Silk Roads: China, The Middle East, and The New World

Kenneth LambertSilk Roads Transcription – Peter Herschock  Introduction  

Hirsh:  When I was in Hawaii last summer, I also met Peter Herschock and it was such an incredible feeling meeting him, because I met a scholar and practitioner who, a well published author also, who brought the special perspective and his scholarly work to most urgent matter of current reality, of our current world, who wrote in such inspiring, simple and profound ways about the problems we have, environmental problems, poverty problems, gender problems and addressed them from his spiritual practice and his scholarly perspective…please welcome Peter Hershock.

Peter:  Thank you, Hirsh.

A couple of themes that went through the talks earlier had to do with China today, issues of globalization, globalization, we all know what that means, it means this vast circulation of good and services, of ideas, cultural products around the world and it is not uncommon at all today for people, people like you here at Evergreen today, the students, people living in Olympia, to be watching Anime that was produced in Japan, to be wearing clothes that are made in China, maybe to be watching films that are coming out of Europe, be listening to West African music, going downtown Seattle and hearing a band that has people from all over the world.  So we are really familiar with the affects of globalization and the ways that transforms our identity or our sense of identity.  Very often is the case especially for young people that when you think about who you are, one of the things you think first about, is not what Roger talked about, your immediate family, your neighbors, the people who live in the immediate community, you are talking about the people that you are blogging with daily or that you are communicating with on email that might be a thousand miles or two thousand miles or eight thousand miles away.  So there is this phenomenon of distant proximity, things in the so called real world maybe thousands and thousands of miles away, but they are nearer to our hearts and concerns then the people that we are living in the same house with and that is a peculiar kind of world to be living in with peculiar kinds of stresses that are placed on us as human beings.  But globalization isn’t anything new.  I am going to take you back thirteen hundred years ago to Tang dynasty China.  In the Tang, Chang’an the capital of China was the largest city in the world, within the walls of the city were one million people, outside the walls another million people, a population of two million, this is in the eight hundreds, seven hundreds, thirteen hundred years ago.  Paris was a mud flat with twenty thousand people living in it.  London the same thing, a fishing village on the Thames, I mean we are talking about a period of time when in India Buddhism is being transported across the Silk Road into China and in India there are Buddhist universities…

Question to audience:  what is the student population here at Evergreen? 

Answer:  Four Thousand.

