|
On June 21 st, 2005 in Oakland, California, Dharma Mirror interviewed Anne Sung, a young woman of exceptional intelligence, compassion, and vision. Anne earned a Master's degree in physics from Harvard University, taught high school to underprivileged youth in Texas for four years, and recently completed a year of teaching science and math at Developing Virtue High School at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. Currently, Anne is pursuing her second Master’s degree at Harvard Divinity School. In addition to her academic pursuits, Anne leads a rich spiritual life consisting of self reflection, meditation, and the study of religions. The Dharma Mirror Editorial Staff asked Anne about her experiences as a teacher and how she became interested in Buddhism.
Dharma Mirror: Perhaps you could start by talking about your parents and your family.
Anne: My parents are from Hong Kong. They met here in the US in graduate school. My father’s father grew up Christian, at a time when that was pretty rare in China. My mother’s mother carries an image of the Buddha in her purse and also subscribes to some Taoist traditions. My parents themselves, though, grew up atheist, and they raised my brother and me without religion. Fast forward 20 years and my brother turns out to be a devout Christian, while I turn out to be Buddhist. I suspect my father wonders now and then “What did we do?” – or maybe “What did we not do?”
Dharma Mirror: When did you first come in contact with religion and with Buddhism?
Anne: I think I’ve always had propensity for religion, or spirituality. My mom recently showed me a piece of artwork I made in first grade. The assignment was probably something like “Draw a picture of what love means to you.” My picture shows a stick figure with big fat banana fingers pressed together in prayer, and a bubble with words crammed in awkwardly. The person is saying, “Love is praying to God.” I had no recollection of this until my mother showed it to me, but I think it shows my early interest in the spiritual.
I think all kids wonder about the world asking things like, “What is the meaning of life? What if my parents had never met? Am I just an accident?” I spent a lot of time considering questions like these. I believe this search for meaning is at the core of the human spiritual experience.
Growing up in Houston, Texas, I absorbed a basically Christian worldview. But even though I didn’t grow up knowing about Buddhism, I would still point back to my childhood for my first “Buddhist” experiences. I spent a lot of time as a child in silence, thinking, or “meditating,” to use the term in its most general sense. And sometimes while contemplating like this, I would get insights. All religious traditions, of course, have a tradition of mystics who develop this intuitive way of understanding the world, but it’s something that’s been largely abandoned by secular, rational, modern society. I certainly didn’t find this experience validated by anyone as a child, so I dismissed it, thinking “Well, it can’t be very important.”
To make a long story short, despite my early interest, I lost my trust in religion sometime in high school. There, math and science became my favorite subjects, and I discovered that there wasn’t a rational, experimentally-verifiable reason to believe in God. I should emphasize, though, that my inclination toward the spiritual wasn’t gone. I was still asking the same questions. What’s the meaning of life? How does one be a good person? What’s the purpose of being a good person? How do you do that anyway? I still asked the questions, but until I was 21, I just didn’t realize anybody had answers.
Dharma Mirror: What happened at 21?
Anne: At the age of 21, I finished college, with degrees in physics and math, and I decided to put those to use by becoming a high school teacher. I joined Teach for America (TFA), an organization which recruits recent college graduates to teach in struggling school districts across the country. They found me a high school six hours south of Houston, 17.5 mi. from the border of Mexico. So I became a teacher in this rural, impoverished area called the Rio Grande Valley.
Dharma Mirror: Can I ask, of all the professions you could have chosen, why did you choose teaching?
Anne: Well, the related question is, Why did I not become a physicist? For me, the appeal of science was that this was one way humans try to understand the nature of existence. You can look at it from a physical sense, investigating the beginning of the universe. How did this cosmos arise that was so favorable for the conditions of life? There are all sorts of people trying to take the recent discoveries of science and interpret them from a religious standpoint. For example, some people say, “Oh, the universe is so perfect for life. There must have been a creator god.” I picked physics as a major because I thought it was as close as I could come to finding answers to my questions about life.
| “I couldn't see disappearing into academia and the middle-class, without ever having to face what is happening to the less privileged.” |
So why not physics? Why not become a scientist and study these questions full time? I couldn’t reconcile spending my life at a blackboard enjoying the beauty of abstract equations while so many people in the United States and across the world live in suffering. I couldn’t see disappearing into academia and the middle-class, without ever having to face what is happening to the less privileged. I couldn’t justify not even knowing how to start making a difference.
