BG 167: I Vow to Feed All Hungers

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Episode Description:

We’re joined this week by one of the pioneers of the socially engaged Buddhist movement, Zen Master Bernie Glassman. Although he grew up in a family that valued social action, after some years of Zen practice he had an experience that amplified his calling to serve those in need. At that point he made a vow to feed all hungers. We speak about the interconnection—and accordingly to Bernie, the inseparability—between contemplative practice and social action.

He shares details of many of the projects he has been part of, including the Greystone project in Yonkers, New York, which helped to cut homelessness in that area by three-quarters. He also shares some of the key tenets from the group that he founded, called the Zen Peacemakers. These tenets link together the “not knowing” of spiritual practice with the “loving action” of social engagement, and make it possible for us to turn our spiritual awareness into a vital force for all those in need.

Episode Links:

• Zen Peacemakers
• The Trickster: A Study in American Indian Mythology
• Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life That Matters
• Zen Peacemakers Free Newsletter on Western Socially Engaged Buddhism
• The First Symposium for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism

Transcript:

Vince: Hello, Buddhist Geeks, this is Vince Horn, and I’m joined today over Skype with a very special guest and his name is Bernie Glassman. Bernie, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me and to speak with the Buddhist Geeks.

Bernie: My pleasure.

Vince: And just a little bit of your background, though I suspect a lot of people have heard your name in the Buddhist community. You’re a Zen master in the lineage of Maezumi Roshi, who was one of the first sort of Japanese pioneers of Zen in the West, and you’re also author of several amazing books on socially engaged Buddhism and on Zen practice. You’re teaching currently, I understand, at the Maezumi Institute and also at Harvard Divinity School, so that must have been a cool job to land, teaching at Harvard.

Bernie: Well, it turns out that a number of years ago, somebody endowed a Buddhist chair at the Harvard Divinity School, and they did a search to find somebody to hold that seat and they found a woman who’s a Tibetan scholar. And the first year she was there, she found that the students were all interested in socially engaged Buddhism. So she started to develop that kind of a track and asked me if I would do some teaching along that line. So I did. It’s periodic, but it’s fun.

Vince: Nice. That’s very cool. And I suspect she asked you because you’ve got a long history of being involved and right at the forefront of the socially engaged Buddhist movement. I understand in 1982 you founded a company in Yonkers, New York, and then that became sort of the outreach for a lot of other really amazing projects. And hopefully we’ll get into some of that. So basically, though, that you’re really an important person sort of pioneering some of these ideas, and I thought it’d be fun to ask you how you got into socially engaged Buddhism. Is that something that’s always been an interest for you, of contributing back to the collective, or is that something that sort of developed after you’d started practicing Zen?

Bernie: Both.

Vince: Okay.

Bernie: That is, I grew up in Brooklyn in a family that was Jewish progressive, so I grew up in the milieu of social engagement. But then I got involved in Zen, the study of Zen, actually quite a while ago, in 1958, and by ‘65 or ‘67 I had decided to be a Zen monk and devote myself to Zen practice as I knew it then and finished my formal training, became a teacher, in—oh, about ‘74 or 5. Actually, it was, started teaching in 1970, but formally around ‘74, ‘75. Then in 1976 I had an experience which changed my whole idea of Zen practice. And that was, I was riding in a car, and I had an experience of all of the hungry ghosts in the world. And by hungry ghosts, people and things being unsatisfied, being…craving. And my experience at the time was that was all aspects of me, all of this was nothing but the oneness of life and was who I was, and a vow came up to serve all those hungers. And that led me to go deeply into socially engaged Buddhism and not do what I had thought, prior to that experience, which was staying in the Zen meditation hall and working in, with people and koans and different kinds of Zen practice. I now started to think, “How can I work in all aspects of society to help reduce those cravings and those unsatisfactions?” So from that time there was a big turning point in my life, and started to develop what I call socially engaged Buddhism as a form of practice. I define practice as being things which lead you to experience and actualize the oneness of life, the dependence of life. So I wanted to develop upayas, or ways of expedient means or types of teachings, that you could do your social engagement as a way of realizing the oneness of life. Not in an dualistic way. Not like I would go do my meditations and my whatever I was calling the Zen practices and then go back into the world and work with others. But I wanted to eliminate that duality and do the socially engaged Buddhist work as a way of obtaining, not only satisfying the needs of people, but as a way of helping people to realize the one who’s sublime.

