In a perhaps apocryphal tale, the painter Ito Jakuchu (1716–1800) once came across live sparrows for sale in Kyoto’s Nishiki Market. Taking pity on the birds, as they were “fated to roast on a spit,” he bought a large number of them and released them into his garden. According to the Rinzai Zen monk Daiten Kenjo, a friend and mentor to Jakuchu, this expression of pity “was the compassion of one destined to become a bodhisattva.”

Jakuchu brought this same spirit of compassion to his artistic work, directing a careful attentiveness toward ordinary creatures often considered too humble for traditional Japanese painting. A devoted lay practitioner, or koji, he maintained close friendships with Zen monks throughout his life, and his Buddhist practice provided a framework for his art. His name, likely given to him by Daiten, translates to “like a void” and was taken from a phrase from the Tao Te Ching, “The greatest fullness is like a void.” Jakuchu’s work indeed demonstrates the fullness and vibrancy of life that close observation reveals, and his technical precision and almost obsessive attention to detail give his paintings a vivid realism that sometimes borders on the surreal.

The eldest son of a Kyoto greengrocer, Jakuchu spent much of his youth in the bustling Nishiki Market among the stands of vegetables and fish. As a teenager, he trained in classical painting under Ooka Shunboku, a minor master in the Kano school known for his bird-and-flower paintings; however, Jakuchu ultimately found this school too strict and opted instead to learn to paint through studying elements of his daily life, from the vegetables in his father’s shop to the fish in the market to the assortment of roosters and fowl he raised at home. In fact, he sometimes imported exotic birds into his garden so that he could observe them firsthand and render them with appropriate vivacity and character.

Jakuchu’s work demonstrates the fullness and vibrancy of life that close observation reveals.

After his father’s sudden death in 1739, Jakuchu took over the family shop; however, he had little interest in business and often sought refuge from the bustle of the market by retreating to the mountains. According to Daiten, Jakuchu “was quite oblivious to the luxurious attractions that daily seduce one’s eyes and ears in cities and towns” and was instead “inclined to enjoy solitary pursuits, patiently labor[ing] day by day to develop his talents and expressive means.” To this end, he built himself a studio on the outskirts of Kyoto, which he called Shin’en-kan, or “Villa of the Detached Heart,” pulling a line from the 4th-century Chinese poet Tao Qian.

Around this time, Jakuchu first met Daiten, the Rinzai monk-poet who came to be his religious mentor, close friend, and artistic patron. In addition to providing spiritual guidance, Daiten introduced Jakuchu into literary circles—and gave him access to the extensive archive of classical Japanese and Chinese artwork housed in Kyoto’s Shokoku-ji temple. Jakuchu honed his technique through assiduous study of these paintings, as well as European books on botany, zoology, and mineralogy.

At the age of 40, Jakuchu retired from the family business, passing ownership to his younger brother. Free to pursue painting, he moved to Shokoku-ji and embarked on his most famous work, Doshoku Sai-e, or Colorful Realm of Living Beings. Now designated as a National Treasure, Colorful Realm consists of thirty-three scrolls of animals, plants, insects, and fish, with a triptych of Shakyamuni Buddha and the bodhisattvas Manjushri and Samantabhadra as its centerpiece. A visual menagerie of flora and fauna, the series depicts more than one hundred species of animals rendered in brilliant color and exquisite detail, among them twenty-five varieties of birds, seventy types of insects, and 146 different kinds of seashells. The resulting compositions are dizzying and at times hypnotic, imbuing the everyday with an almost otherworldly vitality. The Zen monk Baisao was so moved by the series that he gifted Jakuchu a hanging scroll that read, “Enlivened by his hand, his paintings are filled with a mysterious spirit.”

Upon its completion, Jakuchu donated Colorful Realm to Shokoku-ji in 1765 in the hope that it would be used for rituals and ceremonies—and that his work would in some way contribute to the temple’s merit. “On a daily basis I devote myself heart and soul to painting, drawing superlative flowers and trees, and attempting to capture the true forms of birds and insects,” he wrote in the series’s dedication. “My aim is not to win fame or glory in the mundane world but to contribute to the sacred accoutrements that adorn the temple.”

