This is an AI-generated transcript from auto-generated subtitles for the video Introduction to Buddhist Chaplaincy. It likely contains inaccuracies.
The following talk was given by Jennifer Block at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California. Please visit the website www.audiodharma.org for more information.
Hello everybody. Hi. I’m just seeing the screen fill up with faces. Some familiar faces. Wonderful. Some folks I’m seeing for the first time. So, welcome everybody. This is really wonderful. Welcome to this special session, this special time together to talk about chaplaincy, Buddhist chaplaincy, and then a little bit about what we do and offer here at the Sati Center.
In total, we’re due to run for three hours. It’s quite a long session because we’ve got a lot that we’d like to talk about, and we’d also like to make some space for any questions that you might have. So, we’ll take a little break in the middle. We’ll have two sessions this morning with about a 15-minute break in the middle. I hope that’s enough time for you to do what you might need to do.
Before the break, for the first half this morning, Jennifer and I are going to be talking about chaplaincy in general. You know, what is chaplaincy? What’s it all about? How does it look? What does a chaplain actually do? You know, what does this work look like? What shapes and sizes does it come in?
And then after the break, we’re going to focus more specifically on Buddhist chaplaincy. We’re going to have a couple of folks join us who are graduates of the Sati Center’s Buddhist chaplaincy program, both of whom work in different areas of chaplaincy now. So they’re both going to come and talk a little bit about what they do. And then we’ll talk a bit about the program, the Buddhist chaplaincy training program offered at the Sati Center. And then after all of that, there’ll be more time for questions. So that’s a very rough sketch of the day.
Just before we start, there’s a couple of things. First, I would just like to invite us all, as we’re all kind of dropping into this space from different places, different time zones. For some of us, it might be very early morning. For some of us, it’s much later in the day, coming in on the evening. That’s me. I’m over in France right now. So, as we all just come in, I’m going to invite about a minute or two of silence and settling, just to allow ourselves a little breathing time and to let our bodies know that we’ve come into this space together and that we’re ready to start. So, I’m going to ring a bell once to start this little period of silence, then I’ll ring it again when we’re done.
I’ll pass on to Jennifer now. And Jennifer, hello. Good morning.
Jennifer Block: Welcome everybody, near and far. Once upon a time, people attended the Buddhist chaplaincy training from different parts of the United States. And it’s delightful to have people from all over the world, since you can participate online or in person. And we have had people come in person from various places. There actually was somebody once who came from France, and then she decided it was too much travel.
My teaching style is to talk some and then to recollect my thoughts and listen for how what I’m teaching is landing. And also to listen inside about my original plan and to stick to the plan or adapt the plan based on what I discover along the way.
Today, this morning, in the first half of the session, I’m going to talk about what chaplains do, whether they’re Buddhist or Methodist or Anglican or Jewish. There’s a set of skills that chaplains cultivate and use, and they’re not completely digestible until you take the training.
So for example, providing spiritual care to people experiencing grief and loss. There’s an understanding that chaplains have about grief and loss and bereavement. And I have found as a healthcare chaplain that the newer somebody is to the profession, the less they know or understand about grief. In healthcare, people get very task-focused. So there’s been a few times when I’ve talked to somebody and said, “I think their grief is really acute right now. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s an 11.” So I don’t know that what we’re telling them is really entering their understanding, or they may need some time to metabolize their experience to the point where they can engage with us in a manner that we’re used to.
Can I get a show of hands of people who have done some training in caring for others, one form or another, medicine, therapy? Great. Okay. Great. Super. Thank you. This gives me an idea of the crowd.
Chaplains, regardless of identification with a faith tradition, the skills they share fall into a few different buckets, if you will, and I’ll just describe those buckets briefly.
One is a big bucket which is called self-understanding or self-awareness. Who am I in relation to others? How do other people perceive me? What’s my understanding of my upbringing and how that gets expressed in my actions as an adult, even though it’s been a while since I was raised in my family? These things carry on. Also, what are my strengths and gifts? And what are my liabilities? You know, what’s my Achilles’ heel? What triggers me? So for example, do I habitually try to have people in a group understand that I’m the smartest one amongst them? Or do I understand that the way I speak and come across seems either confident or arrogant, depending on some of your worldviews about women’s roles in society? I actually think they’re both sides of a coin.
