Buddhist Encounters：Finding a Home in the Human Condition

Introduction
When I started to work on these lectures, I was not prepared for what I would find and the changes that are occurring right now as you read these words. Much of what I expected to say, had to be abandoned or rewritten. What this means is that by the time I wrote a lecture and finally gave it or prepared it for publication, developments in society had shifted and within a short period of time, the reality moved away from the words that I was saying.
It is a daunting task to try to comprehend what is happening in our world, much less give guidance for how to deal with the staggering events that seem so overwhelming. James Baldwin reminds us that “history is not the past, it is the present.” We are in the midst of history-making at this very moment. The Coronavirus not only affected human bodies, it infected economies, production of goods, and education. The pandemic that has created such havoc in the world came at a time when we already had major issues of human life: inequality where less than ten percent of the population had over ninety percent of the world’s wealth; migration of millions of people from underdeveloped economies were on the move into the wealthier regions; population was growing rapidly adding over one billion five hundred million in three decades; life expectancy averages increased from sixty-five to seventy in the new century; people over sixty years of age doubled from the number in 1990. Population increase was not universal: the birthrate of North American, Europe, and Japan is not sufficient to maintain current numbers of citizenry. At the same time, large-scale growth, in Sub-Saharan Africa and Western Eurasia births, are shifting population density and even in the face of lower birth rates in some regions, the overall number of humans on our planet continues to increase at a rapid rate.
This is not the first time that humans have faced such disruption of normal life. As a child, I listened to stories about the issues of a pandemic. My mother in her late teen years was in training to become a nurse in 1918 when the last major pandemic occurred—the flu—that is estimated to have killed fifty million people. Her children remember how she insisted on lots of hand washing and not touching our eyes or face, seen by us to be inconvenient and unnecessary. Only now that we have experienced a similar outbreak and understand her concerns, all of us wish she was still alive so we could apologize to her for being so resistant to her wise advice.
In 1947, Albert Camus wrote a fictional account titled Plague, of an epidemic in a mythical Algerian town that eventually killed all of the inhabitants because the population was too slow to change their habits of living. It became a best seller because people could identify with the message. They had just suffered through a second World War that had killed millions and leveled many of their great cities. Just as we still try to comprehend the destruction of World War II and continue to ask the question of what went wrong that society could be so self-destructive, so too will people look back to this present time. They will judge us, asking the question of who handled the crisis in the best way. They may well ask the question “What did Buddhists do during that moment in history?”
Does Buddhism have teachings that can be relevant to our extraordinary history of today? I believe it does.
In many ways the pandemic that has changed the course of human history, reminds me of the story told about the young Siddhartha when he took a journey into the world and saw four striking examples of life. Just as we were forced to acknowledge illness, especially among elderly people, with subsequent death for many, so Siddhartha saw: a person suffering from disease; old people bent with age and weakness; the most disturbing of all, a corpse surrounded by mourners. It has been said to be a metaphor for the stages of life, but in our present experience, illness, old age, and death became realities, suddenly affecting the global human population in unprecedented fashion.
At first Siddhartha riding through the crowded city streets, was certain that what he witnessed happened to others not to him or his family, and like the people in Camus’ novel, was resistant to a full acceptance of the world before him and its implications. Fortunately, he was not alone in the chariot, his driver was there to give him help and over and over repeated the news that what he was witnessing was the destiny of all humans. It was shattering to the youth to realize this unexpected and unwanted knowledge of reality.
No longer a metaphor, the Three Great Messengers of Illness, Old Age, and Death lurk as shadows. Let me not be too grim, I have had a full life and many of you who are reading this have helped to make it so. The Three Great Messengers are in fact wonderful teachers and keep us from such destructive behavior as arrogance and feeling entitled to have exactly what we want and demand. They show us that we are all brothers and sisters in this life and what we share can be far greater than our differences. It is the ultimate intimacy to share illness, old age, and death with every living being, every human contact.
Now, there was a fourth sighting for Siddhartha. In the passing dramas of the Three Great Messengers, he also saw an observer, a participant. A person stood in calm demeanor seemingly unaffected by all the aspects of life that were so disturbing to the youth. Seeing this amazing stillness in the posture of the person, Siddhartha was told that this lone figure was one who saw it all and had through practice and inner development, reached a level of calm acceptance of life’s experiences. It was crucial to give the full scope of reality to the young prince, to assure him that while there is suffering there is also hope that we can learn to deal with it. We are provided with the ability to know and fully comprehend the nature of life and all its changes and suffering, and yet have the experience of inner peace. How is it possible to see these realities and inevitable stages of discomfort and even death, and just stand by in calm repose? Perhaps the greatest lesson that Siddhartha had to learn was that calm acceptance of the realities of existence is not indifference.