Jakuchu’s attentiveness and devotion to the details of daily life allowed him to portray the character of each creature with great humor and theatricality, from his beloved strutting roosters to quizzical cockatoos. He took this personification a step further with Vegetable Parinirvana, a monochrome ink-brush painting depicting the Buddha’s entrance into nirvana using more than sixty varieties of produce. A daikon radish reclines at the center of the scroll as the dying Buddha, surrounded by mourning eggplants, cucumbers, and yams; Queen Maya, the Buddha’s mother, looks on from Tavatimsa Heaven as a quince. The painting has been understood as a testament to the buddhanature inherent in all beings, even radishes.

“Enlivened by his hand, his paintings are filled with a mysterious spirit.”

As he grew older, Jakuchu became more absorbed in Zen Buddhism and began spending more of his time at the Obaku Zen temples in the mountains south of Kyoto. There, he developed close relationships with the Obaku monks and turned to a quieter minimalism, putting aside the bold polychromatic scrolls of Colorful Realms for monochrome ink. His projects also took on more explicitly Buddhist themes, and he began work on a large-scale sculpture garden at Sekiho-ji called Five Hundred Arhats, depicting the eight phases of the Buddha’s life through expressive stone statues.

In 1788, Jakuchu’s studio was destroyed in the Great Tenmei Fire, along with his family’s shop and many of his paintings. Over the course of the next few years, he became increasingly reclusive, eventually taking up residence at Sekiho-ji so he could continue to work on the sculpture garden. Facing financial ruin from the fire, Jakuchu funded the project by selling ink paintings to local villagers in exchange for bushels of rice, which he then traded for silver to pay the stonemasons. Inspired by Baisao, or “The Old Tea Seller,” he styled himself as Beito-o, or “The Old Man of One Rice Bushel.”

Jakuchu continued to work on the garden until his death at the age of 84. After he died, it fell into disrepair as sculptures were stolen, buried by earthquakes, or eroded by time; though at its height it boasted more than a thousand statues of the Buddha and his followers, now only 420 remain. Still, Jakuchu leaves behind an impressive collection of silk scrolls, screens, and ink paintings that illustrate the richness and exuberance of everyday life—if only we learn how to look.

The post The Greatest Fullness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When writer Kai Cheng Thom felt like the world was collapsing, she posed a question to herself: What happens when we imagine loving the people—and the parts of ourselves—that we do not believe are worthy of love?

Over the course of her career, Thom has worked as an activist, sex worker, psychotherapist, conflict mediator, and community healer. In each of these roles, she has witnessed both our essential goodness and the violence that we are capable of.

As a way of reckoning with our sacredness and our potential to cause harm, she began writing love letters—to ancestors and exes, to her past and future selves, to those who have harmed her and those she has harmed, and to everyone she believed was beyond saving. “I needed to know that I could love them,” she writes, “because that meant I could still love myself—as hopeless and lost as I had become.”

The result, Falling Back in Love with Being Human: Letters to Lost Souls, is Thom’s “act of prayer in a collapsing world”—a spell to summon the language to help her fall back in love with herself and the people around her. Tricycle sat down with Thom to discuss the Buddhist rituals that inform her work, how writing helps her to hold seemingly contradictory truths, and what it means to choose love as a daily practice.

To start, what drew you to the form of love letters? I love a love letter. It’s my favorite type of letter to receive and my favorite literary format as well. We don’t see too many love letters in the world anymore—it’s rare to receive handwritten notes these days. On a societal level, political polarization and the toxic aspects of capitalism make it harder to take the time to explore what it might mean to love another human being in language. We’re also less inclined to love one another because we’re so full of anger and hatred.

I think it’s important to explore what it means to send love to a person who is acting in a way we might consider harmful. If we all did that, then we might be living in a different paradigm. Part of the project of this book is to trust that there is some goodness and sacredness in every human being, even in the midst of reprehensible behavior. For me, this is what it looks like to have faith.

Throughout the book, you explore what it means to love others and the parts of ourselves that we might consider monstrous, and you define a monster as a creature made of the truth that no one else dares to speak. How did you come to this notion of what it means to be a monster, and how have you reclaimed the monstrous? In the Western psychological tradition, Carl Jung wrote about the monsters within us, and he took a lot of inspiration from Buddhism and Hinduism. In thinking about the monstrous, I draw from Jung’s work, as well as different understandings of demons in Buddhist spirituality, especially practices of looking for the demons inside ourselves and learning to sit with them.

