thanks for tuning in to jyn and tantra please like subscribe and share we would humbly like to welcome on the show a great influence in the lives and minds of many professor robert thurman we are very happy to have him on to discuss his origin story in this particular episode he shares his influences in his life and the circumstances around much of his time during his pilgrimage to india and after becoming a monk and then deciding to return back to the u.s and live amongst the people he shares a story about his brief encounter with fidel castro's army and the economic strangulation of education in today's world professor thurman also highlights giving it a high intensity and how he has learned through his own teaching bob thurman known in academic circles as professor robert a f thurman is a talented popularizer of the buddhist teachings and the first westerner tibetan buddhist monk ordained by his holiness the dalai lama a charismatic speaker and author of many books on tibetan buddhism art politics and culture bob was named by the new york times as a leading american expert on tibetan buddhism and was awarded the prestigious padma shri award in 2020 for his help in recovering india's ancient buddhist heritage time magazine chose him as one of the most 25 influential americans in 1997. describing him as a larger-than-life scholar activist destined to convey the dharma the precious teachings of shakyamuni buddha from asia to america professor thurman served as a json kappa professor of the indo-tibetan buddhist studies in the department of religion at colombia for over 30 years until 2020 a very popular professor students always felt his classes were life changing bob is a founder and active president of tibet house us a non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of tibetan culture and of the american institute of buddhist studies a non-profit affiliated with the center for buddhist studies at columbia university and dedicated to the publication and translations of important artistic and scientific tibetan treatises his own teachings and searching for enlightenment began when he was a university student at harvard after an accident which he lost the use of an eye bob left school with on a spiritual quest throughout europe the middle east and asia he found his way to india where he first saw his holiness the dalai lama in after learning tibetan and studying buddhism bob became a tibetan buddhist monk and the first westerner to be ordained by his holiness the dalai lama some years later however he offered up his robes when he realized he could be more effective in the american equivalent of a monastery the university returning to harvard to finish his phd as a part of his long-term commitment to the tibetan cause at the request of his holiness the dalai lama bob co-founded the tibet house u.s with tenzing teton richard gere and philip glass a non-profit organization based in new york city and dedicated to the preservation and renaissance of the tibetan culture inspired by his long good time good friend the dalai lama bob takes us along with him into an expanded vision of the world through the prisma of tibetan buddhism he shares with us the sense of refuge in the dharma which unfailingly helps us clear away the shrouds of fear and confusion sustains us with the cheerfulness of an enriched present and opens the door to a path of realistic hope for a peaceful kind and wise future we are very grateful to have robert thurman join us enjoy the episode [Music] welcome to jyn and tantra spirituality with a twist the podcast that takes tantrism buddhism taoism sutheasm kabbalism shamanism chinese medicine and all of the other isms we've been influenced by and blends them into a tall crisp cool cocktail your spirit has been longing for you to get together now isn't that refreshing i want you to get together hey fellow g in tears those of us who like our spirituality with the twist well as you will will have already heard and what i imagine is going to be an incredibly long intro trying to capture at least some of his bona fides and accomplishments today we have on someone who i think it is undeniable is one of the most important american figures for making buddhism and especially tantric buddhism available and understandable for those in the us and the west the great robert thurman thanks so much for coming on professor thurman okay nice to be with you guys so yeah i was thinking as i was preparing this it's kind of like a spiritual trickle down from your tibetan and mongolian teachers to you and others like you through to grateful folks like me and daniel kind of like the economic trickle-down theory except the spiritual one actually works you know i always remember when i hear trickle down i think of bill maher yeah but trickle down means you drink a bottle of champagne and then you piss on the other people so i somehow it's hard to think about that with the dharma trickling down but whatever you say i wanted to try the first and throw in the first tangential political jab in there for you dr thurman before the two-minute mark it just seemed like a thing to do all right you always take time for a little uh what you might say wrathful action uh in your lectures lovingly and verbally slightly bonking those on the head who sort of need it so i always appreciate that in your lectures yeah so we have um you know to make the most of time we have together we wanted to divide the section to a couple of parts the first one was a little bit more maybe personal uh your story is so well known but we thought we'd ask you a few what you might call origin story questions we try to do this