Good morning. The first Saturday of the month is usually our children's program. So we have a few kids here today. Good morning. I wanted to talk today, partly because of the children, about friendliness and also because I was just in Malaysia for 10 days at a conference, Buddhist conference. So, kids often know a lot more about friends and friendship and what a friend is, just because that's the daily way of things with other kids. So there's a children's book, it's called A Friend is Someone Who Likes You. And I don't know if you're familiar with that book, but it's kind of old-fashioned. And the title is, A Friend is Someone Who Likes You, but also a friend is someone, of course, who you like.

[01:07]

In the book, the author writes, Sometimes you don't know who are your friends. Sometimes they are there all the time, but you walk right past them and don't notice. And then you think you don't have any friends. Then you must stop hurrying and rushing so fast. and move very slowly and look around carefully. Sometimes you have to find your friend. I thought that was kind of interesting for a children's book. How do you find your friends? At school? Do you find your friends at school? Well, anyone can answer. How do you find your friends? I mean, we're all children, you know, to some extent. You do? A lot of friends? Yeah. What are their names? That's how it is.

[02:15]

How about you? Well, another thing about friends and about being children is we're shy. I was far more shy than these three when I was a kid. So I know it's hard to sort of talk about things. But could you just say what some of the things you do with your friends? Like what makes you... think of them as a friend. Yeah. And do you ever kind of argue or laugh? Yeah, that's it. What kind of things do you think?

[03:39]

And you kind of take care of each other when you're doing that? See if I'll get hurt? Was she a little scared? Well, I wanted to thank the kids for coming, and you're welcome to stay for the talk, but you also can be friends with each other. some of the people here, if you'd like to do that. So thank you for coming. So it's kind of a mystery how we find our friends and how we know someone is a friend.

[04:52]

And This conference that I went to was in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. So I was going to a culture which with I was not familiar. And I was going kind of by myself. Earthland Manuel, who I think some of you know, she works at Zen Center and practices here, was invited to the conference to present a paper. And in some ways she felt alone too. And she asked her partner to come with her. If her partner hadn't come with her, she would have been the only African-American at this conference. So she and I, and I was the only American Soto Buddhist woman, whatever I am. I'm not quite sure, and I'm going to talk about that a little bit.

[05:57]

we were asked to chant the Heart Sutra, and now all the other groups of nuns, there were like at least ten of them, and they were just Earthlin and me. So we did it, and before we did, we talked about what it felt like for each of us to be kind of there alone. And in a certain way, I think that my relationship with Earthland changed in that conversation. I think we got to know each other in a way we never would have otherwise. And we got up and we chanted the Heart Sutra, and it was beautiful, and a lot of people said something to us about how wonderful it was, and we were probably the clearest and the loudest, even though it was just the two of us, and I don't know why that happened or how it happened. But it was difficult. And I don't know quite how to describe that, but the language issues, was I a Japanese Buddhist?

[07:03]

No, I'm not Japanese. But I wear Japanese clothes, you know, and this oddity of the situation. Well, Sakidita is the group that does these conferences, and this was the ninth one, and they've happened every two years since, I think, 1987. And the first one was in Bodhaya, India. And Sakyadita means daughters of the Buddha. So the theme this year was Buddhist women in a global, multicultural community. And with the combination of the lay and ordained participants and people who were doing presentations, it was very multicultural and global. we were exemplifying the theme. So on the first day, one of the speakers was Sister Sumitra. She was born in Singapore, Chinese background and multilingual, and she lives and teaches mostly in Australia.

[08:15]

She talked about spiritual cultivation and liberation. and how spiritual maturity, she said, is pure love, or the realization of Maitreya, the future Buddha, whose name means the friend. And she said this pure love is developed through faith, honesty, confidence, and sincerity, and much more through honesty with ourselves. And she said, pure love was having an unbound heart or a natural compassion accompanied by the awareness of things as they are. Now, I think for most of us, honesty is something like saying what we think, believing in something or

[09:23]

avoiding telling overt lies. But I think the honesty that Sister Sumitra was talking about is a little more drastic because its context, as she said, is the awareness of things as they are. You know, not as we would like them to be or they should be or they could be. And I think this kind of drastic honesty seeing things as they are, is unbinding. It untangles us in a way. Because it undoes, is that it? Unties a lot of our notions and presumptions that I think keep our hearts closed to the things that we find uncomfortable and unfamiliar. and also keep us closed to the things that could change our lives, because we don't actually really want our lives to change when we think about it.