The second bucket is understanding of religious traditions and spiritual paths. So that when somebody says—I introduce myself and they say, “I am a Mormon and I have people coming to visit me, so I don’t need a chaplain from the hospital to engage with me”—my understanding of the Mormons is that they like to be cared for by other Mormons. It’s very important in terms of their tradition, values, and norms. Now, if somebody said, “I am an Orthodox Russian Catholic,” that would be a little trickier because the Russian on top of the Orthodox on top of Catholic is a very unique combination and very prevalent in places like Venezuela. So I know a little bit about it from working with somebody once upon a time. By learning other religious traditions, I have more tools in my pocket, if you will. Other interpersonal skills in the second bucket are how to begin and initiate a spiritual care conversation and how to end, how to say goodbye, how to know when it’s time to leave the room. Those are skills which require a good deal of situational awareness, like what’s the situation that I’m in? What is unfolding? And what do I think is an ideal path forward? If anybody has a specific question or if I’m being too brief in my explanations, please let me know.
The third bucket is an understanding of human nature. And there are definitely different windows in which one can peek into the nature of humanity. So for example, group dynamics, like what happens when a bunch of people are together? What can be expected? Because there are observable patterns in groups as they relate to each other and the context that they find themselves in. Related to this is family dynamics. Probably everybody on the screen now can articulate how the dynamics were in their family. So for example, it’s helpful for me when I enter a family meeting where there’s probably the spouse of a patient and the brother of the patient and the patient and husbands or wives, offspring. And so I might ask, “How many children do you have?” and then ask who the children are. And then I might say, “And who’s the oldest?” In some cultures, it’s important to know who the oldest is because the oldest child is often a prime decision-maker, and it’s part of their role in the family that they have a leadership amongst their siblings, for example.
And then the last bucket is how to function as a chaplain. So, how to communicate about spiritual care to people that aren’t familiar with it. How to say goodbye at the right time. How to communicate with other disciplines: doctors, nurses, respiratory therapists, physical therapists. What do they need to know that I think is important? Such as, I might put in a health record that I discovered that the wife and wife have different opinions about the current health condition of one of them. When people come to the hospital, it’s kind of shocking. Nobody plans a hospital stay like you plan a vacation. People wake up and then find themselves in the emergency room by the end of the day, unexpected. And so they’re trying to digest, metabolize what’s happened to them. And that may mean that they don’t understand something the first time they’re told. So, I might inquire to somebody who I’m meeting for the first time, “What is your understanding of what’s happened here for you today? And what might happen tomorrow?” And then if they don’t really understand what got them here, but I see in the medical record that they had trouble breathing and that they’re doing a workup of the person’s heart and lungs, I would listen for whether they’re talking about their heart and or their lungs. And then I might communicate my impression that they have absorbed about half of the information that is available to them and that we may need to re-educate and inform the patient and the family accordingly.
Lastly, I’ll mention chaplains also each have their own what’s called a faith identity or affiliation. So, Roman Catholic, Methodist, Renewal Judaism, the Swedenborg tradition, the liberation theology that they identify with the most strongly. That people have the potential for transformation, or as a Buddhist, that we are all in the process of awakening, and as practitioners, we share some common understandings.
In healthcare chaplaincy, traditionally in the United States, people followed a particular path towards becoming a chaplain. It typically involved being a regular church member and having, as they say, “grown up in the church.” And then they’re so passionate about the tradition and their own spiritual path within it that they have a sense of calling or being drawn to ministry of some sort. And then after high school, people go to college. And then after college, they typically enter a seminary for training in the tradition of their upbringing. And then after seminary, in most faith traditions, people are ordained to minister to a congregation.
After that, in this country, what happened was that some people didn’t really fit well in the church, and so people started developing what’s called specialized ministries. “I specialize in health ministries.” “I specialize in the environment and caring for the earth.” “I specialize in prison or jail ministry.” So people had quite a bit of training or exposure, if you will, to their faith tradition or their original faith experience.
One of the things that happens in the Buddhist chaplaincy training that we run at the Sati Center is people over time realize that they’re more Theravadan1 monastic practitioners and that caring for others is not quite on their radar yet. The Anukampā program that the Sati Center offers cultivates people’s sense of caring. I read in one of the chats that somebody’s in that training right now, and so that’s pretty great.
