When the author, radical feminist, and Black Buddhist Christian bell hooks died in late 2021, she was widely celebrated for just about everything in the mainstream press except for her spirituality. 

But hooks’s connection to religion is present throughout her entire breadth of work, which includes thirty books across a variety of genres as well as countless articles on feminism (and how it is for everyone), popular culture, education, recognizing the human rights of children, and more. This missing component of spiritual recognition was part of the motivation for bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist by Nadra Nittle, a journalist and education reporter at The 19th, an independent news outlet that covers gender, politics, and policy. 

The book was published by Fortress Press in November 2023. Tricycle recently spoke with Nittle about the book, hooks’s legacy in spiritual circles and beyond, and as well as book recommendations for Buddhist readers interested in learning more about hooks’s life and work. 

You’re the author of several books, including Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision: Faith, Folktales, and Feminism in Her Life and Literature. Can you tell me how this book came to be? Sure. I had written a book about Toni Morrison for Fortress Press, which is a Lutheran publisher. My books are for people who are not necessarily religious, but interested in how a figure they might not associate with a spiritual tradition approached spirituality in their work or personal lives. They serve as an introduction to people who have never read these authors before; some people read them as a companion piece to read with their books. 

The publisher wanted me to write another book and had suggested some men. But I thought bell hooks would be a good figure because she was a Buddhist Christian, and many people didn’t necessarily know that, even though she discussed it. It didn’t come up in a lot of her obituaries. Spirituality was foundational to her work. And she died shortly after the Toni Morrison book came out. 

You write about bell hooks visiting your school in the 1990s, when you were a teenager. Can you tell us your impressions of hooks and what has stayed with you? I wish I remembered it better; this was such a long time ago. I had not read any of her books, though I knew she was an important person and an important figure. I remember being pretty intimidated.

I remember the speech she gave, saying that she didn’t think her father had loved her, how she had been saying it for years, and her mother finally agreed with her. She was challenging the idea that all that Black families, in particular low-income families, needed was a man in their home and all of their problems would go away. You heard a lot about welfare queen moms in the 1990s; you still hear about them today, but especially in the nineties. President Bill Clinton had passed welfare reform, and single mothers, especially Black single mothers, were vilified. So for hooks to come out and say, “No, we don’t just need men in the home, they have to be loving men who are not going to perpetuate patriarchy,” was pretty radical. And this is something she discusses in Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, and other pieces.

She sat with us at lunch, and I sat close to her. She was discussing movies—this part got cut from the book. There was a movie called Sankofa, about a Black American model who gets more in touch with her African roots, and it also discusses issues around enslavement. I remember one of my classmates getting into an argument with her. My classmate loved the movie, and hooks thought it had problems—obviously, she was very critical of popular culture. But she wasn’t like, “Oh, you’re just a little teenager, you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She was respectfully arguing with him and treated him as someone capable of having an argument. 

Yes, and one other thing about her visit, which I write about in the book. I didn’t witness this, but bell hooks told one of my friends that she was beautiful, and should consider not straightening her hair and wearing it natural. And she stopped straightening her hair, and she told everyone that bell hooks told her that she was beautiful. I’m not in touch with this person anymore, but hooks really left a positive impact on her. 

I enjoyed learning more about hooks’s cultural criticism in your book. Unfortunately, I only came to hooks later in life, so she’s always been a Buddhist Christian radical feminist to me. And to learn about her interview with Lil’ Kim and her willingness to speak out against Hillary Clinton, even Beyoncé—especially Beyoncé. [In a 2014 panel discussion at the New School called Are You Still A Slave: Liberating the Black Female Body, hooks said Beyoncé was “antifeminist” and a “terrorist” to young Black girls.] To go up against these figures and take a lot of criticism makes her fearless to me. You refer in the book to hooks’s “Buddhist Christian ethic.” Can you expand on what that means? That’s in reference to what she took from both Buddhism and Christianity: the idea that you weren’t spiritual or religious for the sake of being spiritual or religious, you did so for the benefit of other people, to engage in social action. There was love at the root of it, the love of one’s self and the love of other people. She used the late author and psychiatrist M. Scott Peck’s definition of love, which he said was one’s commitment to one’s own spiritual growth or someone else’s spiritual growth. 

You brought up Beyoncé, so when she was criticizing Beyoncé, or criticizing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, she believed that she was doing so in love, in the tradition of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thich Nhat Hanh and other figures that she was influenced by, like Thomas Merton—people who had social action and liberation right at the heart of their spiritual tradition. 

In a 1992 interview with Tricycle’s founding editor, Helen Tworkov, hooks spoke about her hesitance in meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, whose social activism inspired her Buddhist practice. “As long as I keep a distance from that thread, I can keep him—and I can critique myself on this—as a kind of perfect teacher.” Did she ever meet Thich Nhat Hanh? Yes, she was afraid of meeting him because she didn’t want to be disappointed by him or have [him be] a big letdown. I write in the book about how when hooks first met Hanh, she was still so angry at a past partner who was abusive to her, and she blurted out the words “I’m so angry.” And Hanh told her to “compost” her anger, to turn it into something, for lack of a better term, positive, something that can be used for good instead of her just stewing in anger. And it seems that he handled her anger in a very wise way that she appreciated. 

What about hooks’s upbringing in the Christian church? It seems that she was drawn to social action and outreach from a young age. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Kentucky. She went to predominantly Black churches, where she found people who supported her speaking abilities by reading scriptures; she found people who encouraged her to use her “god voice.” That was in contrast to her home life, where she was more of a misfit and the family scapegoat. She had a difficult relationship with her father; it seemed they butted heads from an early age. She was considered strange or weird by her family members and told she was crazy, even for things like her reading habits. Her mother bought her books, and her family was supportive of her being a good student, but they were still worried if she was going to be a proper young woman who was attractive, found a mate, and was a homemaker—all of those things that she didn’t want to be. 

Her family life really contrasted with her church experience, which was a place of refuge for her. There was an elderly woman, a deacon in the church, who took an interest in hooks and supported her and was loving toward her; she’s the one who told her she had a “god voice.” And both of her maternal grandparents had unique experiences and ideas about spirituality. Her maternal grandmother was not a churchgoing person; she saw the church as being superficial and people caring more about what you wore and who you knew. She was spiritual, but more so when it came to nature—growing things, being self-sufficient, and living off the land. So that was a model for hooks. And her grandfather believed every object had a soul and that she needed to know the stories of all the things around her. He was considered by others to be a strange guy. He was also a pacifist—he never went to war, he refused to fight. hooks believed he was the one family member who truly loved her. 

And this was one of the reasons [why] she was opposed to the traditional, nuclear family, because she believed that it takes a village to raise a child. And if you did have a village, you were more likely to find people who rooted for you and nurtured you. hooks felt that her father was not loving; he was physically abusive to her, to her mother, and at times to her siblings. At one point, this started to affect hooks’s relationship with her mother, because her mother would sometimes act abusively toward her to get into her husband’s good graces. And I haven’t gotten into child liberation theology yet…

We did see a bit of that earlier when you recounted hooks telling your school friend that she was beautiful and to not straighten her hair and engaging in a respectful debate with your other classmate. And with her mother being abusive, that shows that it doesn’t have to be men acting patriarchal, it’s the system, right? Yes. I think the most radical part of bell hooks is her belief that women can enforce or perpetuate patriarchy. Often in popular culture, when we’re talking about the #MeToo movement, or sexism and misogyny in general, it’s framed as women not perpetuating any of these things. And she very much believed women are capable of perpetuating patriarchy and teaching their sons to be patriarchal. She also said women need to interrogate their ideas about women and gender. 

You write that one of the things that drew hooks to Buddhism was her confronting this image of a white Jesus at her Black church. Later in her life, she goes on a pilgrimage to Spain to see the Black Madonna at Montserrat as a way to reclaim the divine feminine for Black women. How did that trip impact her view on spirituality? As a child, hooks went to a church where they had a huge image of a white Jesus holding a globe, and at the bottom of the globe were all the people of color. She discussed how this image really had an impact on her brother who struggled to be a Christian, to be confronted with this image of a white Jesus, that he didn’t feel represented by, every Sunday. It doesn’t sound like she took that as hard as her brother did, but she longed for representations of divine feminine deities portrayed in all different colors, shapes, and sizes.

One of the reasons she became interested in Buddhism was [because] she saw Buddha portrayed in various colors, shapes, and sizes. One of her first encounters with Buddhism was through Buddhist nuns during the time she was a student at Stanford University. She met them, took an interest [in their message], and decided to pursue Buddhism. In terms of the divine feminine and Christianity, she was interested in the Virgin Mary and, specifically, the Black Madonna. She hadn’t grown up hearing about or seeing a Black Madonna, but eventually, she made a pilgrimage to Montserrat, Spain, to view this statue. 

It’s also important to mention that the Catholic Church has recently made an effort to start portraying Jesus, Mary, and other figures in different races and ethnicities, so that people feel represented. 

All About Love: New Visions, hooks’s book that was published in 2000, made a resurgence during the pandemic and even made the New York Times’ bestseller list for the first time, twenty years after its original publication. Why do you think it resonated so much with readers? In the US, we now have more single-headed households than partnered or married households. During the pandemic, especially during lockdown, people were isolated, and it made them think about their connections to other people, maybe in a way they hadn’t before. And people who were partnered or married had to deal with being around their partners for sustained periods, whereas before they were going out or going to work and didn’t have to see their partner or children as much. The pandemic forced some people to engage with their partners and children in ways they hadn’t prior to the pandemic. It makes sense people were interested in a book like All About Love during that time. Quotes from the book were being shared on TikTok and other forms of social media, so I think it was a perfect mix of social media, the pandemic, and younger generations being exposed to the book for the first time. And there are some influential people, like the filmmaker Sofia Coppola and the model Emily Ratajkowski, who began to cite the book as important in their lives and development. 

I also discussed that we can see from dating sites like Match.com that people are looking for more substantial relationships, not just a pretty or handsome face. All About Love is a go-to book for people interested in going beyond the butterflies and rush of feelings at the beginning of a courtship; this book is really about a deeper connection. And she was really clear that she didn’t want to just focus on romantic relationships. A lot of people who like All About Love cited the fact that she writes friendship should be equal to any other relationship, and that friendship will be different (than romantic love) but should not be devalued. And that was a lesson hooks wished she had learned before entering into an abusive relationship where she found herself isolated. 

