Talk given at opening ceremony for Heart Shrine Relic Tour visit to Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre, Toronto

Sean Hillman MA, BA
Doctoral student, South Asian Religions/Bioethics
Department for the Study of Religion
Joint Centre for Bioethics
University of Toronto  

       Venerable Sangha, Esteemed teachers, honoured guests and organizers, it is an overwhelming honour and pleasure to be here with you today in the presence of the Heart Shrine Relics and to speak to you briefly on this occasion of their return to Toronto and to the Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre. We have here a wide-array of people from various cultural and religious backgrounds which is the first thing I would like to celebrate. To me, this truly is one of the most remarkable aspects of these precious remnants of past great masters, most particularly the blood relics of our Lord Shakyamuni Buddha Himself as provided by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. The Heart Shrine Relics constantly bring all of us together. Not only Buddhists, but so many other friends and family: those who are interested in Buddhism and those who are just fascinated with the religious and cultural display of revering and enshrining relics, something that is actually a cross-culturally and inter-religiously shared practice in many different traditions. I wish I could speak in every language to accommodate those who are here and do not speak English, but I will at the very least make a feeble attempt to say a few words in Tibetan:

(composed in collaboration with Ven. Gelong Khenpo Kunga Sherab, University of Toronto)

Firstly, before speaking briefly about the enshrining of remains in general, and the Heart Shrine Relics in particular, I would like to take this opportunity to publicly thank the Tibetan people, both those in Toronto and those in India, for their warmth and helpfulness over the years. In the mid-90s when there were only about 500 Tibetans distributed between the city-triad of Toronto, Lindsay and Burlington, I met my first Tibetan: the amazing Gelak of The Tibet Shoppe renown. I remember how engrossed I was in the recording being played overhead in the store, the chanting of Drepung Loseling monks, and Gelek telling me that he had come to be used to such magnificent sounds. My uncle had given us some money as a gift and instead of buying a tabla-set, I bought a Tibetan jacket, my first mala and some other ritual accoutrements. Since that formative time period I have participated in many Tibetan-organized events: the annual celebration of HHDL’s birthday, Lord Buddha’s birthday or Saka Dawa, March 10th uprising protests in Ottawa and Toronto (during which I would sometimes get on the megaphone to shout slogans), and countless other activities with the Canada Tibet Committee and the Canadian Tibetan Association of Ontario. At those times and at events such as this, the Tibetans are ever-gracious hosts that welcome us into their homes & sacred spaces so that we can share in special events and the love, enjoyment and merit they produce. During my time in India I lived & studied with Tibetans in Dharamsala, and often in the Hunsur & Mundgod settlements of the southern state of Karnataka (which have the largest concentration of Tibetans in India & strangely is a region with terrain as vastly different from Tibet as one can find, and one often plagued with drought) and again and again they were ever embracing of me as an Inji Buddhist monastic among them. My classmates at the Institute of Buddhist Dialectics called me by the name of 'Canada' more than my own ordination name of 'Sherab,' and they came to be close friends and siblings during the course of our debate training. This weekend we once more experience the kind hospitality of the remarkable Tibetans that have chosen Toronto as their new home & place to raise the next generation of Tibetan Canadians. I actually live in Parkdale and my wife Alex often has to restrain me from talking to every Tibetan we pass by on the street.  You make me feel more at home by bringing a taste (literally and figuratively) of my second home of India. For those of you that live here, I want you to know that so many of us feel immensely grateful that our city is graced with your presence. It is from the bottom of my heart that I thank the Tibetan people that I have known, and with profound respect and love I offer my undying support for the cause of Tibet which continues to be under siege & pledge whatever meagre service I can offer towards the preservation of the Tibetan cultural, linguistic and religious heritage of People of the Snowy Lands.

Today is one of the rare occasions when I have the chance to speak both as a Buddhist practitioner and an academic in South Asian Studies. Over the years I have had some exposure to the relics: here at the Tibetan Canadian Cultural Centre, at Sri Lankan, Chinese and Vietnamese temples, and at the Lama Yeshe Ling Tibetan Buddhist Dharma Centre in Burlington. Every time I come into their presence I find it almost impossible to believe that these substances were physically connected to some of our greatest historical Buddhist heroes: Lord Shakyamuni Buddha Himself, the great reformers Arya Atisha and Lama Tsong Khapa, the spiritual partner of Guru Padmasambhava Yeshe Tsogyal, and even some contemporary masters such as the peerless Kalachakra Guru of HHDL and one of my teachers, Kirti Tsenshab Rinpoche. I haven’t had any of the special experiences that many people have described as a result of being near the relics, but they surely remind me of the kindness of my teachers, of their teachings on wisdom and compassion, and they never cease to fill me with much devotion. I even have pictures of the relics on my shrine so I can attempt to make this well of devotion somewhat lasting. But it is the story of their worldwide travels and their frequent return to our city that     

really maintains the inspiration. 

