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Snjezana Veljacic-Akpinar, Ph.D.
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Snjezana Veljacic-Akpinar, Ph.D.
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 I
was born behind the iron curtain, in Yugoslavia. Although a Communist
country, Yugoslavia was on the border between East and West, sitting out
on its own. There people could do what they pleased. I grew up traditionally
and culturally speaking in Catholicism, but there were also Serbian Orthodox
(Eastern Orthodox), Muslims (as we all know after this horrible war),
and there were also a few Buddhists. The groups were not at each other's
throats, but there was prejudice against the Muslims and the Turks. I
wanted to know more about that aspect of our culture and do my own thing--not
my father's--so I studied Islam. My father was Buddhist and became a monk
when I was 24. His life as a Buddhist was about being more aware of the
whole world and my parents encouraged me not to be entrenched in the Western
tradition. Not that there is anything particularly bad with the Western
world. Christianity is a good culture and religion, but we westerners
tend to be very arrogant and prejudiced and very closed to the East. I
got a Ph.D. in Middle Eastern Studies and Islam and I married a Turk.
I came to the United States in 1967 and taught at the University of Akron
in Ohio.
Master HuaI first visited the Gold Mountain Monastery in San Francisco in the Mission
District ten years ago and walked into this cave-like place with a picture
of Master Hua in the corner in darkness. There were two American monks
there with Chinese names and it seemed like I had walked back through
the millenia. It felt so ancient and authentic. I thought "Gee, I wish
I could have met this person on the wall." I was sure he lived hundreds
of years ago. My father, who had left Sri Lanka and was in the United
States for medical reasons, was with me. He told me, "You know, this man
is still alive." Master Hua was a patriarch of the Chinese Ch'an Buddhist
tradition-- somewhat similar to the Pope of the Catholic Church. The Chinese
understand this very well. This is why this place is on the map as the
Center for Chinese Buddhism. He was called a Tripitaka Master, which means
that he had mastered the three "baskets" of books that form the Buddhist
Canon. It's a title that is not easy to attain. His own teacher, Hsu Yun
lived to be 107 years old and was an incredible fellow. So we came here
to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (in Talmage, just SE of Ukiah) and
I met Master Hua. I had the same impression of stepping back in time when
I walked into the Buddha Hall here. There were a number of people from
Malaysia, and American monks who seemed Chinese. It intrigued me, but
I didn't stay long. Instead, I went to Saudi Arabia where I had made arrangements
to set up a foreign language program in a women's college. I did that
for a year. When I came back, I collaborated with UC Berkeley in Middle
Eastern Studies. My dad had also come back to the US for another operation.
Since Sri Lanka was falling apart as a country, I couldn't in good faith
let him go back there. So we investigated the possibility of his coming
to live here. We wrote a nice letter to Master Hua and that's how it all
began about eight years ago.
Cultural Meeting GroundDharma Realm Buddhist University is a small school aimed at educating
the nuns and monks and anyone else who wants to come here and study. This
monastery and its schools moved here in l976. I am the President of the
University. When I first came here, there were more westerners. Now a
majority of people are from Taiwan and from other Asian countries--Malaysia,
Vietnam, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Singapore, Indonesia. This is a very
international community. There are also westerners like myself--Americans
of European origin. All kinds of people stray in. Some stay and some don't.
It is a wonderful place, actually, if you understand it. The first impression
could be that it's somewhat chaotic. When I came here and started doing
work for the University, I taught history. I always see myself as being
the speaker for the minority. In Yugoslavia, this was the Muslims and
the Moslem culture. Here, the little imp within me, if you want to call
it that, tried to make people understand that there are other cultures
and religions than the Chinese/Buddhist. I saw this fascinating and wonderful
Chinese culture wanting to push itself so I would push their thing in
Berkeley, but here I push Islam and the Middle East. This is a very misunderstood
part of the world right now, among the Chinese as well as the westerners.
People liked my class on the Middle East. I made friends with the venerable
Master Hua and being a Ch'an Master he appreciated this balance. Slowly
I started doing things that led to the position of running the University.
Master Hua thought I would be a good person for the job--probably because
I'm neither American nor Chinese. I'm impartial. He asked me to help out
and everyone else agreed. This is a very democratic place. Dharma Realm
Buddhist Association is a cosmopolitan, liberal association. Also, I might
add, it is a very dynamic place. Most of our students have green cards.
Some of the students come from other countries just for training periods,
so they are guests. As a college, we do not offer visas for the nuns and
monks who come here just for monastic training. There are different categories
and some can get visas as religious workers under religious exemptions.