For people who are beginning to learn about chaplaincy, this can sound pretty daunting. Like, “Wait a minute, I got to go to college. I got to go to rabbinical school or a seminary. I got to spend three months at a Zen monastery to get my training.”
So, how about if I pause and people take a moment to write down what’s happening for them in this current moment, such as, “I’m overwhelmed,” or “The questions I came with are not being addressed.” Just to keep to yourself. I started chaplaincy training before I even knew what a chaplain was. I was interested. I just liked the idea, which I don’t know where it came from except for maybe there was a television show in the United States called M*A*S*H, and one of the main characters was a chaplain. And nobody really understood what he did, quote unquote, but they were very happy to have him around.
Buddhist chaplaincy is relatively new in our modern-day world as a particular flavor, if you will, of ministry or spiritual service, spiritual care service. And so people are not clear on what a chaplain does in many settings. So part of the readiness for chaplaincy and the skill is to be ready to explain oneself and the work of a chaplain repeatedly.
The good news is there are now probably 400 people that have taken the Buddhist chaplaincy training at the Sati Center. There are probably a hundred people who’ve gotten a master’s degree in Buddhism in the local area, and there are more Buddhist chaplaincy education forums to be found in the world as well as the one that you’re joining us today with the Sati Center.
In the Buddhist chaplaincy training that we offer, people discover what it’s like to be a chaplain, and they discover if they’re suited to it or not. Some people, it doesn’t mesh well with their values, their life experiences, their intentions, and so it’s just not a good match. So, what it’s like to be a chaplain, am I suited to it? And then the last question is, do I want to do more of it beyond this year of training, and what do I want to do?
In the current group that I am a part of the faculty, we have three more sessions. And at the last session a few weeks ago, we asked people to start thinking about what they want to do after the training ends. And often people say, “Wait, the training is ending?” They’ve kind of forgotten that we go for 11 months of the year.
One question is, “Does this program prepare students for chaplaincy outside of healthcare?” Yes. As I mentioned earlier, there are skills that are transferable to different settings. Chaplains particularly serve in contexts of crisis. The origins of chaplaincy go back to, and the word chaplain relates to the word chapel. And so when a monarch had large territory that they could not oversee, they would send clergy out to live in different places. And so chaplains are mobile, and some people start in healthcare and then move over to incarceration or young people or the environment. Chaplaincy also has its roots in caring for people in crisis: a health crisis, a crisis of incarceration, a crisis of being dislocated and far from one’s original roots. So like Father Mulcahy on this television show M*A*S*H, his job was to help people maintain their own religious and spiritual practice while they were overseas fighting a war.
Vanessa Able: I was thinking, Jennifer, it’s a good time maybe to give more of an overview of the larger chaplaincy process and the path to chaplaincy.
What I’d like to do now for the next few minutes is just take you through a sort of a timeline or a progression. If you’re somebody who’s just thinking about this, “Perhaps this is something that’s interesting for me, this could be a direction for me, where do I go now?” I know that for myself, six or seven years ago, I was at my meditation practice center, and I was just walking past the notice board, and this notice caught my eye. It was a little flyer for exactly this event. Pre-pandemic, I think this used to actually happen in person. I saw the little flyer, and the flyer said, “Introduction to Buddhist Chaplaincy,” and I’d never seen those two words next to each other. And something just in that moment when I perceived that, something opened for me, something clicked for me. I had a very different line of work prior to starting chaplaincy training and then coming into chaplaincy. And really, a lot changed in my own life.
I’m very enthusiastic about this work, about this training, about many aspects of this field. And I think one of the things that’s so encouraging is that there are so many points of entry.
So, first steps: volunteer work, for example. This is often a first step that people who are exploring the idea, exploring the field, take. Depending on where you live, options for different kinds of volunteering are different. Perhaps somebody might have the opportunity to go into a hospital once a week for a couple of hours and be a volunteer there. And maybe that kind of volunteering includes just bringing orange juice to patients or just chatting with people who are feeling lonely, don’t have friends and family around, or going for a walk with somebody. Likewise in hospice.