[10:33]

One definition for samsara is the fact that we hold on to our suffering because it's so familiar. We know what it is, and so we just keep doing it over and over and over because we know it. Not because it makes us happy, but because it's familiar. And naturally enough, we fear change more than we desire our freedom or our happiness. But I think that a bridge for that to happiness and freedom is friendliness. Now, most of the papers at the conference were much more intellectual, and dealt with sort of sociological issues and issues for women and that sort of thing, and much more so than Sister Sumitra. But I felt she gave the whole conference a context for how to listen to the papers, how to talk to each other.

[11:44]

For me, I mean, as I said, I found my role as a representative of Zen Center or American Zen or whatever, kind of uncomfortable and not really genuine, I have to say. And I think that as I thought about this, as I was, you know, there at the conference and seeing all these other people from these Asian traditions, I realized partly what that was about. at least my experience of Zen Center, and that's my only real Buddhist experience that I've been here for since 1987, same as when this Sakyadita started. So what I think is kind of profound about Zen Center is how individualistic each of the teachers are in their experience and their background and their training.

[12:45]

But I'm not sure, but I think none of the teachers have a traditional Japanese Soto Zen Buddhist training as they do it in Japan or education. You know, like a lot of these women have PhDs in Buddhist studies and that sort of thing. And I'm like, hmm, not me. And they're bilingual or trilingual or multilingual. among Asian countries, and most of them spoke English and some other European languages. So what was I representing? Who was I there? It was a very curious experience. And then in our tradition, no one takes public vows of celibacy. And in fact, at Zen Center, as I understand and experience it, what's encouraged is marriage, partnership, family issues, that sort of thing.

[13:54]

And people who are single or claim celibacy are actually thought to be a little odd. And, you know, this is not a judgment or anything. It's sort of an interesting... way for me to be there. Because all of these nuns either had taken those vows publicly or were in process, in training, and going to take those vows at some point. And then the other participants were lay people. So who was I? Where did I fit? And among all the other challenges of being there, I was just looking around wondering who I was, noticing the affinities I felt with the other nuns, and then the affinities I felt with the lay practitioners and participants. But basically we were all in the same boat in terms of our situation there.

[15:01]

The temple where the conference took place was quite a large temple outside of Kuala Lumpur. So there was nowhere to go. It was almost empty around the temple. And when we got there, we were told to leave our luggage and go to the registration. Everyone had to do this. It was excruciatingly complicated and slow. I'm not quite sure why. And we were given some stuff and little identification tags and I had to give them our ID and went through these whole things. And it all made sense, but most of us had been traveling. I mean, I had just been traveling for about 24 hours without much sleep, that sort of thing. And then we went to the sleeping area, and it was a huge room with a marble floor, and wires had been strung up, and all of those wires were these partitions, cloth

[16:08]

partitions with little openings in them. And in each partition, there were about 18 beds and there were about 12 of these sections. Lots of people. And all the beds and the pillows were wrapped in plastic. And I think that had something to do with the dampness. It was very, they have almost 100% humidity every day there. And it rains every day. And so the beds were kind of hot. to sleep in and very crinkly, so whenever anybody moved. And then a lot of the younger participants, I think, found it sort of frustrating. It was kind of geared, I don't know exactly how to describe it. I mean, I don't want to divide people by age in that way, but it was, you know, the presenters were all university professors or very senior professors. nuns and that sort of thing.

[17:09]

So at night, a lot of the younger participants went wild. And they would sing and scream and laugh and talk and all these different languages everywhere and the lights would be going on and off, you know. And none of us got very much sleep. Not them, not anyone. So... After a couple of days, some of us got, I mean, I caught myself whimpering a couple of times because I, you know, I'd been like traveling and then no sleep and then all this input, you know, all this sort of overwhelm. And some of the women decided to go get in a hotel room. But I thought to myself, no, I, I'm just gonna surrender. And, um, I mean, and I was getting up for the meditation every morning, which was fairly odd. I mean, we would go into this Buddha hall, and there were these sort of Zappu things, and I brought something to put under my knees, you notice, and then the floor was marble.