There’s a quote attributed to the Buddha about friendship being the whole of the spiritual path. And the other thing is the epidemic of loneliness that we sometimes overlook. And she was discussing that more than twenty years ago. Now, there’s more attention to the fact that it’s not just elderly people who suffer from loneliness; there are a lot of young people who are lonely and looking for connection. And that may be a reason why [so many] young people [are now appreciating] the book. 

Toward the end of All About Love, hooks writes that the book is a guide about love, but also death. And if we treat each interaction with someone as if it were our last, that would change how we interact with others; it would allow us to live more consciously. To me, that’s a very Buddhist sentiment. Are there any Christian parallels between living consciously or staying connected to loved ones who have died? As a text, the Bible focuses on the importance of your ancestors. But in contemporary Christianity, in the US, I think that ancestors are not focused on in the same way. hooks was interested in how Black American and West African spirituality mixed with mainstream Christianity, and how during enslavement, Black people had to hide their African spiritual traditions but found a way to still have yard shrines and altars, even if it was just having rocks or things placed in a certain kind of way. Or the pictures in their house arranged in a way that transcended enslavement and white supremacy in an attempt to separate Black people from all that. 

And hooks believed in the power of naming ancestors too. That’s the whole reason she chose a pseudonym after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. I tried to honor hooks by naming her grandparents in the book.

Lineage is so important in Buddhism—who your teacher is and lineages that can be traced back to the time of the Buddha. It’s interesting to see the parallels with other religions. Can you recommend a few books for Buddhist readers who have never read hooks or who would like to revisit her more spiritual works? All About Love is one of the books where she most engages spirituality, be it Buddhism or Christianity. Her memoir, Bone Black, will allow you to see where she came from and why spirituality was important for her. [Bone Black also provides some framework for] the lessons and understanding [she received from] her Kentucky ancestors, who were not at all familiar with Buddhism [but who] paved her way to becoming a Buddhist; whether it was her grandfather being a pacifist and telling her that everything has a soul or her grandmother using quilting as a form of meditation, losing herself in the process and coming back to herself. And then, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery. She’s urging Black women to not just have a patriarchal, fundamental approach to Christianity, but to expand our options, whether that’s through Buddhism, traditional African religion, Hinduism, or something else. 

I wanted to close with something hooks wrote in All About Love: “Sometimes, we invoke the dead by allowing wisdom they have shared to guide our present actions.” Since you have spent so much time with hooks’s writing, what do you think she would make of the world right now, especially with multiple conflicts going on? Her grandfather, who was one of her teachers, was a pacifist. Hanh and King were pacifists. So I think she would be horrified. 

About ten years ago, she was one of many writers and scholars who signed a letter in support of Palestine. I imagine she would be heartbroken by what’s happening there. And she cautioned people to be wary of the media and the messages in the media. She talked about the importance of making sure you have access to a wide range of information and aren’t just turning on the TV and absorbing whatever messages [come your way, which often] perpetuate what she coined as “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” I think she would urge people to take in the news with caution and advocate for peace and liberation. 

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This interview has been edited and adapted for length and clarity. 

The post The Spiritual Lives of bell hooks appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the peculiar time span known as the 2020s, the residents of a dying nation known as the United States—who’d been oversaturated and over-traumatized with information—elected as their leader a manic-depressive failed actor turned reality TV star. With an oversized ego, a broken heart, and no real experience or interest in governing, the first millennial president made the secret decision to devote all the powers of his office to building “the Path,” a contiguous footpath that would circle the entire planet. The goal of the Path was twofold: to deliver unity and enlightenment to an atomized world, and to rewin the allegiance of the President’s ex. 

To better know, feel connected to, and eventually manipulate his people, the President would privately turn to an anonymous social media account, which consisted of either utopian or dystopian travelogues about the new cities that were allegedly emerging beyond the President’s ability to see from his self-isolation in the nation’s capital. Wanting, naturally, to capture the source of the travelogues’ insight, the President located and kidnapped their author, an urban nomad and former Buddhist monk called the Tourist, whom the President would adopt as a secret spiritual advisor. In those brief moments between the collapse of one pillar of the American dream and the next, the Tourist would soothe the President’s existential dread by telling him stories of the so-called “New American Cities.”

These are the stories of Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids.

Sunyata Woods—City of Somethingness

After fleeing Cohenville in terror—chased by a man in traditional black samue, swinging a perfectly rounded white stone in a leather sling above his head, with a disturbingly untroubled look that made me realize I was not as nonattached to my physical survival as I had previously thought—I resolved to get as far from that city as I could. Whether I succeeded or not can be debated, as before long I found myself arriving in Sunyata Woods, Cohenville’s sister city and rival for the title of the Zen capital of the empire. 

For all their uniquenesses, cities do have kin—rivals, antagonists, soulmates—bound together by culture and karma and markets. But while Cohenville sought to shun and punish tourists, Sunyata Woods embraced them. And why? Why does Sunyata Woods advertise her attractions and her citizens’ meditative achievements on televisions across the empire, during bodysurfing competitions and reality shows about modern gold miners, no less? 

It is said that, for all the Sunyatans’ excellence in the sport of emptiness, they do cling to a certain ember of self, which makes them more relatable to us than the Cohens, and safer to visit. Sunyatans have names and living wills, the barest minima of personalities and bank accounts. 

If you visit Sunyata Woods, you can ask the citizens (they are a curious people, who maintain no defenses against the curiosity of others): if you accept the teaching of the mind’s innate emptiness, and of the self as an illusion that inevitably perpetuates suffering, why do you not go as far as the Cohens? Why do you not strive to eliminate or surrender every trace of a self, by any means necessary? What advantage does maintaining a self offer the true seeker, who is a tourist toward liberation, who dreams of no destination more than whatever place or nonplace is beyond suffering?

The Sunyatans will happily elaborate upon the differences in their and the Cohens’ understanding. Cohens say they prize emptiness, but if you follow their logic upstream, you’ll find it flowing from a belief in the opposite of emptiness—that the universe is completely saturated with being, which fills even the spaces between the things that make up the things that make up the atoms. Cohens believe that by emptying the self, which serves to separate the inner world from the outer, that the unification of those two realms can be achieved. When the self is dissolved, the world floods in to fill the space with itself, subsuming the emptiness. 

To the Sunyatans, this is an abomination, for Sunyatans believe in actual emptiness as the original and final thing, and this is what they’re after. They grant the Cohens the supposition that there’s an innate somethingness to being, which like the most invasive species or gas or government colonizes even the smallest spaces, in between even whatever it is that space is made of. But for the Sunyatans, the self isn’t only an illusion. It occupies some liminal category between something and nothing that, when sufficiently thickened and purified, can keep the two from interpenetrating. A perfectly cultivated self, the Sunyatans’ mythology says, creates a kind of border around the only true emptiness there is. Without such a self, there’s no quarantine to effectively frame and contain the holy vacuum, to keep the somethingness of the world from flooding in. 

These dogmatic fineries will mean little to the Tourist, except that the Sunyatans can’t really be known except through their passion about them. The Sunyatans use their selves—and bodies and relationships, jobs and possessions—as instruments to advance the collective evacuation. Above all—and this is what really separates them from the Cohens—they use their children. While Cohens are morally forbidden from creating and legally forbidden from raising children, Sunyatans are equally compelled to create this deepest form of attachment, which makes for them, as it does everyone, the worst sufferings of mind, which go on to encapsulate the profoundest blisses of emptiness when sitting in meditation.

The meditation the Sunyatans practice and rigorously drill their children in is also unique. Rather than surrendering thoughts of self, from birth young Sunyatans are trained to cling to them with all the grip-strength of competitive rock climbers. The little Zensters spend all their days at elite self-academies, where they learn to achieve ever more rapid, resilient, sustained, and artful generations of self-cultivation, so strong that none of its inner nothingness will be converted to somethingness by the generative power of witness. 

It will be unsurprising, then, to learn that it’s from Sunyata Woods that all the Zen Champions of recent memory have emerged. Certain wunderkind, tracked from an early age for achievement and fame, receive corporate sponsorship, and even private tutelage from the great masters. They demonstrate their aptitude in meditation Olympiads, in which they’re subjected not just to raucous crowds and live international broadcasts but also the latest in biofeedback and neural imaging, which yields True Emptiness Scores across the most imaginative of tortures and disturbances—frozen mats, needle pricks, and cigarette burns to their knees on the block, other mortifications of the flesh, insults offered from one’s own parents and romantic interests, shaming and exile from one’s community—none of which, when all goes well, corrupts the wall of self or the victorious emptiness the children protect inside. Observe the Sunyatan champion celebrating his supremacy on the podium, the ring of fire around the pupils that have narrowed to the point of vanishing, inside which is contained the unspoiled emptiness that is his true and only prize.

Sankhara Rapids—Where the People Cannot Remember

Just as many cities share the same name—we have many Franklins and Washingtons and Greenvilles—there are also many cities in this amnesiac land known (and forgotten) as places without memory. But only in Sankhara Rapids is that forgetting codified by writ of law. It’s not that the Sankharans are neurophysically unable to remember, nor that they don’t want to. Rather, to engage in any act of memory is seen as a kind of violence against the authority of the present moment—like poisoning yourself with some terrible drug, which disgraces not only the individual citizen’s body and mind but also their entire vibrational field, spreading ripples of destruction into the lives of everyone else. 

So the Sankharans shame and repress the memory impulse, just as many other cultures shame and repress the human’s impulses toward combat, sex, and other forms of fun. Any Sankharan found engaging in an act of public remembering is immediately confronted, by all within earshot and stone’s throw, until the sinner repents, begs forgiveness and the mercy of exile, and insists on the supremacy of the now. 

The citizen and the tourist are both expected to obey the mandate against remembering even in private, even alone, when memory is most dangerous and least avoidable. Schoolchildren are taught an escalating sequence of self-flagellations, obliterating their attention’s natural wanderlust with pain. Remedial students and repeat offenders who have grown immune to such stimuli are prescribed special medicines and mantras to be administered before bed, to suppress the remembering-engine of dream consciousness. (Forgetting to self-administer these treatments is considered a sign of healing.) All Sankharans sleep tangled in hammocks that are actually human-sized dream catchers, lofted protectively above the groundwaters of memory. But all the repressed histories are like demons—cunning, determined, with no need for sleep or rest. They find and exploit any path of escape to the mind’s surfaces, moving through the slightest cracks in its defenses like air. Despite all the energy that goes toward sealing these cracks, all systems fail eventually, and the demons inevitably succeed in remembering themselves into being through the citizens’ minds, without the citizens ever becoming aware they are reenacting not only their own individual memories—regrets, losses, heartbreaks, triumphs—but also all the buried sins on which the city was founded. For Sankhara Rapids, like most cities, was taken in blood, and built in bone. 

