Can you give us some background about yourself.
I was born on Sept. 14, 1915, in Peking, China. My mother was born there as well. Her father was the founder of Peking University. We came to this country in 1927 because of political unrest and settled in San Francisco. Since moving from China to the USA, I have mostly lived in San Francisco except for a nine year period when I lived in the Vedanta monastery in Sacramento. Nowadays I live all over the place.
In Peking, (Bejing), my brother and I attended the American school. But my parents were not pleased with what was being taught there, so they opened a school at home. They were both teachers and provided me with a thorough educational foundation. I attended grade school in San Francisco, and then went to Lowell High School, a college preparatory school where my father taught biology and zoology. In 1934 I attended the University of California at Berkeley and majored in chemistry. In those days we paid only $54 a year for tuition, but this included two years of mandatory ROTC military training. I first went to the university to study biochemistry with the avowed purpose to keep Einstein alive, so he could continue to figure this whole bloody thing out. Ever since I was a child in Peking I was terribly interested by Einstein and gravity, so I could study the cosmos. But I didn’t go straight through the university: after about two years at Berkeley, I became fed up, so I quite school. After a couple of more years I went back, but I quit again after just one semester. I didn’t graduate until 1943.
Of course, I never succeeded in keeping Einstein alive. I also didn’t realize that I was going to inherit his problem [of figuring out the origin of the cosmos]. There are some things that Einstein did in 1905 that were terribly important. I think he took his physics seriously, but not geometry. I also believe that he probably never saw that his writings were being misinterpreted by those teaching relativity at that time. According to Einstein, E=m. The c squared is just how many ergs are contained within a gram of matter. But Einstein’s equation was being taught all over the planet as E + m= k. Einstein never made that mistake, but he apparently never saw how it was being taught. Someone in Hollywood once asked me, why didn’t Einstein clear this up? After all, he was around until 1955. But he probably never saw how it was being taught. Who would have had the gall to teach the subject of relatively in front of Einstein?
At the time I graduated from the university in 1943 we had to choose between a war-related job or rifle [active duty in the military]. Things were tough, the only holidays we had off was Christmas Day. We got Easter off, but that always fell on a Sunday, and we always got Sunday off. I had to do war-related work at the Rad Lab at Berkeley for about a year and a half, and then in 1944, the Swami allowed me to join the monastery. But I had to get out of the Manhattan Project through a double interview with the FBI. The second man asked me, “Do you think that the best thing you can do for your country at the present time is to join a monastery?” “Yes,” I said. He replied, “You might be surprised, buy many people feel like that.” I was surprised and wondered: How does he know?
