Freeing a Prisoner, Freeing the Mind

0:07 [SPEAKER_01]: Axis Mooney when I was 10 I went on a school museum trip where you looked at a painting of the resurrection. [SPEAKER_01]: I came home and said to my parents, did you know Christians believe that Jesus came back from the dead? [SPEAKER_01]: My dad thought this was hilarious. [SPEAKER_01]: We must have failed in your religious education, [SPEAKER_01]: But of course, he was proud of this fact.

0:37 [SPEAKER_01]: There was no religion in our household. [SPEAKER_01]: I later realized this was in part because of Karl Marx's famous statement, religion is the opium of the masses. [SPEAKER_01]: My parents were committed to social change here and now. [SPEAKER_01]: They didn't like that many religious groups told people to accept oppression rather than fight it.

1:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Then one day, when I was in college, my mom announced she was going to a Buddhist meditation retreat in Korea. [SPEAKER_01]: I was shocked. [SPEAKER_01]: Was she taking the opium? [SPEAKER_01]: Why was she joining a religion where you bowed to a big golden statue? [SPEAKER_01]: Plus, the retreat sounded like torture.

1:22 [SPEAKER_01]: My mom would sit all day facing a wall. [SPEAKER_01]: The meals were vegetarian. [SPEAKER_01]: And she couldn't talk to anyone. [SPEAKER_01]: If this retreat was supposed to make her feel better, that sounded like the opposite. [SPEAKER_01]: Yet, when she came back from their retreat, she told us that it changed her life.

1:42 [SPEAKER_01]: And I could see it was true. [SPEAKER_01]: She was like a different person. [SPEAKER_01]: Palmer, centered, maybe even wiser. [SPEAKER_01]: She began going on retreat every year. [SPEAKER_01]: Not long after that, I was feeling despair at the state of the world. [SPEAKER_01]: I could see all these problems with police brutality, ongoing wars, and huge wealth inequality, but very few viable solutions.

2:10 [SPEAKER_01]: I felt so much rage, stress, and anxiety that one night, I suffered a panic attack. [SPEAKER_01]: I remembered my mom's story and tried Buddhist meditation for myself. [SPEAKER_01]: I also found it transformative. [SPEAKER_01]: I felt more grounded. [SPEAKER_01]: I had more clarity about why I felt the things I did.

2:31 [SPEAKER_01]: Soon, I was signing up for retreats and began sitting meditation daily, but I was still stuck on something. [SPEAKER_01]: I couldn't see how all this sitting was making a better world. [SPEAKER_01]: Was Buddhism just an escape from problems, or could it be integrated with social change?

2:50 [SPEAKER_01]: Was it an opium that told us, as Marx warned, or could these practices, as the Buddha promised, help us to wake up, [SPEAKER_01]: This is radical Buddhism, claiming Asian America's Revolutionary Vision. [SPEAKER_01]: My name is Ryan Lee Wong, and in this series, I talk to leaders who inspire me.

3:30 [SPEAKER_01]: Who show me how Buddhism isn't just a way to calm our minds, but a way to transform our society. [SPEAKER_04]: What a short rang out of the alley. [SPEAKER_04]: A man with line gold head. [SPEAKER_04]: When this is green, I've been down to him. [SPEAKER_04]: The belly recollects. [SPEAKER_03]: He kind of looked like his mother.

4:23 [SPEAKER_03]: But they looked alike to see. [SPEAKER_04]: Cops in or her, he want to close her case. [SPEAKER_04]: The end of Joseph Lee. [SPEAKER_01]: But that's the ballot of Cholsuli. [SPEAKER_01]: It's one of the many examples of secular material organizing my mom was part of. [SPEAKER_01]: She helped found the Cholsuli Defense Committee in the late 1970s.

4:51 [SPEAKER_01]: Cholsuli was a young Korean-American man framed for murder and sent to jail. [SPEAKER_01]: His story shocked the Korean-American community and galvanized a social movement, including [SPEAKER_01]: My mother spent much of her 20s on this case. [SPEAKER_01]: Doing fun razors, handing out flyers, attending court hearings.

5:15 [SPEAKER_01]: Political organizing wasn't just a passing interest to her. [SPEAKER_01]: It was everything. [SPEAKER_01]: Her community, her calling, her identity. [SPEAKER_01]: Then one day something else entered the equation. [SPEAKER_01]: What drove my mom to that retreat where she made Buddhism a priority?

