open up.

I had a student who, over the course of time, became a friend, a really very good friend. We officed together for a few years, which was actually a quite a wonderful time in my life. Crazy busy, but we had a lot of fun. When he first came to see me, he was a Fox News Republican, but he had one great quality: whatever I told him to do in practice, he just did. Once he understood that that was what had to be done, he just did it. He didn’t ask any questions. He just did it. And so for this reason, he actually experienced quite a lot through his practice. One day, I came into his office, and he was sitting with his feet up on his desk, arms folded, scowling. I said, “What’s eating you, Dave?” He said, “It was much easier when I didn’t have to experience my anger.” I just looked at him and said, “Good for you,” and left.

James Shaheen: That’s great. You also write that the only way to do nothing is to do nothing. Now, doing nothing is no mean feat. Why don’t you tell me about this advice you received from a Canadian artist?

Ken McLeod: That was quite a few years ago now. I left LA in 2012 because the immediate circumstance was that the people in the apartment above me had become so noisy in the middle of the night that I couldn’t live there anymore. I was at a junction in my life anyway because I had stopped teaching and I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. So I decided on the advice of a friend to take a couple of months and just travel and let things sort themselves out. That couple of months turned into almost two years. During that time, I was at a party in Toronto. I found myself talking with this person I subsequently found was quite a well-known artist in Canada. He said, “Oh, where are you from? What are you up to?” And I said, “Well, I lived in LA. I’m wandering around wondering what to do.” He said, “Oh, yes, I’ve been there many times myself. There are two things you have to do.” I said, “OK, what are they?” “The first thing is you have to stop. You have to stop everything.” And I thought, “Well, you know, I’ve kind of done that. What’s the second thing?” “You have to stay stopped. You have to stay stopped long enough for something to take birth. Your life is going to pull you back and try to get you to do what you’ve always been doing. But if you do that, you will never find out what this next phase of your life is about. You have to stay stopped until it becomes clear.” And I could relate to that.

It was difficult because you have no identity. You don’t know what you’re doing. I had nowhere to live, nothing to do. I do not recommend this, by the way. And people wanted me to do this and wanted me to do that. It was all about going back to what I had been doing. I even got a job offer to become the HR of a creative company in Los Angeles. But that would have meant going back to live there. I didn’t think I wanted to do that. And it took quite a while. But when you stay stopped, you’re doing nothing, which means whatever arises, you don’t push it away, you don’t act on it, and you just wait. It’s a kind of limbo in a way, I suppose, that in that staying stopped, the only thing you can actually rely on is this clear, empty knowing, and you let everything fall away until that clear, empty knowing. You can rest in that clear, empty knowing, and in that clear, empty knowing, you begin to perceive a direction. At least I perceived a direction. I can’t say how I perceived it. I don’t know. It’s just like a direction was indicated. One thing, go here, do this, often not knowing why. And then eventually it became clear I needed to find a place of my own and write two books, The Trackless Path, and then the second one, The Magic of Vajrayana. And now, I’ve got a few things to tidy up, but then I enter into the unknowing again, and I knew that that was going to happen. And so here we are. It’s not a bad way to live life, actually, to keep entering into the unknowing.

James Shaheen: I’ve recommended the book on that anecdote alone, stop and stay stopped. Everyone seems to respond well to it, so I’ve had to tell them, “It’s on page 52 in case you get the book.” The book is worth just that page. But you also say that doing is a way to avoid experience. I would think of that in terms of keeping busy. And it’s often because what arises does not mirror our assumptions, our expectations, our vanity, and so forth.

Ken McLeod: The fundamental problem we have in our lives is that we always want things to be a little different from how they are. And because of that, we often do not experience what is actually going on in our lives right now. We’re planning something, and that planning or striving for something separates us from what’s arising right now. And so if people take anything from this book, maybe it’s just that on a regular basis, and I would encourage on a daily basis, you take some time and experience just what is arising in your life. And the stories may arise, “This is good,” or “That’s not good,” or “I like this” and things like that. Let all of that stuff just be like the froth on top of a stream, and just be in your life, even if it’s only for a few minutes each day. I think it will change everything.

James Shaheen: Ken McLeod, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Ken’s book, The Magic of Vajrayana, available now. You can order it through Amazon. Thanks, Ken.

Ken McLeod: You’re very welcome. Thank you.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Ken McLeod. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. According to the recently released COVID Response Tracking Study, Americans are the unhappiest they’ve been in fifty years. Between the pandemic, mass shootings, and ongoing environmental catastrophes, it can be easy to feel like we’re always in crisis—and to believe that the world is coming to an end. But journalist Emma Varvaloucas believes that this pessimism can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and if we want to build a better future, we have to change how we relate to the news. Previously an executive editor at Tricycle, Varvaloucas now serves as the executive director of the Progress Network, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to countering the negativity of the mainstream news cycle. In this episode of Tricycle Talks, I sit down with Emma to discuss how her Buddhist practice informs how she engages with the news, how we can stop doomscrolling, and what can happen when we pay attention to what’s going right.