So I thought, “Well, what are my skills? I can solve physics equations, and I can do mathematical calculations. How am I going to help the impoverished and those without a voice in America?” There wasn’t a very long list of things I could do, but thankfully, I could teach. I picked Teach for America because they would put me in a community where I was needed.
So that’s why I became a teacher - to learn what lay beyond my middle-class upbringing, and to see if I could be of help to those in need.
Dharma Mirror: So you had a strong sense of social justice.
Anne: Yes, and my work made that even stronger. I learned that indeed, the children I taught had difficult lives, extremely difficult lives. My first year teaching, I looked down my list of students and noticed that almost all had at least one parent whose last name differed from their own. By high school, very few kids still lived with both biological parents. In most cases, their parents were remarried or single. That’s already tough for a child. But then there were so many other difficulties. A lot of the drug trafficking into the US goes through the Rio Grande Valley, and kids have very easy access to drugs and to alcohol. Many of the migrant workers who harvest the crops on farms across America come from the Rio Grande Valley. Parents pull their kids out of school in the spring when they head north for work, and then kids get back for school late in the fall. By high school, the kids themselves are starting to work. I had one student, 16 years old, come to me and say “I’m leaving school next week; my ride up north is leaving.” And I told him, “No, think about what this will do to your studies and your grades and your preparation for college.” Fortunately, I was able to help this student find summer work locally.
It is so normal – and yet so completely not normal at the same time – for kids in the Valley to have adult responsibilities. I’ve had students who were the primary breadwinners of their families, who worked 40 hour weeks to put food on the table for their siblings. And I figure that nearly 10% of my students were parents by the time they were 18. Not every student has all of these problems all of the time, but every child had some story of pain. I really believe that every kid who showed up in my classroom was a hero just to make it to school that day.
| “The weight of poverty on childern across America is just tremendous.” |
So through teaching I got what I came for – I saw firsthand the difficulties that exist in America. And these issues aren’t just Rio Grande Valley issues. Anyone who has taught in New York City, Oakland, Houston, rural Louisiana, or Mississippi will tell you the same kinds of stories. The weight of poverty on children across America is just tremendous.
And while the incredible suffering in the lives of my kids was hitting me, as a first-year teacher, I was simultaneously coming up against my own personal experience of suffering. I went into teaching with some training. I had gone through the Undergraduate Teacher Education Program at Harvard. So I had some idea of how education should go, enough to know that it wasn’t happening in my classroom! [Laughter] I didn’t know what else to do to improve things, so I worked and worked and worked. During my first couple months teaching, I was regularly up until midnight, and then up again at 6 every morning. And my kids still didn’t understand a thing I was talking about. I had to face the fact that I was failing day in and day out, which was a shock for me. What made it especially hard was that I went into teaching with the idea that I was going to help these children, and I had to face up to the fact that I wasn’t succeeding in this at all.
Dharma Mirror: Were you disappointed at first, because you had that expectation?
Anne: Yeah. The idea wasn’t just to observe these children and say, “Oh, look, how tragic.” The idea was to go and help them out with what skills I had. I thought I could teach math and science, and while I knew the subject matter and knew the theory of what education should look like, I didn’t have the practical skills to make it happen for my students yet.
I went into teaching believing in education as the great equalizer. I wanted my students to learn just as much as my younger brother was learning at Houston’s best magnet school. I mean, why shouldn’t a student in rural Texas or in inner city Oakland get the same quality education that a suburban middle-class student gets? That sounds wonderful in theory, but imagine that you’re that first-year physics teacher in a poor school district. Students arrive in your classroom without basic reading and math skills. You hand them a physics textbook, but they have no way of making sense of the words inside. On paper they have two years of algebra, but they can’t solve equations from the first six weeks of Algebra I. If you try teaching the way teachers teach in suburban schools, assuming students can read and write and do math, lecturing and assigning reading and homework, you’ll get nowhere. You have to meet the kids where they are at. But that means your students have to actually learn more in a year than the suburban kids do – just to catch up. You need to teach reading, writing, math, in addition to the physics. And to top it all off, you’re just learning how to teach, yourself. It’s a tough job.
I was frustrated by there being so much to do, while I had so little experience to draw on. Even if I worked 80-hour weeks, the gains that my students were making seemed slow and small. I was hard on myself because my high expectations weren’t immediately being met. So on the one hand I was struggling with the hopelessness of my own job, and on other hand I was struggling with the suffering in the lives of these kids I loved. I might come into school feeling like a failure after grading homework that my students obviously didn’t understand, and then run into a student with eyes bloodshot from drinking, or from working until 1am. There was just so much suffering, so much samsara – a great big sea of that first noble truth.