I once gave a lecture in prison about the way in which I set about trying to deal with long delays in traffic on freeways, not a daily issue for that particular audience. Nonetheless, I described my thoughts and actions to the inmates and my attempt to practice what I often taught. The Six Perfections of Wisdom include patience or perhaps better translated calm acceptance. So I described the anxiety that I felt when I was in a mass of cars stopped and creeping along. I practiced being aware of my breathing and was able to calm down and manage my anxiety and near anger about the traffic. But, as I was soon to see, my smugness about having calmed myself and reaching some degree of acceptance of the situation was far from wisdom and perfection. One of the prisoners raised his hand at the end of the description of my successful mastery of impatience on the freeway and asked me, “Professor, when you are sitting in your car on the freeway with calm acceptance of the problem, do you at the same time have a sense of compassion for all the other people in those cars around you who are anxious and worried about being late?” I felt as if he had nailed me to the wall and taken away my breath. For a moment or two, I was silenced and had to admit to him and the audience, “No, I was not giving them any thought.” After the class, I asked him how he was so insightful that he spotted the gaping flaw in my actions. He said that he had been in the prison for eighteen years and slept every night in a large room with two hundred inmates. It was torment for him to have the lights on all night, to hear his fellow inmates snoring, sometimes shouting out in a bad dream, grinding their teeth in tension while asleep, moaning, and often weeping. One night, after he had been meditating for some years, he suddenly was overcome with a feeling of deep compassion for everyone in the room. He realized that they were like him, they were all suffering from the noise and the environment, and in that moment, he forgave them and decided to try his best to help them when he could. He said, “Professor, you had a traffic jam of cars, I had a traffic jam of people.” What a teacher! What a teacher! A person imprisoned perhaps for his whole life, bereft of any possessions, no family contacts for more than a decade, but one who could access both calm acceptance and compassionate empathy for those in his life.
When Siddhartha saw the calmness of the fourth sighting, it was not an indication of indifference, he was seeing compassion in action. Several of the other prisoners, on that day when I was so severely challenged, said that they had been attracted to the meditation classes with the Buddhist visitors, because they saw my questioner sitting on his bed day after day in calmness. Finally, one by one they approached the meditator and asked about what he was doing. Having the presence of a calm and contented person in their midst turned out to be compassion in action. Just like the calm person seen by Siddhartha, my questioner taught by example. We are faced with unparalleled changes in our world and people are reacting in many different ways. There is a need for these centered and aware persons to provide the introduction to a way of life that can bring peace and kindness to awareness.
Our new century is marked by stress and alienation in the social fabric. The nation is split into divisions that separate the citizens of our country and it is reflected in broken relationships between neighbors, friends, and family. Differences have hardened into immovable positions where neither side is able to make meaningful contact with the other. What does the teaching and practice of Buddhism have to offer in such a stalemate that is marked by anger, and even sadly at times, by violence? When each side shouts across the divide with disdain that can reach to the height of hatred, how can any of them help the other? No one really listens to the shouts and attacks, rather we find ourselves hurling back similar taunts and insults. Buddhism has a long history of debates, dialogues where each side puts forward their own position. These debate dialogues can go on for centuries before any resolution is achieved. The difference to much of our present rhetoric is that, there has been dialogue, communication with the other side in the Buddhist tradition. When Chinese pilgrims first went to India, they were amazed to find that monasteries were open for practitioners from multiple schools to live together in harmony. This tolerance of differences in belief and practice, like the calm acceptance of life’s travail, teaches, just by example.
