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with Sean Oakes, PhD
Online via Zoom
5 Tuesdays, October 27 – November 24, 4-5:30pm Pacific
Co-hosted by New York Insight and Sati Center
In the Pāli discourses, the Buddha teaches laypeople, wandering ascetics, spirit beings, and his own monastics. He was known for radical egalitarianism: denying the meaningfulness of caste, and accepting all castes and genders into the monastic Saṅgha. At the same time, the named laypeople in the suttas are overwhelmingly upper caste. Should we infer from this that the Buddha’s teachings were mostly for the socially privileged?
One thing we find in the discourses is that while upper-caste people pleased with the Dhamma sometimes requested monastic ordination and sometimes went for refuge as lay followers, lower-caste listeners almost always requested ordination. The main place we find representation of lower-caste followers is in the poems of the Theragāthā and Therīgāthā, making these collections not just a radical celebration of the awakening potential of all genders, but also of all castes.
Many of us are committed to the Dhamma as a valuable part of modern anti-oppression work, and look for support for social engagement in the early texts. In this study series, we’ll explore the hypothesis that the monastic Saṅgha functions—both in the ancient past and currently—as an active social intervention, offering genuine mobility and relief from oppression to people otherwise locked into their condition by birth. And that without this communal aspect of the Dhamma, the liberating potential of our practice is substantially weakened.
We’ll read suttas on the emptiness of caste, and meet some of the Buddha’s low-caste and outcaste followers: Sunīta the flower-scavenger, Upāli the barber, and Puṇṇikā the household slave, all of whom became arahants and respected elders. And we’ll ask hard questions of our own lineages: How does wealth and social position shape who gets to practice and lead in lay Saṅghas today? How do our own caste structures—systemic racism chief among them, but also class, education, and wealth—show up unexamined in Buddhist communities that value the egalitarian system the Buddha taught? And how can we make this Dhamma we love more effective as a response to systemic oppression?
All are welcome. No previous experience is required, though a general familiarity with the Buddha’s teachings will be helpful.
About the Instructor: Sean Feit Oakes, PhD, E-RYT, SEP (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in NorCal), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and locally.
Dr. Oakes’ primary Buddhist teachers include Jack Kornfield, Sylvia Boorstein, Eugene Cash, Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu, Anam Thubten, and Sayadaw U Janaka, with whom he ordained as a bhikkhu for a Rains Retreat in Burma in 2002. He studied Yoga with Alice Joanou, Rachel Shaw, Amanda Moran, and David Moreno, and taught mindfulness-based āsana and prāṇāyāma for 10 years. He trained in Somatic Experiencing (SE) and Organic Intelligence (OI) with Steven Hoskinson, and integrates the complex systems approach from OI in work toward a distinctively Buddhist approach to individual and collective trauma resolution.
Sean Feit Oakes, PhD, E-RYT, SEP (he/they, queer, Puerto Rican & English ancestry, living on unceded Pomo land in NorCal), teaches Buddhism and somatic practice focusing on the integration of meditation, trauma resolution, and social justice. He received teaching authorization from Jack Kornfield, and wrote his dissertation on extraordinary states in Buddhist meditation and experimental dance. He teaches at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, East Bay Meditation Center, Insight Timer, and locally.