[18:18]

And the lights would be completely bright, and somebody from one of the groups of nuns would lead the meditation. These people would just be taking our pictures the whole time. I mean, these flashes were in our face and all around us. Very interesting. So, because all of this was being recorded in all the newspapers in Malaysia. It was a big deal. Every time we went to, on our temple tour, almost every temple had a huge banner out saying, Welcome, 9th Sakya Dita Conference on Buddhism. I thought, gee, they all know us. I mean, that was very interesting. So, surrender. And recognizing how grateful I was, and we all were, to the people at this temple. All the people running the conference were volunteers, and they stayed up all night, you know,

[19:22]

making copies of the papers to give to people the next day because of course everybody's papers were late and so they were making copies until like two in the morning and doing other stuff I don't know what they were doing but the food was really good, and not all of it was familiar, and so that was interesting. And just the generosity and the kindness of the people at the temple was amazing. A lot of the temple members participated in the conference, men and women, and they were often, almost every meal, shared a table with people who were from Kuala Lumpur and were participating. So here we were in this very challenging sort of physical environment and a kind of challenging social environment with all the different languages and culture shock a little bit and an intellectual challenge too because there were lots of issues that were really important and some of them I didn't quite understand because of the

[20:40]

cultural differences. But there were general issues about Buddhist women, lay and ordained, and then there were concerns about ordination of women, which is different in some Asian countries than we can imagine, and then educational and other kinds of intellectual opportunities, questions about religious authority, teaching authority, social activism, and community service. And a lot of those issues were interesting to me because I think community service is part of our deepening of our practice. And so there's a lot of emphasis on that in the Malaysian community that I experienced. All the temples had... some kind of housing for elderly. One had an orphanage.

[21:41]

The temple we stayed at had a program for stroke and dialysis patients and all kinds of stuff like that. So one thing that happened when I decided to surrender was that I had a lot more contact with the Malaysian people who were doing the conference, the volunteers and the temple people, and accidentally got permission to do my laundry in their washer and dryer, which was a big issue. There were clothes hanging on all the wires, and there were notes that we should not do our laundry, but it didn't matter. There were cases hanging here and there. But anyway, there I was. I just, for some accidental reason, I was allowed to use this washer and dryer. And it had to do with surrender.

[22:43]

There was something going on there. One day there was a huge storm. Every day there was a rainstorm, but one day there was a huge storm. And there was this lightning, you know, right overhead. And instead of going to the discussion groups, I had taken with me this little knitting project. And I got a chair and I sat outside. I guess when it rains there, it's not cold. It's a little cooler, thank heaven, but not cold. And I was sitting there knitting and this young Chinese nun came over and started to ask me about my knitting and we started to talk. And it turned out she wants to come to the States and she plans to do that. I met her and then during the conference we saw each other several times and talked. So these little moments. And while I was sitting there, a lot of other people from the conference saw me doing that and they all got chairs and came and sat outside and just relaxed, you know, just and by themselves, which we were not very rarely by ourselves.

[23:56]

Well, this all got a little more interesting and intense when we went on the temple tour. at the end of the conference. Three days on buses, driving for hours and hours and hours, and getting to these bizarre, for me, cave temples and things. I mean, we'd go in, and you'd be on this air-conditioned bus, and then we would go out, and the blast of warm, humid air... And then go into these cave temples and they're all dripping moisture, you know. And then in the walls are set these statues of arahats and kuan yin and Buddhas. And then these huge altars, some of them built into the stone. And in the back of one of them was a huge garden. And it was the hottest I was in all the time I was at Malaysia. The sun was beating straight down and the garden was surrounded by these sort of low mountains and cliffs.