When there are large international gatherings, one is moved by the fact that Buddhists from any region, any school, any monastic clothing, any gender, mingle freely. How can significant differences be just ignored and why can the participants greet one another with acceptance? I don’t mean to imply that Buddhism has no issues or that it is a perfect institution. However, for the main, it has managed to have distinctly different practices and beliefs without waging war or resorting to killing those who are not part of one’s own tradition. Our great divide in the US at this moment is created in part by the lack of compassion for the life and problems of the other side. If people are violent, there is a reason for such behavior. It is easy to condemn the acts but much harder to try to understand what is at the root of the problems. Again, it is the prison visits that have opened up, a view and some understanding of a whole sub-culture dominated by issues that I have been spared in my own life. There can be little dialogue if the two sides have no knowledge of the hurts and pains of the other. What can be said about people we find obnoxious and destructive? If we knew the full story of their lives, would we have more understanding and tolerance? If we knew the fears that torment others, would we comprehend how they have no way to give aid to those they fear? If we knew the worries about daily livelihood of others, would we be able to have empathy for their focus on money and inability to be generous?
Our present century with its turmoil and wildly shifting changes that affect how we gather in groups, how we do business, how we carry on with living life, reminds me of the story in the Lotus Sutra. There, we are told of a great mansion with a family of children playing with many toys and games. Their father approaches the house and sees that it is on fire and the children are in immediate danger. He shouts out to them to get out of the house because it is on fire. However, they don’t recognize what he means by “fire” and being fully engrossed with their play and they don’t respond. He finally has to get their attention by promising them something far greater than any of their toys—carts drawn by various animals. Well, they want to see this and finally leave the house. But, there are no chariots awaiting them, instead the father says there is something even better, a larger chariot that they can all ride in together. In California, the story of burning houses and flames is more than a metaphor. We are now experiencing, every fall, a world of flames and smoke. Even worse, in Canada large forests are being burned to the ground and the smoke clouds the whole continent. Schools have begun to set aside the potential schedule for “smoke days” much like in colder climates, there are “snow days” when attendance is not possible. Our world is heating and we are a bit like those children, we still want our toys and our enjoyments and we don’t pay much attention to the flames. What would the father in the Lotus Sutra have to offer to us to get our attention? What could be offered to us that is so appealing that we would be willing to change our habits and way of life? Is survival sufficient reward for action? This story of the burning house is one way of saying, we must be aware of what is happening around us. Instead of being limited to calm acceptance, the father in the story saves the children by entering into their lives and understanding what they prize. Some would say he lied to them in order to get them out of the burning house. Does it take lies to get the attention of people? Must we make extravagant promises to move people to action? Buddhists are telling us that in order to teach and lead people in directions that will be productive and safe, one needs teaching skills. It is not enough merely to state something without appealing to the interest of the hearer. There is a need to get the attention of people, to offer them something that is so prized that they will be led to change their behavior. In Camus’ novel, no one could put forth an appeal that moved the citizens of that North African town and they all perished. I think we are in a burning house and voices are calling out to us to change. But the big question is what reward is being offered that has enough appeal to sway most of us. Right now with the COVID generated problems, the voice that seems to be closest to our hearts is the one that says, “If you change behavior you can return to your former lifestyle.”
But like the children in the Lotus Sutra, when we managed to control the pandemic, the result was not exactly what we expected? Our world had changed and it will never be the same. We must understand that our future will never be like our past. But the father in the story, says to his children who are disappointed not to see the promised small animal drawn carts, “Don’t be cast down by the lack of what you wanted, you can have something that is greater.” We are going to be challenged in the future when we recognize that the past is lost forever. I can imagine the father standing before us as we face the reality of this change. He could say to us, “…the past was not all wonderful, not all happiness, not all compassionate, not all wise, not all tolerant, not all healthy, not all sustainable… you should set higher goals than what was achieved in the past.” If the Buddhist teachings from this story has something to say in our time of crisis, it is, “Achieve a higher degree of awareness, a recognition of the need to have stronger communities that provide support for all their members, be mature in your way of living, and be open to the possibilities that come from changes.” I think of the words of Venerable Master Hsing Yun of Fo Guang Shan. For his whole teaching career, he urged his followers to be successful, be builders of strong families, and be generous in spirit. He reminded them that “there is enough,” enough resources, enough ideas, enough support for the task that lies before us; as we seek to rebuild a new world, a new economy, a new educational system, a new community based on calm acceptance of the nature of our lives and compassionate action for everyone who shares with us, the reality of illness, old age, and death. It is natural to grieve for what has been lost, but once we calmly accept that reality, there is “enough,” there is “enough” for us to forge ahead as we learn to live with and embrace life with all its changes.