On a more personal level, I was raised evangelical Christian, and like many queer and trans people, I grew up being told that I was full of sin and that queer people were sinful monsters. Homophobia and transphobia were really present in my day-to-day. I was trying to repress the sin inside of me, and at the same time, I loved and longed for the sin outside me. I think this happens to us often: we desire the monstrous even as we fear it.

This can be complicated. Queerness is something beautiful that has been labeled as monstrous, but some things classified as monstrous are truly dangerous, like anger and rage. Our monsters need space to live and breathe, and if we’re not careful with them, they can result in harm and abuse.

You’ve mentioned your evangelical upbringing, and many of the letters in the book have a liturgical rhythm to them. How have you reclaimed liturgies and practices from a tradition that harmed you? There’s beauty in every monster and wisdom in every beast. The beast of evangelical Christianity is full of beauty, and its liturgy is something that I love, and Jesus is actually someone that I love. The part of Christianity that has stuck with me, beyond all of the pageantry, is the concept of grace. In Christianity, grace is the idea that we are all full of sin, but we can receive divine love anyway. I just love that. I don’t know if there is a God out there, but I think that human beings can offer one another divine love even in light of all that we’ve done wrong. I want to keep that idea around forever.

Are there any Buddhist rituals or practices that have particularly influenced you? There is a Tibetan Buddhist meditation about sitting and visualizing our demons and just being there and saying hello. That’s a practice that I will always love. But the Buddhist worldview that informs my life the most is the idea that paradox is where enlightenment is born—it’s not about resolving or conquering paradox by choosing one side; rather, it’s in the tension of more than one truth being true that a new wisdom arises. I think it’s so important to allow more than one thing to be true, especially when we’re talking about the nature of good and evil and people who may have harmed us.

Does writing help you to hold multiple truths? Definitely. In writing, I get to put both truths onto the page and then see if there is any new wisdom that arises, and then that wisdom becomes the basis of the poem. Language allows me to be in the chaos of competing truths and to give that chaos form, which is another paradox. Language gives form to the chaos of our internal experience and then somehow makes it more beautiful and bearable.

Do you have any rituals in your process of writing? Oh, yes. I sit in the dark and wait for the self-loathing to emerge. [laughs] I have a spot on the couch, and I sit there at night and order takeout, and then I wait, and the unbearable part of me actually does start to speak. Then I write.

These days, I’m able to fall back in love with the unbearable parts of myself through the process of writing. When I was younger, I was just expressing self-loathing. It’s a fine line to walk between expressing trauma and transmuting trauma, and these days, I feel much clearer on the difference between the two.

So that’s really the ritual: I sit in the dark, eat a McDouble, and wait for the self-loathing to come out—and then I love it.

It’s like you’re enacting your mission in the writing process itself: you’re learning to love the parts of yourself that you find unbearable. Yes, exactly.

In the final letter, you write about your practice of choosing love. So what does it look like to choose love on a daily basis? There are many spiritual practices centered on choosing love, like lovingkindness meditation. But I think on the day-to-day level, choosing love is about resisting the spirit of panic and fear. One thing I’ve learned from my work in mediation and dialogue facilitation is that we need to be very careful about our tendency toward othering and monster-making. When we’re in groups, it can be so easy to get caught up in the spirit of panic. At the heart of panic is deep fear, and this fear can lead to toxic and possibly dangerous situations.

It can be so scary to live in the world. Choosing love is about choosing courage: the courage to take a relational risk that is meaningful. Maybe there’s someone in your community that you’re irritated by or that you disagree with. Actually choosing love might mean starting a conversation with them. I often think about the tragedies that occur when we say that our fear and our right to feel comfortable legitimizes or strengthens the call for the restriction on others’ freedom of others. Choosing love is about saying that it’s OK for me to be a little bit scared or uncomfortable so that we can all be free.

What are you hoping readers will take away from the book? I hope that people who read the book might feel inspired to put it into practice. One important lesson from Buddhist practice is that falling back in love doesn’t really work if we are trying to fall back in love with other people first. Generally, it’s more sustainable if we start with ourselves. If we just try to love the oppressor without loving ourselves first, then we run the risk of internalizing our own oppression or gaslighting ourselves. It must begin with self-love, falling back in love with ourselves, and then we can fall back in love with others. Of course, it’s not linear—it’s a cycle we go through over and over again.