James Shaheen: So I’m here with Emma Varvaloucas, the former executive editor of Tricycle and current executive director of the Progress Network. Hi, Emma, it’s amazing to be with you since we worked together for so many years.

Emma Varvaloucas: Hi James, I know, we’re going back in time here.

James Shaheen: You were an intern at Tricycle, you eventually became executive editor, and now you’re executive director of the Progress Network. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about the Progress Network to start?

Emma Varvaloucas: So the Progress Network launched in October 2020. Obviously, that was right before the 2020 election in the United States and in the midst of the acute part of the pandemic. The Progress Network is all about paying more attention to what’s going right. Obviously, it might seem like a really strange time to launch such an organization. It was a very tumultuous time. But we felt like that’s exactly when the United States in particular needed something like the Progress Network. The Progress Network is really coming from this idea that we’re really locked in a zeitgeist of negativity and cynicism right now. There are certainly lots of reasons for us to feel this cynicism and this negativity and that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. But there’s actually a lot of other evidence and arguments for the opposite: that we could be building a world that’s going to end up going in a positive direction, that there are many positive indicators across a lot of different things going on in the world, and a lot of people just don’t know about them. The media isn’t giving them a lot of opportunity to pay attention to them. The Progress Network first and foremost was a network of people, a gathering of various public intellectuals, business leaders, scholars, journalists, tech people, who were approaching conversations from a more optimistic, more constructive perspective. We advance them in their work and their ideas. And then on top of that, we also are a nonprofit media organization as well, so we have a podcast and a weekly newsletter. Both of those are called “What Could Go Right?” Both the newsletter and the podcast focus on good news that’s going underreported that might be sliding under people’s radars and sometimes counterintuitive but constructive takes on current affairs. And we also publish original articles. There’s a lot going on that we don’t know about that might make you look at the world with a little bit less of the opposite of rose-colored glasses, whatever those may be. Blue-colored glasses.

James Shaheen: You recently noted that the COVID Response Tracking Study reports that Americans are the unhappiest they have been in 50 years, that gloom is on the rise. So anecdotally, that does seem true. Doomscrolling is a phenomenon that we can all relate to. So how do you understand these statistics?

Emma Varvaloucas: Politics in particular seem to be creating a situation for a lot of Americans where everything constantly feels tense. There’s been a lot of discussions in the US about polarization. The pandemic, of course, was a situation that in and of itself led to a lot of panic because it was such an unusual situation. But it also hit the United States while it was already in a particular mood that I think was caused a lot by politics. And then you have a third trifecta there of the media. They’ve actually done studies that headlines in the United States have gotten more negative and more negative over the last 20 years and that the United States is an anomaly with that. News coverage in the United States of COVID was more negative than in many other countries. I understand those statistics as three-headed dragons all coming together: COVID, politics, and the media. And then also this general feeling that Americans have not had, I think, for a few generations, that economically that their kids might not do as well as them. I think millennials are the first generation, and Gen Z coming after them, that it’s not certain that those kids are going to be economically better off than the generations before them. That’s also going on in a larger stew of the United States being on a slow decline now that you’re seeing other countries starting to be on the upswing.

James Shaheen: The group of people you guys have put together and the content you’re putting out is very well informed and such a relief and an antidote to all of the cynicism. But I wonder, the lack of trust in our institutions is kind of frightening from the CDC to the State Department to the presidency, Congress, the courts. How do you see that playing into everything?

Emma Varvaloucas: If you can’t believe or you can’t trust the information that’s coming at you, it leads to this narrative that you can’t trust anything. That trust starts to collapse, not only in the institutions around us, but our fellow Americans. That’s the erosion of trust that I find a little bit more nerve-wracking. Those two things together lead to a situation where we’re not even sure what the truth is, what the facts are. What we’re doing is actually based on stats. We’re actually looking at research, we’re actually looking at what’s going on without a partisan bent. That’s also meant in its own way to be an antidote to the lack of trust. We’re not coming at this with a particular horse in the race. We’re not coming out of this with the bent that we want the Democrat solution to work or we want the Republican solution to work. We don’t really care whose it is. We just want a solution that works.

James Shaheen: I was listening to you on another podcast earlier this morning while I was making my coffee, and you mentioned that maybe it was in a congressional bathroom that Ted Cruz gave Eric Swalwell a fist bump, that behind the scenes, these rancorous rivalries they play out in public aren’t really so much so in private. You’re dealing with a lot of people who are very connected in our institutions. Do you find that’s more the rule than the exception?