They had Buddhist universities in India that were two and half times the size of Evergreen with student bodies of ten thousand and a student teacher ratio…a faculty of two thousand.  This is a world that we are not aware of, that there were these kinds of exchanges taking place, and one of the things coming from India into China was Buddhism.  What happens when a religious tradition crosses cultural boundary lines, that is one of the things that is happening today.  Religions and the effects of religion are crossing cultural boundary lines, not just national borders but cultural boundaries.  So go back thirteen hundred years ago.  There is a young man named Mao Tzu living in southwestern China and he has been practicing Buddhism under some local Buddhist masters with intensive meditation practices and he has gotten a little dissatisfied with what he is learning from his teachers, so he decides like some of you, you have gone from a high school here in Washington State and you have decided that you are going to do study, lets say in New Mexico and you start walking and this is serious business, this is not travel where you have a train or airplane to take you the fifteen hundreds miles…he sets out on foot to go fifteen hundred miles to find a teacher, a Buddhist teacher…he finally finds a community to sit in, he starts practicing, he is a very serious student, after a number of years of meditation he decides he is not quite break through, he is not quite serious enough yet, he needs to demonstrate, really pull it all together, so he decides that he is going to do a solo retreat, he is going to find a little place on the mountain, he is going to go into a hut, he is going to ask that food be brought once a day and it is going to sit and meditate until he breaks through, until he has a realization, until he understands what the Buddhist teaching are about and so he starts and he is practicing daily.  This is a time in China when it was not uncommon for practitioners to grow their hair out and to tie a rope from their hair to a beam, a rafter, like this on top of them, so that as they are sitting twenty hours a day, if they start to nod off, you get a jerk, you have had your head pulled by the hair, you know that is going to shock you wide awake, but he is a strong meditator, so he is sitting in meditation 20 hours a day and then on about the fourth day of this very intensive retreat, he hears a sound outside, one of these odd scraping sounds, we don’t have a blackboard here, but you have all heard what it sounds like when you scrape chalk on a blackboard…I see some shivers going through the room, yeah, it is a screeching kind of ugly sound and it is being repeated just outside his meditation hut and he can’t imagine what this is, he is a strong meditator and he knows that part of the meditation discipline is that you are aware of the sounds around you, you are perfectly aware of all the things that are happening in your environment, it is three hundred and sixty degree attention and he is a strong meditator so he can handle it, he is sitting, he is sitting and then the irritation starts to grow and I am sure you all have felt this at some time, noise in the room next door when you are trying to go to sleep, but what I have read is it is like ants starting to crawl under his skin and that feeling of irritation and annoyance and finally he can’t handle it, he gets up and runs out of the meditation hut and who is sitting there on the ground but his master, with a roofing tile and a rock, scraping the two of them together and he looks at his master and says “what in the hell do you think you are doing”?  And the master looks up innocently and says “I am making a mirror” now you have to understand that in China at the time, mirrors were made out of metal that is highly polished, so he has the right motion, he is polishing something, it just happens to be the wrong material, a roofing tile, a piece of slate that has fallen off the roof and Mao Tzu of course looks at him and says “ You idiot, you cannot make a mirror out of a roofing tile” and the master looks at him and says “Oh, what makes you think you can make yourself into a Buddha by sitting on a cushion” and Mao Tzu has an awakening.  Now the term Buddha literally means awakened, to awake.  Master Huang very nicely illustrated the meaning of awakening, that sense of being open to the world.  In Buddhism there is a comparison, I think there is Dao on this side….going to the slides and flipping slides…hard to hear…. It is Dao as well and the term Dao is appropriated in Buddhism to refer to the path, the Buddhist path. Now Mao Tzu, after he has his awakening, this moment of insight that in fact, becoming a Buddha isn’t just about sitting in meditation, there is something else involved in becoming a Buddha in demonstrating your own Buddha nature, this nature that we have to enter into enlightening relationships, and so he says “Aha, I have a second realization and that is, if the point is not just meditation, but to really follow the Buddhist path completely and entirely, how will you know the Buddhist path when you have seen it?”   There are a lot of false ways out there, there are a lot of false traditions and so he poses that to his master and his master gives him one of those dear twinkling looks out of the eye like he has just thought of something really smart…I had several of these from my own Buddhist teacher and they are always followed by something shocking.  And so the master looks up, twinkling in his eye and says “ah very good, but you never see the Buddhist path, you only see from it”.  The Chinese are very explicit on this, you never see the Buddhist path, you only see from it, you only see the Buddhist path in walking it, it has to be demonstrated, it is about demonstrating a particular attitude, now what is that attitude?  If we go back to Buddhism, which began twenty five hundred years ago in India, the Buddha was asked “what do you teach?”, there are a lot of itinerant teachers, a lot of professors at the university and people are often ask the Buddha what is his special teaching?  And you know I am a relatively simple guy, I don’t have a big metaphysics to give you, I don’t do epistemology, knowledge theory, I don’t have it all worked out in complex details, I only teach four things, first that in this situation that we now find ourselves in, something is not right, there are some troubling relational patterns playing out here, now there is some suffering in this room, it might not be mine, I had a nice lunch, Hirsh treated us to lunch, I had a good cup of coffee, I am feeling pretty good, but if I think a little bit about it, that market that we went to down on fourth avenue and you see in the counter all the salamis and the chicken salad and the fresh greens and so on and I ask myself what about the pigs that went into the sausage, what about the chickens, what felt good to me to eat as lunch, my benefit, made me feel good, if I ask what is the wider implications in the total pattern or relationship that had to come together to satisfy me for my lunch, what was involved in it exactly, where did those greens come from, they surely did not come from the Pacific Northwest, they probably came from Central America and on what basis where they being grown there and under what conditions do the peasants live that are growing those vegetables, what kind of payment are they getting for their labor, is it fair labor, is it fair trade, what about the coffee, is it fair trade coffee, they advertise it as such, it probably wasn’t.  And so from a Buddhist perspective, seeing that all this situation, whatever the situation that we are in today, right now is one that can be characterized as troubled or troubling, is to say “lets now assume that just because I am okay, everybody is okay, lets assume in fact that me being okay, comes in some cost somewhere along the line and become increasingly aware of that”, so the Buddhist first insight, his moment of awakening as he recounts it, is like coming across this ancient city overgrown by jungle, if anyone has been to Angkor Wat, think about Angkor Wat and the temples in Angkor Wat and the Buddhas living in jungle like northern India, it is like coming across a city overgrown with vines and creepers and so on and it is the city, what is the realization, that all things arise interdependently, nothing exists on its own.  Roger was making that point that us as individual human beings constituted by our relationships…if I ask you which comes first the parents or the children…what is the answer?   Not a trick question…the parents obviously….WRONG…ten points…..are there any parents before there is children?  Babies get born; parents get made at the same instance.  Parents and children co create one another.  Once you have the baby, anyone here who has got children, do you become a dad immediately, do you become a mom immediately…no…you learn how to be a mother or father, who do you learn from? From your own parents, from your grandparents, from friends and you know who you learn the most from?...your children, your children teach you what it means to be a mother, to be a father, we learn that together, that is interdependence.  From the very beginning and so the Buddhas insight was that everything, absolutely everything is like this, nothing arises independently, everything arises interdependently.  