A lot of people react to my work with fear, and I get that. But holding two truths is not just about holding someone else’s truth that you don’t like; it’s about knowing we also have a truth, and we get to hold that, too. It takes discipline and practice to be able to hold both truths without needing an answer—and without losing ourselves along the way.

The post Writing Love Letters to Monsters appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It can sometimes seem that Buddhist practice and scholarship inhabit different universes. But on closer examination, the boundaries between the two are much more porous than might originally appear. Through translating and transmitting sacred texts, scholars of religious studies shape how practitioners envision their connection to the sacred, thus reshaping the framework in which practice takes place. At the same time, the questions that emerge from religious practice often form the foundation of scholarly inquiry. Still, in the contemporary American religious landscape, the gap between the two can seem insurmountable.

For the past four decades, Robert Buswell has been working to bridge this gap. A former monk, Buswell has lived his life at the intersection of Buddhist study and practice, and has dedicated his career to demonstrating the synergistic relationship between the two. The author of seventeen books, the founding director of UCLA’s Center for Korean Studies and Center for Buddhist Studies, the recipient of the Chogye Order’s prestigious Manhae Grand Prize, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the first scholar of Buddhism to be elected president of the Association for Asian Studies, Buswell is a formidable scholar, and he has used his role within the academy to draw attention to Buddhism as it is actually lived.

Drawing from the Korean Son (Zen) tradition, he has highlighted how doctrinal understanding and meditative practice have enriched and enlivened each other throughout Buddhist history and in contemporary monastic practice today. By hosting international conferences with Buddhist universities and monastic orders, he has fostered dialogue between scholars and practitioners, both in the United States and in Korea. In addition, he has edited and translated comprehensive collections of Korean Buddhist materials, bringing many of these texts into English for the first time. And through his own dual role as a scholar-practitioner, he has demonstrated how scholarship and practice can support each other in daily life. In all this work, Buswell has laid the foundation for how contemporary scholarship and practice can come together in the decades to come.

Buswell’s path to Buddhism began when he was in junior high school. “I actually wanted to be a cosmologist because I was interested in the big questions of how the universe came to be,” he told Tricycle. “One question that stuck in my mind was: How could I live without exploiting other people?” In an attempt to resolve this question, he turned to Western philosophy, reading the works of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. Although he encountered many possible answers, none of these texts provided practical methods for how to actually live without causing harm.

A couple of years later, as a sophomore in high school, he was assigned Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha in an English course, which he considered a “revelation.” “I immediately considered myself to be a Buddhist, even if I had little idea at that point as to what it might mean,” he later reflected in The Zen Monastic Experience. Obsessed, he began to read everything he could find related to Buddhism, from the Lotus Sutra to The Tibetan Book of the Dead. When he stumbled upon Nyanaponika Thera’s The Heart of Buddhist Meditation, he felt that he had found his answer at last: a practical technique that would help him live without exploiting others. “I finally knew what I would be doing with my life,” he says. 

Determined to deepen his understanding of Buddhist teachings and practices, he began college at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the only UC school at the time with a religious studies department; in his first year, he started learning Sanskrit and Chinese so that he could read and translate Buddhist texts. After a year, he had taken every course on Buddhism that the school offered, and he decided it was time to “just go off and do it”—to travel to Asia and become a monk. A professor put him in touch with a Theravada monk in Thailand, who arranged for Buswell to enter Wat Bovoranives in Bangkok.

In Thailand, Buswell was confronted with the discrepancies between the idealized accounts of Buddhism he encountered in books and the practical reality of monastic life. On a trip to northeast Thailand, he met with the renowned Theravada monk Maha Boowa and asked for a meditation method that would help him achieve enlightenment; instead, he was told that “the only method is no method” and he needed to figure out what worked for him based on his own experience and interests. “His response was telling and my first real lesson in how to live Buddhism rather than study Buddhism,” Buswell reflected in a recent commencement address. “It was a lesson I took to heart.”

But after a year, he decided that staying in Thailand wasn’t viable—between the climate and living off alms rounds, he frequently found himself sick. He had met some Chinese monks during his time in Bangkok, so he decided to give Chinese Buddhism a try.

He ended up in a hermitage on Lantau Island in Hong Kong, where he lived and studied for a year, reading Chan texts for four hours a day. Though he learned a lot about the Chinese textual tradition, he came to miss the experience of practicing in community. Back in Thailand, he had met Korean monks on pilgrimage and learned of the strong communal practice tradition there, so he decided to set off for Korea.

