Loni Baur - Life
as Service:
From Buddhist Nun to Ukiah
Attorney
I always liked English, but when I went from high school to college I discovered Western philosophy, and I was overwhelmed. Everyone was getting into Eastern philosophy. I read an English translation of The Way of Life by Lao Tsu, which was being passed hand-to-hand among people at the school who were into alternative culture. That was in the '60s.
At nineteen I took a walk with a friend in Volunteer Park in Seattle. We went to the top of the big brick tower, where I looked out at the whole city of Seattle, I turned to him and said, "I want to learn Chinese and translate Buddhist texts." It's not like I had any idea how I would do that or anything. I don't know where it came from. It was absolutely present in my mind. From then on, every single thing I did for the next fifteen years involved learning Chinese and translating Buddhist texts.
Wanting to read Chinese classical texts in their original language, I signed up for a ten-hour intensive course at the University of Washington. This was a crash course of about five hours a day. There were two problems. First of all, everyone in the class was Chinese. They already spoke Cantonese and wanted to learn Mandarin. Mandarin came originally from the north and is now universally used and taught all over. It is called the national or common language. Everyone learns it in school. It is the language of commerce and of the government. Cantonese is a dialect spoken in the southern part of China. Second, they wouldn't teach the classical Chinese. You couldn't even begin to learn any classical or religious Chinese until graduate school. You had to slog your way through "Where is the bathroom?" and "Will you give me back my passport?" for years and years, so that was discouraging.
A group of people at the University were studying the I Ching and one of them had a teacher in San Francisco who was a Ch'an or meditation master from China. I decided to go down there and study with him. A group of us from the Seattle area went down around the same time and began to study. It was exactly what I wanted, so I decided to stay and learn the Buddhist scriptures, meditation and other practices. When I was very young I had a recurring dream that I was trying to get from one side to the other of a huge space like an ocean that was full of large, deep holes. After I met the Venerable Master Hua, I read in his autobiography that when he was a young kid he had a dream that he was standing at the edge of a flat large plane like an ocean that was a huge expanse of holes and he was guiding people across. I realized that it was the same dream that I had, only I was one of the people that was trying to get across. After about a year I decided I wanted to be ordained. In 1969 I went to Taiwan and was ordained as a Buddhist nun with the name Heng Yin, which means "hermit/scholar". Then I came back here and continued to study and translate Buddhist texts.
From the first summer in San Francisco, we used the same format used in Chinese monasteries. We started at 6:00 in the morning and went until 10:30 at night. We meditated, listened to formal lectures, learned the basic principles of how to practice Buddhism, and all the traditions. It was very disciplined. Several of the people from Seattle were in the Chinese Department already, and they translated. It was pretty much full immersion in the language the whole time. I learned a lot of the language by just listening to the lectures. I picked up bits and pieces, and would hound the people who knew Chinese until they would tell me what it meant. The other way I learned was to copy texts, character by character, and recite and memorize them until I knew them by heart. This is how they've studied the classical language in China for thousands of years--memorization.
The first thing I learned was the Heart Sutra. I wrote it out thousands of times and memorized it. I learned one character, and when I knew that one and could say it without looking at the paper, I would add the second one. I did this until I learned the whole thing. Eventually I could recite texts for hours on end from memory. I got a very good foundation.
The temple was in Chinatown, and I would come in every day after work. During the day I had different jobs. One of my jobs was wrapping money for an armored car company. I would go to work with a text written on my arms. I covered them with long sleeves. While I was sitting there wrapping money, which was a mindless task, I would memorize the text on my arm. When everything on my arm was memorized I'd go in the bathroom, wash it off and write on the next part. This is how I learned, passage by passage. I got in trouble because one of the ladies complained that I was praying. The boss came over and asked me if I was praying. I said, "No."
It took about a year to learn to speak and translate oral and written Chinese. I learned modern and classical Chinese at the same time. My teacher would read a classical Buddhist text and then explain it in colloquial Mandarin. I went from learning to teaching and translating texts. It was a gradual transition. Sometimes I taught in a classroom setting, and sometimes I helped other people informally.