He also says that, the four insights, the four things he teaches, these patterns of troubling relationships that we find ourselves in, they just don’t happen, there is a pattern to how those things come about, there is a pattern to how you can dissolve it and there is a way you can dissolve those patterns of relationship, those troubling patterns of relationship, and in simple terms he said, there is just really three things we need, one of them is wisdom, the most basic way of understanding that in Buddhism is understanding the interdependence of things, becomingly increasingly aware of those patterns of interrelationship that make us how we are and enable us to enjoy the things that we enjoy.  The second part of it attentive virtuosity, this term “Samadhi” from the Sanskrit language, it is often translated as concentration, and you get the impression that meditation and the Buddhist tradition is about focusing on one thing and certainly that is one kind of meditation, but more properly, what the Buddhist is aiming at in meditation is, is not being able to focus, I mean anyone who puts on headphones and gets really absorbed in the music, is totally caught up and focused on listening to the music, but what happens if there is a fire outside, what happens if the person in the next room is really sad and just needs a friend…I mean under these circumstances, you want to find the kind of awareness, the pattern of attention that allows you to respond freely to whatever situation that you find yourself in.  So Master Lin Jee, Chong master Lin Jee in the ninth century in China is asked, like myself to come to the podium and stand in front of an august group of people like yourselves and he is asked to say something about the meaning of Buddhism…why did bodhi Dharma come from the west?  Why was Buddhism brought to China? What is the meaning of Buddhism?  He says as soon as I open my mouth, I have made a mistake, so you already know that I have been making a lot or errors along the way here and he looks out across the audience to the people gather and says “which one among you is willing now to come up on the podium and we will enter into dharma combat with one another” dharma combat with one another…and usually in the group there is one monk and the very first passages of the Lin Jee Yong, somebody comes up, a monk out of the audience, he is ready for master Lin Jee, he has seen his tactics, he comes up on the stage, walks up and before he has a chance to say a word, Master Lin Jee grabs him by the throat, put his thumbs on each side of the larynx and starts to squeeze and shake him and says “okay, now give me one true word” he is being asphyxiated, he can’t get a word out, he is thinking as frantically as he can about how to respond, and Lin Jee pushes him away and says “what kind of a monk is this”? I am like your grandmother, if you cannot respond to me, here in this kind and compassionate audience, how are you going to respond to people like highway bandits, how are you going to respond to people actually in the world who that have troubles that go way beyond being challenged by a teacher to provide an answer, you have to be ready to respond immediately to the situation that you are in?  So one I was asked by a Zen master, a question…umm...what is the sound of one hand clapping, very typical standard sounds…I started thinking about it, he took his Zen stick and stuck it in my belly and said “the bus is already downtown…you missed the opportunity, sorry, go back, go back and sit a little bit more and come back later”.  So immediacy of response, attentive virtuosity, and the third component is Schilla(sp) in the Sanskrit, usually translated into something like morality, or discipline, but what it really means is morale clarity, clarity about the situation we find ourselves in.  Master Wong mentioned this phrase, this catch phrase many of you have probably heard…Zen mind, beginners mind, very common in Japanese Zen.  Zen mind beginners mind asks us to consider what it would be like to be able to respond to the world as small children do, as infants do, the kind of freshness, the openness to things that small children have and that is really a wonderful capacity…anyone who has had the opportunity to spend time with infants, I did this with my first son, I was one of those people, a stay at home dad, entirely with this kid and decided after two frustrating months of I wanna do this and I want to play the guitar and I was writing a novel, I had all these great things I wanted to do and the kid is just crying in the crib and I finally said “I am gonna go nuts” unless I just one hundred percent put myself at the service of this child.  And once I did that things changed immediately, he wanted to play in the dirt for two hours, I played in the dirt for two hours, I would get down on his level, play on the floor all the time and I learned so much from his way of thinking things through, his way of reaching out and exposing himself to his environment with the totality of all of his senses, everything available, totally awake, totally moving, not an openness that is hungry, but an openness that is really ready, now that is really a wonderful thing, but in Buddhism, that is a little bit like a beginning stage, we need to get that, we absolutely need that, but when you find yourself in a very difficult situation, at school, at home, at work, you also need to be able to perceive what is the full pattern of meanings that are at play within this situation, what is really going on when people are worried about tenure, people are worried about what they are going to do after graduation, when they have been betrayed by their husband or their wife, or their boyfriend or girlfriend…what does it mean when you realize you may not be comfortable with the physical form you were born into, what does it mean to questions your gender identity and to go through those kind of questionings in then real world that we live in means that you need a clarity and kind of purview of the world that takes in the full of what we are as human beings, that is simply not available to an infant, infants are open, completely open, but they are not skillful in the way they respond to things, when infants are unhappy they cry, WAAAHHHHH, sometimes we feel like crying when we are unhappy with the way things are, but is crying an adequate response?  Or do we need to be more skillful?  So in the Buddhist tradition there is an emphasis on cultivating wisdom, inside and interdependence, attentive virtuosity, this flexible, full concentrated pattern of being present, but also moral clarity and awareness of the different values, tensions and actions that are playing out in the world around us, so that we are comprehensively aware of the full picture and can respond accordingly.  In the Chan tradition that I have practiced in, there is this term, dun woo, which is usually translated as southern enlightenment and it is emblematic of this style of Zen that says you need to be present, you need to be responsive, it is not being enlightened a hundred years from now, or a hundred lifetimes from now, it is demonstrating in the present moment, now the capacity to entertain and act upon varies freedoms of choice, globalization as we know it now gives us lots of freedoms of choice, we can chose lifestyle, we can chose identity, we can chose to change our bodily sex if we so desire, we now as human beings have come to that point, but the Chan Buddhists edict is that the freedoms of choice are not bad, it is certainly better to have freedoms of choice than to have none at all, but what is truly important is the capacity for relating freely in whatever situation you find yourself in, to be able to relate freely within that situation…freedom is not a state, freedom is an adverb, freedom is a way of doing things.  From the Chan perspective, the moment of Dun Woo as I like to describe it is, it is not about suddenness, in terms that it is going to take so much time to get enlightened, that master Lin Jee who I mentioned before, when he is asked about the Buddha and finding the Buddha, finding your Buddha nature, he said “as if you happen to find Buddha on the road, kill him, because this Buddha that you can project out there, there is something different from you, this Buddha nature that isn’t already being demonstrated by you, in your situation in your day to day circumstances, that is not Buddha, that is some imagination you have, and you project that out as a goal, then you suddenly think that the path is going to get you somewhere, it is about a destination that you are going to arrive at…no this is a direction in which you live, a sense of commitment that you have a certain sense of quality of presence in”...and so Dun Woo(sp), as I like to say it, is about readiness for enlightenment, the readiness to enlighten, the readiness for enlighten and it is the moment the character Dun, can be reads as sudden, but it can also be read as ready or readiness and it refers to the moment when a servant, who is before the master and bows and listens to what the master would like you to do and how you may be of service and then you bow….Peter bows….the moment that your forehead touches the ground and comes up, is the moment of Dun, that is the moment when you are ready to go into service…and so for what little time I have left…If I can be of service by answering a few questions now, of maybe later, if five minutes before the next speaker, I will do that….THANK YOU.