Emma Varvaloucas: I think so. I think a lot of people don’t realize how connected a lot of these people really are. A lot of them went to the same schools. Some of them have dated one another. You don’t hear these stories, but they are definitely going on. That one particular story you just mentioned about Eric Swalwell, he had such a great line about it, which is that politics is like pro wrestling. The problem is that a lot of people don’t realize that. They mistake the show, the fakeness of the wrestling, for an actual wrestling match. Obviously, anyone watching WWE knows that it’s not true. However, a lot of people watch politics, and they see these politicians brawling out on Twitter, and they think that it really is true and it’s not. Really, they’re giving each other fist bumps in the bathroom.

James Shaheen: At what point do they need to make that clear?

Emma Varvaloucas: I think that they do bear responsibility for that. But I certainly don’t think that they are taking that responsibility. There is also this really interesting thing that happened just recently when McCarthy wasn’t getting enough votes to become speaker. Part of that show is that the party that controls the House controls the C-SPAN cameras, where the C-SPAN cameras are pointing. When there’s no Speaker, C-SPAN can point the cameras wherever they’d like, and there’s this really interesting image of AOC interacting with Paul Gosar. He had put out that video of her getting ax-murdered as a cartoon, and they were like leaning in next to one another chatting. And that for me was such a great visual example of what you’re saying, that these people have to go to work together. It’s not quite as much of a wrestling match that we’re all led to believe on Twitter. The politicians are doing a disservice by not correcting that, of course, and we are also doing ourselves a disservice by buying into that show.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it seems also it’s a way to get votes if you fire up your base and play this game. You write that pessimism can focus the mind, but it can also become a self-fulfilling prophecy, leading people to detach and despair rather than galvanizing us. I’m also at times highly pessimistic, and I buy into this polarization almost unconsciously. Unless I take a step back and do my Buddhist practice, I get very sucked into it. The pessimism that we experience and the feedback loops it creates, can you say something about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: I can’t take credit for that nice line that you read. That’s from Zachary Karabell, who founded the Progress Network. What he was getting at there is the same thing that Buddhists are talking about when they say that holding on to anger is like holding on to a hot coal. You end up burning yourself. And the same thing with anger inspiring activism. At a certain point, that’s going to burn out. Pessimism, again, can be a really strong force. It can push people in the short term to do things. It’s not going to bring you to the endgame into the future that you want to see because a lot of the argument that pessimism ends up making is the us versus them argument: “We got to have victory over the bad guys because they are terrible and evil” argument. It’s not an argument that’s like, “Let’s create a better society for ourselves and make sure that we’re getting there in a healthy way and that we’re not going to give up along the way.” I don’t see pessimism as a long-term galvanizing force. I see it as a very good short-term galvanizing force but not one that’s going to take you all the way there because it’s just too easy of a drop into cynicism. It’s a high price to pay.

James Shaheen: You’re in the middle of this now. You really left this Buddhist cocoon, and you’re dealing with all of these movers and shakers in politics, economics, the arts, and so forth. How did you bring your Buddhist practice with you? Because you too must feel the pull of the culture of negativity.

Emma Varvaloucas: I have to say that the very framework of the organization really helps. That’s a Buddhist thing: the mindset in which you approach something completely changes how you react to something, how you see it, how you understand it, how you digest it. And for me, it was the focusing of attention. That’s the thing that helps. Because if you continuously focus on everything that’s going wrong, all you’re going to do is gather more evidence for why that’s correct. That’s going to feed into the cynicism cycle. That’s going to feed into the pessimism. And then when you go out and see something that actually might be more neutral, the good things don’t even enter your awareness. But if you’re coming at it from a fundamentally different framework, then you’re opening up the field of inquiry. I am allowing reality to come to me. I am seeing what’s out there rather than having a pre-assumed story about what’s going on out there. And I do see that as a fundamentally Buddhist mindset. It’s an inquiry. You’re looking, you’re paying attention, and you’re asking. Every day when I wake up and I look at the news and I see what’s going on, I want to prevent myself from falling into “Wow, here we go again, into the same old stuff.” That Buddhist mindset of keeping a nonreactive open awareness definitely helps. And it helps that it’s embedded into the very framework of the organization.

James Shaheen: Yeah, there’s a really strong confirmation bias. You keep looking for evidence for why things are as bad as they are, and it doesn’t help that we move from crisis to crisis to crisis and that’s what’s emphasized. So how does the feeling that we’re constantly in crisis change how we perceive the world and relate to the people around us?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah, I think that what that does is that it makes everything seem urgent. Some things are actually urgent, and some things are not actually urgent. But when everything seems urgent, you can’t distinguish between the things that are. The crisis thing really does flatten the distinction between urgency and importance, and everything gets mixed up because everything seems equally terrible, and everything just seems like we need to deal with this now. And what happens when you have This mentality is that it stops an actual dialogue from happening: What would be the best way to solve this? And are we choosing a way that’s going to lead to more problems down the road? Are we choosing a way that the cure is worse than the disease?

James Shaheen: Well, it’s just the overwhelm. I turn on the news, and I leave thinking, “Oh, I give up.” That’s just the natural reaction to what they’re feeding you, and what they’re feeding you is rather addictive.