There, he took up residence at Songgwang-sa, one of the oldest temples in Korea. Considered one of the “Three Jewels Temples” in South Korea, it is one of the twenty-five head monasteries of the Chogye Order. Though originally founded in 867, it fell into disrepair until the 12th century, when the Son master Chinul transformed it into the institution it is today—and laid the groundwork for the distinctive style of Korean Zen, or Son, practice that Buswell encountered there.

When he first arrived, he didn’t speak a word of Korean, so he would communicate with the monks in writing using literary Chinese. After finishing his first retreat, however, he realized that he needed to learn Korean in order to understand the meditation technique more deeply. “That’s what started my scholarly career: trying to understand this type of meditation, which was so different from the way Theravada Buddhism approaches meditation,” he says.

In an effort to understand the unique features of Son meditative practice, each spring and fall he would immerse himself in study; each winter and summer he would participate in meditation retreats. Buswell cites this constant back-and-forth between scholarship and practice as a distinctive feature of Korean Buddhism, and it shaped the trajectory of his career. “My scholarship has benefited from my practice, and my practice has always been framed by my study,” he says. “This was rooted in the rigorous combination of doctrinal study and meditation that I experienced at Songgwang-sa.”

But over time, Buswell found that he “could not shake the pull of scholarship.” After two years at Songgwang-sa, he and a couple of his fellow monks decided to translate some of the dharma talks of Kusan, the head teacher; this project turned into the short book Nine Mountains. Two years later, Kusan asked him to translate the works of Chinul, the reformer of Songgwang-sa; Buswell agreed if he could finish the project in one “off” season, but he ended up devoting three off seasons to the task and produced what would eventually be published in 1983 as The Korean Approach to Zen: The Collected Works of Chinul.

After seven years of monastic life, he returned to California in 1979, ostensibly to explore publication options for the book. While he was staying at a Zen center in Berkeley, Lewis Lancaster, a professor in the Department of East Asian Languages at UC Berkeley, invited him to sit in on his seminars, and soon, he enrolled at UC Berkeley to resume his BA. “I realized that I was a much better scholar than I was a meditator,” he quips, “so why not accept it and continue my studies?”

He remained in monastic robes for his first two quarters; once he decided that he wanted to stay in the US to complete undergraduate and graduate studies in Buddhism, he disrobed and transitioned into the role of scholar and lay Buddhist practitioner. 

As a graduate student, he was startled by the impression of Buddhism he encountered in Zen literature and scholarship. “If you read the normative literature of Zen, it’s filled with iconoclastic stories of Zen masters burning Buddhist icons and books,” he says. “But when you’re in a meditation hall, there’s none of this at all. It’s a very rigid, disciplined way of life, which is based on sustained meditation practice and doctrinal study. There’s no time for iconoclasm.”

Realizing that most Westerners understood Zen only through its texts and not through its living tradition, Buswell focused his scholarship on Buddhism as it’s actually practiced: “I felt that people needed to understand what life is like on the ground in Zen monasteries—what monks are actually doing rather than what they say they’re doing.”

With this aim in mind, he published The Zen Monastic Experience: Buddhist Practice in Contemporary Korea (1993), which provides a rare glimpse into the day-to-day of monastic life as he encountered it at Songgwang-sa. Through examining the rigors of monastic training, the delicate interplay between doctrinal study and meditative practice, and the practicalities of life at a monastery, the book provides a counterparadigm to many Western stereotypes about Zen.

In 1986, Buswell was hired as an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. Though he was ostensibly appointed to teach courses in Chinese Buddhism, he believed the department viewed him as someone who could look across traditions and begin to build a program in Korean studies—and Korean Buddhism in particular. “I think they saw in me someone who could articulate a vision of what that program could become,” he said in a recent interview with UCLA.

When he first arrived at the university, there were no courses that covered Korean language and culture (and no faculty to teach them). Yet demand for opportunities to study Korea was “exploding”: the Korean American student population was growing rapidly, and the first tremors of the Korean Wave left many others interested in Korean history. Responding to this rising interest, Buswell developed a vision for what a program in Korean studies might look like.