The forgettingness imposes certain limits on commerce and property ownership, which promotes a culture of taking and sharing as each moment dictates, with the model citizen often forgetting whether they identify as a generous or selfish person, empathetic or pitiless, employed or penniless, single or partnered or polyamorous. But certain spontaneous structures do emerge. At some point in my stay—I couldn’t (cognitively or legally) have said how long I’d been there—I found myself in a building that had that day decided or discovered itself to be a diner. I was studying the ways of all the ghosts of the foundational tortures, who brought themselves back into being through the oblivious locals as they unconsciously mutilated their paper napkins, impaled their breakfast potatoes with primal glee, slurped their spilled yolks through a straw. Then I saw someone burning an auroch onto the underside of her avocado toast with a lighter, and I half-realized it was her. It was the clearest view of her face I’d had in months, and yet my mind refused to fully carve the image for future retrieval, nor to understand who exactly this person was. I was compelled to sit and watch for what might’ve been hours—I’d forgotten about time—as she seemed to wonder what she was doing there in that place, as that person. I found myself following her as she left at dusk, as the day changed to night and all the violent spirits took their evening constitutionals through the people who would never remember becoming the remembering of that which they refused to remember. I watched the way she seemed to be walking nowhere but to inevitably be walking away, always away, cutting an almost drunken wave as her feet went out of their way to fall on insects and flowers without seeming to recognize them or to remember she’d ever felt any preference for sparing life rather than destroying it, maybe forgetting there was any difference between life and death at all.

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Get the full story by reading the first installment, New American Cities: Cohenville, as well as more, at Fiction on Trike Daily.

The post New American Cities: Sunyata Woods and Sankhara Rapids appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In both Buddhist and Hindu traditions, devotional objects seek to bring the viewer and worshiper into tranquil and compassionate states, aimed at getting the mind into concentration, samadhi, and closer to the sublime. In The Benevolent Beings: Buddhas and Bodhisattvas from South and Southeast Asia, currently being exhibited at Pasadena’s Norton Simon Museum until February 19, 2024, the interplay between the objects of these two religions is on full display. Inspired by assistant curator Lakshika Senarath Gamage’s personal experiences growing up in Sri Lanka, Gamage organized the show to “speak to the continuity of devotional engagement with objects that remain essential to healing and tranquility” in these two traditions.

In contrast to the monumental deities that make up part of Norton Simon’s permanent collection, many of the objects exhibited in Benevolent Beings reflect small-scale everyday devotional objects, whether previously installed in temples or possibly kept in people’s homes—some still bearing traces of their original intended use. The exhibition’s design evokes South Asia’s 13th- to 18th-century Buddhist temples, and the three galleries are organized to guide visitors to increasingly sacred objects as they progress through the exhibition, encouraging slow and deliberate contemplation and the feeling of interaction and interconnection between the object and the viewer. As a visitor, I felt encouraged to slow down and look closely to immerse myself in the values shared across these two dharmas. The challenge of this exhibition is to keep in mind that these are devotional, votive objects and not just art items. With thoughtful and meaningful curation, the exhibition aims to be accessible to both religious practitioners as well as the lay art-appreciating public. 

Visiting this exhibition as a scholar of comparative religions, I am reminded that Buddhism has always existed in the context of other traditions. We recall that it was first introduced into the region in the 4th century CE in conjunction with several types of pre-Hindu religions, Vedic beliefs, and local indigenous animistic cults. The Buddhas and bodhisattvas in this exhibition highlight the syncretic nature of the artistic exchanges between pre-Hindu and Buddhist and, in some cases, Islamic, or Persian, art and culture. The art exhibited in these galleries retains regional distinctions yet showcases a sense of cosmopolitan artistic interplay. 

The first gallery features a selection of mythical bird-shaped incense burners from South India, including Censer in the Form of a Mythical Bird, designed to either venerate the Buddha or to please the senses of the Hindu gods. It also includes a Buddhist Manuscript with Covers, from northern Thailand or Myanmar, and Hanging with Nepali Stupas, a cotton scroll, which most likely originated in India. Most of the objects in this gallery were commissioned by either laypeople or religious patrons who aimed to accumulate merit. By commissioning works of art, patrons believe that they acquired an abundance of blessings and protection, a practice that continues to this day. The gallery also includes a selection of bodhisattvas and merciful gods, including Ganesha with the Hindu Triad, a 10th-century sculpture of Ganesha, a beloved Hindu “remover of obstacles,” as well as the god Vishnu. 

In both the Buddhist and Hindu traditions, elephants are sacred symbols. In Buddhism, elephants are the guardians of the Buddha and Earth’s energy and represent physical stress that also indicates mental stress and responsibility. Similarly, in Hinduism, elephants also represent intellectual and mental strength. Further, the notion of mental strengths and knowledge is exemplified in the Bodhisattva Manjusri, a bodhisattva of wisdom, who generally holds a sword in one arm to cut off all delusion. Notably, Vishnu often appears in Buddhist temples to protect visitors in sacred spaces. Gamage explains that it is not unusual for Hindu gods to be placed near the Buddha. Placing Buddha close to Vishnu allows the worshipers to combine blessings for earthly matters with a focus on transcendent values, further underscoring the notion of religious interrelation. Buddha with Two Bodhisattvas, a triad of the Buddha with two bodhisattvas, can be perceived as having only Buddhist relevance. Here, the idea of compassion is underscored with Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of infinite compassion, on the Buddha’s right, and Vajrapani, the earliest protector and guide of Buddhism, on his left. However, we should note that Vajrapani shares his origin with the Vedic deity Indra, also the king of gods in Hinduism.  

Another significant art object is the statue Buddha, from 20th-century Thailand, which features the Buddha standing on a lotus pedestal placed on a mythical bird. It appears that artisans possibly combined the Buddha with Garuda, which in Hindu mythology is the bird and the mount of Vishnu. While the Buddha does not have a similar carrier, since he is not divine but human, some Vishnu devotees consider the Buddha Vishnu’s avatar or a manifestation of the deity on earth. The interplay of the traditions can also be observed in Descent of the Buddha. Here, we see Hindu creator Brahman, who is positioned on the Buddha’s right, and Indra, the king of gods, on the left. In Descent, note how the depiction of the Buddha is made to look much larger than his Hindu counterparts, illustrating the concept of hierarchical scale, or hierarchical proportion, displaying the sensibilities of the environment where it was created and the weight of importance given to the separate traditions by the image’s creator, Tibetan artist Phurbu Tshering of Chamdo.

The second gallery aims to convey the concept of multiple Buddhist heavens and evokes the same architecture as seen in South Asian Bodhi shrines. A Bodhi tree is placed in the center and is surrounded by four sitting Buddhas or four stupas or four objects. This setting allows practitioners to circumambulate the Buddhas (or four stupas or four objects) just as they would have done in the Bodhi shrines. For the general public, it is a space to encounter each individual Buddha within a frame of the Bodhi tree to appreciate the iconography, the material, and the quality of the art. This approach considers different audiences and makes it accessible to anybody without being didactic in its application. 

Along the second gallery’s back wall viewers encounter Stele with Buddhas and Bodhisattvas—a solitary Buddha dated to c. 1100 India, of either West Bengal or Bangladesh origin. Carved from a chlorite stone, it glitters and shines in the light, allowing devotees to experience the immediacy of this visual encounter. The representation of the Buddhist cosmos in the stupa and the three-dimensional mandala brings forth the idea of symbolic meaning that serves not only as a meditation guide but also as protection against negative forces. Stupas illustrate the earthly realm (through their base), as well as nirvana (the jeweled pinnacle), or the ultimate goal of cessation of death and rebirth. The three-dimensional mandala, in turn, represents a cosmological map of the universe. The symbolic meanings of these images serve not only as meditation guides but also as forms of protection against negative forces. It needs to be noted that this lotus mandala is meant to commemorate the Hindu god Vishnu, the preserver of the universe, even though mandalas are most commonly used for Buddhist symbolism. Visitors will note the confluence of Buddhist and Hindu symbols: at the left side of the Buddha is Lakshmi, a goddess of wealth, prosperity, fertility, and abundance, and on the right is Sarasvati, a goddess of education, creativity, and music. 

Another example of this interplay is the Lotus Mandala with Eight Mothers, from 18th-century Nepal, composed of a bronze cosmic diagram that features eight female deities, known collectively as the Ashthamatrika, which is deeply rooted in Hinduism. These Eight Mothers symbolize the connection between the divine and their maternal forces of creation. Another example is Railing Pillar: Female Deity, which also serves as a prototype within both Buddhist and Hindu contexts. 

The third and final gallery has two benches for visitors to sit down and relax, or meditate, and includes my other favorite object—Buddha Shakyamuni in Meditation, a solitary Buddha placed in the front of the gallery. A sculpture of a solitary Buddha dates to 6th-century Sri Lanka. Here, the Buddha manifests a feeling of deep meditation and invites visitors to partake in meditation as well.

Notably, this gallery provides a space for tranquility and serenity but also underscores the idea of cultural interplay and productive coexistence. Benevolent Beings explores the links between Hinduist and Buddhist traditions; their shared history, their shared liturgy, and the compassion and sublime attitudes they both value above all else. It’s a must-see exhibit for those who wish to engage in openness of religious and cultural interplay that transcends territorial boundaries, ideologies, and biases, presenting the spiritual as a vast and interconnected web imbued with wisdom for those who are willing to stop for a moment and take in what’s around them.

The post Charting the Artistic Interplay between the Benevolent Beings of Buddhism and Hinduism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Prime Video recently released the second season of Wheel of Time, a television series based on the vast fantasy world of Robert Jordan. The first season covers the first book in the series but also pulls in aspects from later books. Rebirth is an important component of the show. 

Characters make frequent, even cynical references to the cycle of death and rebirth, while the book mentions the topic distantly and reverently. It is only referred to regarding the savior/destroyer of the world, who keeps being reborn, and the discovery of this character’s identity drives the plot. A character on the show says casually, “There is a wheel that spits out our lives,” in the midst of an everyday conversation. It’s as common a topic as the weather.