Emma Varvaloucas: I think that a common mistake that people make is that they take in what’s happening on the news, and they feel like it’s their personal responsibility to solve everything. And you can’t. For most things, you really can’t do that much. And on one of our podcasts, Lauren Leader, who does a lot of advocacy work for women to join politics, she had a really good piece of advice, which is if you care about the issues and getting involved and wanting to make something better, choose one. Put your energy there, and just go for that. And the rest of them I’m not saying you don’t need to care, but you cannot put your mental energy and your physical energy everywhere at once. And I think that people often forget that when they’re looking at the news, that they somehow feel like A, they need to solve everything and B, they forget there are actually a lot of good faith people out there who are equipped to help solve some of these issues, trying to actually do something.

James Shaheen: It’s important to remember that we’re not alone and that one person isn’t going to do everything and we have to think of it in terms of a collective effort. This idea of isolation and loneliness, apparently we’re beset with that along with pessimism, and the Progress Network is focused not just on changing the news narrative, you mentioned working toward a future where people have some agency or ability to make change, but you also referred to not just material needs, but also existential needs. So what do you have to say about existential needs and how they can be met?

Emma Varvaloucas: What I mean by existential needs is that at the end of the day, we’re all humans. Humans need connection. Humans need meaning. Humans need purpose. Those things cannot be forgotten. I think what happens a lot of the time when we talk about those topics that are a little bit more material like public health or politics or economics is that they forget that humans are humans and that humans yearning for meeting, humans yearning for purpose, all of those things are a factor. Our society has a way of forgetting that. I think the pandemic was a really great example of that. The whole conversation around lockdowns, school closures, and all the things became extremely partisan, and it became a partisan argument to say how can we keep people safe from this novel virus, but as time went on, what is the price we’re paying to keep going, for instance, with the school closures and lockdowns? The dialogue got a little bit shut down around this, but we can’t forget that we’re all humans at the end of the day.

James Shaheen: Also, the weird thing is that COVID took on a sort of mythic dimension, and you have these people who live in absolute terror of the virus and then you have people who simply dismiss it altogether. That polarization in the United States in particular was so destructive. I really don’t know how our needs were centered. Zachary Karabell wrote that “the present feels almost unbearably messy, but these are the times to reshape the world.”

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s in our mission statement, and I think that’s absolutely correct. These are the times because if you’re not going to do it now, when are you going to do it? I think that people sometimes are waiting around for things to be easier or waiting around for things to be simpler or more easy to understand or clearer. And they’re probably not going to be. We’re just living in an age now where, as you mentioned, there’s information coming at us from left, right, and center. We’re dealing with things that we’ve ever had to deal with before. We’re dealing with technology we’ve never had to deal with before. We’ve got to be willing to dive into the mess. You can’t look at the mess and be intimidated and just say no. Jump in because if we don’t jump in, someone else is going to jump in for us. We’re going to end up in a future that we haven’t taken part in at all.

James Shaheen: It kind of sounds like Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck.” So you guys are a collaborative organization, and I look at the impressive list of names that you guys have brought together. How diverse ideologically are these writers, and how do they become involved with the Progress Network?

Emma Varvaloucas: They become involved through invitation, so it’s people that have been on Zachary’s radar for a long time, the organization’s radar as we launched. So these are people who are in their various fields or in their various industries, but they’re all united from a sense that they’re not approaching things with outrage or approaching things with hostility or knee-jerk reactionism. They’re all approaching things from a constructive perspective. That might not mean that they agree with one another on certain things. For instance, we have Thomas Chatterton Williams, who talks about race relations in the US, as well as Peniel Joseph. They would not agree with each other when it comes to how they see racial issues in the US and the progress or lack thereof around those issues. So we do have lots of people in the network that disagree with each other, whether it be about more emotionally strife things or less emotionally strife things like economics. We do have people from the right, the left, and the center. There’s probably a little bit more people on the left than on the right. We don’t have anyone, for instance, who’s a climate change denier on the roster. It just doesn’t make sense. But we do have everyone from pretty progressive, pretty far left, to pretty hard right libertarians.

James Shaheen: So the emphasis then is bringing people together rather than putting them at odds, which is what we’re used to seeing on the nightly news.

Emma Varvaloucas: It’s people that you just might not be hearing on the nightly news, because they’re not saying things that are meant to get our hackles raised. They’re saying things from a constructive perspective, or from a solutions oriented perspective. A lot of times when you see people on the news, they come on, and they’re kind of just saying what everyone expects them to hear, which is like, “This really stinks.” And then the host goes, “Yes.”

James Shaheen: One of the themes we’ve been focusing on recently on the podcast is loneliness, particularly the dangers of isolation. Watching the news, like I just described, can often leave us feeling isolated, both in cementing divides between us and those we disagree with and contributing to an overall feeling of doom. You go everywhere and people think the world is coming to an end. It’s millenarianism or the kaliyuga in Buddhism, the decline. So how have you worked to counter this tendency toward the isolation and division that we seem to be so afflicted with?