with all our guests okay in part because those stories are always uh interesting especially psychologically why else would every comic book movie have one to understand why spider-man or batman or black widow or black panther or even deadpool do what they do um so that's interesting just intrinsically but hopefully our hope in doing this is that they're inspiring hearing someone uh who has you know done the kind of things you've done with your life kind of following a different path in the world and doing extraordinary things and uh so we thought yes a little bit a little bit about that the tibetans had their own kind of famous stories of this i was thinking about this and prepping people like marpa or mila repa and those stories are meant to be i think not only like teaching but inspiring to see that other people who come from the same background as you have done extraordinary things and not that you're comparing yourself to those figures necessarily but do you ever think of your life story that way when you're sharing it yeah yeah so what what what do you want me what do you want to know about uh so do you think of your own life story as kind of similar to those tibetan stories or do you think there's a way in which developing those kind of stories no and yes no and yes no in that there's a you know the biography in tibetan language is called namtar and namtar means liberation actually story of liberation and i don't consider myself enlightened so therefore i can't say that i'm telling a story of how to get in life being liberated however maybe that's a no and then the yes is well maybe i'm a bit more liberated than i would have been if i hadn't encountered the buddha dharma you know and hadn't had some misfortunes actually which then helped me discover some extraordinary people discover something outside of the american culture from a higher more ancient culture but still a living culture and um and so therefore i think i did get a bit liberated from some things that i think some of my contemporaries may not have been and so so that's the yes part so no and yes there's always a no-one yes something and for example when i was around 20 years old i lost my left eye in a garage accident perfectly self-inflicted not really anything too dramatic and actually there's no nerves in the eyeball so it wasn't even that painful but it was traumatic and uh and then they you know the operation and the whole thing and then the re you know rediscovering depths in the world uh once it's flattened without with less parallax actually you still have parallax out of one eye because each eye delivers to both to both sides of the brain which i didn't know for 50 years until i actually happened so i thought i was reconstructing a sense of depth by sort of mental you know you know like inference or something like that but actually it brought the one eye sense to both sides so that wasn't my mistake and my the doctor didn't bother to tell me or didn't know actually anyway that shook me out of sort of my harvard married privileged semi-privileged lifestyle and made me decide to not just be a dilite about you know nietzsche hermann hesse and carl jung and buddha but really try to go do it and while you know you know and didn't not go for a career like in diplomacy or in business or whatever it might have been in in the arts i think probably i i think i had a plan to be a novelist or a playwright and um so uh that was really great and then i immediately took off as a pilgrim to india pretty much my former wife didn't feel up to that and so we just parted ways and and then different things happened i met the wonderful geisha one girl the great mongolian scholar in new jersey uh who passed away in the 83 he was 61 that year and uh and we just um the door to the dharma opened to me and i really was happy about it it almost sounds like kind of like an existential thing you change from wanting to be like an armchair philosopher maybe to someone who wanted to really do it is that uh but the thanks to the injury actually it was really because of the the injury the shock you know the the because we know our culture tells us to live in denial of death and denial of impermanence and therefore act like we'll always be doing whatever we do and then also we'll only do it in this body because that's all we are with these material bodies of course we still want to find meaning you know we're like the people in the matrix who have to pretend to have meaning or we die in the test tube where we're actually living so i mean that's the theory in our culture the materialist theory so um so i never bought that actually personally and i also never bought theism you know although of course i like baby jesus when i grew up i kind of liked him i didn't know jesus was a rabbi at the time but i liked i liked pure baby jesus and i really didn't like uh you know people making a big thing about him being wasted by the romans i thought that was very unpleasant so um so i had no path really in the western culture and the companies from a small age and and so i took the injury though to blast me out of a sort of track that i was on you could say it's always sort of a curiosity for me because it sounds like you grew up in a house where there was maybe religion uh christianity religion was not luckily for me not much they were not i mean they were you know like ferocious anti-religion and my father had a little mystical feeling and my mother's religion was shakespeare which is a kind of religion you know shakespeare was pretty amazing and uh you know she was theater person and um so you know they didn't pressure us particularly about that but