In addition to the wheel governing characters’ lives, there is a “pattern” made up of threads that dictate characters’ fates. Only one character, a seer, can see the pattern. She can tell by looking if someone is destined for great things or “important to the pattern.” Everyone is subject to the wheel of rebirth, but it seems not everyone is clearly a part of the pattern. The main characters on the show are, naturally, and part of the mystery is that you don’t know why they are important or what role they will play. Even the seer isn’t sure. (The seer is a moody character; a bartender and drinker. Seeing the innermost truth about people at a glance will do that to you.) The relationship between the wheel and the pattern is not made clear in the first season or book, but how they interact is apparently one of the saga’s major themes. (In the first episode of the second season a character muses about the wheel weaving, implying the wheel creates the pattern. Maybe.)

Richard Gombrich discusses belief in rebirth among Sri Lankan laypeople in his 1971 classic Buddhist Precept and Practice. His two categories of belief are affective and cognitive belief, with affective or conventional belief referring to the idea that personalities and memories transmigrate between lives, and cognitive belief referring to the more doctrinal notion of an impersonal karmic survival or continuation between lives. Wheel of Time seems to operate in this latter mode, and it’s key to the suspense. No one knows what their previous lives were; if they did, their paths would be much clearer.

It is accepted by all that time is a circle, that events that happened long ago will recur, and that the principal players will return to the stage to reenact the drama, but the outcomes are not necessarily predetermined.

The book series, begun in 1990, was planned at six volumes but eventually numbered fourteen, as well as a prequel and ancillary stories. Jordan died in 2007, before he could complete the work, and the final volumes were written by fellow fantasy author Brandon Sanderson, with the last one being published in 2013. I recently read the first volume, the 800-page Eye of the World, before watching the first season of the show. This to say that I’m no expert on Jordan’s world, which is huge and richly detailed. A reader of the entire series told me as much, saying that the first book (and TV series) is essentially a prologue with very little “real” information given, and that the story only gets going later. 

Early episodes of the show lacked the urgency of the book, which may seem like an odd thing when comparing an enormous book to eight fifty-minute television episodes. The first episodes were painfully slow while tearing through the plot at a dizzying speed. Unpromisingly, showrunner Rafe Judkins made his entrée into the industry as a contestant on the 2005 season of Survivor. But things pick up later.

Wheel of Time premiered in 2021, roughly a year before Rings of Power, based on J. R. R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion—also a Prime Video production—and HBO’s House of the Dragon, the Game of Thrones prequel based on the work of George R. R. Martin. Both these series received a great deal of mainstream attention, positive and negative, while interest in Wheel of Time seemed limited to fans of the books. This comparatively narrow and passionate audience may explain why the first season received such harsh criticism. Though it failed to live up to the fandom’s demanding standards, the series was somehow renewed and Season 2 earned better reviews, and more viewers.

Rebirth as a fact of life comes up frequently on the show, and is accepted as a fact across all the cultures encountered in the world of Wheel of Time. Beyond this, as the name of the show implies, it is accepted by all that time is a circle, that events that happened long ago will recur, and that the principal players will return to the stage to reenact the drama, but the outcomes are not necessarily predetermined. Some change is possible, but it’s not clear how much. Jordan himself said in a 1998 interview that “Hindu mythology” informed his writing of the series as well as the concept of time as a circle, or wheel, and that the world of Wheel of Time was meant to be a mirror of our world:

I wanted the circularity because I wanted to go into the changes by distance. So the myths and legends and a few of the stories that these people tell, some of them are based on our current events, on the present. What they are doing is based on our myths and legends. So they are the source of our myths and legends, and we are the source of theirs.

I felt that because America is a melting pot, I had at least some right to mine the mythologies of any nation that is represented in the United States. And also religion. So there are elements that come out of religious books.

The wheel is a trap that forces the same conflicts again and again, and there is one person who seems to have the power to disrupt the cycle, but who is it?

The story begins, in classic Tolkienesque fantasy fashion, in a wholesome and bucolic village. A group of young friends prepares to celebrate a seasonal festival. (In the book they are teenagers, but on the show they are older, in their 20s.) A mysterious woman named Moiraine (played by Rosamund Pike) and her grim “warder,” a warrior named Lan (Daniel Henney), arrive, in search of someone born (or reborn) in this area. Shortly afterward, monsters called trollocs invade, burn the town down, and chase Moiraine and Lan and the friends out onto the road, in search of the far-off city where they will be protected. In the show, some of the group quickly (by the fifth episode) reach their destination. In the book, none of them do, but it doesn’t matter, because arriving at the destination only creates new problems.

Wheel of Time is full of magic and monsters, which isn’t for everyone, but the series is fairly restrained in both these areas. Only certain women, known as Aes Sedai, can “channel” magic. Moiraine is one of them. We learn that men used magic long ago but abused it somehow, and the power was taken away. As the show begins, this power shows signs of returning, and the Aes Sedai have been dispatched to contain the threat. Everyone, every villager and innkeeper on the show, knows that a person will someday be reborn who can use magic far more forcefully than anyone else, and they will be called the Dragon Reborn, after the ancient wizard who is said to have “broken the world.” A few “false dragons,” men using magic, are abroad in the land, causing trouble. (The Dragon himself can be seen on YouTube from an earlier attempt to film the series that was derailed for copyright issues. But it features the underappreciated Billy Zane.)

In the book, the Dragon Reborn can only be a man, or rather a boy. In the show, it is not known what form the reincarnated wizard will take. Though skeptics might see this as pandering to modern sensibilities of equity and representation, it greatly improves the story. The reincarnated soul may even be split among multiple people, one character suggests. In the novel, it is soon made clear to any reader paying attention who the chosen one is, but the show does a much better job at concealing this important point. The uncertainty gives greater opportunity for tension within the group, and the characters are often as confused as the viewer. 

There’s a lot more to all this. There’s the Dark One, the satanic figure everyone is trying to defeat, who gives our heroes a lesson in impermanence (or is it just a threat?), saying, “Everything that means anything can be gone in an instant.” There are the Forsaken, powerful servants of the Dark One whose presence is barely hinted at in this season but whose role will loom ever larger. There is the Light, which is an undefined deity, or an aspect of the deity power. And there is the One Power, the source of Moiraine’s magic, and what the Dark One seems to draw on as well. Access to it appears to drive men mad. 

Toward the end of the first season it is revealed that, at the Eye of the World, a place of great magical power that is crucial to the mission, the young people who are not the reincarnated Dragon will be killed. Moiraine demonstrates tremendous power, doing all sorts of wizardly things, but she is not omniscient. Her failure to detect the correct figure has potentially horrendous consequences for everyone around her, and as it turns out, it’s not so great for her either.

In the world of Avatar and Legend of Korra, another franchise with rebirth at its heart, reincarnation seems to be limited to the superpowered savior of the world, and it is easy to identify this figure because they display extraordinary powers at a young age. The extended Avatar universes also borrow the Tibetan tulku system’s use of identifying toys and ritual objects of the previous incarnation. Moiraine has only vague ideas to guide her to the one she seeks, and because she doesn’t know, she exposes innocent people to great danger. The one intimate relationship she is allowed is with her boss, which goes about as well as you might expect. Moiraine’s task is a painful and lonely one that ends with decidedly mixed results. But then again, when the wheel turns again, she may get another chance to do it a bit better. 

The post Trapped on the Wheel appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Although the broader community of poets shares them as common property, the traditional season words of haiku allow for a remarkable range of expression. They can be used to create seasonal feeling, evoke humor, lodge a protest, or explore the inner recesses of our emotional lives—to name only a few possibilities. The winning and honorable mention haiku for last month’s challenge covered an unusually broad spectrum of meanings and emotions, using just 17 syllables and the words “autumn sun.”

• Marcia Burton finds a melancholy beauty in the sunlight “filtering through the nursery” where a baby is falling asleep.
• Nancy Winkler’s humorous image of a low sun giving her “the side-eye” captures the shortness of an autumn afternoon.
  
• Jill Johnson goes for broke in her desperation to get the sun back on a dismal fall day—“no questions asked.”

Congratulations to all! To read additional poems of merit from recent months, visit our Tricycle Haiku Challenge group on Facebook.

You can submit a haiku for the November challenge here.

***

Fall Season Word: Autumn Sun

WINNER:

soothing the baby
the autumn sun filtering
through the nursery

— Marcia Burton

Our first impression of a good haiku is often that it touches us in some palpable way. That it is beautiful, poignant, or bittersweet—sometimes all of these at once. Because haiku are so short, they naturally invite a second or third reading, and this is where it gets interesting. Nearly always there is some further dimension to a poem.

An infant has been put down for a nap in the late afternoon. The nursery is dim, lit only by the sun filtering through the drapes. The baby cries briefly on being placed in the crib, but soon grows quiet, soothed by the warm light slanting across the walls and ceiling.

Most readers can grasp that much after a single reading. A good haiku presents an image that unfolds easily in the imagination. That image offers a point of entry into the world of a haiku, much like opening the door into a room.

Beyond that doorway another, much larger world appears, as the 17 syllables are shown to contain more than 17 syllables of meaning. In that more spacious world, words take on additional, sometimes unexpected meanings.

The term “self-soothing” was developed by child psychiatrists during the 1970s to describe how babies learn to calm themselves down and go to sleep on their own, unassisted by a caregiver. In recent decades it has come to refer to behaviors used by individuals of any age to self-regulate their emotional state. As such, it has been the subject of widespread cultural debate.

Questions arise about the need for constant emotional self-regulation in negotiating the complexities of end-stage capitalism—from the cradle to the grave. Why must we acclimate ourselves to loneliness and alienation, anxiety, overwork, and stress?

The poem presents none of these concerns on the surface. The scene is peaceful, beautiful, even wholesome. And then, there is the autumn sun itself, a consoling presence reminding us of our most intimate point of connection. There is no alienation in Nature—where everything belongs, no one is forsaken, and nothing exists alone.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

passing by quickly
while giving me the side-eye
aloof autumn sun

— Nancy Winkler

Missing: Autumn Sun.
100 dollar reward.
Gold. No questions asked.

— Jill Johnson

♦

You can find more on October’s season word, as well as relevant haiku tips, in last month’s challenge below:

Fall season word: “Autumn sun”

whatever I think
the autumn sun only cares
about my shadow

As I was walking along, thinking deeply about something, the autumn sun inscribed a shadow at my feet. But that was the extent of its interest in me. It didn’t care what was inside of that outline.

Submit as many haiku as you wish that include the season word “autumn sun.” Your poems must be written in three lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables, respectively, and should focus on a single moment of time happening now.