5:33 [SPEAKER_01]: Had she changed her mind about religion? [SPEAKER_01]: did her views of organizing change. [SPEAKER_01]: I recently had a chance to sit down and ask her about it directly. [SPEAKER_01]: Hi, Mom. [SPEAKER_02]: Hi, Ryan. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you for sitting down to talk. [SPEAKER_01]: Sure.

5:57 [SPEAKER_01]: So I wanted to start off by asking about Chelsea. [SPEAKER_01]: So in 1973, this young Korean American man was wrongfully convicted for murder in San Francisco and sent to prison. [SPEAKER_01]: In prison, he scuffled with a member of a white supremacist gang, stabbed him, and then he was put on death row.

6:20 [SPEAKER_01]: So how do you hear about Chosili's case? [SPEAKER_01]: And what did you do? [SPEAKER_02]: I had been going to school, and you see Berkeley, and I decided to move back to Los Angeles. [SPEAKER_02]: And part of that interest was to be involved in organizing Korean immigrant community, which I'm a part of.

6:42 [SPEAKER_02]: When I read that article, which was written by a Korean American journalist named KWV in Sacramento, [SPEAKER_02]: really identify with a church's case. [SPEAKER_02]: I think I was up all night reading. [SPEAKER_02]: And church's story was so much like mine, except I was at a college, and he was in jail.

7:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Church will grow up. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, he was raised by a single mother who had fled her abusive marriage came to the US with her son and a daughter and had really had difficulty raising their children. [SPEAKER_02]: At one point in that story, it talked about how church so fell so alienated from this country that he stole a bicycle, and his plan was to write that bicycle back to Korea.

7:52 [SPEAKER_02]: Of course, we know you can't write a bicycle back to Pacific Ocean, but that description [SPEAKER_02]: just really hit my heart, you know, and I remember there are moments where I wanted to go back to Korea. [SPEAKER_02]: It's identification of a church's story as an immigrant, and also my understanding at that time of a criminal justice system and how it is unnessing your Uber rich, [SPEAKER_02]: and obviously discrimination discriminates against people color, particularly if you have an accent and have no money.

8:34 [SPEAKER_02]: So Chersu was defended by the public defender system would really didn't care about Chersu as individual. [SPEAKER_02]: They were just on a lot of pressure by San Francisco community to find somebody who was involved in killing [SPEAKER_02]: a Chinese gang leader. [SPEAKER_02]: Everyone inside the Asian community knows that there's no way Korean will be involved in killing a Chinese gang leader, but obviously for a white community in San Francisco, all nations look alike.

9:08 [SPEAKER_02]: So I went into organizing at that time. [SPEAKER_02]: I was working at the continuation high school, which were mainly boys. [SPEAKER_02]: High school boys that couldn't pop with a regular school system. [SPEAKER_02]: So I had already been familiar with circumstances in which a lot of our youth were living in.

9:26 [SPEAKER_02]: So I talked to them immediately all the young people said. [SPEAKER_02]: It's wrong he was, he was a railroaded, he was convicted, we need to do something. [SPEAKER_02]: on an answer to the case. [SPEAKER_01]: So something that stands out to me is you heard about the story and then I think right away you went to go see him.

9:47 [SPEAKER_01]: Can you talk about going to see each other? [SPEAKER_02]: Well, yeah, right. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I was maybe down the 20. [SPEAKER_02]: And so after work, we decided to pile up in my yellow Toyota and drive up to dual vocational institute, VVI, which was in Tracy, Central [SPEAKER_02]: So we drove all night that there as a sun came up and then we went into the prison and when Tracer came out, it was just shocking.

10:14 [SPEAKER_02]: He was shackled, you know, in chains from waist down, wearing the yellow orange, um, [SPEAKER_02]: prison suit and it was tiny, you know, he might be like maybe five feet five, very, very thin, I mean muscular but small, and so this is not the image of a Someone who is in death penalty, right, that's wrong.

10:39 [SPEAKER_02]: So we each have the turns [SPEAKER_02]: to be able to talk with them. [SPEAKER_02]: And I remember that he was just changed smoking. [SPEAKER_02]: And by his voice was clear, he was an iceberg very clear. [SPEAKER_02]: And he, you know, just told us about his case, which drove all the way back to LA and then started a defense committee.