you know i went to school where they put you you go to chapel and you know you so it's around you you know but but nobody takes it seriously in america because everybody's a materialist because they think they only they're not going to have they don't have a soul and they're not going to have a future life that's our consensus reality which is you know supposedly reinforced by scientific authorities who have discovered that we don't have anything that endures past the brain but they actually haven't discovered that it's just their new dogma actually but we grow up thinking they discovered it you know somebody discovered it and so ask any scientist who got the nobel prize for discovering that nothing where we go when we die yeah we talked about that we had a great deal of irritation and no no discoverer actually because in fact it's not an experience that nobody's ever experienced nothing nobody ever will experience nothing you know so because that's what it means is you can't experience it anyway so then i you know i studied a lot and then i found out it wasn't just a matter of adopting a belief and i don't consider buddhism primarily a religion i actually don't although i i've been in a faculty in the religion department but that's because the american university will not credit anybody but the euro-american culture with having philosophy and um you know they're just doing theology or they're just primitives or they have some sort of belief actually in the 19th century they didn't think they had religion because they thought only christianity was a religion and uh you know the the our own people and and um so that's the only reason i'm in a religion department but i've never been comfy in the religion department you know particularly i should be in philosophy department but they don't want to fight with me so they never asked me and we still think about there's almost nobody in philosophy departments who knows anything about indian falsely for example which is probably the greatest of all philosophical cultures would be the sanskrit culture for sure we had on uh professor guy newland he was really making the point that sankapa really should be recognized as a great world philosopher except he's from tibet so it's not going to be acknowledged yeah charlie like the original world champion back in the old days in time of aristotle and so on 100 percent nobody ever and the the even the vedanta and the great vedanta plus was never rejected you know they just dismissed him but they never were able to overthrow him and some of them imitated him in fact actually just so the curiosity um before we totally leave your childhood i was interested in one thing my first experience of hearing buddha was with joseph campbell talking on public television and he was comparing sort of the the stories of the buddha and the stories of jesus and i was just wow buddha it really struck me and i was just curious do you remember when you first learned about the buddha was that a moment where you went ah this is something that's that struck me somehow yes well i think i heard about it in prep school high school and um i mean i probably had met up with a buddha ashrae or a garden ornament before that but i think i sort of heard about it there and i think hermann hesse siddharth that book might have been a very good influence for rather my teens yeah i read that in high school and um then and and then i bumped into some other things of that type you know but uh i was sort of into but i started i was an english major you know so i didn't i didn't uh didn't study any like asian religion or something like that or didn't take a course in buddhism in college where a lot of people first hear about it so i don't have a big moment of buddha i know but i haven't i haven't i have moments of dissatisfaction with american culture for sure well that's like every every other episode in this podcast yeah yeah we we we express a lot of that so you're in good company good so you know you kind of had this shocking moment with this uh this accident involving your eye yes yes and that shook you up i had a long-term hallucination during that period i hadn't turned on in any way by that at that point and um i i had a recurring vision that i noticed afterwards you know that that happened all during the time several days that i was basically sedated and while they were figuring out whether to have much of the eye optical nerve to remove and so on and um and in that i was in this this sort of hall of mirrors it was sort of a high narrow hole that went as far as you could see in all directions and it was reflected out like you're doing when you have mirrors opposing each other and in the mirror where all those busts that you have of you know thomas jefferson or benjamin franklin sort of just as a there's a round thing that's the base and then there's a stem and then from the shoulders up you have the shoulders on the head you know that kind of thing and all white and there was rows and rows and rows of these like going up endlessly and down endlessly and then behind them were these vivid colors especially orange and green colors and swirlings and dynamic energies that i recognized much later a couple of well a couple of years later i recognized as the energy field of a buddhist deity called hayagriva who is a ferocious um but not wrathful i don't like the word you know but because he's not angry with anybody but fierce ferocious um uh form of the bodhisattva of compassion or buddha of compassion you know i have a look at this part and it was hyagriba who had come to retrieve me come out from all the white busts you know the world of