Be straightforward in your description and try to limit your subject matter. Haiku are nearly always better when they don’t have too many ideas or images. So make your focus the season word* and try to stay close to that.

*REMEMBER: To qualify for the challenge, your haiku must be written in 5-7-5 syllables and include the words “autumn sun.”

Haiku Tip: Master the Turn of Thought—In English!

Japanese and English language haiku are not the same. Their form is similar, and both use season words to explore human experience in the context of the natural world. But the techniques they use to express poetic meaning are very different.

A Japanese haiku usually consists of two images: one seasonal, the other not. As those images “rub up against” one another, a spark of meaning jumps between them, kindling the reader’s imagination. But that meaning must be inferred from the pairing of images. It is rarely made explicit. 

For a haiku to work in English, it must use the techniques of English language poetry, including metaphor and simile, rhyme, personification, allegory, and more. In practice, this means relaxing our notion of what a haiku ought to be. A haiku in English is “whatever you can get away with” in 17 syllables—with the added caveat that it include a season word.

To better understand the difference between Japanese and English language haiku, let’s look at one of the earliest examples of the latter. Published by Ezra Pound in the April 1913 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, it is considered a quintessential text of Imagism, the earliest modernist movement in English literature.

In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Despite its lineation, this is a formal haiku plain and simple. The Japanese translations Pound had read were typically rendered in two lines with a pause after the first five or first twelve syllables. His haiku follows a 5-7-7 rhythm (The apparition / of these faces in the crowd / petals on a wet, black bough), which was a common variation on 5-7-5 during Basho’s day.

“In a Station of the Metro” was the first haiku of note to be published in English, but it wouldn’t feel like a haiku to a Japanese reader. It’s not so much the title, which Japanese haiku lack, but the use of an explicit comparison between the faces and the blossoms.

A Japanese version, written in Tokyo rather than Paris, might have read as follows:

faces in the crowd
the petals at the station
on a wet, black bough

The slant rhyme of Pound’s original wouldn’t come through in Japanese, nor would the sense of the poet having entered an altered state of awareness. But if hana (“cherry blossom”) were used in place of petal, the effect would at least be similar. And yet, the Japanese-style version has none of the power of the original. Had Pound published this “haiku” in 1913, no one would remember it today.

A note on autumn sun: Season word editor Becka Chester writes: “As the autumn season catches its stride in October, the character of daylight changes. In the Northern Hemisphere, the sun hits the earth at a more pronounced angle. Diffused over a greater swath of the earth, the light seems softer, less harsh, more golden. Plants and animals have a direct biological and chemical response to this changing light. As the sun’s energy hits the earth at an ever-increasing angle, the phytochrome in plants triggers a slowdown in their chlorophyll production causing the leaves to change color. In humans and other vertebrates, the diminishing light causes an increase in melatonin production, altering their circadian rhythms. So the change is light is felt everywhere—even inside of our bodies.”

The post Best of the Haiku Challenge (October 2023) appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This past September, artist Ines Sun was teaching Chinese calligraphy in a large outdoor tent in Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park. As one of the park’s 2023 Artists in Residence, the Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist demonstrated nature-based characters and traditional posture, breathing, and brushwork with a deft hand and grounded presence, seemingly undisturbed by the strong winds that would periodically lift participants’ paper from their tables. With an enthusiastic and nonjudgmental instructional style, Sun’s teaching was less about commanding her pupils and more about the power of suggestion, as if pointing out a beautiful vista that they might care to enjoy. In a welcoming atmosphere of artistic grace and play, students of all ages dropped into the moment to experiment with their designs. This public engagement is crucial to Sun’s overall practice and conveys her bodhisattva-like approach to making art. “I see my art, including painting and installations, as a service to all,” she says.  

The stroke of a calligraphy brush flows long and deep throughout Sun’s life. As a child growing up in Taiwan, her grandfather taught her the foundations of calligraphy, a skill that was also transmitted to her father. She recalls growing up surrounded by Chinese brush paintings of flowers and birds, and how her grandfather wrote short poems in ink to express “frustration with the Communists.” (Her parents were born in China, but her grandparents felt the need to move their families to Taiwan “because of the Communist takeover.”) 

While a multidisciplinary artist, Sun’s interest in calligraphy can be seen all throughout her life’s body of work, including her practice of calligraphy as a “purification” ritual done before engaging in oil painting sessions, her workshops teaching Chinese calligraphy through regular copying of the Heart Sutra, along with her most experiential offering: the Mobile TeaHouse.

An Ephemeral Oasis

The Mobile TeaHouse installation is a one-on-one encounter with Sun that combines ink tutorials with a tea ceremony inside a temporary space, typically shaped by silk walls, sashes, and curtains, often incorporating Sun’s paintings, which can feature lush depictions of nature. Beginning with the Brooklyn Art Fair in 2011, Sun has now created the Mobile TeaHouse (sometimes referred to as a tea garden or hut) installation seven times, including at Taiwan’s Lanyang Museum and Suho Memorial Paper Museum, and at the Tenri Gallery in New York City’s Greenwich Village. 

“I transform and quiet myself down through drinking tea and calligraphy,” Sun says. “[And so] I realized, I can simplify this and share it with other people so they can find peace within themselves.”

Throughout the teahouse’s various incarnations, Sun has experimented with format and ambiance, collaborating with different artists working in sound, stone, as well as textiles, including silk art master Akihiko Izukura. As part of this installation series, Sun created the Heaven and Earth TeaHouse (“天地茶屋” or “TianDiChaWu”), in which a participant spends fifteen minutes in silence with the artist engaging in a silent meditative ritual, inspired, at least in part, by her knowledge of Japanese tea ceremonies. “I got rid of the Japanese part,” she says, “but I used that rhythm; I kept the discipline and the movement.” Sun explains her project further: 

“People gradually focus on my movement because there’s rhythm to it…I make them tea and we drink. [Then we start] grinding ink, [which is done in] a circular movement that usually quiets people down immediately. When they start to write, even if they don’t know Chinese, there’s something about touching the brush to the paper—it helps you connect with your being, and you have to pay attention. It’s body and mind.” 

A Unique Combination

The Mobile TeaHouse is a synthesis of Ines Sun’s specific life experiences: her familial tradition of Chinese calligraphy, her study of contemporary painting, and her years spent running a for-profit tea room in New York. 

In 1995, Sun studied oil painting and Abstract Expressionism at The Art Students League of New York with Frank O’Cain, a teacher who she says changed her life. This training is evident in her gestural brushwork and larger-than-life scale. Much like the Chinese calligraphers before them, action painters emphasize present-moment awareness, forming another powerful vein of Sun’s artistic lineage.

Beginning in 1998, Sun led the Wild Lily Tea Room, for close to a decade, complete with a small fish pond nestled on a bustling street in Chelsea. The Wild Lily Tea Room was a huge success for Sun in many ways, and yet, still, she sensed there was something missing. Sun wanted to change her life in a way that would deepen her artistic practice as well as her inner life; “my spiritual world was developing,” she says, “but I didn’t know how to anchor it.”

On a chance visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sun encountered Chinese calligraphy characters in the Asian Art section and immediately felt a pull to reconnect with her family’s heritage. Sun realized, “I have to go back to the root to dig out all of the treasure.” In 2007, she closed her tea room for good and moved with her husband and two daughters to China, where Sun studied calligraphy and brush painting.

This transition was not without its complications. “It was conflicting to see the Communist flag swinging in the wind outside of the classroom window, [the flag of the party] that tortured my grandfather, [the one] who taught me calligraphy,” Sun says. In spite of this feeling, her eighteen-month immersion in Chinese brushwork was very fruitful, initiating an ongoing series of lotus paintings exhibited in multiple international shows, including, most recently, in 2022 at the Painting Center in Chelsea. The lotus is an enduring symbol in Chinese brush painting as well as across Buddhism. Given that her Chinese name is “Sun, Tsai Hua” (blossom flower), the subject seems more than apt.

After focusing so intently on her own artistic development, Sun still felt that something was missing in her life. She began to feel guilty for having spent so much time focused on developing her own skills and less on helping others. To find an answer, Sun embraced a Zen-like practice of nondoing and silent contemplation by simply sitting in her thinking chair. “I call it a thinking chair, but I don’t [really] think,” Sun says. “I kind of [just] rest, but an idea will come up naturally, and one day, this mobile teahouse idea just came [into my mind]: you can put it everywhere, and people can participate; it’s like the Wild Lily Tea Room, but it’s free.” And so the Mobile TeaHouse was conceived. “Buddhas had been knocking on my door, and, this time, I listened.”

Bodhicitta in the Pandemic

Through mobile teahouses and calligraphy workshops, Sun offers contemplative experiences in-person and online, often for free or by donation. Her public offerings ramped up during the pandemic when she lived near several hospitals in a busy area of Brooklyn, where the sound of ambulances “didn’t stop, and you knew somebody in that ambulance was not going to be able to come home.”

Wanting to be of service, Sun decided to offer more creative opportunities for her local community, with an emphasis on Chinese calligraphy instruction. At first, she concentrated on virtual classes, before masking up to teach while social distancing in city parks. “The practice to arouse bodhicitta worked its way to an extreme during this time,” Sun says. Through a series of grants awarded to her, Sun was able to hold pop-up classes in an unused storefront in Brooklyn, which allowed her to introduce Chinese calligraphy to a diverse set of seniors from the area.

On visits home to Taiwan, Sun often borrowed her father’s books and copied the characters for calligraphy practice, including from the Diamond Sutra by Liu Gongquan. “Gradually, the power of the text [and] the dharma [together] started to work its magic. I copied the sutra three times alone and many times with others.” Sun led workshop participants in sutra writing, including during the pandemic, when they dedicated the Heart Sutra to those who had passed away. She also dedicated community sutra writing to the victims of the war in Ukraine, of local gun violence, and to all of those suffering, sometimes even taking requests for dedications. She still offers a weekly open Zoom “Sutra Collective” every Wednesday night. These public classes allow Sun to be more grateful and generous with her time. 

“It’s nice to see people try and take risks,” Sun says. She remembers a specific child’s brushwork from September in the Shenandoah Mountains. “He does a mountain and a river, and I [can] see the old soul coming out from that stroke…it’s very powerful,” Sun tells Tricycle. This type of volunteer work helps Sun to feel more complete in her practice. She notes, “A lot of times, it’s me receiving the gift.”

For Sun, this appreciative, bodhisattva nature also extends to the smaller, more subtle moments of her existence. In the garden, “to cut the flower and put it in front of Buddha…or to have my tea and my bun, this is a perfect match, and it makes me so happy…the little things—that’s life.”