[24:58]

And there was this small lake or large pond, I'm not quite sure what you would call it, that was full of lotus flowers. And I was like, am I dreaming? You know, because I was so hot. And it was just like, so it was amazing. And on that tour, of course, I met a lot more of the other nuns and women who were on the tour. I mean, who had come to the conference, so lots of talking. And one of the temples we went to had a statue of Kuan Yin at the very top, and she must have been two or three hundred feet tall. And she stands up there and she's pouring out the water of compassion just like... Anyway, I have a picture of her. And on the way up to that temple and down, it was all lined with shops selling food and clothing and that sort of thing. So that was our first opportunity to spend any money, which was curious after a few days of... So, I just got back and so I know a lot of what I'm doing is just sort of giving you a feeling or an atmosphere for what happened.

[26:19]

But I'd like to say a little bit about, you know, the sort of more formal part of the conference. And I brought home all the papers. So if anyone wants to see what people talked about, I can make those available. And a lot of the presentations, they just read from their paper. And some of them kind of read and presented. Some just kind of... and talked. But there were very few of them that did not interest me. As I say, there were a couple that culturally, I just couldn't quite take them in. Plus, I hadn't slept for days and days, so that had something to do with it. But most, there was only a couple that I couldn't follow. The keynote address was given by Sandra Su, who is a professor at the University of Washington, and I'm sorry I'm not remembering everything specifically, but she, during her keynote address, she talked about something that I've often been concerned about, and that is how we romanticize Asia and things Asian.

[27:36]

And that was part of my dilemma being there. Who am I? You know, I'm wearing this Asian outfit, but I'm Who am I? Am I Asian? Am I Buddhist? So I think that one of the things that kind of troubles me in my life here at Zen Center is that I know this is done out of respect and about an effort to understand Buddhism and our Japanese roots, but that we often wear sort of Japanese clothing. outside of our sort of formal practice events, like meditation and say, this situation where I'm doing something formal. And so I was looking at all the other nuns when I was there, and they were all dressed from their own culture. And even their own cases were specific to their culture.

[28:39]

And I thought, what does an American Buddhist wear? What do I wear underneath my oquesa? What kind of oquesa do I wear? Am I? Who am I? What am I? You know? It was just a wonderful experience, and I learned a lot, and I watched these women with their clothes. There was particularly interesting to me were these Meiji's from Thailand. And they're called Meiji's because they are not allowed to ordain. And they wear white. And they tie this rectangle of white fabric around them and pin it with a safety pin or with a straight pin. And I thought, that's another formula with the ocasa. How amazing, you know? And here I've spent hours and days and months sewing my ocasa stitch by stitch. How interesting, you know, that it's all in this... context of these different, and some of the ocasas were not, like these, they had the little flaps sort of loose.

[29:44]

And this was, you know, a very formal ocasas. And when I wore mine, there were some nuns sitting behind me looking at it and fussing with it, you know, and I was like, wondering who I was. Of course, you know, they were wondering as much as I was. But anyway, I was thinking about how Buddhism sort of has gone from country to country and each country has kind of adopted the okesa and worn it over the clothing of that culture or country and how that's going to look here. So in my mind, I've actually been designing my clothes and I have an experimental outfit that I'm going to try to make. I'm serious. I'm serious, actually. I get very uncomfortable because I feel like this imitation of another culture has a certain racist connotation to it in that romanticizing.

[30:49]

I'm just uncomfortable. I'm not saying it's wrong. I'm just feeling this out as best I can. I also thought about whether there would ever be a women's training temple in the United States. And for one day, I kind of off and on fantasized about myself establishing this women's training temple. Where were we going to go to school? Who was going to teach there? What would we wear? That was part of it. These American Buddhist clothes. But it was, how are we going to identify ourselves? Because there's a certain honesty to wearing religious clothing. You know, this is who I am. This is how I wear my hair. I shave my head. What is the meaning of that? And it gives people an opportunity to see what religious vocation looks like.

[31:52]

So anyway, I don't know if American women would want to train in a women's temple. Would we ever sort of move in that direction? I was curious. As I said, I was intrigued by the Meiji's from Thailand, partly because they were so well-educated. They were all master's degrees and working towards PhDs, or they had their PhDs. And one of them, Kitsana Raksacham, gave a presentation, and in it she said, In Thai society, Buddhist nuns are not completely accepted, since Thai law does not officially recognize them as religious persons. When monks become ordained, they are automatically respected and receive support from society. Without this recognition, no laws protect nuns, and their lives are difficult. Now, this group of women, they were just so open and open.