whiteness and the the culture that i was brain you know indoctrinated into but resisting you know all the way that's really a fascinating question because there does seem to be this moment where people have to make a little bit of a cut and recognize the problems in the culture that they come from and be willing to do something else with themselves right yeah i had that earlier actually without the input of buddhism in any formal way where in my senior year at exeter i left with a mexican friend to go to miami to to enlist in fidel castro's revolutionary army wow and lucky for me they laughed at us instead of accepting us because my friend was only five two or maybe five three and he weighed as much as i did and i was sixth three but when we came in and i was sort of sold skin and he was a little butter ball and so they said oh don quixote and sancho panzer coming to save the revolution yay and then they would break and then they said no no you that blonde head will be blown off in five seconds and and you oh you're from mexico oh you're from the the such and such a family oh well we we want to talk to your family about having more land to do our training in veracruz where they were training troops you know and things and so they wanted us to go to mexico and intercede for them that way we could help that type of thing and we we were not it was not a socialism it wasn't an activism thing it was he was a poet seeking liberate liberty from tyrants so that was enough uh know and we were set off by all these and and the school i went that schools for the elite school these uh children of very wealthy right-wing latin american families sent their kids there and then the kids would be rebellious while they were there and they wouldn't go back they'd be back in the saddle you unfortunately i think too many of them some of them probably remain very worthwhile but many of them i think rejoined the feudal order that was occurring in those days 15. i don't think i had ever really heard that story of yours before that's pretty amazing i haven't ever heard that so eventually it looks like uh you know you really were gonna go the buddhist path and one of the things we're always curious about and asking you know when you made that choice really to go to india um how easy was that for you did you feel like you were leaving a lot obviously it looks like you were living in a marriage at the time it was a second daughter we had a baby daughter and we had enough money and i told my wife i said look we just get a jeep we can easily buy a jeep and we get an ayah you know like a nurse for the baby you know et cetera and we will travel in style i don't mean we have to crawl on these in the dust and and you could come and we could see something different and learn something no way yeah she thought i was going crazy you know so and she was very psychologically oriented and thought this was very out of the you know whatever she wasn't ready for that so we that and that was hard separating but but it just happened you know it was it was the minute i we regained consciousness in the hospital with one eye i said bring me siddhartha bring me nietzsche bring me the president parameter sutra i'm i'm going you know i'm gone yeah and um so it just took a little time after that also yeah that was that was that was legitimate sacrifice you know it's interesting we've heard different stories for some of the people we've talked to like we've had on uh glen h mullen our beloved llama glenn to his students yeah and his hair stood on end when he saw a picture of him in the newspaper probably when dolomi escaped or something all right tell us exactly that but that's really interesting he did say it was a little bit like uh he was in uh he was in great britain and the opportunity came and he just went it seemed like it was a serendipity thing i he told me long ago maybe the first time he saw gollum his hair stood on him no he really had the feeling for him and he and other people in the field they had something about tibet but mine was different i had a thing about india and i've always i've been sort of a heretic among tibetan buddhist people because for example i don't pronounce the mantras the way the tibetans do because they don't they they say they don't say because the jra sound is hard for them they go benza and this kind of thing you're supposed to say it the way the guru says it but i always correct and say sans could say it the way the sanskrit word is the name banjarapani you know i say what's up honey and uh because i have this affinity i had some older affinity about india i think as well but i definitely have it tibetan affinity but like glenn and some other people they oh talalama or patty smith which you heard about that i'm escaping she did a thing in her eighth grade class about the tibetans you know and so on but uh and i you know that was fine but i wasn't drawn there as much as india except when i got to india nobody knew anything about buddhism buddhism oh no that that's that's the china oh no that's in sri lanka oh we don't know we have hinduism and uh and so i said well where so who knows about buddhism oh the tibetans are worse they were just beginning to escape you know in 61 there they were just beginning to get to 61 62 in them so you kind of went there with a little bit more of an open attitude you weren't immediately directed to dharmsala and the dalai what was going to happen yes yes but it was the tibetans were but but the treasons knew what it was and then the minute i heard the language saw the writing system i spoke spoken in 10 weeks you know it's just oh yeah all this is right this is what