They can spend a year or two for their novitiate here. The Asians here
and the westerners beyond our gates need to make an effort to understand
each other better. The University is a very good avenue for that because
it is a teaching establishment. The Asians here need to understand America.
They need a lot of encouragement to learn better English and to understand
the culture around them. The local community needs to realize that Buddhism
is not a preaching religion. Buddhists do not convert other people. As
happens in any culture or religion, there may be individuals that are
narrow minded, but this does not reflect on the group as a whole. What
we need to do is communicate better and cooperate with each other. This
place has a lot of potential, particularly when it comes to offering courses
and classes in various areas of study, such as Sociology, Theologies,
Religions and Liberal Arts.
Buddhist Text TranslationOne of the main issues and interests of this whole organization is the
translation of ancient Chinese Buddhist texts into English. Chinese Buddhism
and Buddhism in general has a vast set of scriptures compared to Christianity.
These scriptures are called sutras. You don't have just one bible to read
and call that your scripture. It goes on and on and on. Most of these
have now been translated into English. Master Hua was trained in Manchuria
and had a phenomenal understanding of Buddhist texts. That is one of the
reasons why he was a patriarch of a tradition of Chinese Buddhism. He
wanted to share his understanding with the world and specifically to translate
and explain these texts to westerners. All of his lectures and commentaries
on the sutras were conducted in a very traditional Chinese fashion, but
they were translated into English on the spot. The Buddhist Text Translation
Association (part of this Dharma Realm Buddhist Association) did the translations.
Without commentary, those texts would be very obscure, even to the Chinese,
since the language is very old and reveals an old philosophy of life.
The commentaries, often related to other commentaries, are made after
a great amount of reading, study, and contemplation.
In many ways the texts shed light on our contemporary life. We just have to be willing to see it. The problems of this world are pretty much the same, even though they come with a different wording or slant. If you read these texts slowly, you will find many answers to our condition right now. It will trigger something inside you--awaken something that will help you understand yourself or our human condition in a much better way. It is like a switch--not intended to answer a particular question, but to guide you in the right direction. This is not only true for a Buddhist text but any sacred text. Master Hua was beyond biases. He could see very, very well. Women's Lib Chinese StyleThe reason there are so few monks and so very many nuns here, in my impression,
is what you would call "Women's Lib" Chinese style. It is a very liberating
thing when women are together. Here, the nuns and the monks are completely
equal. You might not think it, but they really have the same rights. Nuns
can conduct ceremonies. They can do anything they like within the limits
of their monastic vows. If Master Hua were here he would stress this aspect
of the monastery. It is, as the Chinese say, "A way place of the ten directions."
There are monks and there are nuns and also lay people who come with or
without their families. He would make it very clear that Buddhism is an
egalitarian religion and that everything else is cultural--but that is
probably true for any religion. Right now the Abbot of this monastery
is a quite young Taiwanese. He is a very fine person. I don't want anybody
to think that I am criticizing him because I admire him very much for
what he is trying to do. But there are these Taiwanese attitudes--not
with the Abbot but with the majority of the people here that don't quite
understand that the women can do as they please--and they do if there
is no question. But there is a cultural bias and it makes the nuns upset
every so often about certain little things. Today we had a very big celebration
and none of the nuns spoke. I don't know why that happened, but had Master
Hua been here, the nuns would have been blasting off there at the microphone.
Why that happened and how that happened I don't know, but nobody was paying
attention to it and there wasn't an aggressive enough nun to take over
and say "Hey!" These things happen in any organization when an anacronism
is played out.