11:01 [SPEAKER_01]: Something about meeting him, hearing a story directly, it sounds like you believed him right away that he was innocent. [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. [SPEAKER_02]: Koreans have a Nunchi, which is like, you know, I, she is energy. [SPEAKER_02]: So we rely heavily on that, which is like kind of like also a good level intuition.

11:24 [SPEAKER_02]: And that often when we meet people, we trust our old Nunchi to really assess whether this person is real, whether you want to spend time with this person or that person is just ways of time. [SPEAKER_02]: Three of us met him separately, and all of us, when we got back in the car, there was just a silence for our moment, and then we all just said, he's innocent.

11:48 [SPEAKER_01]: So something that stands out to me when you were describing the case and telling the story, is that you had this very big analysis of all of the social conditions, all the government [SPEAKER_01]: him being in prison. [SPEAKER_01]: And so I actually want to backtrack a little because, you know, you were just in your 20s that and you have this very sophisticated analysis, I want to figure out how you kind of formed that analysis.

12:14 [SPEAKER_01]: So starting with your early experience, you know, your born in Seoul, Korea. [SPEAKER_01]: And at that time, [SPEAKER_01]: There was a military dictatorship that was actually backed by the U.S. government. [SPEAKER_01]: So can you tell me a little bit about what the political situation was like growing up and how you understood that at the time?

12:36 [SPEAKER_02]: There. [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, I was born about three years after the Korean War. [SPEAKER_02]: So, Korea at that time is very different than it is today. [SPEAKER_02]: are walking on am. [SPEAKER_02]: We are extremely poor as a country and a lot of things were in this pair, you know, because of a war.

13:00 [SPEAKER_02]: My family live in a neighborhood that is very close to what is known as a choreo university. [SPEAKER_02]: This is the university that is known for their political activism. [SPEAKER_02]: So at three days, there were demonstrations, you know? [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, so I grew up just assuming this was norm, right?

13:22 [SPEAKER_02]: Because you see, you know, police, the tear gas, young people running, you know, that was the area in which I grew up. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I would ask my parents about it, and they will try to explain to me that the students are protesting before democracy. [SPEAKER_02]: But also, what would line that as a strong, strong anti-communism, coming out of Korean War?

13:51 [SPEAKER_01]: So you come to America and then you're in high school and you tend to this conference. [SPEAKER_01]: Can you tell me about that first Korean American conference and what you made of this idea, even of Korean American versus Korean? [SPEAKER_02]: I used to read the Korean newspaper and had a little blurb that there was a Korean American conference.

14:12 [SPEAKER_02]: And I thought, wow, that's interesting. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't know what Korean American conference says. [SPEAKER_02]: So I went and they were mainly like the third generation Korean Americans, which I didn't even know such a thing existed because I was just only familiar with Korean immigrants.

14:28 [SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I came in at least 70s, the Korean community in the US was not that big. [SPEAKER_02]: It was pretty small. [SPEAKER_02]: at that time. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, the key debate or conversation amongst the conference organizer was [SPEAKER_02]: identity question, am I Korean or am I American?

14:47 [SPEAKER_02]: And coming from Korea, I just thought that was the silliest thing. [SPEAKER_02]: I said, what do you mean? [SPEAKER_02]: And they were, they were like, what do you think? [SPEAKER_02]: I said, [SPEAKER_02]: And so you were just really, I just thought, like, why have people so confused, you know, I had no context of understanding.

15:13 [SPEAKER_02]: They were asking those questions because they felt like they never belonged here, right? [SPEAKER_01]: You thought this was a silly question. [SPEAKER_01]: Like, are we creating our American? [SPEAKER_01]: Do you remember at what point something else clicked for you? [SPEAKER_01]: Where you said, oh, I think I understand why people are saying [SPEAKER_02]: I was introduced to a number of literatures, including Asian women, and that was a magazine that was brought by Asian American women that, well, not only talked about just the sense of who am I, am I free and Japanese or American, but also just a whole sexuality and identity as Asian women.

15:58 [SPEAKER_02]: And I had never really realized that there are all this stereotypes [SPEAKER_02]: of Asian-American women in this country that women are constantly fighting against. [SPEAKER_02]: And that I had gone to a camp, a human relations camp in high school, that's where I learned about Japanese-American concentration camps.