While most existing programs prioritized studying contemporary Korea, Buswell proposed that UCLA first focus on premodern Korea to provide a deeper understanding of the nation’s history and place within the broader East Asian cultural context. “Because they used literary Chinese as their lingua franca, Koreans were able to communicate across national boundaries throughout their history,” Buswell says. “Korea was deeply embedded in Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, so focusing on premodern Korea allowed us to demonstrate the synergies with Chinese and Japanese studies and to highlight Korea’s centrality in the broader East Asian tradition.”

In Buswell’s first few years at UCLA, he helped to recruit a number of faculty members to build up the department’s Korean studies curriculum: Peter H. Lee, a senior scholar of Korean literature; Sung-Ock Sohn, an instructor in Korean language and linguistics; and John Duncan, a scholar of Korean history and Confucianism. With these core faculty members, they established a small graduate program focused on premodern Korea with the intention to expand over time.

In 1993, at the encouragement of the UCLA administration, Buswell drafted a proposal to establish a Center for Korean Studies. He approached the newly formed Korea Foundation for funding. At the time, the Korea Foundation was looking for opportunities to strengthen international ties and bolster global cultural literacy about Korea. With the Korea Foundation’s support, the Center for Korean Studies was able to establish faculty positions in humanities, social sciences, and art history, as well as a permanent librarian for Korean materials. These new positions established the Center as the largest program in Korean studies in the country. With this institutional support, the program was also able to add an undergraduate major in Korean language and culture, which quickly gained traction among students and has only grown in popularity since then.

The Center for Korean Studies was instrumental in establishing Korea’s importance in the academic study of Buddhism. “Robert put Korea on the map—and kept it on the map,” says Richard McBride, Professor of Korean and Buddhist Studies at Brigham Young University and Buswell’s first doctoral student. But his contributions to Buddhist studies extend beyond Korean Buddhism. “Robert Buswell is duly famous for almost single-handedly establishing the study of Korean Buddhism in the North American academy,” says Donald S. Lopez Jr., the Arthur E. Link Distinguished University Professor of Buddhist and Tibetan Studies at the University of Michigan and Buswell’s longtime collaborator. “But he is also one of the most accomplished American Buddhologists of my generation, doing sophisticated work in everything from Sanskrit Abhidharma to Chinese Buddhist apocrypha.”

With the Center for Korean Studies well under way, Buswell turned his attention again to Buddhist studies, going “back to [his] roots,” with the hopes of establishing a similar program. As with Korean studies, he began by advocating for building up the faculty. The Department of Asian Languages and Cultures had recently hired a scholar of Japanese Buddhism, but Buswell noticed a lack of emphasis on Indian and South Asian traditions. To fill this gap, he helped recruit Gregory Schopen, an eminent scholar of Indian Buddhism. 

As the core faculty in Buddhist studies grew, the administration asked Buswell to put together a formal proposal for another center. In 2000, UCLA established the Center for Buddhist Studies, which receives substantial support from the Numata Foundation. “I don’t think there was another Buddhist studies research center in the country at that time,” Buswell told Tricycle. “It really was the first of its kind.”

At the heart of Buswell’s vision for the center was collaboration across disciplines. In addition to faculty in Buddhist studies, the Center draws together scholars in anthropology, art history, archaeology, neuroscience, medicine, and more. Jennifer Jung-Kim, the current assistant director of the Center, notes that the Center has always aimed to bring people together across campus. “That interaction with scholars across disciplines enriches everyone, both within and beyond Buddhist studies,” she told Tricycle.

One of Buswell’s first tasks as director of the Center was overseeing Macmillan’s two-volume Encyclopedia of Buddhism (2004). He and his colleagues at the Center brought in scholars from around the world to assemble a 500-entry encyclopedia that quickly became a reference work for graduate students and professors alike. Nearly a decade later, Buswell and Donald Lopez produced the 1.2-million-word Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (2013), with more than 5,000 entries compiled with the help of graduate students at UCLA and Michigan.

“Buswell and Lopez’s Dictionary of Buddhism profoundly transformed how I understand, cross-reference, and translate Buddhist terminology from the primary canonical languages,” says Frederick M. Ranallo-Higgins, Tricycle associate editor and a former student of Buswell’s. “Even here at Tricycle, we have multiple copies and frequently reference it as a reliable authority.”

The Center has also supported Buswell’s efforts to make classic Korean texts more widely available, both in Korea and in the US. Many of these projects go beyond the texts that scholars typically privilege and instead center on the materials that monks actually use, including apocryphal texts, ritual materials, and monastic curricula.