Introduction
When I started to work on these lectures, I was not prepared for what I would find and the changes that are occurring right now as you read these words. Much of what I expected to say, had to be abandoned or rewritten. What this means is that by the time I wrote a lecture and finally gave it or prepared it for publication, developments in society had shifted and within a short period of time, the reality moved away from the words that I was saying.
It is a daunting task ...

自序
Preface
Over the years, there have been many who helped lead me to the point of giving the lectures contained in this volume. Technology has transformed our way of communication. My first attempt at giving online talks came with the encouragement and help of Tom Nickel when he was in charge of setting up the early internet on the University of the West (UWest) campus. Howie Lan from U.C. Berkeley for the past three decades has kept me aware of the fast moving world of the digital age. On another level, my reluctance to share personal information was deeply embedded in the idea that scholars only deal with textual resources. Objectivity in research was the goal and subjective data had no place in publications. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I moved to Pacific Palisades to be with my sister during the lockdown. As I took daily walks for exercise, I became acquainted with Tomas Harlan, a filmmaker. He challenged me to be more open about my personal thoughts and I began to explore how to talk with him about this side of my life that had remained mute throughout my academic career. One of the breakthroughs happened during a previous visit to and long walk with SienaDune Buchanan along the beaches and shoreline of Sydney, Australia. She led me into a deep discussion of how important it is to have gratitude for the gifts and assistance I have had during my academic life. President Ta of UWest and Professor Miroj Shakya, Chair of the Religious Studies Department asked me to give this series of lectures online when the campus was under closure due to COVID. Later, Venerable Abbot Hui Dong of Hsi Lai Temple arranged for me to give online talks for the lay organization of Fo Guang Shan, the BLIA (Buddha’s Light International Association). Both the President and Abbot urged me to include my personal information and thoughts in the lectures. Up to this point, I had never ventured to do so. Many of the doctrinal issues have for more than six years been discussed with the translation team of the Fo Guang Dictionary of Buddhism project in my role as an editor. Led by Venerable Miao Guang and Venerable Zhi Yue, the English translation of this eight-volume Dictionary will soon be published. Those conversations have allowed me to explore Buddhist thought at a deep level. As I prepared the talks, my sister Ora Pelton was always the first reader and I relied on her to tell me if my talks were understandable. She was an invaluable assistant with years of group and therapy experience. After receiving her approval, I felt at ease about presenting each talk. Having to give the talks from my bedroom at Pacific Palisades presented a barrier. There would never be a live audience in a classroom. Fong Sam took over the logistics of publicity and contact with other staff members at UWest campus. Professor Shakya presided over the sessions and made introductions. A great deal of work fell on the shoulders of Chris Johnson, who did all the Zoom setup and I was left free to give each talk without distraction. Now, the final stage of publication is in the hands of Fo Guang Shan in Taiwan. The team from Fo Guang Shan Institute of Humanistic Buddhism took on the task of putting the texts of my talks into some order and then edited the final version. My thanks to all these friends who have made this volume possible.

自序
Preface
Over the years, there have been many who helped lead me to the point of giving the lectures contained in this volume. Technology has transformed our way of communication. My first attempt at giving online talks came with the encouragement and help of Tom Nickel when he was in charge of setting up the early internet on the University of the West (UWest) campus. Howie Lan from U.C. Berkeley for the past three decades has kept me aware of the fast moving world of the digital age. On ...

Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface

Introduction

Part 1 Understanding the Human Condition
1. Human Condition: Earthly and Cosmic
2. Human Condition

Part 2 Learning from the Four Great Messengers
3. The Persistent Message of Illness
4. The Future of Old Age
5. Death: The Last Moment of a Human
6. Learning to Respond to the Human Condition

Part 3 Living with Reality
7. Cause
8. Emptiness: Not Nothing
9. Behavior: Acts of Consequence
10. Personal Self

Part 4 Confronting Challenges
11. Desire
12. Racism
13. Buddhism in the Time of COVID

Part 5 Journeying Toward Enlightenment
14. Enlightenment: A Distant Beacon
15. Reincarnation
16. Detachment
17. Compassion

Conclusion

Appendices
● How a Buddhism Teacher Deals With His Own Pain
● Surprising Ways of Dealing with Adversity and Hopelessness
● On Personal Life, Academic Journey, and Research

Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Preface

Introduction

Part 1 Understanding the Human Condition
1. Human Condition: Earthly and Cosmic
2. Human Condition

Part 2 Learning from the Four Great Messengers
3. The Persistent Message of Illness
4. The Future of Old Age
5. Death: The Last Moment of a Human
6. Learning to Respond to the Human Condition

Part 3 Living with Reality
7. Cause
8. Emptiness: Not Nothing
9. Behavior: Acts of Consequence
10. Personal Self

Part 4 Co...