Peter:  This must be one of those already enlightened groups…dharma combat.  The term dharma combat is an interesting one, because you normally associate Buddhism with a kind of pacifistic attitude and there is certainly some truth to that, that if you talk about the positive side of Buddhism, the kind of side of Buddhism I was talking about, you realize the situation you are in has suffering within it that it is troubled in some way, that you want to respond to that, some people think that, that is kind of a negative religion a negative way of life, you are focusing on what is not right, but Buddhism at the same time…if Buddha was asked, how will you know a practicing Buddhist if you find one, and he says it is really easy, they are the kind of person, that when they are present in a situation will suffuse all four directions, the horizontal and diagonal directions, up and down, will suffuse all four directions with compassion, with loving kindness, with equanimity and oddly enough for us Americans joy in the good fortune of others…it is our pleasure to be here and enjoy the hospitality of you, but if you have any questions now….good if not we will turn the program over and I think we are all supposed to come back up for a panel where you get to through questions at us en masse…Yes there is a question here.

Question: (I cannot understand him completely) but the only way to do Buddhism is by demonstrating it?

Peter:  Obviously there are practices you take, all Buddhists will undertake a certain range of different daily practices, but the idea is that Buddhism is about demonstrating a particular quality or relationship, a way of relating with the world that is quite distinctive, as it has at it’s core and concern about the troubling relationship of our interdependence, a strong desire, a commitment to doing something about that, in the day to day situation that we find ourselves in, so as not to say,  I will start dealing with these negative relationships that are taking place everywhere in the world, once I become enlightened….