The post Escape into This Brooklyn Artist’s Mobile TeaHouse appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Jean-Philippe Cyr, the Canadian blogger and cookbook author known as the Buddhist Chef, has heard it all when it comes to the reasons people don’t want to follow a vegan diet. It’s expensive, it doesn’t lead to instant weight loss, it angers family members. Recently, someone complained that vegan recipes create too many dishes to wash. Cyr accepted this with a laugh, as he is wont to do, knowing full well that people will always find excuses. “But when you have the why, the how becomes very easy,” the classically trained chef says of his decision to become vegan after returning from his first meditation retreat. Extending compassion to all beings was the logical next step for him when he decided to become Buddhist. 

“Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In French we say the tree that doesn’t bend breaks.”

Still, he knows his path isn’t for everyone, and he supports a middle way for those who aren’t fully sold on the vegan lifestyle. “The tree that doesn’t bend breaks,” he says. If everyone simply ate a little less meat, so many animals would be saved, he says, and he’s in favor of getting there however we can. As a food blogger and cookbook author, he works toward that goal by developing recipes that, as he says, seduce meat eaters—familiar dishes like shepherd’s pie, lobster rolls, and flaky apple tart. After the 2019 release of his first book, The Buddhist Chef: 100 Simple, Feel-Good Vegan Recipes: A Cookbook, he doubled down on the hearty, comforting recipes with his just-released The Buddhist Chef’s Homestyle Cooking: Simple, Satisfying Vegan Recipes for Sharing.

Tricycle caught up with Cyr to learn more about his new book, how his Buddhist practice informed his decision to change the way he cooks and eats, and how he navigates nonvegan family members.

When did you first learn about Buddhism? Seven years ago, I attended a Vipassana meditation retreat in Montebello, [Quebec]. It’s a nice center, and I’ve been back there a lot of times now to cook for people that are on retreat. When you go there for a retreat, you don’t get to know people because it’s silent. But when you go back there and cook and work with people, you realize that people are wounded. You don’t go to the doctor if you’re not sick, you know?

What compelled you to go to the meditation retreat? I was suffering. I was selfish. I’m a pretty narcissistic person. I like to be recognized. I have to be honest. But you have to separate the public figure from the person, otherwise you’ll think you’re perfect. If they say you’re the best or the worst, they’re both wrong.

When did you become vegan? I was on the verge of becoming vegan [when I attended the meditation retreat]. I had read a couple of books about veganism and the health implications of a plant-based diet, but I hadn’t made the connection between the animal and the plate yet. So I attended this retreat, and I was driving back with a woman, and we stopped at a fast-food chain. She said she was having the vegetarian burger, and I said, “I’m gonna have the regular burger.” She was shocked. She was like, “Aren’t you vegan? We just spent ten days meditating on compassion!” Her reaction made me think, maybe I should be. At this point, I was still working as a cook, because I’m a classically trained chef, and the irony is that I specialized in cooking meat. A few weeks later, I was asked to cook lamb for 400 people at a banquet that was taking place at a funeral home, and that’s when it clicked. When I saw all the meat for 400 people, and some people didn’t even touch their plates, I thought, those animals are dead for nothing. They gave their lives for nothing. At that point, I made the connection and became vegan, and I’ve been vegan ever since. 

What does your practice look like today? I practice Vipassana meditation in the morning. But my practice is more about following the principles. That’s the hardest thing, because Buddhism is not about becoming a better person for yourself. It’s about becoming a better person for everybody else. So I just try to create no harm. My wife is a doctor, and the first principle is always do no harm. That’s basic. If everybody would follow this principle, the world would be better. 

Do you follow a particular teacher? I follow the teachings of [Satya Narayan] Goenka, the founder of Vipassana here in the West. He passed away a few years ago, but his teachings are still very available for everybody. What I like about the teaching of Goenka is that it’s free. Anyone can go on Goenka retreats anywhere around the world. 

Let’s talk about your work as a blogger and cookbook author. When did you become “the Buddhist Chef”? I became vegan because of Buddhism. For the animals. Because Buddhism and veganism share a common value, which is compassion. It was after that first meditation retreat. So I called my blog The Buddhist Chef. And I’d do it again, even though I get a lot of hate. Just this morning someone in the US said, “I would prefer it if you were a Christian chef.” Some people say, “I’d love to buy your cookbook, but my family won’t let me because it’s Buddhist.” It’s strange. And you know, I have a sense of humor. Sometimes I publish a joke and people say, “That’s not very Buddhist!”

“When you have the why, the how becomes very easy.”

I wanted to ask you about your Instagram account, where you share memes and jokes. Why do you do it? I try to show people a vegan is not always a party pooper. It’s not always someone who is going to be radicalized and going to shame someone. You can have a sense of humor and be a normal person. You can be vegan and Buddhist and not take yourself too seriously.

People also think that being vegan is a restrictive lifestyle. How would you respond to that? It’s restrictive, but when you have the why, the how becomes very easy. When you shift your mindset from meat to animal, it’s easy. I don’t struggle. But people say things like, “I tried being vegan for a week and I didn’t lose weight.” Or, “My family got angry,” or, “I hate tofu.” “It’s complicated,” “It’s expensive.” The last one I heard is, “I don’t have time to wash so many dishes.” If you realize that an animal had to die for you to have a burger, you wouldn’t mind washing a few dishes. If you’re not eating vegan, it’s because you just don’t want to.

What would you say to someone who is interested in moderation? As in, not being fully vegan but being a little vegan? Do you think that’s a good thing, or do you think that’s stopping them from fully realizing compassion? I would always tell people, “Start where you are.” If you’re a hunter and you only eat meat, don’t try to quit meat altogether. Start with Meatless Monday, or one to two days a week. But, above all, start with recipes that are familiar. If you want your family to eat less meat, it has to be familiar and fun. It’s the same spaghetti sauce you like, but tonight, instead of meat, I swapped in tofu. Or if you like General Tso’s chicken, try General Tso’s tofu. One vegan meal a week is quite easy. Not everybody is going to be vegan. I’m not naive. But if everybody would cut their meat consumption just by half, it would be amazing.

Can you share a few ingredients that you use heavily in your vegan cooking that you didn’t use before? I use tofu a lot, a lot, a lot. It’s versatile, it’s rich in protein, nutrition, calcium, and it doesn’t contain any cholesterol. It’s cheap—half the price of ground beef. And it tastes like whatever you cook it in or season it with. I remember, when I was a kid, my mom would do tofu, and she would just marinate it in soy sauce. That was the recipe. But you can fry it in cornstarch, and change the texture. You can also marinate it or add spices and bake it in the oven. It’s pretty easy to cook.

Do you even grind it up and use it in place of ground meat? I use tempeh and seitan for that, but sometimes tofu too. I have tofu in my spaghetti sauce. 

I notice a lot of your recipes call for cashew cream. Can you tell me about that? I buy the cashews and then I blend them. Every cream or vegetable soup, I put a cup of cashews in and blend it, and it gives this sweet and creamy taste, because cashews are a little bit sweet. People don’t realize it, but cream is sweet. So if you want to replace cream, you need to replace it with something sweet. I also love soy milk because it’s rich in protein, but I always add a couple of cashews here and there. It’s a secret ingredient. [See below for a Tuscan Soup recipe featuring cashew cream.]

My family loved your healthy oatmeal cookies, which you say have become one of your signature recipes. What’s another go-to recipe of yours that you always tell people to try? The trouble is you’re always trying to seduce meat eaters. Buffalo cauliflower wings, for example, are a big hit. You do always get the same feedback, though, like, “Why do vegans always try to imitate meat?” But I always say I didn’t stop eating meat because I didn’t like meat. I stopped eating meat because I love animals.

And you do use plant-based meat, like Impossible beef? I prefer to use seitan, which is made with real ingredients, but once in a while, in addition to lentils, for example, I do. If I do a shepherd’s pie, I put in celery, carrots, onion, mushrooms, lentils, and a little bit of Impossible burger. 

How do you feel about cultivated meat, the meat they’re developing based on animal cells? I’m all for it, because if it means that it’s gonna save millions of animals, of course I’m for it. There are always those debates: Yesterday a girl wrote to me and said, “I thought you were vegan, but you use Impossible meat, which has been tested on animals.” Yeah, but how many animals are you going to save with those products? Some people want to be the only vegan. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In French we say the tree that doesn’t bend breaks.

You recently came out with your second cookbook, The Buddhist Chef’s Homestyle Cooking. Can you describe the vision for this cookbook and how it differs from the first? All of my cookbooks are inspired by my childhood favorites. In this cookbook, I have vegan lobster rolls, for example, which were inspired by camping trips to Gaspésie, [in eastern Quebec]. My bolognese sauce is inspired by my mom’s spaghetti sauce. We have a recipe in my family for pouding chômeur, or poor man’s pudding, which is a classic here. It’s a cake baked in a caramel sauce made of maple syrup and brown sugar. So it’s full of very hearty recipes. It’s not scary, it’s not salads and bowls. It’s desserts, vegan fried chicken, vegan fish and chips. It’s inspired by the time when people had a completely different vision of food. When people would just show up at your house. They don’t do it anymore—unfortunately or fortunately! But there were no cell phones, so you always had to be ready. My mom always had food, and people would just show up and stay for dinner. It’s another philosophy. Nowadays, it’s like, let’s order food. Let’s call in. Let’s meet somewhere.  

How do you navigate serving your family members who maybe aren’t following a vegan diet? Do they mind eating vegan? They like it. They’re not against it. But they’re always surprised because they expect nothing! They’re like, “Wow! That’s vegan. It’s amazing that it tastes good!” 

I notice you use a lot of maple in your recipes. I use maple, because when I traveled in Thailand and Cambodia, they always balanced the acidity with sugar. They don’t use maple syrup, of course, but this is where I learned to better balance the acidity, and I use it everywhere. Some people in France get mad at me because it’s like $20 an ounce, but we’re lucky here [in Canada]. I have a hard time using refined sugar. I prefer to use maple syrup. Every time I use refined sugar, I feel as if I just smoked a cigarette.

It seems like a big focus of yours is teaching people how to eat vegan. Do you ever teach people about Buddhism? I try to, but people are not very interested. They follow me for the food, and every time I try to talk about something else, they say, “Yeah, but we don’t follow you for that.” In the social media era, it’s very compartmentalized. But more and more people are getting interested, and they reach out and ask advice on where to start, or if they should attend a retreat. Some people come back from retreat very angry with me (laughs). But I like it because when you can have an influence on people, especially with something that’s going to change their life, it’s very rewarding, of course.