i was looking for completely i learned sanskrit only later did you feel there was sometimes people describe this sort of coming home experience where you're coming back to something that you already knew did you certainly feel that way absolutely like i had like a i had a lot of uh epiphanies when i first tasted zamba you know the roasted barley flour i thought oh now i understand because as a child i would never eat rice krispies or corn flakes i hated them i wouldn't eat them i had to be given cheerios and zamba tastes just like cheerios so a material thing also i never would eat fish tomatoes only fish you know they don't catch fish i mean traditionally you know who knows what they do nowadays but in the old days they never they never fished in the river so china had a field day catching fish in the tibetan rivers i was at the dalai lama's monastery in new york namgal there and those tibetans are so warm and welcoming people too so you feel instantly at home you know yeah and there's also this thing and you know who knows what this means but they'll kind of go like oh i feel like i know you you know they'll kind of do that little thing like oh you look a little familiar to me you know we've met each other at some point it's very it's a wonderful culture you know tibetans among the asian people so tibetans have the least interest and the least cultural focus on their own ancestors almost zero actually basically maybe a few high aristocratic tibetans will talk about somebody but basically they really don't care about there's no ancestor cult they don't do worship their ancestors in any way which is completely different from every other asian group and you know the the piety about your ancestors is a complete indicator of a sense of racial identity or mechanism identity or whatever family identity and so it's a complete measure of how the the sort of kin stranger barrier how broad that is and tibetans have a meditation where uh which of course the idebs do to full degree but everybody has it sort of embedded in the language where you meditate a meditation that every being has been your mother because of your infinite previous lives well you know that he must have heard that from gail yeah yeah yeah yeah what they call recognition of the mother who didn't everyone and when you meditate that you become deja vu about everybody if you really do it to a depth and then the ordinary people don't necessarily do it to that bigger depth but even in the language they have a thing that they constantly go oh oh the old mother sentient beings they can't always say that and that's that that's from that sense that everybody is a mother and that's actually the secret of why asia allowed itself to be conquered by the brits and the dutch and the portuguese and the french and so on because they had become relatively more because the whole karma theory that you'll be reborn in different nations and you have been reborn in different nations weakens the ability of a nationalistic drive to make you think that the next neighbor who you who your king wants you to go conquer is some alien species that you should just you know treat not human and just slaughter you know and it makes it hard it's not like they were perfect by any means but they were they had been having that erode the rigidity of their regional identities for a long long period of time so they were kind of more open and friendly and the europeans were like we're the superior whities and we're and you're just a fantasy party and you're going to be our slave or die you know as they did you know maybe before we totally leave this little part of your life uh dr thurman i one of the things we always wonder about this show and any advice you can give and it's a it's a hard and funny question but obviously you went to india as kind of a spiritual seeker and you you do talk about that you say to to be open to the possibility of looking for enlightenment is to become a um my own feeling in the way is that it's you know i have i have gen z uh kids right my daughter's 18 and in some ways i feel like even compared to like in my life you must have married very young no not that young i'm a gen xer [Laughter] but um uh i feel like you're not even 40 yet i'm 51. oh yeah yeah yeah region formula what's going on a tiny bit but you know hopefully chinese medicine helps me out a little bit too yeah yeah yeah um well you're a young 51 that's i'm sorry i feel spry i feel a spry 51 let's say okay i feel a spry 51. okay daniel will sometimes call me young young baker that's my last name baker i think he's being facetious with me but i'll take it i'm just trying to lift the mood you know all right so i think it's like i think when i look at my kids um i think it was probably easier for me this is a tiny anecdote there i was listening to an interview with alan moore who's kind of famous for watching for writing uh v for vendetta and the watchmen you know these comics and novels and he's a very contrarian person after my own heart and he he tells the story it was in 1993 and it was his birthday and he just was drinking and he had this thought i'm going to become a ritual magician like the golden dawn or something and he announced it to this big group of people at his party he said i'm going to be a ritual musician magician study magic yeah it's an amazing story and uh and i was thinking wow 1993 that was like my time too where i was like i'm gonna go study buddhism that was my that was my moment all right and i feel like somehow it was easier back then i think it was financially less pressure on people you know younger people under something yeah nowadays financial