Vince: Beautiful, and it sounds like you didn’t throw away the Zen practice but rather it’s part of something larger.

Bernie: Sure, because you know the Zen practice lead me to realize the oneness of life. If that’s the case, then everything you see is aspects of that oneness. And just like in yourself, if your hand is bleeding, you don’t just say, “Well, I got to do my practice, I can’t bother with the bleeding hand,” or if I’m hungry, “I should forget about the hunger and just do the practice.” You got to take care of all of those things. So everything that I was seeing, whether they were homeless people or constant going-on in a sea of fights or wars or whatever, those were aspects of me, and how do I make that my practice. So it was a deepening of the practice. It was expanding the venue from being just the meditation hall to all of society.

Vince: And connected with that, I understand one of the projects you’re really passionate about right now and working on a lot are these things where you’re calling Zen houses. I understand there are several of them scattered all throughout the Northeastern part of the United States including the one that you helped start originally. The original model was developed on what you started in Yonkers. I was wondering maybe if you could start by saying a little bit about the original projects and how that developed, and then maybe we could get into some of the other new Zen houses.

Bernie: Sure. We need a little history in, I think, it was 1987, somewhere around there. I did my first street retreat, that is, I went to live in the streets and took some people to live with me in the streets. It was a 1-week period; it was raining the whole time. It was during the whole week, which is Easter, Passover, Buddha’s birthday—they all come around that time. And at the end of that week, what I realized is that there were no Buddhists or dharma groups helping us in the streets. The only support that there was out there was in the Christian world.

So at that time, I said, “I’m going to start dharma centers that would work and serve the local community.” It’s the main case, people go to a dharma center to improve themselves; to become enlightened, whatever they think that means; to become stable. I wanted to have dharma centers, where that was the case, but the main focus was serving the local community, the local needs. I started in Yonkers, New York, which is a very poor area. Yonkers was the poorest part of Westchester County, which is a very wealthy part of New York. And Yonkers has the highest per capita homeless in the country. In a few years, it got another distinction of having the highest per capita AIDS in the country.

So I started to work there, and the biggest need in that community was homeless families. And I went into a holistic model building permanent housing, creating jobs, working with issues of addiction, with broken-up families, with all the problems that you’d find if you work with the homeless or the very poor. And I spent a fair amount of time doing that in Yonkers. And during that time, we actually, in Yonkers, due to our efforts, the homeless population went down by three-quarters. And I looked at the holistic model, looking at the whole…all the aspects of the needs of people, people that wanted to get out of the welfare system and what was it that was keeping them from being able to do that. We built permanent housing, we created jobs, we created child care, and created places, housing for people with AIDS, a health center for HIV…folks. We did the whole picture, working with broken-up families, with addiction.

That’s still happening, that is called Greystone in Yonkers. After I left, they kept growing and I still go down there about once a month to mix with the people living there, people being served. There are about 180 people on staff now, most of them came from the streets, a lot of ex-drug dealers. So that’s a rather large and it sort of engrossed me for quite a number of years. And it’s just a couple of years ago that I decided that now is the time to go on a smaller scale and try to create dharma centers which I’m calling Zen houses. And eventually, there’ll be maybe dharma houses or Buddhist houses because it’s not just for Zen folks. But I’m calling them, at this point, Zen houses, in which the Zen practice is going on for the people that are serving or training people how to run those kind of houses, and the main issue being how to take care of the community. How to do assessments to find out the needs of the community, needs of the families, needs of the people, and how to help get them jobs and train them in jobs, create businesses, and doing all of this from what I call a spiritual basis. And by spiritual, I mean, the realization and actualization of the oneness of life. So how do you do those kind of works such that, in the midst of doing them or being served by them, you’re led to realize and actualize oneness. So I spend a lot of time on kinds of ways to do that.

We’ve just started the Zen house. I don’t like to call it a movement yet, I hope it becomes a movement. That is, I hope many people copy what I’m doing, and that’s actually happening. But, first from when we started was in the Appalachia, in Pennsylvania Appalachia, training people to garden, there’s an organic garden called the Ahimsa Farm with different projects in the Appalachia. We’re putting a lot of energy into our mother house, the Zen House, which is located in Western Massachusetts, in a small place called Montague, that’s where the Maezumi Institute is. And we have a mother house zendo here and we have now a mother house—Zen House. We’re serving meals to people in poor towns. This is the Appalachia of Massachusetts, the area where we live. And on Buddha’s birthday in a couple of weeks, we’ll be opening our first community meal at our facility on a Saturday, and we’re leading up to doing it every Saturday then eventually every day. In our area, as I said, a very poor…there are no meals served on weekends. And most families are afraid to bring their kids to a soup kitchen.