Buddhism has changed the way you eat and cook, but has it also impacted how you behave in the kitchen? I try to be more present. I try not to listen to podcasts. More and more, I try to live in silence. It’s tempting to walk the dog with your earbuds and your music, or to cook and have on the TV or a YouTube video, but I try not to do it. The first five minutes are the worst, but at some point, you get in the flow state, and you enjoy cooking and the silence.

And do you miss restaurant cooking? I miss the camaraderie. When you cook, it’s a very hard job, so usually you make a lot of jokes and talk with each other. When I cook at the meditation retreats, there are always some people, and we talk while we cook. You know, when you have guests over for dinner, they’re always in the kitchen. There’s a reason for that. Because when you prepare food, you talk, you share stories, and you share your state of mind.

◆

Vegan Tuscan Soup Recipe 

Serves 6 | Prep Time: 35 min | Cook Time: 40 min

Creamy, luxurious soups don’t always need to be pureed. This recipe still packs the same decadent punch, while also including nice hearty chunks of vegetables. The creamy texture from the cashew cream and the aroma from the fresh herbs make this soup an incredibly comforting dish.

Ingredients

Cashew Cream:

1 cup (140 g) cashews

2 tablespoons nutritional yeast

Tuscan Soup:

2 tablespoons olive oil
4 vegan sausages

4 cloves garlic, minced
1 onion, minced

1 tablespoon dried basil

1 tablespoon dried oregano
1 teaspoon salt

½ teaspoon dried thyme

3 yellow-fleshed potatoes (about 15 oz/425 g), diced

6 cups (1.5 L) vegetable broth

4 cups (50 g) chopped kale 

croutons to garnish

Directions

For the Cashew Cream:

• Soak the cashews in boiling water for 15 minutes. Drain.
• Add the soaked cashews, 1 cup (250 mL) water, and the yeast to a blender and blend until smooth. Set aside.

For the Tuscan Soup:

• In a large pot over medium heat, heat the oil, then add the sausages and break them up using a spatula. Increase the heat to medium-high and cook, stirring, for 3 minutes.
• Add the garlic and onions, lower the heat to medium, and cook, stirring frequently, for 4 minutes. Stir in the basil, oregano, thyme, and salt, then the potatoes and broth. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and simmer for 20 minutes.
• Stir in the cashew cream and kale, and cook for 10 minutes.
• Divide the soup among six bowls and garnish with croutons. Leftover soup can be stored in the fridge in an airtight container for up to 4 days. Reheat in a saucepan over medium heat for about 5 minutes, or until hot.

The post The Buddhist Chef Wants You to Start Where You Are appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the spring of 2017, Kobori Geppo, the abbot of Daitokuji Ryokoin, a Buddhist temple in Kyoto, Japan, traveled to San Francisco for a conference. During the trip, he and his followers paid a visit to the city’s Asian Art Museum, which at the time was preparing two different exhibits on Buddhist art: “Flower Power,” about the symbolism of plants in contemporary paintings, sculptures, and pop art; and “A Billion Buddhas,” about the portrayal of the Buddha in Tibetan culture. 

Charmed by the museum’s warm welcome, the abbot made its curators an offer they could have neither foreseen nor refused. Back in Japan, inside the heavily guarded storage facility of the Kyoto National Museum, Daitokuji Temple kept a painting by the legendary Chinese artist and monk Mu Qi. Known as Six Persimmons, this abstract still life of autumn fruit had long been regarded as the Mona Lisa of Zen Buddhism, its enlightened composition pointing observers in the direction of nirvana. Made during the 13th century, it was famous for its beauty as well as its inaccessibility, having never been displayed outside of Japan, until now.

“The abbot chose us,” Laura Allen, the Asian Art Museum’s chief curator of Japanese art, clarifies over Zoom. “We are very honored that he thought of us as the right venue,” adds assistant curator Yuki Morishima, who together with Allen turned Daitokuji’s proposal into an exhibit titled “The Heart of Zen.” Running from November 17, 2023 until December 31, it will first show Six Persimmons, followed by another, slightly less iconic but equally hypnotizing still life Chestnuts. In addition to outlining Mu Qi’s global reception, the once-in-a-lifetime exhibit will answer an initially bewildering question: whether his paintings are truly the spiritual masterpieces we think they are. 

Mu Qi—also spelled Muqi or Muxi, and sometimes called Fachang—was a Chan Buddhist monk who lived during the final days of the Southern Song dynasty. Largely ignored by his home country—one Chinese text from 1365 refers to his work as “coarse, ugly, and lacking in ancient techniques”—his unconventionally atmospheric brushwork and preference for seemingly mundane subjects acquired a devoted following in Japan, where they would influence painting for centuries to come. 

Mu Qi’s rise in popularity is understandable, as even today his deceptively simplistic paintings possess a calming aura that cannot be easily replicated. In the case of Persimmons, this effect derives from the image’s seemingly spontaneous but actually quite meticulous construction. Foregoing the realistic detail that defines many a Western still life, the monk allows his fruits to float inside an empty space. By creating contrast between size and color, he further manages to produce a composition that is diverse yet unified, energetic but balanced.

The longer you stare at the painting, the more its design appears to illustrate concepts central to Zen Buddhism, including groundlessness. Persimmons are a powerful metaphor for human mortality. Harvested during the fall—a season of death and dying—the bittersweet-tasting fruit (described as a combination of mango, cinnamon, and roasted pepper) ripens just before it begins to rot, and can be dried and preserved to make candy. 

Rendering the fruits’ exteriors with single, circular strokes, Mu Qi evidently wanted to evoke the ensō, a Buddhist symbol of strength, connectedness, letting go of expectations, and embracing imperfection in yourself and others. Read from left to right and right to left, the arrangement of the persimmons also seems to suggest the cycle of life, with small, white fruits giving way to bigger, darker ones. As Chinese art historian Friedrich Zettl observes in his blog: 

“We enter the world with nothing as if coming from the light. In our early years, we are innocent and inexperienced (persimmon #2 from left), but full of vitality. During adolescence, we start at the very bottom (#3), looking up to our superiors. It’s worth noting that the perspective of #3 is from above, emphasizing our inferiority. We reach the zenith of our life and work (#4) and become superiors ourselves. From then on, it’s a downhill journey until we leave this life with nothing.”

Zettl goes on to note that Mu Qi chose a subject that had not yet been depicted in Chinese painting. Free of the cultural connotations that tied down paintings of bamboo and blossoms, Six Persimmons could not be scrutinized for hidden meaning, observed only for what it was. 

And yet, when approached from a Buddhist perspective, even this explicit lack of symbolism becomes, in a way, highly symbolic. Just as Zen Buddhists favor meditation over the study of scripture and sutra, so does Mu Qi’s still life depict an object without imposing a narrative. 

The still life also evokes what Zen practitioners refer to as nonconceptual understanding. “Contrast Muqi’s Persimmons with Song paintings that make literary, poetic, historic references,” another Chinese art historian, the late James Cahill, once explained in a lecture at the University of California, Berkeley. “In Zen, viewer and viewed do not stand apart, but occupy a continuum. Chan artists cut though the overlays of style and literary references to present direct, unmediated image without intrusion of styles.”

For a long time, Cahill’s interpretation of the painting—as an unrivaled illustration of Zen teachings—reigned supreme, so much so that, to this day, many of its admirers are shocked to learn about its original reception in feudal Japan. Although certainly revered, none of this reverence was directed toward its spiritual subtext. Rather, Persimmons was appreciated for its aesthetic and aesthetic alone. Its first Japanese owners, the well-to-do Tsuda family, used it as a decoration for their tea ceremonies, held in a period when the beverage started to be accompanied by fruits and nuts. Seldom looked at directly, the still life remained in the background, contributing to the mood instead of the conversation. 

Persimmons arrived in Japan when Zen Buddhism was still restricted to monasteries, exerting little influence on wider Japanese culture. The painting became associated with Zen only once its audience had become acquainted with the movement as well. In a 2021 study published in the Korean Journal of Art History, art historian Heeyeun Kang of Seoul National University argues that the Japanese upper class began to promote Persimmons as the poster child of Zen Buddhism as part of a larger project to “emphasize Zen as their [national] identity.”

When Zen started catching on in the West, too, critic Okakura Tenshin proclaimed that Zen culture, forgotten in its native China, had become inextricably Japanese in character. Fellow critic Aimi Kōu used Okakura’s sentiment to essentially rewrite their country’s cultural history, starting with a fateful reconsideration of Six Persimmons. “Only the artist with a thorough experience of Zen could have achieved such sureness of effect with such apparently simple means,” echoed Yasuichi Awakawa’s decisively titled book Zen Painting, published in 1970. In Persimmons, the philosopher Hisamatsu Shin’ichi asserted, the true Buddha appeared as the “Formless Self,” awakened to existence’s inherent emptiness. 

By the early 1900s, Mu Qi’s painting had become such an unequivocal emblem of Japan that the government declared it an “Important Cultural Property” despite its foreign origin.  

Japan’s Zen-centered reappraisal of Persimmons was blindly accepted by Western scholars like Cahill, who himself was one of the most prominent sinologists of his time. Beating him to it, though, was the equally influential orientalist, Arthur Waley, whose 1922 essay “Zen Buddhism, and Its Relationship to the Arts” described the still life as “passion (…) congealed into a stupendous calm.” Providing contested support through the writings of a 12th-century monk named Dogen, Swiss translator Helmut Brinker later referred to Mu Qi’s fruits as “ciphers of transcendence.” 

Studying Japan’s treatment of Mu Qi not only prevents us from drawing erroneous conclusions from his work but also helps us better understand the role of art in Zen. In reality, notes one of the didactic texts at the “Heart of Zen” exhibit, paintings like Persimmons “live side by side at Zen temples with myriad visual objects: colorful priest portraits, traditional Buddhist icons, incense burners, tea wares, and ecclesiastical robes among them. Encountering them together, we can honor the heterogeneous nature of monastic experience, as well as the multiple lives and reception of objects over time.”

But even though Six Persimmons wasn’t initially received as a Buddhist masterpiece, that doesn’t mean it cannot resonate with the viewer’s own spiritual journey. Having seen the painting only in the form of reproductions, Morishima, the assistant curator of “Heart of Zen,” readily recalls her excitement when coming face-to-face with the real deal. Staring at the paths of individual brushstrokes, unbroken and confident, and sensing the weight of the empty space around the fruits, one simply cannot help but feel a certain calm. Maybe it’s a placebo effect, brought on by the painting’s inescapable reputation. Maybe it’s real and authentic, and, as such, one the reasons the Tsuda family kept it around for so long. 