pressures and i think the the thing that you bring up a lot is sort of the scientific materialism being more dominant so people don't see the possibilities as much as they used to brilliant young college kids they want to really look around and find some meaning somewhere and they they can tell that it's senseless to live a meaningless life which is they're told is what it's a grown-up thing to realize you're living a meaningless life and they don't like it and they look for it but but you know the thing is since the 60s and the younger generation my younger generation we refused to go kill kill indians kill no more indians in vietnam you know which is you know texas lbj you cowboys and indians and refuse to go do the right wingers who pretty much have a lot to do with our government ever since then they have been chopping the funding into education and making it more and more expensive and then this then they gave the banks this this like chokehold over the young generations of the loan and the high interest rate and the no refinancing and no bankruptcy and they strangled our younger kids so then our younger kids were like well i don't have time to go look around for me you know and i just i gotta i gotta survive you know whatever and they it got more like that so so the boom of the 70s in studies of buddhism and hinduism and whatever mystical christianity mystical judaism kapala all of that pretty much got very compressed by governmental intervention actually i felt like in the 90s like the dalai lama was doing a lot of these translating of these very deep kind of tantric texts i could read some kappa i could read the zohar kabbalistically if i wanted to i could read rumi it was like well but like a few people you know the larger and in this late 60s and 70s there was a much broader ability looking around you know but if you have if i could say eric but i'm i'm a little i'm younger than i'm so uh doctor dr thurman i'm i'm 39 and so i didn't i don't you know so you guys are a couple different eras but then from my perspective because i've been only at this for the last probably six seven years i mean maybe 10 if you count chinese medicine but the ability that i have access to so many teachers online is is really amazing so that's bad yeah you know so i mean i make it i make it a priority in my life to take time to do that so that's a different different argument but there's so much more access now that that i have fortunately i could sit in a retreat by myself at my house and watch you know uh dr thurman i can watch your videos you know and dr nita and some of the other people that you have on that are really that are really that's great that's a new thing yeah yeah so let's open up some new doors absolutely yeah yeah though they'll be thinking of how to close them if they get back in power they will but that is great sure that's good but i hope you're not settled in student debt no fortunately uh you know i was in the army as well um the united states army so that helped paid for education and i worked throughout school so i'm very fortunate not to have a dollar in debt but those who have it they should forgive it now okay i hope they do that would help a lot of my friends elizabeth warren would see to it because they they are the ones who are going to build up the build back better that's the young people aren't going to do that yeah so you still find your grad students people who are coming through do you have any little pearls of wisdom you try to share with them when they're going on this seeking life because there's some risk you know well no i no i don't particularly i'm i i like them and uh they're kind of like children you know they're like your one children and um but there's not too many of them because there's not any jobs you know and then the whole system is now geared to kind of cut down on that because the funding is not there and then also the universities are run like corporations their boards of trustees are corporate people the american corporate people lately have been just offshoring jobs and downsizing and it's become an obsession of not to pay people for labor correct in this country which is why we have this terrible inequality and so they they hate the idea of free academics who can talk back to them you tenure and things like that so so the our university system is very corrupted also not good at all and i'm very worried about it frankly it's sort of propped up lately with a lot of full tuition paying foreign students but uh but the local people in the expense of it that the tuition expense and it's unbelievable and then and it doesn't go to the faculty particularly no it goes to the administrative uh things i mean there's some books like that you know university inc books you know that that challenge what has happened to our education system yeah even though we don't really do as much politics we do feel like it's important to talk about this kind of neo-liberal takeover of everything yeah i think you really have to have the people you know you're just talking about my i was lucky you know i didn't have to do loans i got scholarships and uh i got through and then i i was not you know i'm i come from impoverished gentry but quite privileged but not you know my grandparents and great-grandparents wasted their money they didn't save them for me and uh so that was lucky for me i think i think it's very difficult to grow up wealthy you get a distorted view of things and you get you lose all self-confidence you think you're only okay because you've got some money and you you don't have to do you're not challenged enough you know it's not good for your growth