I made a dictionary of idioms of the classic language on note cards. The language is so old that it is layered with allusions to the history and to different philosophers and ideas. You can sum up very complex, abstract concepts in three or four words that trigger whole scenarios of tradition and history. Yet ordinary Chinese also contains classical idioms that refer to very complex concepts that are part of the culture. Similarly a lot of our speech comes from Shakespeare, even though we don't recognize it. In Asian Studies departments in universities, Chinese is learned academically. I didn't learn from a book but from a teacher who was available to talk. We could discuss one Chinese idiom for two or three hours or an entire afternoon over a cup of tea. I had access to tremendous learning. I wasn't just learning Chinese. I was practicing vegetarianism and following many different rules, practicing mantras, meditation, recitation and so on.
This was a very difficult life-style but it was exactly what I wanted to do. I was very single-minded. I began at twenty and was ordained at twenty-three. I was one of five (three men and two women) who were the first American Caucasians to be ordained as monks and nuns in the orthodox Chinese Buddhist tradition.
First, I translated the Sixth Patriarch Sutra, then the Dharani Sutra, the Amitabha Sutra and finally the Lotus Sutra. The Lotus Sutra is twenty-eight chapters. With commentary, it took five years to translate, working every single day. It is very hard work, very solitary work, like being sent to the Aegean stables with a toothbrush. You pick a very small brick and start washing it off. You don't think about having it done. You just do what you need to do every day. I started translating it from lectures on reel-to-reel tape. The commentaries explain the meaning through stories and examples that make the text come to life. The size of the Sutras isn't important. They are monumental teachings and the commentaries make them living scriptures that are sublime and wonderful. This is essentially the difference between learning at a university and learning from a living teacher. At the time you are learning about Buddhism, the principles of Buddhism are part of life that you live hour-to-hour and day-to-day.
I decided to go to law school when I was working for an attorney. I was making $7 an hour and he was making $150 an hour. After working there for a short period of time, I realized that there wasn't anything he was doing that I couldn't do. So I went to law school for four years, and passed the bar. It took very much the same kind of discipline I applied for fourteen years in the monastery: You put your feet to the floor at a desk and you learn a body of knowledge until you know it inside and out and backwards. When you have mastered one piece you take on another piece, and you build a structure. The inspiration you feel as you learn and assimilate, plus the experience you acquire in practice, helps you master something, until it appears intuitive. I found this to be true in translation. There is much more to it than taking words from one language to another. The words were alive in their original language, and the trick is to make them alive in the other language as well. It is a creative process.
When I was in law school, I wrote songs and memorized them in order to retain information. They made the information so readily available that it helped me a great deal during exams. The songs were lists written as lyrics to a song with a tune. In the monastery, if I came across a passage of a Sutra that I really felt inspired by, I wrote a song that basically said the same thing. I wrote songs very much like you hear on the radio, with messages that came from India in 50 A.D. or from the Tang Dynasty in China. They were in the forms of stories and messages from the past about what's important and how to keep yourself on track.
One of the things that drew me to Buddhism is the principle of ahimsa which means doing no harm. It is gentle--the idea that all life is sacred and should be treated with respect. In our society you are pushed into adulthood and expected to compete and succeed and get somewhere--to get material things, recognition, fame and fortune. That's how we measure what life is worth. That was very repellent to me, and still is. Buddha was a prince who had everything and sacrificed it all to become enlightened. We are here for something more than ourselves.
Buddhism embodies this beautifully. Its core teaching is that we are all one substance, and there isn't really any place to get to. There is nothing to attain, and there is no point to everyone climbing on top of each other to try to get something, because when you finally have what you seek, you realize it's empty. People hunger for material things and power, and when they finally have them they realize it wasn't worth the trouble. They could have been having a V-8.