The first major translation project Buswell spearheaded was the thirteen-volume Collected Works of Korean Buddhism, the first comprehensive collection of Korean Buddhist materials ever to be published in a European language. The anthology spans two millennia of texts, including commentaries on scriptures, collections of kongan (koan) cases, travelogues and diaries, and historical materials, and aims to give the writings of Korean Buddhist masters “their rightful place in the developing English canon of Buddhist materials.” The Chogye Order distributed the series to monasteries throughout Korea for everyday use, and it is freely available online on the website of the Center for Buddhist Studies. 

Buswell has also served as an editor for the Korean Classics Library, a sixteen-volume series of classic Korean religious and philosophical texts. Many of the texts in the series have never been published in any language, even modern Korean. 

One of the largest translation efforts he has supported is that of the Tripitaka Koreana, a 13th-century collection comprising 81,257 woodblocks. Lauded as the most complete and accurate extant collection of Buddhist texts, the collection contains the Tripitaka, or “three baskets,” as well as Sanskrit and Chinese dictionaries, travelogues, and diaries and biographies of monks and nuns. Buswell has advocated for renaming the collection the Korean Buddhist Canon to reflect its broader scope—and to demonstrate Korea’s central role in the development and preservation of key Buddhist texts. “In Korea, Robert is well-known and respected even by the nonacademic community because of how he has championed awareness of this Korean national treasure,” Jung-Kim says.

These projects illustrate Buswell’s commitment to maintaining ties with Korean academic and monastic communities, as well as his aspiration to demonstrate what Korean Buddhism has to offer to the field of Buddhist studies. In 2009, he was asked to help establish an international research center for Buddhist studies at Dongguk University, a Buddhist-affiliated university in Seoul. For three years, he served as the founding director of the Dongguk Institute for Buddhist Studies Research while also maintaining his position at UCLA, and he used this unique dual role to bridge the divide between Buddhist studies in Korea and in the US.

At the encouragement of his wife, Christina, Buswell organized a number of conferences at Dongguk, bringing both Korean and Western scholars into dialogue with Korean monastic teachers. “In Korea, most monks still live in the mountains, and most scholars live in the cities, so there aren’t a lot of opportunities for conversation,” Buswell noted. In fact, for some of the monks, it was their first time setting foot in the university.

Most of the scholars at the conferences had never been to a monastery before either, so Buswell also arranged tours and retreats so that they could observe and participate in everyday monastic life. “That way, they could see what it really means to embody the Son tradition,” Buswell says. 

Buswell brought this same spirit of collaboration to his teaching and advising. Over the course of his time at UCLA, he supervised nineteen PhD students, many of whom have gone on to shape the field of Buddhist studies. George Keyworth, associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan and one of Buswell’s first doctoral students, jokes that it’s hard to identify a Buswell student because of how wide-ranging their research areas are—he encouraged students to find topics and methodologies that were of interest to them, even if these areas were outside his own expertise. These topics are far-reaching, ranging from spontaneous human combustion and self-immolation to the role of tea and alcohol in medieval China to the history of Buddhist spells and incantations.

“I’ll miss having regular exposure to students—the chance to come out of my study for a while and just talk about Buddhism.”

“He wanted us to find new directions, places where we could make a contribution to the larger field of Buddhist studies,” says James Benn, Professor of Buddhism and East Asian Religions at McMaster University and one of Buswell’s first students. “He treated students in his seminars as scholars of the future.”

Keyworth agrees. “He was extremely supportive, and the biggest thing he taught us was to get out there to build the field and promote the study of Buddhism.”

Buswell remained at UCLA for thirty-six years, continuing to teach the next generation of scholars until his retirement in June 2022. “He spent basically all his career at UCLA, which demonstrates his commitment to the kinds of education that can take place in a public university,” Benn remarked. “A lot of Buddhist studies goes on at the Stanfords and Harvards and Princetons of the world, but Robert was a strong believer that Buddhist studies had every reason to be at big state schools as well—and that the scholarship that takes place in public institutions should inform Buddhist studies globally.”

Part of Buswell’s commitment to public institutions manifests in his dedication to teaching undergraduates, particularly in introductory courses. He describes the Introduction to Buddhism course as his favorite class precisely because of the variety of backgrounds and experiences that students bring to the course. “Some students come in with little to no understanding of Buddhist teaching and practices,” he says, “so that’s where it’s possible to frame their understanding of the tradition and what it can offer us today.”