16:19 [SPEAKER_02]: So it is the beginning of like really understanding how racism in particular in the U.S. has [SPEAKER_02]: So my initial, you know, reaction of these people being silly, then obviously I had a time to reflect on the structural issues, you know, systems and particularly on racism. [SPEAKER_02]: And when I saw the film about Japanese American camps, I first thought it was about, [SPEAKER_02]: You know, uh, not to Germany.

17:00 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's just like the barbed wire, you know, the towers. [SPEAKER_01]: So then you got to UC Berkeley and you re-encounter some of those folks you met through Korean American conference. [SPEAKER_01]: And they invite you to these study groups, rereading Karl Marx. [SPEAKER_02]: I went, you know, these study groups were very serious people to get seriously, but I had really hard time reading this books.

17:26 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, honestly, you know, even if you had made it as English speakers are, but for me, it was particularly difficult. [SPEAKER_02]: But I did try. [SPEAKER_02]: I actually like Mao because it was a lot easier to understand. [SPEAKER_01]: So even if these were difficult thinkers, what about them attracted you?

17:45 [SPEAKER_02]: just the realization and beginning to be convinced that there has to be change, you know, and that the change has to be structural change. [SPEAKER_02]: And that fundamental made capitalism as an assert most people. [SPEAKER_02]: And that it is really for the very, very few that benefit from it, but most people are suffering, [SPEAKER_02]: from the current system of exploitation.

18:17 [SPEAKER_02]: And so I really was attracted to that notion of creating a society that benefit and to care of most people, the majority, not just for you. [SPEAKER_01]: And then, you know, my understanding is it wasn't just a study group. [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't just intellectual, but you were actually trying to apply what you were reading and what you're debating in a study group to the world.

18:42 [SPEAKER_01]: Can you give a couple of examples of how you made that connection? [SPEAKER_02]: So people are beginning to leave and getting a job at factories. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I too was told that I need to [SPEAKER_02]: look for a job and a factory. [SPEAKER_02]: I went down to Silicon Valley and I actually got a job and a electronic factory.

19:07 [SPEAKER_02]: And so which meant that I had to drop out of college. [SPEAKER_02]: I was on a full scholarship at that time. [SPEAKER_02]: This would like completely change my life because I couldn't cash get anymore checks because I dropped out but we were making something minimal a wage. [SPEAKER_02]: I had to get up at five in the morning, drive down there, work all day, drive back, and then afterwards I have to go to this meetings.

19:32 [SPEAKER_02]: It was extremely difficult, just physically, of course, people are there and that factory job because they had to. [SPEAKER_02]: Lenin had both things around advanced middle backward workers. [SPEAKER_02]: So I would actually try to apply his criteria by talking to people over lunch, and besides was advanced was metal and was backward.

20:08 [SPEAKER_01]: want to connect this actually to the kind of larger Asian American movement. [SPEAKER_01]: So the Tulsa League case was not only the first big Korean American movement, but it's also one of the later cases in the larger Asian American movement. [SPEAKER_01]: And so can you talk about how it fit into that kind of larger movement context?

20:27 [SPEAKER_02]: In initially, people who started or mostly Korean immigrants, but clearly we needed to build alliances and coalitions beyond Korean community, [SPEAKER_02]: I remember going to New York and meeting with the Yuri Kochaima, who has been close with Michael Max, and she was very interested in getting involved, and so she said, we need to get, you know, after going back to the community involved.

20:56 [SPEAKER_02]: In that process, Chris is Jima and I were friends, and he was very interested in supporting, and so we came up with this idea. [SPEAKER_02]: What about having a reunion concert with Chris and Joanne, who are icons of Asian-American movement back in the 70s, and they have not performed together for almost a decade?

21:17 [SPEAKER_02]: So we organized this reunion concert. [SPEAKER_02]: And in Los Angeles, we booked a shrine on a tourium, which is a huge venue of 1,000 people. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm like, well, let's go with it. [SPEAKER_02]: But then, yeah. [SPEAKER_02]: It's like, oh my god, how do we sell tickets? [SPEAKER_02]: Because we didn't have a lot of resources.

21:36 [SPEAKER_02]: So we are doing all these things ourselves. [SPEAKER_02]: I think we sold out of the concert in LA and San Francisco. [SPEAKER_02]: And for many folks in Asian American community, this was like the nostalgia, right? [SPEAKER_02]: All the bringing, all Chris and not go together, but also Charlie Chen who used to perform.