When I began studying Buddhism, I knew a woman who had studied Tibetan Buddhism in Nepal for years. I respected her a lot. We were in the flat in Chinatown where a bunch of us lived at the time. She was having a discussion with a guy in the kitchen about the question, "What are we here for?" I was making noodles while they were talking on in a philosophical way. She said, "We're here to help each other." The other guy said, "Well, I don't know, I've read this and that Sutra and I'm not sure I agree with that." She turned to him and looked him straight in the eye and said, "Well, it's as good a reason as any other." I just froze in that instant. Yes, it is as good a reason as any other.
It doesn't mean we don't have personal desire and selfishness to overcome every single day, but when I feel best is when I am effectively helping someone else. Translating the Sutras was putting them in English so other people would have the opportunity to see how profound they are.
Part of being an attorney is being able to stand in a place where I can be an advocate for someone who needs to be represented so they can be treated fairly. When I am standing in that position, that is when I feel really grounded. That's my basic orientation, and one of the reasons I went to law school. I have a son and want to provide for him and survive in the world on a material level, but the other reason was that I would be in a position to do some good.
It's pretty obvious that society is weighted very heavily in favor of people who have money, power and influence, and an insatiable desire to accumulate more. A counterbalance is needed. Consumer law provides this counterbalance. A consumer can act as a "private Attorney General" to enforce state and federal laws that protect the public from deceptive, illegal or oppressive business practices. The way the law judges whether a claimant has been cheated by a corporation or company is to use this standard: "Would it have been deceptive to the least sophisticated consumer?" If they find that it would have, then that law has been violated.
Consumer law encompasses laws regulating lending, warranty, school loans and the collection of debts. A debt collector, for example, cannot harass, oppress or bully a debtor--that's the law. If you don't want a debt collector bugging you, you can write them a letter telling them to stop contacting you--it's called a "cease communication" letter. Then, by law, they have to leave you alone. But few people realize that such protections exist. Consequently, the horror stories are sometimes truly amazing. One problem, however, is that not many attorneys practice this type of law.
Having represented Chinese-speaking clients has given me a chance to blend these two aspects of my life. I was very steeped in Chinese culture. I still dream in Chinese. By the time I left the monastery at age thirty-four, I had lived half of my life in a Chinese community. For that reason, I'm in a good position to be of use as the two cultures draw closer and the world continues to shrink. You see a lot of Asian bashing going on in the country now. People like things to be familiar and when they aren't they get scared. Some people are doing it for political gain. Different groups have been used as scapegoats in the past and now, unfortunately, it seems to be the Asian people's turn.
People are pretty much the same, although each culture approaches things differently and has different strategies. To the Chinese, we may seem as unsophisticated and unaesthetic in our lack of subtlety in dealing with each other. It's not a difference in the people but a difference in education and custom. As long as people have no contact and are uneducated to these differences, they don't understand. A newly arrived Chinese person can be very bewildered by different aspects of our society. Our laws and our system of civil and criminal justice can be quite baffling to them--all the more so if they do not speak English. To act as an advocate in such situations is very rewarding.
I have been out of the monastery for fourteen years. It was certainly a big adjustment when I left to establish myself in the "outside" world. Ten or fifteen years ago, I might have had in my mind a lot of day-to-day questions about, "What am I doing?" "What is the plan?" "Am I doing the right thing?" I don't think about those kinds of things anymore. My spiritual training and discipline have served me very well. What I didn't have was training in how you make a living, go to Safeway and the ordinary things. Those aren't that difficult to learn. They just take time.
I'm just getting started practicing law. I'm not sure where that's going to take me. I want to use my Chinese to help clients who actually need help. I'm doing what I want to do, and have achieved what I wanted to achieve so far, In general, I'm right where I want to be. I've moved from wanting my dream to being in it.
Things work in mysterious ways. We think it is all our own doing and striving, but often we find ourselves at wonderful junctures in our lives with no idea of how it really happened. Looking back, we may see that all the struggle didn't make that much difference. We might just as well have relaxed and enjoyed the ride.
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