Emma Varvaloucas: One thing that we do is we do try to have a conversation where it’s clear that we don’t have a horse in the race and that we’re not approaching things from I’m a Democrat or I’m a Republican or I’m a Trump supporter or I’m not a Trump supporter. We just try to have a conversation as a conversation. Taking the politics out of it like that is really helpful. One of our members, Robert Talisse, he’s a philosophy professor at Vanderbilt University, and he talks a lot about how he thinks we’ve over politicized everything so that you have to know how someone feels about Black Lives Matter before you can go bowling with them or whether or not they voted for Trump, whatever the hot topic is. So I think first of all, we need to take that out. There is this really great article in an album called Reasons to be Cheerful, which was founded by David Byrne, and it was about these Black women that were going around in one of the weather emergencies in California trying to help people. They talked about how they went up to this one Trump supporter’s backyard and they were like, “Oh, what are we getting into here?” And he was like, “Help, we need to save the chickens and the goats.” So they all worked together to save the chickens and the goats. The problem is a lot of us don’t do that in our real lives anymore just on a day-to-day level. We only interact with people that think differently than us on the news or even as figures, people that we see at Thanksgiving that we don’t like very much. And I think that it’s because a lot of that division is existing in theory that it’s getting cemented. If you really interacted with people of different minds every day, some of that would slowly get eked away because you get to know them as people and you realize they’re more as people than their political beliefs.

James Shaheen: You’ve been talking about the project and the newsletter, “What Could Go Right?,” which I get every Thursday, and it functions as an antidote to doomscrolling for me and for most people, probably. I’m sure that’s the intention. But could you say more in a nutshell what the philosophy of that newsletter is?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So the philosophy is that there’s a lot going on that people miss through no fault of their own. All of the progress is being made on various fronts around the world on topics like climate change, like the economy, human rights, women’s rights, it gets covered by the news, it’s just that it’s siloed. So you really have to go looking for it. And it’s definitely not the kind of stories that are going to appear on your push notifications, definitely not the things that are going to be appearing necessarily in your Twitter feed unless you curate it in a particular way. So we scour the internet, we pull all the stories about progress and things that are going well that we can find. It’s mostly focused on the US, but we also do things from around the world. And then we put that all together in one place every Thursday. It’s the opposite of doom scrolling because there are a lot of just really cool and interesting things that don’t reach our ears. There’s lots of success going on in various countries. Child marriage is going down. Various different sexual assault and harassment laws are being changed in places like Pakistan. It’s just difficult for people to hear those stories.

James Shaheen: It’s amazing. Even the stories we do hear gets so easily drowned out. And I noticed something very striking when reading “What Could Go Right,” and that was how amazing that they came up with a vaccine that quickly and yet we took it for granted, and it got buried in all of the gloom and doom and rancorous debate going on, and we dismissed it in favor of a lot of negative news.

Emma Varvaloucas: If you look at news articles from before the vaccines came out about the pandemic, it was very much so like, “Hey, guys, there’s no way we’re gonna have vaccines anytime soon, so buckle in.” And then it was sort of like this miracle that occurred that all of a sudden, by Thanksgiving, there were almost seven of them that were up for trials that seemed to be efficacious. It’s not like on TV, you saw teams going into these labs being like, “Look at what these scientists are doing.” That wasn’t the storyline that we heard.

James Shaheen: Well, what are some of your favorite stories from the past year? Are there any stories you wish people knew more about?

Emma Varvaloucas: There are a lot. One really important one for me is around climate change. I think that it’s really hard to track the progress that we have made on climate change. 5–10 years ago, we were in a place where we were looking at potentially a real apocalyptic result of eight degrees of warming. We’ve cut that out. That’s not going to happen anymore. There’s a lot of focus on are we going to meet the 1.5–2 degrees target. And there’s a good reason that we’re focusing on that. I’m not saying it’s not a good reason. But there was a future that was truly apocalyptic that we’ve already cut out. A lot of people don’t know that emissions have been falling in the United States for years. They’re twenty percent down over the last twenty years. Some people say that they think that we’ve already hit peak global emissions in 2019–2020. Now we’re seeing projections that they’re thinking it’s going to be 2025. I don’t think that anyone’s saying we’re gonna hit 1.5–2 degrees as quickly as we need to, but there’s a lot more progress that’s happening than is really being told. Another one is just the drop in poverty that we’ve been seeing over the past 50 years. The short-term story of child poverty and malnourishment is not so great because of COVID and the Ukrainian war. So if you look at things in the short term, those numbers are not going in the right direction. But if you zoom out a little bit, we’ve cut down on child poverty in an amazing way. There’s a lot of wonderful graphs about this, by the way, at Our World in Data, and it’s just a steep decline. The story of how that happened is not one that a lot of people know. In India, they want to have their entire population have access to piped water by next year, and they’ve already accomplished half of that. So you’re already seeing a lot of these diseases that are spread by unsanitary water starting to get cut down. There’s almost immediate results.