21:55 [SPEAKER_02]: So this became really about also a part of Asian American movement. [SPEAKER_02]: history at that time because it had to got to much broader. [SPEAKER_03]: We are the offspring of the concentration camp, sons and daughters of railroad builder, leave their stamp on their couch. [SPEAKER_03]: We are the children of the Chinese waiter, [SPEAKER_03]: We are the offspring of Japanese guard her.

22:36 [SPEAKER_03]: The best and won America. [SPEAKER_02]: It was great, and we have some of the Korean youth, especially youth that we're involved in gangs, to a skit, but police line up obitiously as a weight of the telling story about the case. [SPEAKER_01]: It's great. [SPEAKER_01]: And I want to pick up on something you mentioned, which was part of organizing [SPEAKER_01]: And so, you know, your reading marks, who says religion is the opiate of the masses, you grew up in South Korea, which had this very strong anti-communist spend.

23:13 [SPEAKER_01]: And then you're trying to build this kind of broad coalition within Korean America that, especially the first generation might hate communism and Karl Marx. [SPEAKER_01]: So, can you talk about how you're navigating all these very different worldviews and how you yourself are making sense of it?

23:30 [SPEAKER_02]: Sure. [SPEAKER_02]: So first of all, I didn't talk about Marxism when I was doing outreach on church in the case. [SPEAKER_02]: I basically talked about the case. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think when I talk to churches or people in the congregations usually what will happen is we have to ask the ministers and then they'll give us like 10 minutes during their social hour.

23:52 [SPEAKER_02]: So I knew that what I represented or believe was not typical of bringing community that I was dealing with, but at the same time, I knew that I wasn't going to make me the issue, you know, it was about organizing. [SPEAKER_02]: Although it did be inside our style very frustrated and alienated, [SPEAKER_02]: with the people that I was trying to organize.

24:35 [SPEAKER_01]: This isn't the image most people have of Asian America. [SPEAKER_01]: Young people reading Marxist theory and then going into factories to organize. [SPEAKER_01]: Yet those organizing skills allowed my mother to build a large coalition around Cholsu Lee. [SPEAKER_01]: And after six years of non-stop organizing, the Defense Committee succeeded in securing a retrial and Lee was set free.

25:04 [SPEAKER_01]: It was a bittersweet victory. [SPEAKER_01]: On one hand, it was the first major political success in Korean American history. [SPEAKER_01]: On the other hand, Lee had already lost 10 years of his life to prison, and he struggled with addiction and maintaining a steady job for the rest of his life.

25:21 [SPEAKER_01]: I believe it was these unresolved questions of what true justice and healing look like that drove my mom to explore Buddhism. [SPEAKER_01]: Organizing could bring about freedom in the law. [SPEAKER_01]: But I think this experience taught her that it would take something else to bring about freedom in the heart and mind.

25:47 [SPEAKER_01]: I was really, really surprised when I was in college and you decided to sign up for this five day meditation retreat at this temple in Korea. [SPEAKER_01]: And I don't even remember really being able to ask you that much about it at the time because it's so different from anything I knew or anything, you know, I kind of had context for in our household.

26:10 [SPEAKER_01]: So how did you end up signing up for that retreat? [SPEAKER_02]: Most of my adult life, which was a political activism, even when I was working for philanthropy or organization, it wasn't really about the job that got me there, but it wasn't realizing that we need to have more resources going into organizing spaces.

26:33 [SPEAKER_02]: So how do I help make that happen? [SPEAKER_02]: But I decided to live that because of the kind of relationship became very toxic. [SPEAKER_02]: you know, I was also going through a lot of questioning. [SPEAKER_02]: And it's odd because I had never thought about spirituality or anything until that point, but something was missing.

26:56 [SPEAKER_02]: And I didn't know what it was. [SPEAKER_02]: Somehow I thought I needed to just be in this retreats to think, you know. [SPEAKER_02]: And so I had been asking like my yoga teachers and different people, [SPEAKER_02]: But most of the spaces that they suggested were all white. [SPEAKER_02]: And for me, new age spirituality was synonymous with, you know, like, excuse me, but like, navel gazing, right?

27:24 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, it's like, I can't, I mean, that's just, you know, that, why am? [SPEAKER_02]: And some reason I thought that it'll be good for me to go to Korea, and I think part of it was probably some intuitive thing that I felt the need to go back to where I came from, and I knew there were lots of Buddhist temples in Korea.