Every evening there are Dharma talks at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. These are comparable to sermons in Christianity. We read a sutra text and then discuss it. Those always have to be translated in a formal way as part of the monastic tradition. These Dharma talks are part of our University curriculum. Monasteries throughout the world were universities and they still continue to educate their members in traditional ways. We're combining an ancient practice with contemporary methods of teaching. I am hoping we will also have something more to offer that will be interesting to the public--like brush painting, flower arrangement, Tai Chi, and ceramics. We don't have these classes now, but we have had them in the past. We do have Sanskrit and Chinese classes in addition to ESL classes. We have voluntary tuition for each class. If you are poor, the fee is waived. The organization will pay for nuns and monks who don't carry or have money. By definition they are poor; they take a vow of poverty. At The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas there are traditional Buddhist devotional practices, daily ceremonies, recitation sessions and Ch'an meditation retreats. Whenever there is a major event or the whole monastery is meditating, classes are suspended. Special sessions are interspersed throughout the year. Otherwise, we generally follow a typical college semester schedule. The recitation and Ch'an sessions give punctuation to our courses. It is very nice to take off and meditate for a week. Nuns and monks abide by very rigid rules and regulations. They get up at 4 o'clock in the morning and meditate; they chant and do their bowing. These things are a given. That's the underpinning of everything--the anchor that keeps it all together. If you are a part of the University, you have to go to school, obviously. Beyond that, there is still a lot of room for doing what you wish. Like now--painting the University building--I'm making sure that the right color is being used because people come from different countries and they all want to help which is wonderful and heartwarming but you have to know what you're doing. We could get paint all over the place and we often do. The gardening is similar, it just goes wild; everybody contributes; one plants a rosebush, one pulls a rosebush and plants something else, before they give themselves or others a chance to think. We do need a little more order in the maintenance and upkeep. This is the challenge for everybody--to see if they can all grow up and mature. We have been running things two years now without Master Hua. Nobody is in charge. I believe that the Quakers are a little bit like that. They run by consensus. Even when Master Hua was here there was this creative chaos. AccreditationOur degrees are recognized by the California Council for Post-Secondary
Education. We also need to get Western Association of Schools and Colleges
(WASC) accreditation. We are working on this, but is it is complicated.
It does not accredit theological institutions. This is not a theological
institution because Buddhism is not a theological religion and it's not
a Western religion, so they don't know which category to put us in. They
send us to various agencies that accredit Bible schools, but we don't
fit into that category either. We are caught in between categories. We
send some of our students and some of the nuns and monks to Mendocino
College for classes we cannot offer. We aren't a big school, and we run
on a shoestring budget. Many of our teachers are volunteers. We accept
students for seminars from other California Universities, but cannot transfer
our credits to their schools. However, approximately 50 people come here
for weekend seminars each semester from Humboldt State as part of their
World's Religions class. Now we are working with them so that they can
get credit for their work here. This may eventually create the missing
link for transferring units to the CSU system. Our summer ESL (English
as a second language) program is taught by a woman who also teaches for
Mendocino College. In addition to regular ESL classes we have a special
class that teaches methods for teaching ESL. It offers continuing education
credits through the Dominican College.
Here, at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, we mostly train nuns and monks who learn about Buddhism and study the scriptures using age old methods which are quite wonderful. At the Berkeley Monastery it is slightly different. There we have the Institute for World Religions, an academic arm of the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association and University. The underpinning is Buddhist, but it is not only Buddhist. We collaborate with the Graduate Theological Union (GTU) that has a special connection to UC Berkeley. It offers a joint doctorate with UC Berkeley and its masters program also has classes that switch back and forth. We're working with them now. For example, I taught a course for the GTU and for our Institute. We are offering a couple of courses that will be co-taught by GTU professors and our professors. We will be giving credit there on the graduate level. Here at DRBU we only offer a Masters degree. Saudi ArabiaBefore coming here, I set up a program for the study of foreign languages
in a women's college in Saudi Arabia. I taught English and History there
for a year. A Yugoslav couldn't work in Saudi Arabia since there was an
injunction against communism and they had just passed a law that only
Muslim women could teach Muslim women. I'm not saying the people were
happy with this, but it was government policy. All these laws limited
the schools ability to hire native speakers of English or other languages.
My husband is a Turk so I had this wonderful alibi. I speak Turkish and for them I was an American Turk and could be considered a Muslim for official purposes. I could also be viewed as a Westerner, and a Christian. They loved people like me who could be both ways. They figured out a way of allowing Americans and English women to teach under a clause that put us under tourism rather than academics. Academics would fall under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Education but tourism comes under the Ministry of Information which wasn't as conservative. So I found it quite interesting to see how we had to go against the status quo and to bypass and circumvent things in order to teach there. I discovered that Saudi Arabia is not as oppressive to women as we think it to be. Westerners, and probably Easterners too, tend to see their own faults in other people and magnify them. The women in Saudi Arabia have more freedom than Western women in many ways. Although women wear a veil and are segregated, they are not suppressed. On the contrary, the women can do whatever they please within their segregated society. Very often the women have businesses and are the breadwinners. They are often better educated than their husbands. Husbands can't even walk into their living rooms unless they have permission from their wives. They have a different way of looking at the world that we don't always see or understand. By some standards, the Saudi women are probably much better off than many women in the West. Of course you cannot generalize and I'm not making a judgment. I simply like to point out stereotypes. |