James Shaheen: What’s really amazing to me just listening to you is how unwilling we can be to entertain the possibility that there is positive news out there or that things aren’t necessarily going in the direction that we think, that it’s all going downhill. What do you think this attachment to negativity is?

Emma Varvaloucas: That’s definitely an attachment, and I have definitely learned through my work at the Progress Network that you have to approach it lightly. You definitely can’t just appear in front of someone and say, “Actually, you’re completely wrong about that, and I will tell you why.” You really have to validate their emotions around it first before you can say, “But actually, if you look at this graph…” There are a lot of things like that. The bottom 50% of wealth in the United States finally started to grow over the last few years. I mention those because those are also ones that people have an emotional attachment to where they’re like, “It’s just not true.”

James Shaheen: I think sometimes it’s stimulation. We’re being engaged, though it’s in a very negative way, but it also absolves you of engaging, because, well, if it’s all going to hell in a handbasket, I’ll just sit here.

Emma Varvaloucas: It goes back to the conversation we were having about the double-edged sword of pessimism is that it leads into that apathy. That’s what’s so tantalizing about the villain story. We’re just at the mercy of a few villains that are turning the world into chaos, and I’m just Emma. But I think there’s also something else going on that I can’t put my finger on. I think liberals in particular, and I say this as a liberal, I think there’s sometimes an attachment against admitting that there’s been progress because that somehow means that the message that liberals put out there about change we need to happen is not important. If you tell people that things are getting better, that will lead other people into sitting idle and sitting on their hands and not wanting to do anything. I actually think that it’s the opposite, that if people are served too much despair, that’s when they’re going to clock out. But if they see that this as messy, this is hard, but little by little, we can do things together, that they’re more apt to be like, “OK, well, I’ll try to do my part then.”

James Shaheen: We’ve become so ideologically rigid. I see it as attachment to view, as we would say in Buddhism. We kind of develop this identity around a particular belief we hold, and in the face of evidence, we’re unmoved. We just continue looking for that evidence that confirms what we already think. That’s a hard one to get out of.

Emma Varvaloucas: If you really are honest with yourself, you want to be right more than you want it actually to be true that things are better. You just want to be right. You want to tell that idiot guy who voted for the person that you think is a terrible politician that they’re stupid. You want to be the smart one, you want to be the informed one, and you want to be the person who’s correct.

James Shaheen: I certainly understand that feeling. You probably noticed working with me all those years.

Emma Varvaloucas: I plead the fifth. No, we all feel like that.

James Shaheen: So talk a little bit about the podcast. I know, it’s mostly your members, and they’re all impressive people we want to listen to. Has anything surprised you?

Emma Varvaloucas: We’ve had people on the podcast where if I were to look at their body of work or if I were to look at what political party they belong to that I, particularly as a woman, I don’t really want to have a conversation with you, to be honest, just does not seem like that exciting to me, and I kind of don’t like some of the things that you’ve printed. But a lot of the time, I’m completely wrong about the conversation that ends up happening. I’m completely wrong about how they are as a person. Some of the people whose body of work I admire, I get on the podcasts with them. And I’m like, oh, that’s not what I was expecting at all. But I think it’s just a really good lesson that the assumptions that we make around people are not always true. And that’s one thing I feel really grateful for just in my professional work, that I am able to interact with people that are not like me on a daily basis.

James Shaheen: I think that’s really interesting. I want to talk a little bit about Buddhism. You were our executive editor. You did a fantastic job. You spent so many years steeped in our world in the Buddhist world that you still remain connected. How did you first come to Buddhism?

Emma Varvaloucas: I first came to Buddhism in college. I was doing psychedelics with my friends in college, and I was not a very religious person at all when I was growing up. My father was Greek Orthodox nominally. We would go to the United Church of Christ, which is a Protestant denomination, but I really was not into Christianity or into religion really at all. For some reason, the psychedelics really opened me up, and I always say that my friends kept the drugs and left the religion and I kept the religion and left the drugs. Because I was at NYU, where I was studying journalism, I double majored in religious studies and got into Buddhism. I was sort of the prototypical Western Buddhist that I was like, “Ha, don’t give me any of that religious stuff. Maybe Zen is the one for me, there’s no rituals, there’s no trappings.” Somehow I ended up studying Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal because I was dying to study Buddhism more thoroughly and they offered academic accreditation. That’s what got me into Tibetan Buddhism. I was totally convinced that I had found the secret to happiness and was like “I’m going to be happy forever.” That was the power of the Buddhist teachings for me. Obviously, I crashed landed back into reality after I left Nepal, but I applied for the internship at Tricycle from my bedroom in Nepal. I remember I talked to Mani McKeever, and I had to reschedule the interview because the power had gone out and I remember being very stressed about that. I started as an intern at Tricycle my last year of college, and then Buddhism became both a spiritual practice for me and professional work.