But it got better rapidly. One thing TFA emphasized was professional development. TFA taught me to keep learning new techniques and keep trying new things until I succeeded. It sounds simple, but a lot of teachers don’t do it. When your students are failing, it is very easy to focus on all the problems they are coming in with – the family problems, the low literacy and math skills – and blame the failure on that. There are 110 things you can blame instead of your teaching, but in the end you have to focus on the things you can change. I was able to get help from my colleagues to improve my teaching. By the end of my first year, my students were learning a lot in my class, and I was just loving my job.
Dharma Mirror: What made you seek out Buddhism and meditation techniques?
Anne: Fall of 2000. It’s a Friday afternoon. I’ve been planning and teaching and grading all week nonstop, and I’m about to do my usual weekend crash. And I think, “Where am I going? I’m going to crash, sleep through the weekend, and be no better prepared mentally or emotionally to face the next week. I’m drowning. Professionally and personally too, I’m drowning. What can I do to get out of this downward spiral?”
So I called up my friend Whit, a former colleague of mine now in graduate school at UC Berkeley. I knew he had recently been to his first Buddhist meditation retreat, and moreover he seemed to be a person who had spent some time thinking about how to lead a happy, peaceful life. I said to Whit, “Help! I’m dying!” and told him my story.
The one thing he said that had the most immediate effect was this. “Anne,” he said, “I hear so much compassion in you when you talk about your students, so much concern for their suffering. But I don’t hear compassion for yourself and your own suffering.” That was a huge revelation for me – the idea of including myself in compassion.
The other thing that Whit suggested was that I try a meditation retreat. Whit found a vipassana retreat in Texas, not far from Houston. So that winter, Whit and I did a New Year’s retreat. It was the first time in my life that I didn’t speak for 3 days straight. And it was like coming home.
| “It was incredibly moving to discover that this kind of freedom was possible.” |
On a silent meditation retreat, everything slows down enough for you to see the thoughts as they drift by, and to know they are thoughts as opposed to being swept up by them. It was a very strong experience. It was incredibly moving to discover that this kind of freedom was possible, and to know that there is a whole tradition of people who have studied this path before me
I wouldn’t say I became Buddhist immediately after that retreat. I still had doubts, but I was also convinced that a spiritual life was the answer to my professional and personal crisis. I spent much of the next year, when I wasn’t teaching, intensively investigating both Buddhism and Christianity. My roommate was an evangelical Christian, and I went to church with her and read most of her bookshelf, C.S. Lewis for example. And I used Amazon.com to buy dozens of books on Buddhism.
Dharma Mirror: Can you mention what you liked about Buddhism?
Anne: What I really liked about Buddhism is the practical aspect of it. It gives you different approaches to accomplish the same goal. It takes you as you are and gives you things to do that will help you break your bad habits and put good ones in their place. And when you suffer less, you’ll make others suffer less. Meditation felt so natural, and it was so very fruitful in helping change how I behaved in the world. And I found that practicing meditation and learning more about Buddhism did change how I taught and helped me survive teaching.
Dharma Mirror: Do you want to elaborate? Give some examples? This sounds very interesting.
| “Buddhism gave me a vocabulary to deal with what was happening in my mind.” |
Anne: Buddhism gave me a vocabulary to deal with what was happening in my mind. Buddhism is very psychological. It gives you the terminology to see what the bad habits of the mind are, and when you can identify them, you can go about investigating. You can ask, Is this helpful? Is it good to be attached? Does it help me to be attached to my students’ performance? Does it help anyone that I’m so invested in this idea of being a really good teacher? Buddhism helped me have names for the bad habits – attachment in particular. All teachers, I think, who are reflective, realize that putting yourself first, thinking about how successful you are as a teacher, doesn’t help your students. Rather, you should be thinking about your students and how to help them.
Buddhist terminology let me name these bad habits as they were happening, without identifying with them. What Vipassana teaches you is to notice what is happening at this very moment, instead of telling yourself a story about it. For example, when a student talks during a test, I can notice that I don't feel very happy about it, and not go into the whole story of what I told this student last time this happened and why won’t they listen to me? If I don’t get wrapped up in my own story of suffering, I can react from a place of kindness and calm, and probably be a lot more effective in communicating with the student.