27:45 [SPEAKER_02]: So I asked a friend to find me a temple. [SPEAKER_02]: So she found a place that she said, where really known for doing the ritual right way, not like the superficial way. [SPEAKER_02]: She said, but I just want you to know, you have to set for a long time and his silence. [SPEAKER_02]: Also, this will be hard for you, she said, because you cannot have dinner.

28:10 [SPEAKER_02]: And what, why, why, I mean, you know, because you know, I love to eat. [SPEAKER_02]: So that's how I ended up being there. [SPEAKER_02]: I think that I knew so little actually of our Buddhism or what I was getting into, but I always kind of tend to dive in, you know. [SPEAKER_02]: So I went to a new house out, which is a British temple and a sudden tip of Korean peninsula.

28:34 [SPEAKER_02]: My group of girlfriends dropped me off and they said, okay, since you're not gonna be able to eat for a while, we should just take it to a really nice lunch. [SPEAKER_02]: So we went and had a pork barbecue. [SPEAKER_02]: And so, you know, like we stunt like barbecue right poor and then we're going to get to you get to the temple and the air that meets us and I thought, oh, looking back, I was like, oh my god, what were we thinking?

28:59 [SPEAKER_02]: Because, you know, I'm sure you could smell pork and barbecue, you know, all from all of us. [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, my friends dropped me off and then they snuck all his snacks for me. [SPEAKER_02]: They said, if you can hungry, here are some apples and heartburn eggs, you know, and there you could eat.

29:19 [SPEAKER_01]: What did you expect was going to happen on this retreat and then what actually did happen? [SPEAKER_02]: So I went with the attitude, I'm going to check it out to see if it is good, or if I wanted to do this. [SPEAKER_02]: And that I could already leave, or I could sneak out and do my own things.

29:36 [SPEAKER_02]: I brought a book, you know. [SPEAKER_02]: I brought, you know, journal. [SPEAKER_02]: So I was going to do all these things. [SPEAKER_02]: And I, you know, first day, first day, the orientation was not journal. [SPEAKER_02]: No proof. [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, that I'll encourage you because we had a full day from 5 in the morning until 9 o'clock when the lights are out.

29:58 [SPEAKER_02]: We're busy. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, every minute was occupied except the time when we, three times, you know, but they were generally taken up by walking or doing other things. [SPEAKER_02]: So I really didn't know. [SPEAKER_02]: So first thing was like that I couldn't be an observer that I had to really commit to being there.

30:17 [SPEAKER_02]: I have never really, really meditated until that point. [SPEAKER_02]: Just, I still been, you know, without any practice or understanding. [SPEAKER_02]: And maybe in some ways, that was good because then I got a lot more out of it, I guess, because I had to just block with it. [SPEAKER_02]: And I didn't even, like, really believe in who that's teaching necessarily, because I was going to check it out.

30:45 [SPEAKER_02]: There was a main habit, and there was a system sitting, was also a monk who was very funny young, funny, but also very strict. [SPEAKER_02]: Couple of days into the retreat, he put me to a side and he scored me. [SPEAKER_02]: He said, I've been observing you, and he said, you are one of the worst students.

31:08 [SPEAKER_02]: And I just looked at her and I said, well, what do you mean? [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, I was also all this woman, right? [SPEAKER_02]: So, you know, for young and slim to tell me this, I was like, it's that every morning when we pray and bow to Buddha, you do it with almost respect. [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, you barely could just, [SPEAKER_02]: Wow, you know, you said you really have difficulty, he said, I know you're from United States and you have used to being American way, but he said, you have to bow to Buddha with a deep respect.

31:41 [SPEAKER_02]: So it has to show and I was like, show me. [SPEAKER_02]: So he demonstrated, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Then I turned to the men joke to him, I said, why were you looking at me when you supposed to be praying to Buddha yourself? [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, well, plus my job, you know. [SPEAKER_02]: Anyway, so, you know, we kind of have back and forth throughout the whole retreat.

32:04 [SPEAKER_02]: I mean, the pain was excruciating because of sitting for so long. [SPEAKER_02]: And then I wasn't used to sitting on the floor that long. [SPEAKER_02]: So just dealing with the pain and every time I shift, the monk will say, I know all of you are shifting. [SPEAKER_02]: He said, you feel better for a minute, but it's not gonna go away.