James Shaheen: How does your exposure to Buddhism in your practice shape your thinking about your work? It seems like a pretty seamless fit.

Emma Varvaloucas: When I heard of this job at the Progress Network, it had been sent out to an alumni network that my friend was a part of, and she forwarded it to me, and she was like, “This is totally up your alley and totally up no one else’s alley.” I loved working at Tricycle. I love Buddhism. I loved it being part of my professional life. And in fact, it still is because I do a lot of freelance work with it. But I really wanted to be part of that engagement. I wanted to see how that really worked with politics and how that really worked in real life and what that looked like beyond the sort of navel-gazing accusations. So I’m hoping that I’m being primarily of service to people, and that’s actually why I went into Buddhism as a profession and journalism as a freshman, actually, in the first place, why I married the two because I was like, wow, this is a way that I could see bringing a skill set and a search for meeting together to be helpful to people. I see the Progress Network in the same way. I’m hoping that all the stuff that we’re putting out into the world is really helping people navigate what truly is a challenging landscape to navigate and giving them just a bit of something else to chew on that’s not so poisonous.

James Shaheen: When Trump won and they were televising the inauguration, of course, I didn’t want to watch it. In fact, I didn’t. But Helen Tworkov, whom you know and who founded this magazine, Tricycle, said, “I’m going to sit in front of a television and watch it and see how I relate to it and watch my mind while I’m watching.” And I thought, well, that’s an interesting thing to do. It’s very Buddhist, but I wasn’t prepared to do it. I just was too depressed, frankly, to watch that. I later watched clips, and it was everything I thought it would be. But you wrote something for the Progress Network called “How to Read the News without Losing your Mind: Five Things to Remember Before Giving Up on Everything.” Can you say more about how you’ve learned to engage with the news with more intention? And do you have any tips for our listeners who might want to do the same? And for me, because frankly, I could use the tips.

Emma Varvaloucas: Some of that was understanding how the news works. The news is not meant to give you an accurate portrayal of the world as the world is going on around you. The news is like man bites dog. The news is supposed to give you the things that are going wrong because that’s what it’s designed to do. It’s not a news story to say, “Man woke up yesterday, he had coffee, he had a pretty normal day.” No one would read that. But that’s actually what’s going on most of the time. But when you read the news and all you hear about is wars and this and that, there is a mental trick that happens where you think that that’s actually the majority of what’s going on when it’s completely not. It’s actually the absolute minority. There are some tricks you can learn going into the news, for instance, about numbers. I cover that in that article as well. Beware a lonely number. When I wrote that article, I used a balanced number of examples from left-leaning media and right-leaning media, and I used a Fox News article as an example. It was an immigration op-ed that we should be careful about immigrants coming here with measles. And then she put out this eye-popping number that in the last year, we’ve had 100,000 measles cases globally, and measles can cause death. Those are true numbers. It is also true that in extreme cases, people might die. But she didn’t give us any of the context around that number. The US has basically stamped out measles. We had had 12 cases the previous year. That number of 100,000 globally was actually at the tail end of a long decline in the last 30 years. So the whole basis of her article to get lots of fear around immigrants bringing measles really had no basis in reality. And I’m not saying that every article you read with a lonely number doesn’t have a basis in reality. But what I am saying is beware of big numbers on their own that are not explained without context. I do think there’s a certain portion of media literacy that’s not given to people that we really should be giving to people. There’s a couple other things that I mentioned. Even if the media says it’s a crisis, not everything is a crisis. I went back and looked over one week on everything that the media had called a crisis, and it was everything from avocados to Canadian bacon. And then remember that you’re not alone. A lot of these big-picture items, there are people that are actually really working to try to make them better. You can try to make things better in your corner of the world. Just because it’s not being covered as a story doesn’t mean that it’s not happening. So it’s just trying to give people a little bit more of a balanced picture, trying to help them take a step back with the news so they don’t just get lost in that hole.

James Shaheen: Right, there’s an article in the Atlantic about entertainment, that everything has has become entertainment, that we’re immersed in this world of entertainment. I think that television news, not to be too cynical, but it really does seem, in so many ways, like a horror show. So I think you guys are doing great work. People might be surprised to know that you tend to avoid headlines that focus on hope. So why is that?

Emma Varvaloucas: We actually try to avoid the word almost entirely. I try to avoid it in the newsletter. I try to avoid it when I’m talking about the Progress Network and Zachary as Well. We’re actually not trying to convince you that everything is fine. Not everything is fine. We don’t have a horse in that race either. We’re not even trying to tell you that the scales are tipped towards better and not tipped towards worse. No one really does. Hope, to me, is a narrative-based word in the sense that things are really bad, but here’s some hope, like everything really, truly does suck, but here’s a little something to get you through the day. I don’t think that gets us very far, and that’s not what we’re really trying to put out there. What we’re trying to put out there is there are facts that we’re just not paying attention to, and you can decide at the end of the day if you think the scales are tipped in one direction or the other if you really feel like you need to decide. Maybe you don’t. But here’s just a bunch of stuff that you probably haven’t heard about, you probably haven’t read about. Here’s a different way of approaching things, not with hope and that something will change because we all know that it’s not going to. No, it’s here are a bunch of problems that have actually been solved in the past. This is the way that we did it. Let’s apply that now. It’s a stronger framework than hope that’s not an emotion-driven narrative like that.