The post The Untold History of ‘Everybody’s Favorite Zen Painting’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Written after the passing of her father, Phantom Pain Wings is a remarkable achievement from one of South Korea’s most heavily revered and imaginative poets, Kim Hyesoon. While the poems of this collection center on grief and death, they never aim for consolation or an easily digestible sentiment but rather create parallel worlds, separate from reality and simultaneously separate from the memories or images that conjured them into being. In “Korean Zen,” the writer explores grief through a reckoning with her country’s Buddhist traditions as well as the limits of language and poetry itself. In the book’s penultimate piece, “Bird Rider: An Essay,” Kim lays out what can be seen as the thesis of the collection, noting the inability of the medium to comfort or console the reader, as the poet can produce only “failure, grief, and self-erasure.” Kim writes: “Just as there is no geometric or genetic consolation, literary work merely constructs an afterimage or alternative symmetrical pattern of the event that occurs.”

In many ways, this idea of the false reality or afterimage contains echoes of the Buddhist concept of sankhara. Kim’s work is full of paradox, a poetry that disavows Buddhism and yet simultaneously creates and lives within imagined Buddhist worlds. In an interview that appeared in conjunction with the Poetry Parnassus festival in London in 2012, Kim asserts that she was actually raised in a more Christian environment, and yet her poetry is filled with Buddhist references—to samsara, to asuras, to bodhisattvas, and, as is exemplified in the featured poem, Zen. In the same interview, Kim states: “I think Buddhism is more than a religion, it is first a process of discipline, and Buddha is one who has gained wisdom rather than being a god.” Much like the real is never achieved, Buddhism is never explicitly revoked. Rather than give you what you came for—catharsis—Kim is more inclined to let you linger in the pain, in the worlds she creates; alternate realities where the questions that arise open up to multitudes, koan-like in their wisdom, more valuable than the relief they refuse to confer. 

Korean Zen

Even if I don’t blink
my eyelashes write on my face 
(but I don’t have any eyelashes)

I tolerate time
as I lift up strands of hair from the crown of my head 
to write on empty space
(but my head’s shaved)

For how long can humans endure silence?

But I’m listening to the typewriter
of the girl above my pelvis who is typing

(For how long can humans stay inside a poem?)

Bird floats me high up then 
takes off alone

I can’t tolerate the sky
like the way I can’t tolerate poetry

I think of a plump girl called Ego 
Tonight I need to starve her to death

Maybe I’m killing the future before the past 
by killing the girl in order to attain nirvana

But who’s breaking the swishing 
windshield wipers of my heart?

I pick up the receiver of a red phone 
that’s been ringing nonstop
inside a pocket made of bone

It’s that girl

♦

“Korean Zen,” by Kim Hyesoon, translated by Don Mee Choi, from Phantom Pain Wings, copyright © 2019 by Kim Hyesoon. Translation copyright © 2023 by Don Mee Choi. Used by permission of New Directions Publishing.

The post ‘Korean Zen’ appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 initially caught my eye because of how much I enjoyed the humor-filled interstellar action of the first two films in the series. And while I knew beforehand that this movie would center more on Rocket—the anthropomorphic raccoon who is both a Guardian and former mercenary—I came away pleasantly taken aback by its explicit engagement with animal rights and liberation. In a Marvel franchise characterized by irreverence and flashy galactic battles, the third installment carries the unexpected and bodhisattva-like message to save all beings, even the nonhuman ones.

The movie opens with a cage full of baby raccoons in a dark, dingy lab. One kit is pulled from the cage for experimentation, and the scene then transitions out of the past to present-day Rocket Raccoon, revealing metal implants and scars all over his body. Rocket is critically injured shortly thereafter but cannot receive treatment due to a proprietary “kill switch” wired into his heart by the bioengineering company that created him. While his fellow Guardians race to unlock the code that would allow them to treat Rocket’s wounds and prevent his death, the movie fills in his backstory as an escaped laboratory experiment for the High Evolutionary, a scientist seeking to perfect the universe. The High Evolutionary created a planet called Counter-Earth with the aim of populating it with peaceful and intelligent humanoid inhabitants, but he first needs to recapture Rocket so he can harvest his highly intelligent brain and perfect his latest batch of specimens. And even though a perfect society is sought, viewers are pushed to consider if it’s worth the cost of countless animal lives discarded along the way as failed experiments.

Like some of the other main characters—such as Gamora and Drax—Rocket’s past is filled with suffering and pain. Yet unlike the others, Rocket’s story also highlights concerns surrounding nonviolence and compassion for all beings, beckoning viewers to consider their positions regarding the treatment of those who aren’t human and how they might work toward saving them. Buddhist ethics regarding the treatment of nonhuman animals generally follows the same perspective concerning human animals, grounded in the first of the five precepts—don’t take life, don’t cause life to be taken, and don’t encourage or facilitate the taking of life—and ahimsa (nonviolence), often phrased as “do no harm.” In his chapter on animal ethics in The Oxford Handbook of Buddhist Ethics, Paul Waldau indicates that committing to the first precept amounts to “a conscious effort to refrain from intentional[ly] killing any living being” and that it “requires one to notice, and then take seriously, one’s nonhuman neighbors.” That’s certainly a unique imperative to consider in a series predicated on the protection and guarding of the galaxy’s inhabitants—since many of them aren’t human—and the focus on caged animals that demand the same level of compassion as humanlike species illustrates this well.

Ever since Rocket’s initial escape from the lab many years ago—during which he witnessed the murder of his friends and fellow test subjects—he shut out his painful past and even distanced himself from identifying with his own kind, becoming enraged if anyone called him a raccoon. It’s not until the end of the movie that Rocket decides to stop running from the suffering of his past so he can rescue others. After the Guardians board the High Evolutionary’s ship, he tells them to “save all the higher life-forms” while he heads to the control room. As he’s wandering through the ship, he finds himself face-to-face with cages of animals waiting to be experimented on—including a cage filled with baby raccoons that is all too reminiscent of his own imprisonment years earlier. In Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh’s book on Buddhist ethics, For a Future to Be Possible, he explains that it’s through suffering that compassion is born. “Our real enemy is forgetfulness,” he states, so we must stay in touch with that suffering and nourish an awareness of it so compassion can grow, which is exactly what stirs Rocket to action in that scene and shifts his perspective: a palpable reminder of the similarly grisly treatment he had pushed away. With tears in his eyes, Rocket uses the same key card he created for his own escape—having held on to it his whole life—and frees the raccoons and other animals along with the latest Counter-Earth candidates: children of a species that look and act very human.

Once all the children are off the ship and the High Evolutionary is defeated, Gamora tells the Guardians that they need to go, but Rocket replies, “We have to save them.” Peter Quill, the group’s leader, tells him they already have “all the kids on board,” to which Rocket replies, “No, Pete. The rest of them.” When all the additional animals start jumping onto the Guardians’ ship, one of the crew members assisting with the rescue remarks, “I thought we were limiting ourselves to the higher life-forms.” “Me too,” Quill replies, suggesting he still isn’t convinced that their rescue is warranted. Even Rocket’s fellow Guardians, who flew across the galaxy to try to save him, fail to extend compassion to the other nonhuman animals aboard the ship—and Rocket comes to the realization only after he encounters the room full of cages. In many ways, Rocket’s journey symbolizes the bodhisattva vow to save all beings and the cultivation of bodhicitta (arising of the awakening mind)—which is foundational along that path—as self-concern gives way to selfless concern for others. And his newfound dedication to taking seriously that shared, interrelated preference to avoid suffering and experience joy noticeably aligns with the outlook of biocentric ethicists: the recognition of inherent worth of all beings, of which humans are merely one species among many.

Resonating with Thich Nhat Hanh’s remarks above, the movie also points to the need to maintain a close connection to the suffering that exists in the world if we are to work toward transforming it. Animal testing isn’t public for a reason. It’s characteristically inhumane, and seeing it take place can be harrowing. But that’s also exactly why organizations like People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), Animal Liberation Front (ALF), and Last Chance for Animals (LCA) include footage of their raids or undercover operations in their campaigns and rescue announcements—to not only demonstrate what’s actually taking place but also to appeal to the emotive response of a public seeing what discreetly, if not secretly, takes place in the industries structuring our societies. 

After the young Rocket is first taken and experimented on, he’s returned to a cage with the top of his scalp exposed, implying that his brain had been subjected to some sort of manipulation. It’s at that moment when viewers hear his strained, first spoken word: “huurrttss.” This scene of a raccoon with a stitched and shaven scalp shaking in pain is eerily similar to one of the more famous rescues from the early days of documented raids: Britches, the stump-tailed macaque monkey whose eyes were sewn shut at birth and affixed to a device that “let out a constant screeching sound” as part of a sleep deprivation study. Although Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a work of science fiction, the use-value relationship between scientist and specimen continues every day, and the movie brings us closer to that very real suffering, violence, and taking of life. And it’s important to reiterate that Rocket’s shift from wanting to just save the “higher life-forms” to setting out to save “the rest of them” doesn’t occur until he stumbles into an all-too-familiar cage-filled room on the High Evolutionary’s ship and sees the trapped animals. But simply feeling compassion isn’t quite enough, Thich Nhat Hanh adds. “We have to learn to express it” through understanding and insight. 

Such an imperative might call for a mindful release of laboratory animals suffering in the confines of their cells. But we need to eliminate the possibility of even getting to that stage to begin with—and I think Rocket would agree. In a flashback scene showing the members of his test group coming up with names for themselves, viewers finally get an explanation for “Rocket”: “Someday, I’m gonna make great machines that fly, and me and my friends are gonna go flying together into the forever and beautiful sky; Lylla, and Teefs, and Floor, and me…Rocket.” 

As Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 brings us closer to the suffering of nonhuman beings—and animals that are experimented on—to remind us that they too deserve compassion and freedom from suffering, Rocket piloting those he cares about through a forever and beautiful sky becomes a great analogy for the bodhisattva-like resemblance suggested above. But until that requisite freedom is fully recognized—until we notice and take seriously our nonhuman neighbors in a way that the first precept entails—the world will continue to be built upon the violation of those who will never catch a glimpse of anything as endless or magnificent as what Rocket dreamed. 

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