32:23 [SPEAKER_02]: The next position, you're gonna hurt again. [SPEAKER_02]: And I'm thinking, well, this is like religion, like a basicistic, it's very, like it's all about pain, you know. [SPEAKER_01]: Did you ever consider quitting? [SPEAKER_02]: So I tried to go to Bathroom on the last release. [SPEAKER_02]: So I mean, in the beginning, I was thinking of, I'll sit there and think of all these tricks.

32:46 [SPEAKER_02]: How I was going to try to relieve myself from sitting so long. [SPEAKER_02]: And the office manager came up to me and she said, how are you doing? [SPEAKER_02]: Can you, are you going to be able to last? [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, I don't know, I'm trying. [SPEAKER_02]: She goes, well, you know, let me know if you are really, if it is really too hard for you.

33:06 [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, okay, so when she said that, and I thought, well, why she asking me, you know, not others. [SPEAKER_02]: And I thought, well, you know, maybe I really should try. [SPEAKER_02]: I think at some point after a few days, I think I decided that I was going to stick it out. [SPEAKER_02]: So then it changed my attitude around that once I stopped resisting, then I was able to actually have some very profound experiences during the meditation.

33:37 [SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, so I remember when you came back from this retreat and we're kind of asking you like, what was it like? [SPEAKER_01]: And you were telling these stories we were like, why would you do that? [SPEAKER_01]: It sounds terrible. [SPEAKER_01]: But clearly, we could also sense that this really changed something for you, is very powerful.

33:55 [SPEAKER_01]: Why do you think it had such a big impact? [SPEAKER_02]: I think it's the first time I realized that this meeting [SPEAKER_02]: I think I was able to get in touch with and it wasn't like profound or light wall thing, but I think as I was sitting more and more I became more comfortable with who I am and what I am made of.

34:26 [SPEAKER_02]: The I think silence is extremely important because you waste a lot of energy just talking. [SPEAKER_02]: But I would also have this moments during the meditation where just this emotions will come up. [SPEAKER_02]: And they were very powerful and I didn't know that I needed to cry or you know, sometimes I'll just think have this moments where I would have a flesh back over something funny, you know, that house that laughing or but there were memories, especially from my only child that I never knew that I remember then that will come up.

35:06 [SPEAKER_02]: At the same time, the teaching was that stayed in present moments, right? [SPEAKER_02]: Do not plan for the future, do not do it on the past, you know? [SPEAKER_02]: So when I was talking with the effort at the end, and I said, well, you know, he said, how was it, you know, and how are you doing?

35:23 [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, well, I don't know if I didn't really well, because I kept on having these memories, and I know you told us to stay present. [SPEAKER_02]: And what he said was that, [SPEAKER_02]: These memories may be from the past, but the feelings are present. [SPEAKER_02]: What you feel is what you're feeling at the moment.

35:45 [SPEAKER_02]: And I said, yeah, I didn't know that I had so many. [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, well, think about it like a slow, in a high mountain, they're packed snows. [SPEAKER_02]: And there when spring comes, it starts melting slowly. [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, that's, you know, what you're going through is then you're releasing.

36:06 [SPEAKER_02]: So I thought it was really, very nice and very beautiful. [SPEAKER_01]: So going back to, you know, Karl Marx for a second, this famous line religion is the opium of the masses, it's something that kind of keeps us pacified. [SPEAKER_01]: I think many people talk about this tension between Buddhism, which is about kind of accepting things as they are, or accepting the world, being present here, and then radical politics, which is about changing the world, kind of like shaping reality around ideals.

37:08 [SPEAKER_01]: Having had this experience and having done many of these retreats now, how do you make sense of those two worldviews? [SPEAKER_02]: 20 years ago, I had an opportunity to sit with a pala frate from Brazil. [SPEAKER_02]: And he has done a lot of work on, I know, pedagogical oppressed. [SPEAKER_02]: I don't remember a lot of things.

37:28 [SPEAKER_02]: I only remember two things from that meeting with him. [SPEAKER_02]: One was that somebody asked a question about tension between what he was teaching and Marxism. [SPEAKER_02]: And he said, Marxism is great, except one thing. [SPEAKER_02]: it denies people's right to have a spirituality.

37:51 [SPEAKER_02]: The separation or negation basically of a spirituality is what is not sustained revolution. [SPEAKER_02]: And second thing was the food that he served, Fed you on. [SPEAKER_02]: I think that often when I look like given and then the social movements here, all the protests come and go, it's not sustained.

