Off By an Inch in the Beginning...

The Venerable Master Hua, famously and pithily recounted: "Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end." I have to say -- Christopher Columbus might have benefited from that advice in 1492 when he missed India by nearly 10,000 miles. I wonder what that says about the scope of our compounding trajectory 530 years later. But luckily the NASA engineers working on getting Apollo 13 back to earth from new explored terrains weren't off by an inch in their calculations. Truly, never has Master Huas shared wisdom been more critical than today in terms of our internal alignment. 

As you exit this sacred environment where you are encouraged and supported to constantly be aware of and to align with your center -- where you are encouraged to veer off by not even an inch -- you may well be entering environments where there is little or no time and space for that kind of careful internal discernment and calibration. And the hard reality is that you may not even notice it. Because the thing about being off by an inch is that we most often don't feel the misalignment until it is too late to make a quick course correction." 

Preeta Bansal shares more in this thought-provoking 2023 commencement speech, delivered at Dharma Realm Buddhist University.

Thank you, President Susan Rounds and to the distinguished faculty and board of DRBU. Special thanks to the many dear friends who are part of the extended community here and have been shining lights for me for more than a decade now.

Above all, warmest Congratulations to all of you in the Class of 2023. And to the families, friends, ancestors, and loved ones – near and far – who have set in motion and nurtured the ripples that allow us to be here today.

It’s customary, I realize, for the person standing here to pretend or at least attempt to share with you stories of wisdom gleaned from a lifetime of experience. It is true that I have both toiled and found tremendous joy and reward in various material realms of our society – from public service, to the global financial and corporate world, human rights diplomacy, academia, nonprofit work, and the voluntary service sector.

But rest assured, I’m not going to do that. The truth is, I – and others like me who have walked the realms of so-called external and societal power – have much to learn from you. It is you who have had the foresight and insight to step off the beaten path and choose to study at this unique and exceptional incubator of wisdom and virtue.

It takes a very special kind of person, deeply grounded in himself or herself – not to mention clear and courageous in her convictions – to seek out such a unique institution while still relatively young in life. A place where the wisdom and Great Books of both East and West are equally combed and revered. A place where learning is focused on self-reflection and knowing oneself, as much as it is on the outer forms of knowledge. And a place where theory is deeply integrated with practice, so virtue and learning become embodied. That’s a rare place indeed – and hardly the norm in institutions of higher learning, as we all know.

Not to mention (I might add) a place where the roads are named Compassion Way, Protector Avenue, and Filial Avenue. Oh my! Or where, I have learned, you can be a student, a lunch pick-up driver, a dishwasher, and a farmer all in one day. Or where peacocks and sheep leisurely stroll together.

The truth is, it has taken me a lifetime of experience to realize the wisdom that you graduates here today are blessed to have received early in your lives – ancient wisdom transmitted through the Venerable Master Hua, who famously and pithily recounted: “Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.”

“Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.”

I have to say – Christopher Columbus might have benefited from that advice in 1492 when he missed India by nearly 10,000 miles. I wonder what that says about the scope of our compounding trajectory 530 years later. But luckily the NASA engineers working on getting Apollo 13 back to earth from new explored terrains weren’t off by an inch in their calculations.

Truly, never has Master Hua’s shared wisdom been more critical than today in terms of our internal alignment.

As you exit this sacred environment where you are encouraged and supported to constantly be aware of and to align with your center – where you are encouraged to veer off by not even an inch – you may well be entering environments where there is little or no time and space for that kind of careful internal discernment and calibration.

And the hard reality is that you may not even notice it. Because the thing about being off by an inch is that we most often don’t feel the misalignment until it is too late to make a quick course correction. It’s not like a situation of being a fish out of water, where we immediately jump up and realize we are not being true to our nature. It’s more like being the frog in water that is slowly heating up. We can end up being burned alive, without realizing it.

That has certainly been my experience working in the big, complex institutions of our modern era. Fresh on the heels of America’s successful Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969, the educational institutions for my Generation X – beginning in elementary school, at least in the conventional system – encouraged us to think big and shoot for the stars – we were taught to believe in the power of reason, science, and the analytical mind to break down, debate, and solve massive problems. It was an overwhelming belief in the power of the mind – an abiding faith that we can think our way through any complex social problem. (Much like the AI of today.)

And so with a certain intellectual toolkit, I went on to have a bit of a moonshot career – taking me to the United States Supreme Court, White House, and to diplomatic, legal, and corporate roles around the world.