Early on, several years ago, I did some volunteering through San Francisco Zen Center at the jail in San Francisco, where we were part of a mindfulness for stress relief group that would go into the women’s jail and offer a one-hour session of meditation and talking. It wasn’t direct volunteering in the chaplaincy sense, but it was still offering spiritual care to people. I know that some people volunteer at refuges, for example. Some people have come into our program and they’ve already been volunteering for the Red Cross. We had a student from Maui who had been volunteering with the Red Cross following the fires there. So, volunteering in crisis, showing up. There’s all sorts of ways. Also, perhaps grief groups, grief circles, something like this. There’s all sorts of organizations that take volunteers and train volunteers to do this kind of work. Even though they might not necessarily have the label “chaplain” on them as volunteering positions, I sort of think of them as adjacent activities. They use so many of the skills and so much of the discussion and learning and connection around chaplaincy.
Then I think another element is foundational training, the kinds of courses that are offered, like we offer at the Sati Center. It’s not a professional training, and I’ll say more about that later, but it’s a foundational training. It’s a way of kind of taking a tour of what the various aspects of chaplaincy are, what the basic skills are, and also, how does this relate to me? How does this relate to my spiritual practice? How can I really bring what is deeply authentic to me and deeply important to me and real and alive in my practice into this work?
Having an established spiritual practice is a very useful thing. It’s probably unusual for somebody who doesn’t have an established spiritual practice to want to go into chaplaincy. There are humanist chaplains, there are atheist chaplains working in the world, but that’s not to say that one wouldn’t say that that person doesn’t have their spiritual practice; it just might look very different. Their spiritual practice might be going for a walk in the forest, writing poetry, engaging in silence in a different way.
Another thing that can be very useful and nourishing is community memberships. That can be an extension to the spiritual practice. So if you do practice with a group, a sangha, a community, what does that look like? How does that support you, and how does the work that you’re doing with chaplaincy then feed back into that community as well?
Then, if somebody has kind of done all of that and is thinking, “Yes, this is really a direction that I’d like to move in in a more serious way,” then there are options for further education. The standard for chaplaincy education in the United States, and increasingly in some other countries, is this thing called CPE, which is Clinical Pastoral Education2. It’s an education that can be taken full-time, part-time, in units, usually in a healthcare setting, but increasingly this education and training is being offered in other contexts as well. This is the standard, especially in the US, for professional chaplaincy.
On the side of one’s spiritual practice, ordination is something that starts to be a question. There’s a lot of folks who practice in communities that don’t perhaps have a formal ordination process, and that’s okay. There are ways in which an equivalency can be demonstrated.
The final steps, the sort of crowning polish on a professional chaplain’s career, would be a certification process. This comes after one has finished one’s formal training. There’s an expectation that you would work for another two or three years to amass about 2,000 hours of work experience. Usually, that’s paid work experience, be it in a hospital, hospice, or it could be volunteering in a prison or something. Then there’s a process of writing a lot of papers to demonstrate professional competence. Endorsement from one’s spiritual community is also very important, and a Master of Divinity (M.Div)3. But this is something that’s much, much further down the line. If any of you are thinking, “My gosh, an M.Div really does feel like quite a large mountain to climb,” there are some institutions now in the States that will take a lot of the spiritual training that you may have done over the years and work that into an equivalency of a Master of Divinity. There’s lots of options for that, too. Or you may just choose to go to college and study for an M.Div, which is a wonderful thing to do if that’s an option for you.
Question: Should chaplains in training be involved in significant experience with their own family members’ illness or dying, or is it preferred that their training be focused on non-family members?
Vanessa Able: That is such a good question. I found from personal experience, and for a lot of the people that I meet who come into this training, that very often it is experience with the illness or the caretaking of somebody close to us that can bring us into this orientation in the first place. In my 20s, I was very close to my grandmother who was diagnosed eventually with lung cancer, and I had the privilege of being able to move in with her and care for her for the last six months of her life. That experience, which I was lucky enough to be able to participate in fully and wholeheartedly, opened me up to a relationship with life and death and dying that I hadn’t anticipated to be possible. The intimacy with what was supposed to be a difficulty, what was supposed to be the absolute worst-case scenario, actually revealed itself to be a most wonderful opportunity for growth, for contact, for really feeling the power and the energy and the possibility of spiritual practice, of healing, and of facing something that might be a very deep fear.