38:14 [SPEAKER_02]: And I've been thinking about why is that? [SPEAKER_02]: It's because, you know, it just is outbursts. [SPEAKER_02]: I'm more interested in sustained long-term change when I thought about it, [SPEAKER_02]: Although, you know, the dogma or the teaching is very different, there are many similarities, I think, about organizing and Buddhist way of enlightenment.

38:42 [SPEAKER_02]: First of all, you have to believe in individuals capacity to realize that they have a power to change. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and then you get into organizing in groups, you know, it's about connected and it's about the community, you know, that makes change in Buddhism is about the community.

39:05 [SPEAKER_02]: The song is not just individual, so what do you do with your enlightenment is not for just when you to feel whatever, you know, and obviously and, you know, [SPEAKER_02]: marches teaching us about organizing and bringing revolutions. [SPEAKER_02]: So it's not all that opposite. [SPEAKER_02]: You know, it's kind of like people have taken Christianity into liberation theology, right?

39:28 [SPEAKER_01]: You know, I think before I studied, but as of myself, I had this idea of awakening or even enlightenment as this big kind of like transcendent experience where your mind would open or something. [SPEAKER_04]: Yeah. [SPEAKER_01]: And now, hearing you talk about, you know, your experience at this retreat, maybe awakening isn't this transcendent thing, but it's actually these very tangible things like empowering people and believing in people's capacity and kind of building community.

39:57 [SPEAKER_01]: And I think that helps me to make sense of how Buddhism can actually apply to many people and our daily lives. [SPEAKER_02]: Yes. [SPEAKER_02]: And I think it's no accident, actually, in a lot of more in the last five ten years, in movement spaces, there's a lot more interest and integrating Buddhism or meditation into our work.

40:22 [SPEAKER_02]: You know, and I think part of it is that you cannot sustain yourself or the movement, just based on organizing on anger or [SPEAKER_02]: Right, so I think that it to me is a really good sign and Healthy sign because that I think it would help us sustain the movement Okay, thank you so much mom really appreciate your stories and sharing Right, thank you.

40:47 [SPEAKER_02]: This was fun Good. [SPEAKER_01]: Thank you My mom has led a remarkable life [SPEAKER_01]: growing up in a tumultuous South Korea, arriving in Berkeley and studying marks, helping launch the first Korean American political movement, and meeting and learning from Palo Fair. [SPEAKER_01]: But she probably wouldn't be able to speak about her past so openly if she hadn't gone on that Buddhist retreat.

41:26 [SPEAKER_01]: When you do that much meditation, you see the essence of who you are. [SPEAKER_01]: I found something similar when I started sitting and doing Buddhist rituals. [SPEAKER_01]: I saw that my anger and despair weren't helping anyone. [SPEAKER_01]: It wasn't enough to analyze violence. [SPEAKER_01]: I had to find connection and joy as well.

41:48 [SPEAKER_01]: Maybe, as my mom said, religion and social change aren't at odds after all. [SPEAKER_01]: it can be a way to build community, empower leaders, and sustain movements beyond protests. [SPEAKER_01]: We need organizing to shift our material conditions. [SPEAKER_01]: And we need spiritual practices to face those conditions clearly.

42:15 [SPEAKER_01]: But of all the things I've learned from Buddhism, maybe I'm most grateful for this shared understanding with my mom. [SPEAKER_01]: There's a metaphor in Zen Buddhism of the chicken and the chicken side its egg. [SPEAKER_01]: Both have to tap slowly and gently at the shell until one day there's a breakthrough.

42:36 [SPEAKER_01]: It took each of us years of tapping to crack through our complex histories. [SPEAKER_01]: It's so essential we did because understanding the past is the first step to creating the future we want. [SPEAKER_01]: In the next episode, we'll go deeper into the Asian-American movement that shaped my mother's radical politics, a history that's critical to understanding Buddhism in America.

43:03 [SPEAKER_02]: Join me next time on Radical Buddhism. [SPEAKER_01]: Radical Buddhism is a production of Axis Mindi Media and made possible by a grant from the Henry loose foundation which seeks to deepen public knowledge of religion. [SPEAKER_01]: Andrew Gill is the producer with a original music by Scott Okamoto.

43:23 [SPEAKER_01]: The Barry Center for Buddhist Studies is our fiscal sponsor. [SPEAKER_01]: Thanks so much for listening. [UNKNOWN]: Thank you very much for watching.