But then something happened to upend and disrupt the coherence of that trajectory. I felt keenly the limits of the toolkit of the mind to address increasingly complex problems of a certain massive scale, at least without doing a good amount of collateral damage along the way.

When you’re working on a piece of legislation that takes up 2200 pages, or working for a corporation operating in 83 countries, or working on causes and issues that can now go viral globally almost overnight, the idea that you can map or fully anticipate cause and effect seems pretty far-fetched. That’s true at the apparent level, and even more so at the subtle or root level.

Working on issues that can affect the lives of a 100 million or a billion people – as happens in Silicon Valley or Wall Street, Washington, London, and other elite power centers – may sound impactful and well-meaning, except that there’s no way you can be in relationship with a million or billion people, or to ultimately find out “how’d that work out for you anyway?”

In an era of exponential technology and change, where institutional mottos include “move fast and break things,” and where BHAGs, or big hairy audacious goals, are celebrated, I became keenly aware of the Hippocratic Oath, “first do no harm.”  And while that certainly doesn’t advocate failing to act, it does counsel humility and conscious awareness about the scope, scale, and speed of our actions – and our sense of alignment with our own conditions and internal guidance – a near-impossible task for actions at a certain massive, global scale.

“Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.”

Dr. Hinton

Consider also the recent news about Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, who went from being an artificial intelligence pioneer to conscientious objector because things felt off for him by more than an inch. He and two of his grad students had created the technology in 2012 that became AI’s intellectual foundation, and received for it the Turing Prize – the computational world’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. But last month, he quit his job at Google, where he has worked and become one of the most respected voices in the field, so he can freely speak out about the risks of A.I.

Dr. Hinton had always had the internal tools to re-calibrate his work with his inner conditions throughout his professional life. In the 1980s, he left his professorship at Carnegie Mellon University for Canada because he said he was reluctant to take Pentagon funding. In 2012, Google acquired the company he started with his two students after his breakthrough innovation at the University of Toronto. And while he felt Google acted as a “proper steward” for the technology for a decade until last year, careful not to release something that might cause harm, he realized that the tech giants now are locked in a competition that might be impossible to stop, and so he quit.

“Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.”

A part of him, he said, now regrets his life’s work.

“I console myself with the normal excuse: If I hadn’t done it, somebody else would have,” Dr. Hinton said.

But because of his internal tools that allowed him to continually re-calibrate to his conditions, he is now in a position where he can speak freely about the risks of AI, with knowledge and authority.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

Or consider the more complex case of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who felt a deep obligation to join the American war effort. He believed that stopping fascism was a matter of saving civilization itself. He was appointed leader of the Manhattan Project in early 1942, though he understood immediately the true destructive power of the atomic bomb.

After the war, Oppenheimer was deeply concerned with the successful control of nuclear energy, and sharply opposed the further development of the hydrogen bomb – enough so that, due to his positions and his political activity, his security clearance was revoked in 1954. While he in part regretted his role as "father of the atomic bomb", he also refused to be paralyzed by the complexities of the matter. As reflected in his recitation of the Gita when the bomb was first deployed in Hiroshima, he realized at some level that he, like Vishnu on the battlefield, was doing his duty, as he became “Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Was this a case of “Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.” ? Who knows?

None of these examples are meant to suggest any absolute sense of wrong or right action. Every action in every unique context – and by each unique person with their own conditioning – has causes and effects that we cannot control or predict, and what’s right for another may not be ours to do and vice versa. As the famous parable of the Chinese farmer who brought home the wild horse illustrates, “good thing, bad thing, who knows?”

And as Vivekenanda said, we kill thousands of living microbes every nano-second as we draw breath. And so the notion that we must do no harm is a recipe for paralysis or reflects lack of clear discernment – it even can create a vacuum which other people inevitably may fill, doing the same work but with less awareness and fewer conscious boundaries.

Nevertheless, we each are called to continually evaluate our work – not by its impact, but by our sense of joy and internal alignment with it – and to re-calibrate what’s off by an inch for each us. In many sectors and institutions, through forces that precede and succeed us, that inch can easily get closer to the 10,000-mile mark before we are able to shift course.

And I would suggest that in this postmodern era, where so many of our systems and institutions are 10,000 miles off the mark before we even enter them – over the past several centuries of collective disconnection and dislocation from soul, soil, and society, the need has never been greater for you, DRBU graduates – who already have presciently and courageously chosen to focus on cultivating wisdom and virtue – to remain committed to this work of alignment and realignment (both personal and collective).