actually i think and um i thought i was lucky in that way and then you know different things collapse as i go through them i don't know i don't i don't think i had the influence but when i leave then things seem to go to the dogs i don't know why wow because but we have to rebuild the whole thing now that's all we do really do that we have 10 years we don't have 50 years any politician who says oh we'll be all clean in 20 in 2016. they're just bullshitting you they should just retire right away then that means they're not serious they're just going to follow their money you know but the ones who say in 2030 between 35 we're done we remove set at least our side of it and if we have if we're a wealthy group we're going to help the other ones hugely you know the ones who are behind you know and uh who are suffering worse because they're you know topics are poor you terrible it's just awful yeah we're trying to hit on them people who are at the philanthropists as well on the show we've had on pete cadence who's been a very generous person you know giving away money so that's kind of the things we're trying to do here too because it's important the point is that one of the blessings i'm i'm against i don't like the super so-called lefties who are against people with wealth and who also even have even especially like silicon valley billionaires this kind of thing they are great and actually one of the things that they can do even even though there is a point there should be a new tax system etc it should be better but meanwhile they can make huge support to things without going through a committee and without being vetoed by mitch mcconnell they can give a billion dollars to this and that and they are doing so beginning to sort of do so and more and more energetically some of them are just green washing but some of them are really doing it and that's really good and and we need their help they they need to get up get busy too and they're it's great that's their luck they got a lot of money then they should use it really intensely because what's good to have money if you if you have a big mansion in southern california and the whole state burns what the hell is it going to do for you that's right which is happening is that burning is just going to start up again shortly and there were sudden habitable loss last year the people i know wealthy people in their cities couldn't breathe in the cities they didn't get the fire but they couldn't breathe they left for hawaii or bali or they went somewhere else some rough areas they came east even even oregon too so i think in like our little endeavor we're trying to be honest about this to talk about you know buddhist things but also to talk about you know this is the state of the world and i think to be a spiritual person to acknowledge that anyway listen about my life i'm happy and thanks to buddhism and even my my mongolian teacher you know predicted it when i was in my late 30s before he died and he said um i was boasting that my father was thin and grandfather was on i could eat as much as i want i'll never get any weight and he said oh no no i said yes your lineage is thin and nervous and angersome and worrisome he said but you he said thanks to the dharma you're too jelly and you're gonna really gain a lot of weight if you keep picking up like that you're going to be worried about your weight and you're not going to have a heart attack like that and uh and he was right it was i was up 50 pounds more than i am now at one point maybe the only last tiny question we'd ask you about your life when you were leaving india and coming back because we're going to talk with you about what you learned that'll be the second part of this but just as maybe a closer did you have a vision of what you wanted to do when you came back did you think you were going to be in academia did you think you were going to be doing what you were doing no well i plan to be when i plan to be a monk and uh permanent monk and uh i was so happy doing that and i wasn't missing anything and um but my mongolian and the dilemma was happy to make me a monk and he thought that would be okay he didn't listen to the old mongolian who said don't make him a monk he seriously wants to be he intends to be he's gone about it but he doesn't know his own future and he won't be saying a monk i can tell you and uh i didn't believe that and i was and i was annoyed and the dilemma sort of took a little time but then he did make me a monk and so i had no plan but then once i i had a vision that i couldn't really that i had been born in america to accomplish something in america to help america change probably and um and get more hip you know and um and i couldn't do that from being among because they didn't know what was a monk and there was no monastery there were ethnic monasteries in in immigrant enclaves but they're and still that's the case there's there's one one there's one real american nunnery i don't think there's a real american monastery basically really not not in the tibetan tradition uh they're zen ones but the zen monks are not monks anymore because they they marry that which because of a change in japan in the 19th century in the meiji era they made all the zen monks married they didn't like unmarried monks because they were too uncontrollable you know but they wanted some had a family and then they could then the state can threaten the family then the guy will bathe you know they felt that rightly oh that's interesting so so uh i had a vision that i had to be a regular person in order to be able to deal with the other regular prisons and um so i had to regretfully resign from