I found it an extremely energizing and life-affirming experience, and that point of reference opened up a whole new possibility for me. I think that those of us who have that experience with loved ones who have been sick—and perhaps sometimes that experience is not in the least bit pleasant, perhaps it’s been very traumatic and we have a lot of pain and grief that resonates still around that—but even that is something that we hold and we carry and that we can work from as chaplains. This is something that can be a great generator of empathy and compassion for others. For the actual chaplaincy training, I’ve seen a lot of people go through the training, and the volunteer work that they’ve done has been as a primary caregiver to somebody, whether it’s somebody in their family or somebody very close to them. Having that experience while doing the program has been valuable, to say the least.
Jennifer Block: This might be a time to introduce the word “discernment” into our offering here. There’s a process of development, and part of the development is to consider, you know, you kind of feel like maybe you’ve come to a crossroads in your life and you’re like, “Am I going to turn left? Am I going to turn right? Am I going to go straight ahead?” To the left looks sunny, to the right looks rainy, and to the north looks like there’s a truck stop that probably has really good greasy food. So, these things inform my decision. This presentation may or may not start you off on a process of realizing that you’re at a crossroads and you’re considering the left, the right, the straight ahead. It’s called being in discernment, and it’s part of something called spiritual formation.
Vanessa Able: For this second session, as promised, we’re going to focus in a little more on Buddhist chaplaincy and what we’re doing as Buddhist chaplains. To start the session off, we’re going to hear from Jim first, Jim Leaky, and then from Ram. Jim and Ram are both former students of the Sati Center Buddhist chaplaincy training program. They’ve both recently taken the course. Both Jim and Ram continue to work in chaplaincy in quite different ways. Jim has been completing his CPE in LA and is possibly looking at continuing in hospital chaplaincy specifically. Ram is working in prison chaplaincy and he is also a member of the faculty for the Sati Center’s eco-chaplaincy program. So Jim is going to start us off by talking for about 10 minutes or so about what Buddhist chaplaincy is to him.
Jim Leaky: I’ll talk a little bit about my view of what Buddhist chaplaincy is, but also, I’m aware there’s a question that came in from Amanda and Carla. They kind of wanted to hear more specific examples of the path people take, so I’ll share some of my path as well as one version of what that might look like.
In terms of Buddhist chaplaincy, the way I see it is the Buddhist part that makes it Buddhist is you. It’s what you bring. There’s not really a thing that’s Buddhist chaplaincy that’s different to other types of chaplaincy. In a healthcare setting, you know, in California, I think we have 2% of the population are Buddhist. Around the States, it’s 1%. So you’re not encountering a ton of Buddhists necessarily in any given setting. At least for me, I function more as an interfaith chaplain. The Buddhist part is really what I bring.
My background, I’m a Zen priest, and I spent a long time training, about six years in a Zen monastery here in Southern California, and always kind of wanted to figure out how to bring that forward in a meaningful way. And for me, chaplaincy really kind of checked the box. To be a Buddhist chaplain is to kind of figure out how you connect to the Dharma4 and how you’re able to bring that forward and to share it.
I’ve had this experience of feedback from others, and I’ve heard other chaplains and educators talk about their experience with Buddhist chaplains as being pretty positive because a lot of what we’re trained in is very relevant to the skills that a chaplain calls on. This kind of inner quiet, a sense of knowing of one’s own emotional life, a sensitivity to self and others, and this ability just to listen very deeply, to be very present to other people and one’s own experience. Not everyone has that. It’s quite amazing when you go into CPE and you start training alongside people from other religious traditions. For me, I was amazed by this wealth of knowledge and skill that people bore from these different faith traditions. The one thing that a lot of them seem to lack, that I would say the Buddhists really have in spades, is this reflective capacity and just something that feels a little more grounded, a lot more present. I’ll often get the feedback for me as a chaplain that I have a very calm presence, and that’s not my personality; that’s really coming from my Buddhist training.