James Shaheen: I always quote her, but I had Joanna Macy on the podcast, and I asked her about hope. I think I might have even asked, “Do you have hope?” And I said that may even be the wrong question to ask. And she surprised me. She said, “I’m a Buddhist, I don’t do hope, I’m in love with what is.” So I thought that was a pretty interesting take on hope. But you described TPN’s approach as optimistic. So what does optimism mean to you, or am I incorrect about that?

Emma Varvaloucas: We do use it occasionally. But it is actually another word that we kind of try to avoid. We try to use constructive, not because there’s anything really wrong with the words. It’s just that people tend to look at that as meaning a certain thing. It’s less glass half full, more so ditching the arrogance and the surety that you know the outcome of the future, that you know for sure that the future is going to be bad. It’s all about Joanna Macy remaining at what is going on and not I’m absolutely positive that things are going to turn out badly. Because we don’t know. So it’s more of a humble optimism in that way.

James Shaheen: Do you consider your work right livelihood?

Emma Varvaloucas: I sure hope so. I think it’s one of those professions where, especially here in Greece, people have really intense opinions about journalists. They really think that they are bad-faith actors. The media has lots of issues, but it’s a systems problem. It’s not an intentions problem. I’m hoping at the end of the day that what I’m putting out there is helping guide people in the right direction. It’s helping guide people to constructive mindsets, to constructive action, to the better future that we want and less of the future that we don’t want.

James Shaheen: Were you at some point steeped, like many of us or like the country, in a kind of negativity? Was there a kind of doomscrolling going on and you emerged out of it and changed your attitude over time? Or were you always inclined toward a more positive approach to information?

Emma Varvaloucas: With politics, I think just because I had been reading Jonathan Haidt’s work in college, I was always inclined towards we can’t be all that bad. There’s no way that we live in a country where half of the country’s voters are terrible people. I just refuse to believe that. Where I was really lost in the apathy part of the equation was really climate change. I couldn’t get into the climate as a discussion at all. Everything that I was hearing around me was that the world was going to literally end. That seemed way too much to take in. It seemed in my gut untrue, although I couldn’t tell you why. That’s really what the science was saying. I just couldn’t find any entry points for myself in that. And so I just didn’t do anything. I really didn’t find a way to get into that conversation until I started working for the Progress Network and until I started understanding that climate change wasn’t this threshold of if we don’t hit 1.5–2, we’re all going to die. No, every little tenth of a degree counts. This for me is a better entry point. It’s not that if we don’t hit the goal, everything’s lost. It’s that we just have to keep bringing it down, keep bringing it down. Here’s the progress that’s been made. That for me from the Progress Network was really helpful to find some thinkers and some climate scientists that were communicating things in a different way.

James Shaheen: In the current issue, we have two pieces by Renee Lertzman and Karen Armstrong. They both point to this idea that burying people in data does not inspire them to act. They talked about creating a narrative of why the earth is important, why it’s worth preserving, because missing they felt was the sort of mythic narrative that would motivate us to engage rather than bury people in x degrees Celsius and countless data points that start to make a person feel helpless.

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. I also think that language is really important. There was a really great article in Scientific American around this. It made the point that all of the language around climate change is very negative when it could be a narrative of, for instance, something that I find much more exciting of cheap, abundant energy. Your energy prices could very well drop. It’s not a narrative of lack or a narrative of we need to make sacrifices or a narrative of we’re terrible people who are ruining the planet. It’s a completely different one. It’s a positive one. I would love to see that change in the climate change discussion as well.

James Shaheen: OK, one more question about your next project. I’ve been wanting to ask about it. You’re working on a podcast called Practical Buddhism. Is that right?

Emma Varvaloucas: Yeah. So there’s this wonderful guy, Tanner Campbell, who has a podcast called Practical Stoicism. It’s really popular. And he is branching out to making a larger practical philosophy empire. He’s great with stoicism, and it’s really good stuff. Someone does practical cynicism, and so we’re going to start with Buddhism. I’m going to do practical Buddhism with them starting in mid-February.

James Shaheen: That’s exciting. I’m sure I’ll be an ardent listener. Emma Varvaloucas, it’s been a pleasure. For our listeners, be sure to check out Emma’s work at the Progress Network. Emma, thank you so much.

Emma Varvaloucas: James, thank you so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.

James Shaheen: You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Emma Varvaloucas. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by As It Should Be Productions and Sarah Fleming. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!