Episode #158: Ayya Yeshe
“My father died when I was 14, and that sent me into a tailspin,” Ayya Yeshe shares vulnerably. “Then I went to India when I was 17, and discovered Buddhism, mostly Tibetan Buddhism. I discovered a profound peace, and realized that I could choose my thoughts, which was very liberating. I didn't have to just follow whatever thoughts came into my head, and I could observe emotions without being drowned by them.”
So begins Ayya Yeshe’s spiritual journey, which led to her becoming a nun when she was 23 years old. However, she soon learned that female renunciates weren’t treated with the same respect as males, which she found to be very “disheartening,” presenting yet another roadblock in her path. Eventually moving away from Tibetan Buddhism, she trained under Bhante Sujato in the Ajahn Chah tradition, and then took Bhikkhuni ordination in 2006 in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Plum Village.
“Engaged Buddhism is the way I practiced going forward,” she says, although she admits that she didn’t begin her ordained life with an intention to engage in social causes. “What I saw in the world made me an Engaged Buddhist. I think Westerners have this misunderstanding of what a Buddhist community is, and they underestimate the value of community. A monastery in Asia is more than just a place where you go and sit alone and find liberation from the world, separate from the world. A monastery is a community,” she notes, adding how the 11 years she spent living in (and then supporting) a Dalit community in India also had a profound impact on her worldview. “A lot of the problems we're having now in the West are because we are disconnected from community, and we're disconnected from the planet. We don't have a sense of our place in the world. We're just completely obsessed with individual identity.”
Realizing that everything is interconnected, including one’s pursuit of happiness and spiritual striving are as well, Ayya Yeshe soon came to believe that an ideal Buddhist community wasn’t one where each yogi was seeking their own liberation apart from others, but rather a community that valued the welfare of all its members.
Still, this doesn’t mean that she neglects or underestimates the value of solitary practice and inner contemplation. “Seclusion is necessary,” she affirms. “It's the building block, the foundation stone of Buddhist practice. But communal practice is often underestimated and misunderstood, because Westerners had just taken this insight practice and left everything else, like ethics, altruism, and community, which were naturally there as part of Buddhist practice.” She talks about the many years that the Buddha spent teaching lay people, and how the rules governing Buddhist monastics guarantee that their sustenance can only be provided by lay communities.
Similarly, she notes how she didn’t ever intentionally choose to be a feminist. Rather, a series of difficult interactions within Tibetan Buddhist monasteries made her take on this cause. “I was constantly being treated like a second-class citizen! I was more or less told to feel shame because I was a woman, and that it was my bad karma to be a woman. I felt oppressed and depressed,” she recalls, referencing a particularly painful incident when a Tibetan lama said the best she could hope for was that she might reborn a man in the next life, as he advised her that her very existence as a woman was a barrier to liberation. “Without human rights and without basic equality, spiritual practice becomes very difficult.”
Pointing out that the Buddha clearly affirmed that women had every potential of awakening as did men, she began to wonder why so little progress had been made within monastic communities in the centuries since. “It was by necessity that I became a socially Engaged Buddhist, because I literally had nowhere to live as a nun!”
At that time, she was residing in Bodhgaya, where it was impossible not to notice the chasm between local residents and more affluent pilgrims. “There is the real world where the descendants of the Buddha are living, which for the majority is a world of vicious poverty, heat degradation, desperation, and hunger; and there's a barbed wire fence and soldiers with guns in between. I thought if the Buddha was here, which side of the fence would he be on? [As soon as] you start practicing, your heart opens, and you look all around you, and you see there's suffering. So how can you do nothing? My question is, ‘How can you not be a socially Engaged Buddhist, and to be honest with the way the world is?’”
It was this spirit that compelled Ayya Yeshe to join forces with Bhikkhuni Vimala soon after the military coup in Myanmar. They began a campaign encouraging Buddhist monastics around the world to photograph themselves with their alms bowl upside down as a sign of solidarity with the resistance movement. “Burma is a bit of a black box,” she acknowledges, “we get tales of human rights atrocities and people driven in trucks out into the forest and just murdered, and kinds of horrible atrocities going on. It can make you feel a little bit helpless.” While she hopes that some reconciliation may happen years down the line to bring peace to the Golden Land, for now she sadly recognizes that Burma is in a “fire phase.”
Ayya Yeshe is not shy about calling out meditators who choose not to act in the face of injustices happening around them. “Human rights violations are a threat to the preservation of the Dhamma, so I don't know how people can remain apathetic!” she exclaims. “It's a sign of privilege when you take a spiritual tradition that has been carefully preserved and handed down with so much care from Asia, and you take that and you benefit from it, but you don't give the source credit!”
Having followed the conflict in Myanmar develop over the past few years, Ayya Yeshe understands that military atrocities need to be resisted in some form. “I'm not a pacifist, and I'm not opposed to necessary force,” she says, but expresses concern for the potential of an armed resistance becoming unchecked and creating a never-ending cycle of violence. “It takes a commitment to human rights and justice, when you experience violence, to not then become worse than the people who committed violence against you.”
But mostly, she notes the importance of deferring to those actively engaged on the ground, and doing more listening than leading. “What I can do is to use my privilege to lend a voice to those inside Burma, to take the direction from those inside Burma, from those who are experiencing the oppression, and amplify their voices, rather than me as a white person telling them what to do.”
Aware that the world is quite often a messy and unjust place, Ayya Yeshe encourages meditators to examine when they are passively benefiting from systems of oppression. She advocates what she refers to as “Sacred Rage,” which she defines as “not to be destructive with anger, but it's the place where we allow anger to arise, and we process it and understand the causes of it, and then allow it to be tempered into compassion and empathy.”
Ayya Yeshe sees a clear intersection where meditation practice can inform and guide positive social engagement, and conversely, how spiritual bypassing can take shape. “Hopefully, one would hope that spiritual practice would make you more aware of your sacred relationship with all of life. But unfortunately, some people tend to use spiritual practice as a place to hide rather than as a place to grow and to open up,” she says. “There's nothing wrong with seeking your own peace from spiritual practice. That's a starting point, but it can't be where you stay your whole life. It's like staying in preschool, and never going to college. There comes a point where you need to take the good things you've learned into the world, and not remain silent in the face of injustice, and not be co-opted by money and by security to support atrocities or to be silent about exploitation.”