When I show up in the hospital where I work, probably 5% maybe of patients end up knowing that I’m a Buddhist. It doesn’t come up. I just wear normal clothes. There’s nothing that makes me stand out. I’m a priest, but I don’t keep my head shaved anymore or anything like that. So, there’s no real physical indicators that I’m a Buddhist. It’s only if people will ask me and they’re genuinely curious, I’ll share. But otherwise, people probably assume I’m a Christian because that’s what the majority of chaplains are. Functioning as an interfaith chaplain, it’s not necessarily relevant to share that about me unless it becomes relevant. The relationship between a chaplain and the person that you’re caring for is paramount, and you really have to tailor what parts of yourself you’re sharing and making use of to really take care of that relationship. For some folks, that might be sharing more of your Buddhist practice and being a bit more explicit about that, but a lot of it is really just embodying what you’ve been training as a Buddhist. This deep sense of care, of connection, of compassion, of wisdom, and really finding ways to kind of bring that forward and share it.
Awareness is a big thing, and we maybe sometimes take it somewhat for granted in Buddhist circles because we’re so steeped in it. But that’s the thing that I think we have that really allows us to serve others well as a chaplain. This ability to have accurate empathy, where you’re really able to listen to what someone’s saying and intuitively reflect back and summarize what you’re hearing so someone just feels heard. That can be such a powerful gift.
Ram: I’m very happy to be here. Sati Center means a lot to me. On my left at the back are my two certificates: one is the Buddhist chaplaincy training, another one is my eco-chaplaincy training. Unlike Jim and Vanessa, these young people, I bloomed very late. I joined the chaplaincy program when I turned 60 in 2020. So I’ve been in this path for five years, and I’ve been working as a prison chaplain, jail chaplain, for four and a half of those years. And I can honestly tell you, I never expected my retired life to be this awesome just being in this area. I’ve been practicing Buddhism for 15 years, but bringing all of that Buddhist practice into something meaningful has been nothing short of an amazing experience. This is one area I think craving is allowed, so I crave for more of this area of engagement.
I put on different hats. I work 25 hours as a jail chaplain in Santa Clara County Main Jail as well as the Elmwood Jail. I’m also a Red Cross disaster care spiritual chaplain, which I spend about 5 to 10 hours a week. I started this beginning of the year after the fires in LA. I supported about two and a half dozen people there. And then there were the tornadoes and flooding in the Midwest Ohio Valley, and I spent a lot of time there. Just a few days ago, a home got burned down here in Fremont, California. The mother died, and all three siblings have reached out to Red Cross for spiritual care and help. So I’ve already connected with one of them. The scope of the chaplaincy continues to evolve. The last area is I started, as a part of Insight World Aid, to bring caregiving to homeless shelters.
The question was how the Dharma supports me in my prison chaplaincy work. I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Essentially, it’s not about my knowledge or my hypothesis. I just want to focus this purely on my experience in this context. I’ve been practicing Buddhism since 2010, and I’ve been deep into Vedanta5 studies for 20 years before that. One thing that really caught my attention very early on is this refrain in Buddhism: “A wise person is motivated to benefit oneself, others, and both self and others, and the world.” What does benefit to others mean? And what constitutes benefits? How do I know it’s truly beneficial to the others? And what does Dharma teach about understanding other people’s suffering?
I played around with these words. What if Dharma itself is service? Buddhism is really a self-discovery process. It’s not about knowing things: Four Noble Truths, Eightfold Path, Brahma Viharas, dependent origination, you name it. We can read a lot about this. The question is, how does this Buddhist path allow me to explore my inner conditioned life? What do I learn about myself?
Buddhists are students of suffering. What does it mean to suffer? How do we get rid of suffering? This is where the discipline of cultivating the inward look started for me: gaining wisdom through self-awareness. On one side, Buddhism teaches there is no self, in a sense, but to be aware is an important thing. Dharma teaches that self is a flow of states or processes or conditions.
When I take up a role, what does that role really mean? How do I bring Dharma into that role? And really, chaplain to me is one such role I take which encompasses, or at least I try to portray myself in, a most dharmic way. It really comes down to the presence I bring into the situation and to the people. Am I coming up with my own conditionality, with my suffering, with my thoughts, or am I able to apply the teachings, be self-aware of everything that is going on in me, and yet create the space to position myself to the person and be able to offer service to them?