[32:58]

They were the first women we met. We met them in the airport. We happened to arrive around the same time and went to the temple with them. And all through the whole conference, I ended up, like, talking with them quite a bit. And Meichi Amphai Tan Son Bun describes Meichis this way. A Meichi is a laywoman who is ordained as a female renunciate and leaves lay life behind with little concern about society outside the monastery, wears white clothes, shaves her hair, eats two meals a day like the monks, and chants in the temple. The Meiji's objective is to take the three jewels as their refuge, learn the Dhamma, practice meditation to gain tranquility, concentrate on purifying their minds to become free from defilements, and cultivate merit in order to reach the ultimate goal of Nibbana. So Meichi Anfai Tansom Boon has a BA in Business Administration and Psychology and did graduate courses in social work at the University of Washington.

[34:12]

And she received her master's degree with honors in Buddhist studies, in the international program at Maha Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. I just thought it was interesting to juxtapose her definition of a Meiji with her intellectual and educational background. So all of these women from all these different Buddhist traditions Some of us would get up every morning for meditation, and I was very grateful for it because sort of balanced out not sleeping, which it does in my daily life here too in a certain way. And I don't mean that it offsets, I just mean it's balancing. And so each morning a representative from one of these groups of nuns, and I was in some mild terror, they would ask me to do this, but I was ready.

[35:16]

in case they did, would lead the meditation. So I described what it was like and how we would be sitting there and all the flashbulbs would be going. But it was extremely energizing and uplifting to sit in that space with these women who were really seasoned, serious meditators, or deeply devotional practitioners. And at one meal, I was sitting at a table with a group of Malaysian women from the temple, and we were talking and I said, well, for me, my devotional practice arose through my meditation. And they said, oh, you know, my interest in meditation came from my devotional practice. And so it was interesting how we could sort of meet and be coming from you know like this the way I understood Buddhism was meditation but out of that came this way of seeing things of presenting myself at the altar of understanding what this hands gesture meant and

[36:42]

When we would go into the Buddha hall in the morning, everyone would do three full brows before they sat on their cushions. So I started to do it too. And so, you know, in the... Actually, on the temple tour as well, when we stayed overnight at a couple of temples in the morning, they would have a meditation and chanting session. And I and all the other ordained nuns would be... We just do it in this funny way. And it was really, I guess it was reassuring. And in the midst of all the discomforts of that traveling and being on the bus for so many hours and hours and having to talk almost the whole time, socialize almost completely all day long, those meditation warnings. Very helpful.

[37:53]

So then one afternoon presentation, and this is still on the theme of friendship and multicultural, global, Buddhist women. One afternoon was titled Dharma and Cross-Cultural Communication. And Pit Chang Chang presented a paper entitled Communicating Effectively in the Buddhist Community. And this is what she said. Generally, we prefer to spend time with people who are similar to us rather than different from us because we experience interaction predictability. with people who have similar habits and outlooks as us. Among people with dissimilar habits and communication rules, we experience interaction unpredictability. In an unfamiliar cultural environment, we experience emotional vulnerability and threat.

[38:59]

It is worth investing time and effort into dealing with emotional vulnerability, which is part of an intercultural learning journey as it brings diversity into our lives. When she said that, I was just like, thank you, you know, for bringing that up, that sort of vulnerability we feel when we try to cross over cultures and relationships living lifestyles and class differences even. I know that in my experience, I grew up in sort of a middle class environment, but lower class standards because of our low income level. So sometimes when I've spoken to people who are from more middle class backgrounds, I don't always know what they're talking about. It's this sort of disconnect about values.