What we have created is the soup kitchen but not really because it’s going to be a fun place for families and kids. There’ll be music, there’ll be toys, there’ll be hikes, there’ll be making puppets, people will take home puppets. We’ll have puppet shows. We’ll have a resident doctor, chiropractor, massage, so there’ll be a wellness center as well. So it will be a place where people would, instead of being afraid to go to, will wait for the time when they can come to get their meal because they’ll also get medical checkups and they’ll be all kinds of fun things for the kids. We’ll have bands playing and all kinds of stuff like that. So I hope that model spreads through the dharma world with people doing that kind of thing.

Vince: That’s fantastic. While you’re describing this, I’m really reflecting on how that sort of thing impacts the communities you’re in. I’m wondering how it does or how you’ve seen it impact the people in the communities. And also, how does it impact the people that are serving the communities? I’m just wondering what it will be like to be practicing meditation intensively and also really engaged in this type of work—like, how that maybe would be different than just if I we’re practicing meditation?

Bernie: Sure. In Zen, as you know, there are koan studies developed and different practices, different ways of Zen meditation developed. And our key goal, though, is to come to an experience of what we call, the source of life, or the state of not knowing, represented by Vairocana Buddha. No fixed idea, so you’ll have all these phrases like letting go, and as the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland would say, “Off with the head”—letting go practices. So, part of our work, when people come to serve or to be involved, obviously, they are coming with a lot of conditioning as to what a homeless person is like, what poor people are like.

So, part of the work first is to train and how to do this work without any conditioning. How to greet everybody, whether it’s the server or the people being served, as a beautiful aspect of life and without labeling, “Oh, that person is homeless or that person was a drug addict or that person is a dealer.” Forgetting all of the labels we have; how to work from that place

We actually have 3 tenets of the Zen peacemakers—the first is the state of not knowing. So, we do a lot of work in bringing people, plunging them into that experience of not knowing. The second is bearing witness, that is, staying in that, becoming, grokking. What it is? What’re the kids like? What are the people like? What will you serve? Grokking in the situation. So we provide practices for doing that. If you can do that, our third tenet just comes naturally, and I call that “loving actions,” service.

For example, when people go in the streets with me, and the first time you’re on the streets, you have no rush and a way of figuring out what’s happening, so you are, you’re plunge into that place of not knowing. Then we stay in the streets, so you’re bearing witness to that, and out of that comes loving actions. There’s been nobody that’s been with me on the streets, and I’ve done street retreats around the world…Certainly, hundreds of them, maybe thousand people that have gone with me in the streets. Nobody has gone on the streets and then been able to look away when they see somebody on the streets as homeless. They always will go up and say, “How are you doing? What’s your name?” That is, love comes out, rather than avoidance, rather than a loss of dignity. You give dignity to everyone and everything you see. That just naturally comes out of that kind of practice.

Vince: And how have you seen it impact the communities that you’ve been in? How has it changed the lives of those that you are serving?

Bernie: It opens it up, it’s so fascinating. I call it clubs, we all belong to clubs, and we tend to invite only the people that think the way we are into our clubs. So, the Democrats invite the Democrats, the Republicans invite the Republicans, the poor hang out with the poor, the rich hang out with the rich, the geeks will hang out with the geeks [Laughter]. We all hang out with those who have our similar interests. So when you start working in the community at large, all of a sudden, that window opens up and you’re bearing witness to so many different aspects of life. So you brought it, you would enlarge; therefore, that becomes a way of becoming at one with everything, because that’s what you’re doing, you’re not staying in a small group.

One of the things I do is I also trained a little as a clown or a trickster, more like what you see in the native Americans, the coyote. And there’s a wonderful book called “The Trickster,” in which it says that the trickster’s world is the world…the cracks between these clubs. So when we form clubs, the way we form them is we don’t invite certain people in. The ones we don’t invite in, we’ve got to figure out what to do and society does different things, from avoidance, that’s the most common, we just avoid those people; to the extreme, like Hitler did, we’ll kill all the people that are different than us. In between, you’ve got beating up of gays, you’ve got lynching of blacks, you’ve got prisons. You’ve got all kinds of systems for dealing with the people that don’t fit your club. And the trickster or the clown works in with all of those aspects that don’t fit your club. So, in a way, my dharma teachings of helping to realize the wonders of life is working with those parts of yourself that you have expelled, either by avoiding them or worse.

