Soryu and I live on opposite ends of the continental United States: he runs his monastery in Vermont, and I live along the coast in California. We were both so overwhelmingly busy we haven’t talked in months. One day, I checked in on him. “Where are you?” I asked. “I’m here,” he replied. I was like, yeah, very funny Soryu, ha ha. I thought he was making a Zen joke (“wherever you go, here you are.”) It turned out, he was actually here, like here here. He was traveling and stopping by my part of California on his way to Japan. That became the inspiration of the opening joke for our video.
“Wait, what video?” you may ask. Once upon a time, I half-joked to Angela that I had so many famous Buddhist friends we should just do a video series of me joking around with my friends. Angela responded, “That is a great idea, we should do that.” And so, as often happened, my joke became a product idea. But who to have the first conversation with? Soryu was a great candidate because besides being a widely admired Buddhist abbot, he was also co-founder of Buddhism.net. But Soryu was always an entire continent away, and I didn’t want to do videos of two talking heads on a screen. What to do? And just as I was thinking about it, Soryu suddenly showed up.
So, my friends, may I present to you the inaugural video of our new Meng & Friends series, where Soryu and I joked around in my backyard, or rather, I joked around while he tried to talk about the serious topic of the climate crisis, innovation, and ideology. Enjoy!