So how do we keep Master Hua’s wisdom close at hand as a daily practice – in order to make continual adjustments when we’re just a few inches or yards off, not thousands of miles? In my own more recent journey back to myself, I’ve found 3 helpful strategies.

First, move at the pace of bodily guidance or internal wisdom. By that, I mean the opposite of “move fast and break things.” I used to live a good chunk of my life right here (in my head) and to ignore the residue or the intelligence that was building up elsewhere in my whole being. In a world that is speeding up exponentially, it’s critical to slow down our external work long enough so as to feel the body and attune to the subtle energetic signs that something is out of whack – whether through meditation, movement, or simple silence. As we know, our bodies keep the score of internal misalignments.

A few weeks ago, I was at this powerful talk by a renowned person who was speaking about overcoming trauma through resilience. And the first step in his five-step plan toward resilience was to accept the pain. He asked people to remember their dates of traumatization – the dates where their lives changed forever, either through loss of a loved one or something else. Because everyone has a date, he said – and they can recite the date without thinking. Many people in the room raised their hands reciting their dates.

But I realized that not everyone has a date or has experienced the kind of acute trauma he was talking about, and they can’t recognize much less name their pain. He wasn’t speaking to the kind of low-level, structural trauma that many people feel every day in a postmodern society that is out of whack and possibly at an inflection point, transitioning to an undefined reality still to come. It’s not surprising in this environment that chronic medical illness is rising – as is chronic inflammation, autism or neurodivergency, and mental health issues – all of which may be the canaries in the coal mines, or shamanic signs. Many people’s minds and bodies are literally rejecting our environment, but in such cases of slowly building chronic trauma, we don’t have a single incident or date or even awareness to point it on.

Our society has gotten pretty good now at metabolizing, integrating, and even paying homage to the acute trauma stories – so much so that there was a recent powerful TED talk on the rise of the “trauma essay” in college applications. That’s because such stories of individual resilience in the face of acute trauma can challenge and inspire us without undermining systemic structures. But stories of rising and deeper chronic ailments point to something more fundamentally out of whack – something that our institutions can’t yet face.

And yet we need to remain keenly aware. Remember the frog in slowly warming water? So often, if we’re not paying close attention, we don’t notice the rising heat. We ignore the chronic conditions and toxic accumulations before the ailments turn acute and fatal. But our bodies deeply know when we need to slow down to metabolize or shift course because we’re off by more than a few inches, either individually or collectively. We need to allow space for that attunement, and to move at the pace of bodily guidance – no matter how slow. We will conserve time and energy in the long run, because “Off by an inch in the beginning, off by ten thousand miles at the end.” So first, move at the pace of bodily guidance.

Second, focus on people and relationships, not projects.  I’ve started realizing that if we are working with virtuous people or virtue aspirants as we cultivate our talents and energies, it often doesn’t matter what we do, and what we do will almost inevitably be both nourishing and impactful in often unexpected ways. But if we’re focused largely on what we do – and choose people who will further our sense of our projects or our projected needs – then the whole is almost always inevitably less than the sum of the parts. It can even sometimes lead to affirmative harm, because of the transactional nature of the relationships.

Third, bloom where you’re planted and remain connected to place, land, and soil. As important as it is to plant seeds of virtue wherever we go, it’s also important to remain rooted to place so as to see and learn from a single cycle and ecosystem in a certain location and with a manageable scale. We’re each entangled with particular life energies, and we must joyfully work at those places of entanglement. No matter how much we scatter and travel and scramble and seek to scale, a good part of our work must remain accountable and rooted to land and place – whether ancestral or adopted.

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Now remember, everything in our modern world will conspire to make all three strategies – and the many more you’ve learned as students here – difficult. A society built on and fueled by disconnection is not one that easily creates space for the work of alignment, much less accountability. But we must persevere. As J. Krishnamurthy said, “It’s no measure of health to be well-adjusted in a profoundly sick society.”

As frogs living in ponds that may be overheating around us, let’s remember not to get too attached to the waters we collectively swim in. So above all: Love. Laugh. And let go. Choose life, in other words, over the familiar but decayed or decaying.

And maybe if we do that, we’ll find our way to build new ponds and even oceans of water along new versions of Compassion Way, Protector Avenue, and Filial Avenue.

We’re counting on you, our 2023 graduates of wisdom and virtue! May your cultivated and sustained powers of discernment and courage be blessings to our world and to all of us!