[40:03]

And I know more about it now, but that was partly true in college, where people would say what they wanted to do with their lives, and I would just think, I don't get it. They'd have these plans about their lives, about professions, and that sort of thing. And for me to... To do that out of the sort of low-income reality that I was familiar with, the clothes you would need to have a good job, you know, and what it would take to go out into the world on my own without, like, a whole family supporting me, which my family couldn't, was very hard for me to sort of take in. So anyway, those kinds of differences, and I noticed some of you looking puzzled, and I'm like, Yeah, it's weird, you know, why would I have that difficulty? But it's just... So, I appreciated her bringing up this vulnerability, and I remembered Earthland and I having that conversation at the beginning of the conference about her feeling about being the only African American, my feeling that I was the only American Japanese Buddhist or something.

[41:20]

What were we doing, you know? And I don't think that that quality, that vulnerability is often brought up when we talk about multiculturalism or when we do our diversity trainings and that sort of thing. And I think that part of that is that vulnerability is often interpreted as weakness. And what I think it often is is just that It's not our favorite thing to look at our fears. And we just don't want to do it. And yet, that's the sort of key to understanding ourselves and others, actually. And I thought about, you know, this sort of what Pit Chang Chang called the intercultural learning is similar, you know, to our efforts of friendship.

[42:22]

there's this mysterious sort of effort you make and sometimes you make mistakes or you say something and maybe that other person doesn't understand or... But you just, because your effort is friendship, it sort of happens in this atmosphere of sort of mutual discomfort and mutual forgiveness. So... If we can do that in our sort of daily interactions of friendliness, I think we can do it in all of our sort of intercultural learning situations. Before the temple tour, some of the women who had been there for the conference were going to leave. one of the women who'd presented a paper and I'd spoken to her a few times, told me, she said, you know, I really appreciated your calm presence.

[43:31]

It helped me so much. I was like, what? And a lot of other people told me that too. And I just thought that was so interesting, you know, in the context of my surrendering to the situation. And when we returned, From the temple tour, we were all packing and putting our things away and throwing stuff away and saying goodbye. And I wrote down my address to bring it to the young Chinese nun who I'd met. And actually, I'm not using anyone's names except the people whose names were published for the conference itself, just for privacy reasons. That's why I'm calling her the young Chinese nun, just so you know. But anyway, I went to give her my address, and she said, Oh, I was always so happy whenever I saw you. Who knows, you know, these odd friendships that you make, you know. So in my time there, you know, I met and interacted with women from so many different cultures and, you know, they with me from my culture.

[44:37]

And there was one Vietnamese nun who had lived in the Bay Area for many years and had a family here. And when her children grew up, she told her family, I'm going back to Vietnam to become a nun. And so she was in the conference. And at one temple, she lost her shoes. So I said, OK, what did they look like? I'll see if I can find them. So I was looking all over because, you know, in the temples, there were shoes everywhere that were public. that, you know, because you wear, you don't wear shoes in some places, and you do wear them here, in other places, just like here. So I think somebody thought her shoes were general shoes. So I found them for her, and I told her where they were and everything. So she goes, oh, thank you, you don't wear everything. A little while later, I saw her going like this. She lost them again. And so we were laughing. Anyway, it was just these funny little interactions, you know, that I have with people, and then find out so many things about them. And finally the temple gave her a new pair of shoes and they were bright blue.

[45:42]

She was laughing, but very funny. So with a lot of these women I exchanged, you know, information. And you never know, you know, if you'll keep in touch, but I think with some of them I will. And some of them I just might meet again at Buddhist events, who knows. I began my talk saying that I was going to talk about friendliness. And for me, friendliness is a primary ingredient to spiritual maturity. And I also think, as you have already said, it's essential to our intercultural understanding and even a kind of integration. I think it includes the courage to make mistakes.

[46:45]

And we need to learn or remember that we know how to make mistakes. And one of the things that you need in order to learn to make mistakes or be willing to make mistakes is courage. And in Buddhism, they say one of the characters of Bodhisattva is fearlessness. And I don't think that fearlessness is about not being afraid. Fear is important. It's information. It's about vulnerability, which I was referring to earlier. But what fearlessness is about is a willingness to go on no matter what happens. You just keep going. And I think it's based on a trust in ourselves and others.

[47:49]

And I think as Sister Sumitra said, it's the nature of an unbound heart marked by honesty and an awareness of things as they are. Thank you very much.

[48:10]

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