being a monk which is very embarrassing in the tibetan tradition and and then and then i then i did realize well the only way i can keep doing what i love which is studying practicing buddhism learning more about it learning how to articulate it in relation to our current problems and so on the only way to do that is as an academic you know so then then i went back to i had luckily i was uh on a leave of absence or during all that time from my senior year at the college so i would i would just i didn't have to get accepted again as the next moment i just went back and the admission guy laughed at me and he said how you guys in the 60s you thought you knew everything and you're wrong i said what do you mean he said well you wrote here on this application infinitely from absence he said instead of indefinite and i know you're back so then i'm so smart ass you know smart smart mouth i said well how do you know it wasn't infinite i told him that was [...] well any case i think we're really grateful when you get to people like you know daniel and i you know that people like you uh went and did the things that you did right to bring these things back to us so yeah so it was great being an academic and then you learned that because your life is learning and furthermore when you teach others you learn more yourself that's the great thing about teaching you know you don't learn half as much when you take a course as when you give the course because you have to then you have to really ask oh well what does it really mean so i can explain it and then also when other people even sometimes you don't not explaining it and if you're honest and you kind of show your uncertainty and you work at it while you're with the people with the class and then they ask questions or it's just even in their awareness the vibe of them looking then you you see it suddenly click you get a new insight right there in the class and then you learn so much more when you do that it's really really great actually dr thurman that's i think for daniel now we both decided to study chinese medicine because that was a way to connect our our spiritual pursuits with our lives i was studying uh zen when i graduated i spent three years just you know doing zen and doing retreats and i was like what am i going to do for my life and i figured it out and now i teach so everything you say i think is so true and it's inspiring right the sweet people doing that seeing someone like you do that is inspiring it's wonderful you guys are you're doing acupuncture and with that you can help people but in a way a lot of the people who are doing acupuncture now they're doing something quote unquote complementary but actually they should be doctors our medical system is completely ruined by the commercial aim of everything and they wash out people who just really want to help other people out of compassion they wash them out and they bring in people who they get to come to bond with their guild and then actually you know marianne williamson was correct during her campaign where she said we don't have a health care system we have a sickness care system they get more business if more people are sick so they don't want to heal subliminally i'm saying of course every many of them have a really great aspiration they have a dedication they have a have an altruistic wish in there somewhere but it gets kind of beaten out of them unfortunately by the system and then it's just a it's a money-making thing and then you don't make money if everybody's will and so so you there's a there's an automatic hesitancy to see the positive outcome do you know what i'm saying chinese cultural thing that they don't you only pay the doctor when you're well the minute you get sick you stop paying the solves that problem well that would be good an ancient period yeah but some were saying okay you know all we knew you know the point is china is a great culture what we need china to do is to try to be chinese again instead of the stupid communist marxist industrial neo-imperialism pretend they're going to be the brits of the 21st century which they say publicly to the other that's what they say to like the those the state department people or others who talk to them saying what can we do for you they say you can't do anything for us it's going to be our century we own it like you guys owned the 20th of the brits on the 19th they're completely like that but that's a whole western thing before in columbus's era in the ming dynasty china had their boat would have run over the pinto nino and santa korea like a row boat they had like 300 meter long boats and they had people pulling oars as well as sails giant boats they went to africa they brought back elephants but they didn't colonize they didn't go genocide of the africans you know they didn't they they sort of well that's kind of boring they probably there are some chinese anchors in los angeles off the coast stone anchors you know they're people that's not sort of hidden away but probably and from that era and that so they they if they were chinese they like to be in and they like their cooking and they double dig and they're they're cool they're peaceful they usually get they get run over by mongolians now and then but otherwise they're pretty peaceful and that's what we need them to return to being enjoying being chinese you know well we uh uh daniel and i always appreciate this fiery part of you thanks for tuning in to the first half of our interview with professor robert thurman we hope you enjoyed the episode for any questions or comments please email us at jin and tantra gmail.com we'll catch you in the next one get peace