What is the purpose of enshrining and venerating relics?  I cannot say anything above and beyond what has been said before on such a topic, but I will say that perceiving the relics brings us into an unbreakable karmic connection with the masters from which they arose. At most the relics bring us closer to enlightenment by allowing us to accumulate merit by way of our offerings given with devotion, a compassionate wish to benefit all beings, and a correct view of reality; they light a fire under us to practice with haste in light of our impending and indeterminate demise, and at the very least (but still of crucial importance) they serve to allow us to gather together in solidarity as Buddhists and fellow human beings (and actually sometimes animal beings have the chance to be exposed too), all of which can only serve to help us feel less alone in our struggle towards temporary and ultimate happiness. Rather than the melancholy that usually attends ordinary funerals, the death of adepts is often an extraordinary event accompanied with perceivable signs such as those environmental (rainbows, odours, raining flowers and so on), those internal to us, and those in the form of special remains such as those that have emanations of deities arising from the matter. Such signs can lead us from the sadness of the loss of a great teacher to the joy that celebrates the vast accomplishments of yogic masters, and give us the hope that we too can have an extraordinary death that is no longer something to cause us dread, but one in which we can potentially enter in awareness and with realizations of the deepest empathy for others and the actual way in which phenomena exist. These qualities will surely lead to an auspicious human rebirth so that we can continue to try to improve ourselves so we are better able to help others.

This is why Lama Zopa Rinpoche has said that the Maitreya Project to build a 500-foot statue of the Future Buddha in the location of Lord Buddha’s Parinirvana in Kushinagara, India is his life’s most important project. On an ultimate level, Rinpoche hopes to help as many beings as possible move towards ultimate happiness and wisdom on the basis of this holy project of the Heart Shrine Relic Tour and the Maitreya Statue, and on the ground he hopes for there to be many religious and social services available for free to both pilgrims and local Indians.  It is an incredible task and is ongoing. We will eventually only be able to be close to these relics when they are placed in the Heart Shrine of this amazing statue of Maitreya Buddha, so, now, we can take the opportunity to be near them and use them to the best of our ability to improve our own lives and the lives of those around us. Once again, thank you so much. 

Intro to talk on Buddhist Perspectives on Social Justice at event hosted by Interfaith Dialogue Institute (IDI)/Faith Communities in Action Against Poverty (ISARC)/Church of the Holy Trinity

Sean Hillman MA, BA
Doctoral student, South Asian Religions/Bioethics
Department for the Study of Religion
Joint Centre for Bioethics
University of Toronto   

Full talk can be seen here:
Buddhist Perspectives on Social Justice, Sean Hillman (IDI/ISARC interfaith dinner) 

For the sake of brevity, rather than a broad spectrum talk about the various social injustices perpetrated internally within the Buddhist traditions themselves, those social injustices that have Buddhists as their target, and the many ways in which these problems have and have not been addressed by Buddhists and those concerned with their well-being, I will instead briefly zero in on a particular case of a Buddhist death in a Toronto Catholic hospital to highlight some key issues with end-of-life care delivery to diverse patient populations. My ongoing research project has as its object of focus Buddhists, Hindus and Jains of South Asian descent, and as its main concern the unique, religiously-based conceptions of these groups that affect their end-of-life decision-making. Although my upcoming ethnographic fieldwork will be investigating how religious ideas affect end-of-life decision-making of adherents within India, some of the questions that I have asked in my earlier work concern South Asians in diaspora:

• Can South Asians have their religious needs met in end-of-life care settings in diaspora? 
• Can healthcare providers with a different worldview than their patients successfully meet their patients’ religious needs?

I have some current and emerging questions yet to be answered and hopefully something we can discuss during our gathering today:

• Is the term ‘diversity’ a useful one? Here in Toronto we pride ourselves with our incomparable diversity, but does the defining of a patient group as ‘diverse’ actually distance healthcare providers from the ‘other’ that we are caring for? Is such terminology actually an ‘othering’ technique?
• Is it possible for cultural-sensitivity training and diversity education in healthcare to be an overdetermination of the unique needs of certain patient populations?
• Is there a point at which accommodations for unique religious healthcare needs actually begin to impinge on other patients by taking away from their due share of resource entitlements? 

These questions are not comfortable ones, which is that they challenge my own ideas as an academic, as a caregiver and as a Buddhist. Growing up in quite a sheltered Jewish environment, and subsequently being exposed to an almost unlimited number of people of various backgrounds both in hospital and in my travels, I came to cherish diversity. With newly opened eyes, I then also came to directly experience the mistreatment of some patients from diverse backgrounds. Such obvious and undeniable ethical breaches strongly influenced me in the personal, religious and academic spheres of my life to tackle the problems in healthcare delivery to diverse patient populations: not just to point at the difficulties but to attempt to discover and offer solutions as well. I aspire to compile a South Asian Religious Health Ethics Guide to assist those of South Asian descent and those caring for them, and it may well end up being gray literature addended to my dissertation or a separate project. My very recent discomfort with how we address diversity in healthcare, however, has arisen from problematizing my own work. With the distance of time and analysis I could see in retrospect that my deep concern with meeting the religious needs of my patients was at times not totally helpful but was, in fact, troublesome for my co-workers, my patients and their families, and myself as well. I will come back to this point in the narrative of the case study.

    Before I touch on the case study, I wish to say that I firmly position equity in healthcare delivery to diverse patient populations as a matter of justice. From a Rawlsian standpoint, utilising his second principle of justice, we can argue that the requirement of the difference principle to arrange social and economic inequalities to be of the greatest benefit to the least-advantaged members of society can and should include the ill and the dying without a breach in logic. I would even be so bold as to say that the conditions of the fair equality of opportunity principle need not merely refer to access to offices and positions in society, but also to healthcare.

[case study can be found in "A Bioethical Analysis of a Buddhist Death in a Catholic Hospital"]