Another question from the person that is hard to hear and understand:  So is Buddha their God?

Peter:  No, the Buddha is just an enlightened person, he is just like one of us, who happens to have undertaken an particularly intense regime of practice, realized this and then started teaching in India about twenty-five hundred years ago, and as he walked around and taught different people, they were also having these enlightened experiences, these freedoms from suffering and trouble and learning a capacity for entering into relationships that were liberating for others.  He become so well know, that of course people start to revere him, consider him a teacher and in some traditions of Buddhism you will certainly find statues that people make offerings to and so on…but not a deity, no.

Questionnaire:  Thanks.

Peter:  Questions in the back there.

Question:  (Another speaker whom I could not understand at all.)  Something about wondering how you would use the model….blah, blah, blah…

Peter:  Well one of the things that is really important in Buddhist practice is, is, to question our own habits, our own ways of thinking and our own patterns of likes and dislikes…ummm….the teaching of Karma in Buddhism, everyone has probably heard the work Karma and the common popular American understanding is that “what goes around, comes around”, so action and reaction, you do something bad to people, sooner or later people do something bad to you, but the bigger picture of the teaching of Karma in Buddhism is that, if you pay close enough, detailed enough, sustained enough to your situation, you will find that there is a meticulous consonance between your own values, your intentions, your actions and the particular topography of your life experience…so your life history as it is, plays out moment by moment, day by day, month by month, is a reflection of your own values intentions and actions…so in undertaking questions about our gender identity, one of the things a Buddhist would first do is to look at that and to understand those feelings one hundred percent.  I mean to really feel what you are feeling, not to fall under the categories that are provided by the media, or by other people, but to really try to understand your own uncertainties and to see where those directions might carry you, what way will your way of thinking through the gender dilemma you might find yourself in, if you think that through in a way that leads toward compassion, equanimity, loving kindness, joy in the good fortune of others, an increasing sense of interdependence with others rather than separation from them, than it is a good thing.  But from a Buddhist standpoint, any pattern of thinking or feeling that produces suffering or trouble, either for ourselves or others, is really to be questioned and dealt with.  So there, it is not simple answers in the Buddhist tradition, it is saying take the relationship that we find ourselves in seriously….there is this term “Yatha Button”, which means things as they have come to be…sometimes we think it would be really nice to be somebody else…you wake up one morning, you look in the mirror and say “damn I wish I was somebody else”…you know a different life, a different job, a different body, a different something…and what Buddhism says is “start from where you are right now and work out from the present situation to something better, start with what you have available now”…it goes back to what Roger was saying, was talking about earlier…make the most out of the ingredients present in the given situation.  So in what way, can you take this gender dilemma, this question, from that question, from that dilemma, in what way can you increase your capacity to love, to cherish the relationships you have with all of the people you have around you and to celebrate the beauty that we do find in the world around us.  To the degree that is possible, that is very Buddhist.

Another question:  The questionnaire is saying something about crossing borders and in his final presentation this quarter….blah, blah, blah…

Peter:  One of the things, that, Buddhism is one of these teaching, that you know, the more you ask about it, the more depths there are in aspects, you get a fifteen minute version of Buddhism, you are not getting an awful lot.  But in addition to interdependence, especially in Chinese Buddhism after it comes from India and it kinda becomes indigenized in China, you start talking not just about interdependence, but interpenetration and so there is a teacher in the eighth century, Fa Zhong(sp) who is asked about this idea of non duality and everything has Buddha nature and he says well that just doesn’t really jive with the way the world is, there are a lot of different kinds of people, lots of different kinds of actions, how can all this be Buddha nature, and his reply was actually quite interesting “all things are the same precisely insofar as the differ from one another”, everything is the same precisely insofar as they differ from on another, that things are what they mean for one another.  From a Buddhist perspective what that suggests is that we don’t want to run in the direction of cultural appropriation and assimilation.  We don’t want to go there to quickly, that there is this idea of diversity that we talk all about, I mean diversity is all over college campuses and university campuses, but we really just mean a bunch of different kinds of people a bunch of different kinds of actions, a bunch of different kinds of culture, with no necessary interaction with them at all.  We talk as if you could walk in the room here today and look around and say “oh this is a very diverse group”, the way a Buddhist would use the term is to say “until you know what the quality of relationships are, playing out over time among this group of people, you can’t say a single thing about diversity, because diversity is a way of relating, that is based on mutual contributions to sustainably shared welfare, in which all things are what they mean for one another…..THE END.