Vince: And do you find, for people that maybe had been involved in Buddhist practice, but haven’t really ever engaged in this type of social engagement, do you find that there are certain things for people that keep them from engaging in that way? I mean, you’re talking about the clubs and I could certainly see that in my own experience. But I’m wondering if there are other things that keep people from wanting to engage or make them afraid to do so.

Bernie: One of the books I wrote is called “Instructions to the Cook.” It actually chronicles the work I did in Yonkers, at Greystone, and gives the Buddhist values behind it. And there’s a number of themes in that book, one of which is to take the ingredients you have and make the best meal possible and offer it. That is not to work the things you don’t have but work with the things you have and offer them. And when I went on a book tour, when the book was published and they sent me on a tour, so many people came up to me saying that, these were Buddhist practitioners, and they said that reading the book gave them the freedom to do things that they had been told by their teachers and by their peers that you can’t do anything until you’re fully enlightened, or until you’re enlightened to some…whatever.

So, I think in your early days there was pressure and people not to get involved in social engagements. In fact, when I started to do this in a very big way I was heavily criticized by many teachers, and this was a long time ago, but many people said that you can’t do that. You got to just stay in your club. Just meditate or do other things, as if there were any of them that were just meditating. They were all working in one way or another with their Madison Avenue advertising, or business, or whatever. They were working, but they were afraid. They thought it was not appropriate to be doing things until you were fully enlightened or enlightened to some stage, and I don’t know what those stages are. And I pushed the idea that where you are, what you are doing right now, just look at your ingredients and do something. And the very doing, the offering of the meal, that is if you take the meal, and that’s the metaphor I use through the book. If you take your ingredients, you know you go through a refrigerator, maybe there’s only a few things there—some baloney, some bread, maybe some lettuce. You could say, “Well there’s not enough of the right ingredients so I won’t do anything. I won’t make any meal,” or you could say, “I’ll take what I have, make a meal, offer it and then look for more ingredients.” If you offer it, all of a sudden people will arrive and they’ll pitch in and they’ll settle for…and it grows. So yeah, I think there was a lot of prejudice in the early days in the Buddhist world that we shouldn’t be doing things like socially-engaged Buddhism.

Vince: That’s really interesting. And I know, kind of connected with this whole topic, your Zen Peacemakers is organizing this summer a big gathering of western socially-engaged Buddhist activists and it’s a symposium that’s being held in Massachusetts. I was wondering if you could say a little bit about that conference, or that symposium and sort of what the intention is behind it.

Bernie: Sure. I’m getting up there in years. I decided I want to put a fair amount of my energy into promoting socially-engaged Buddhism, and I started to look around for who’s doing and doing what. It was not so easy to find out who is engaged in this way, and when you mentioned socially-engaged Buddhism, people normally thought of the Asians. They thought of Thich Nhat Hanh, the Dali Lama. And I knew that there were many people in the West, and by West I mean everywhere outside of Asia. I knew there were many people doing socially-engaged Buddhism, but who knew who they were? So I decided I would create a symposium and invite people in. And I started off with inviting what I called the pioneers. These were people I knew. They were older folks, they had been doing it for a while. And then I started looking for others, and then people started calling me.

So we now have 60 presenters…60 people who are doing all kinds of social-engaged work. And they’ll be coming together. Many of them will have never met each other, so this will be an occasion for them to meet each other, and then it’s also an occasion for people who want to work in those areas, want to do this kind of socially-engaged Buddhism. They can come and meet people that have been doing the work, so it’s almost like a job fair. They could come, they could just be inspired, or they could say, “Hey, I’d like to volunteer,” or, “Do you have jobs where I can actually work in these?” So, it’s sort of gathering a clan. And we had to limit the number of people because people kept asking “Can we come too?”, “Could we present?” The idea would be to do it, hopefully, on a yearly basis and the next one that I do, what I want to do is bring the generations together. So we’ll have panels on ecology, on contemplative care, on prison work, on conflict resolution, mental health. All kinds of work. Next year, I want to bring…each panel would have half the younger generation and half the older generation—that kind of mixing. So part of my joy is sort of connecting people together and bringing people that don’t normally mix because they’re in separate clubs. So, it’s to create bigger and bigger clubs.

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