This is where Buddhism teaches us about generosity. In the West, anytime I use the word dāna or generosity, the thoughts quickly go to a wallet or a checkbook. But the reality is there are so many ways to be generous: with time, attention, listening, empathy, energy, knowledge, caring. All of these other elements of generosity become key.
In a prison setting, on an average, a person stays in the jail between two and a half to three years. I’ve been with some of them for close to five years right now. So you have a deeper relationship than a transient one. You go through the cycles of a person with anger, anxiety, helplessness, remorse, addiction issues, shame, loss of hope. You have a front-row seat. What this brings out is that in each one of these opportunities, you learn about yourself. Dharma teaches us to bring presence and generosity and care in the most compassionate way. This is the lab for us to bring this collective set of tools.
We are not fixing them. We are not helping them. We are supporting them in a spiritual way. And these people are Christians, Muslims, different sects of Christianity like Jehovah’s Witness, Catholics, Protestants, you name it. None of them comes in the way of us bringing our chaplaincy skills to offer a deeper assessment of their situation and really be able to do a very thorough spiritual assessment and begin to understand what their suffering is.
Question: I imagine that people in hospitals often have death and life after death on their mind. Has that come up for you, and how do you deal with that without getting into Buddhist lingo?
Jim Leaky: It’s an interesting question. For me, I don’t really know, so that helps. I don’t really have many fixed views about that matter, so I wouldn’t know what I’d be pushing on people apart from my own doubt and uncertainty. But I think those things allow me just to be a bit more open. With chaplaincy, you’re really listening to where someone’s coming from. Are they trying to make sense of it on a cognitive level? Is it arising out of fear? Are they curious? Are they fearful? Is that question asking something about concerns about relationships? Maybe they feel like they have done something bad in their life and they’re concerned that they won’t see their loved ones in the beyond. It’s a case of often unpacking a question like that and really getting to the heart of what the concern is, because it’s often not what it appears to be. As a chaplain, you’re skillfully listening, reflecting back, and helping people peel back a question like that to see what the pain at the core of that is and then trying to address it directly. Getting caught up in theology or Dharma is tempting, but that will just get you in the weeds, and that’s not really what the person needs.
Question: What do you wish you had known when you began that you know now?
Ram: What I loved most about the program, why I call it such a pivotal moment in my life, is that I was a very cerebral guy, expecting way too much structure as against letting things unfold. That was the biggest thing I got out of the Sati Center program. Having said that, towards the end of the program, when we got into interfaith settings, the biggest “aha” for me was that until that point, I was going through the program thinking, “I’m going to be a Buddhist chaplain.” I had that “Buddhist” part a little bit too strongly wired in me. Then I went through the interfaith pattern, and the “aha” came: Buddhist chaplaincy is my inner orientation, and externally, I don’t care who I am caring for. It would have slightly helped me if I got that fact earlier—that most of the people I’m going to be serving are not like me.
Jennifer Block: Let us take a moment to reflect on all the beings who have created this moment and this workshop: people at the Sati Center for Buddhist Studies, the National Professional Chaplain Organization, the people who brought the Dharma to the West, the people who maintain Zoom so we can be together, the plants and the trees and the magical creatures. And lastly, let us dedicate the merit to all the people who support all of us: family, friends, neighbors, teachers, sangha members. There are so many unseen ways that we are supported. So, let’s dedicate the merit of our time together to all these beings.
May they be free from suffering and the causes of suffering. May they be happy, and may they realize their Buddha nature.
Theravāda: The “School of the Elders,” the oldest surviving branch of Buddhism. It is the dominant form of Buddhism in countries like Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar. ↩
CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education): An interfaith professional education program for ministry students and clergy of all faiths. It provides supervised encounters with people in crisis to develop awareness of how one’s ministry affects others and to develop skills in interpersonal and inter-professional relationships. ↩
M.Div (Master of Divinity): A professional degree for those pursuing ordination or work in ministry. It is a common academic requirement for board certification as a professional chaplain in the United States. ↩
Dharma: A key concept in Buddhism with multiple meanings, including the cosmic law and order, the teachings of the Buddha, and the path to enlightenment. ↩
Vedanta: One of the six orthodox schools of Hindu philosophy. The term literally means “end of the Vedas” and refers to the ideas and philosophies contained in the Upanishads. ↩