Dharma Mirror: Why did you decided to teach at CTTB after teaching in the Rio Grande Valley?
Anne: Yes – that was a big decision. I spent four years in the Rio Grande Valley. I had built up a career as a classroom teacher and as a trainer of teachers. I was helping train local science teachers and new Teach for America teachers, helping them be more effective in their own classrooms. This was work that I believed in, work that made a difference in the lives of so many children. It was very hard to walk away. So why did I leave?
I couldn’t see doing this work for another 40 years and finding it ultimately fulfilling. Seeing the many challenges in my students’ lives, I didn’t really believe that teaching them physics equations was the best use of their time. What’s more important? Well, I would say life skills, or Dharma. The language doesn’t have to be Buddhist – we can just say learning to be a good person, learning to deal with the struggles in life, and after that, learning basic literacy skills, and learning how to be critical citizens, critical thinkers in society.
As a physics teacher, I could address some of these issues tangentially. Professor Verhoeven of the Dharma Realm Buddhist University, says that the primary lesson students get from their teachers is the teacher themselves. They'll remember the teacher, their character, and their moral example longer than the subject of the class. To a degree, I agree with that. I think a lot of what you convey to your student is the example you set, especially to students who don't have many adults in their lives, who are hungry for role models they can trust. So, that was part of what I was doing. But I wanted to find a situation where I could make that the focus of my work.
The other reason I wanted to leave the Valley was a need for spiritual and emotional support. By my fourth year of teaching, my closest Teach for America friends had already moved on with their lives. Spiritually, without any Buddhist community, I wasn’t making much progress in Dharma practice. So I set about looking for a place with (1) access to Dharma and (2) time to study Dharma.
At this point in time, Whit and I were talking a lot about careers and direction. He was trying to figure if he wanted to continue on in physics. I described my situation to Whit, and he said “Well, you want Dharma. You want teaching. You want to learn things. There's a place, [laugh] the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas. They probably would accept you as a teacher at the school there, and it’s got lots of Dharma.”
When I went to visit, I talked with Heng Yin Shr, the principal of the girls’ school, and I was really taken with her vision of the school and its mission. She talked about helping students develop virtue and character, and that was exactly what I had so wanted to do in the public schools.
Dharma Mirror: Could we jump ahead to you teaching at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas? Can you compare the school there with the one in Rio Grande Valley?
Anne: I really think that one of the most important things in a child’s life is strong relationships with adults, with role models that the students can talk to and confide in. The kids in the Valley were really hungry for that. A lot of them would come in to talk to me because they just wanted an adult to talk to and didn’t have anyone like that at home. The girls at Developing Virtue Girls’ School had so many caring adults in their lives. Why the difference? I think it’s both the small size of the schools and the fact that they are gender-segregated. The girls don’t have all their energy focused on a significant other, and so they can spend it on things like a wider array of friendships and connections with adults. So that’s very beneficial.
One thing that is nice for me is that since it’s a parochial school, a Buddhist school, I can acknowledge I am Buddhist and I can bring in things from Buddhist teaching into the classroom.
Dharma Mirror: So you moved to the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas in Ukiah. What was that like?
| “I really appreciate the democracy of Buddhist practice.” |
Anne: I have to say that at first I experienced some culture shock. I had a hard time with the ceremonies. The chanting and bowing were different from anything that I was used to. In the beginning, it was hard for me to pay much attention, because I would get to something that my mind would stumble over – like “Homage to some Buddha,” and my mind would go off, asking “How do we even know about these Buddhas in these other worlds?” Now that I have come through nine months of it, though, there’s been a real shift. I’ve experienced how the ceremonies and the other practices at the CTTB can inspire me to transform my mind and life. They say that there are 84,000 Dharma doors, 84,000 ways to get to the paramita, the farther shore of freedom. I really appreciate the democracy of Buddhist practice – it’s the goal that matters, and we are free to choose the path that works for us. Living at CTTB, I’ve come to understand the Mahayana path better, to see the wisdom of its time-tested Dharma doors. Some of them may not make rational sense to the Western mind, but that’s ok. There are other faculties of the mind – imagination, for example – that can also cross people over from suffering to liberation, from samsara to nivrana. And that’s ultimately what matters, isn’t it?
Another thing I’ve come to really appreciate this year is the value of living in a community of Buddhists. It was really hard being Buddhist by myself in Texas, where I wasn’t even sure myself what I meant by the word Buddhist. But at CTTB there are so many people that know what it means to cultivate. They know what I mean when I say I'm trying to get a handle on false thoughts and trying to cultivate patience. And that validation is important. When you’re alone in your beliefs, it’s easy to conclude that it’s you not the wider society that’s got things wrong. Also, there’s the danger of heading off in the wrong direction, with nobody to correct you.
So, what's so wonderful about practicing in a community with other Buddhists is the support, the feedback that comes from having people around with similar goals. I’m reminded by others’ examples of what’s really important. This experience has given me the courage to leave, to take what I have learned and share it with the wider society. Knowing that this community will always be here, for me to turn back to when I am in need of support and feedback, I think I can go out and help others find for themselves what’s really important in life.
Dharma Mirror: What are your future plans?
Anne: At CTTB I’ve been taking classes at DRBU, studying Buddhism and using Sanskrit and Chinese to study sutras. It’s been wonderful, and I’ve decided I really want to go back to school full time. I have found a program which I think will meet both my need to continue study Buddhism and also my interest in service. It’s the Master of Divinity (MDiv) at Harvard Divinity School (HDS). Originally, the program was designed to prepare Christians to be ministers. Now, HDS accepts people from all religious traditions and prepares them for many different kinds of service work. It’s a three-year program, integrating training in what they call the “Arts of Ministry” – counseling, preaching, etc. – into the academic program. HDS also plugs into the wider university, and in addition to my classes in Buddhism and other religions, I also plan to continue studying Chinese and Sanskrit and to take classes in sociology and other fields.
In addition to the Master of Divinity program, I was also accepted into Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government to do a Master in Public Policy (MPP). If I can get the finances to work, I’ll add a year to my program, and finish with MDiv and MPP in four years. I see the MPP as a complement to my studies in religion and spirituality. Hopefully, the MDiv will help me understand humans’ full potential for happiness and peace, and the MPP will help me understand the structures in American society that work for or against that potential.
I was talking to Whit recently about how my students live in poverty, and our conversation got around to how materialistic American society is. Is the point of education to help students go make lots of money and fulfill the American dream of owning a big house and a big SUV? We know that dream can turn out to be pretty empty. Whit and I decided to ask the question, “What is true poverty?” Is it not having food to eat? Not having medical care? Not having access to clean water or housing? All that matters, of course, but just as important, perhaps even more important, we decided, was access to wise people, access to wise teachers. If you don’t have that, everything in life is more difficult.
For example, if you live in a Sub-Saharan country where 40% of the adults have HIV, then you end up with parents dying and kids raising kids. This is a place with material poverty, but just as bad is that the transmission of wisdom from generation to generation has been lost. That's a horrible tragedy.
Now turn the question around and ask, “What is true wealth?” If access to wisdom is the measure of wealth, then the question for educators becomes this: How can we create the conditions so that all children, everywhere, have access to wisdom, access to teachers that can help them develop into wise, compassionate people?
| “If we prioritized access to character and wisdom instead, schools would look very different.” |
While I’m in school, I’d like to think about the implications of this. What would our society look like if we prioritized the development of wisdom and compassion over economic development? There are so many issues that tie into this. The United States is putting its citizens behind bars at an accelerating rate, and we need to ask ourselves, what is happening to all the children who are growing up without their parents? For nonviolent offenders, might there be a better way? Universal health care is another related issue. Improving access to health care – in America and across the world – is not only an expression of compassion, but also preserves access to the wisdom of our elders. How would schools be different? Because we value economic development, we organize our schools to make sure kids have access to commercials and high-calorie junk food. If we prioritized access to character and wisdom instead, schools would look very different – maybe a bit more like the schools at CTTB – and I think people would grow up happier and kinder to each other.
In America today, we're choosing a lot of very destructive policies. One reason I went into teaching, as opposed to working to change those policies, was that I didn't know enough about what was going on. I didn’t know what was going on in schools or with health care or the prison system, or who was working on these issues. Now I have the chance to go to school and figure out what’s going on. I have the opportunity to meet and learn from people who are making a difference. And as I learn more about what the issues are, what the resources are, and what the possibilities are, then I trust that I will find a place where I can join my hands and my heart to help.
Dharma Mirror: Wow. On that inspiring and up-lifting note, I want to thank you, Anne, for the opportunity to interview you! And wish you all the best in your future endeavors. D|M
Back to Table of Content
|
|