As he looks ahead, Buswell cites talking with students as what he will miss the most. “I’ll miss having regular exposure to students—the chance to come out of my study for a while and just talk about Buddhism.” 

Even in retirement, though, Buswell continues to advocate for the place of Buddhist studies at UCLA and to lay the foundation for future generations of scholarship. In May 2022, he and Christina made gift commitments of $3.7 million to establish the Chinul Endowed Chair in Korean Buddhist Studies and the Robert E. and Christina L. Buswell Fellowship in Buddhist Studies. The endowed chair, named for the monk Buswell has dedicated much of his life to studying, is the first permanent endowed chair in Korean Buddhism outside of Korea.

Buswell said in a press release that it seemed appropriate to name the chair after Chinul because of his broad impact on the trajectory of Korean Buddhism, particularly his synthesis of meditation and doctrine: “Chinul believed that success in Buddhist meditation demanded a solid grounding in doctrinal understanding. This rigorous combination of doctrinal study and Zen meditation has remained the distinguishing characteristic of Korean Buddhism ever since.” 

For many of his students, his retirement is bittersweet; it’s hard for them to imagine UCLA without him. “The Center is where it is today because of Robert’s vision,” Jung-Kim reflects. “We’ll feel his presence for a long time.”

He will be missed not only for his many contributions to Korean and Buddhist studies but also for the spirit of generosity and humility he brings to his work, which his students and colleagues cite as a rare gift.

“His distinguishing feature is his kindness, which is not always the case in academia,” Benn comments. “Sometimes, people with high scholarly standards have been taught to be rigorous in their professional life, so they bring a degree of rigor and harshness to their personal interactions as well. But not Robert. He’s very patient, and he’s a good listener, which can be unusual for senior figures in the field—he doesn’t always want to be the person talking.”

“I think it has to do with his training as a monk,” Keyworth adds. “He never lost sight of that side of his life, personally or professionally. I don’t think there’s another academic like him, and I don’t know that there ever will be.” 

The post An Academic Like No Other appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In a well-known koan from the Book of Equanimity, an abbot asks a scholar where he is going. The scholar replies that he is going on pilgrimage. The abbot then asks, “What are you going on pilgrimage for?” The scholar confesses he doesn’t know. The abbot simply responds, “Not-knowing is most intimate.”

Chenxing Han takes this last line as the guiding philosophy of her new book, one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care. Written in the aftermath of her friend’s death from acute myeloid leukemia, one long listening is an ode to not-knowing, chronicling how grief fundamentally restructures Han’s view of reality. She describes the book as a “mala bracelet of rumination-worn beads” that circles around three autumns: the fall of 2014, when she began a chaplaincy residency at a hospital in California; the fall of 2015, when she moved to Taiwan to study spiritual care at a Buddhist college; and the fall of 2016, when her friend and former roommate passed away. Han’s friend once said to her that autumn is “the most honest season,” as it “does not pretend that life blooms forever.” The autumns that Han chronicles in one long listening are no exception. Filled with reminders of impermanence, these three seasons of Han’s life are times of profound loss and quiet transformation as she learns what it means to grieve—and to care.

The memoir’s fragmentary structure mirrors how Han comes to understand grief: as a cyclical process that ruptures expectations of coherence and instead unfolds in its own time. Over the course of the memoir, we watch Han revisit the same memories, turning questions over again and again as if in prayer, never arriving at a clear answer but rather delving deeper into the intimacy of not-knowing. In eschewing linear narratives and clean resolutions, she aims not just to describe the experience of chaplaincy and grief but also to evoke it in all its opacities and uncertainties.

As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets.

Han, as a hospital chaplain, interfaces with uncertainty on a daily basis as her patients and their loved ones grapple with new diagnoses, rapid physical decline, and death. Confronted with their many questions—“Why does my father have cancer? Is grandma ever gonna leave the ICU? Where is my daughter now that she’s dead?”—she can only answer honestly, “I don’t know.” For Han, this is the heart of chaplaincy: learning to accompany others through the unknown and unknowable as they come to terms with illness and impermanence. Of course, this is no easy task: “At the threshold of every patient’s room, I can foresee nothing of the visit ahead,” she writes. “This not-knowing is terrifying.” Often she is called in when other medical providers are at a loss and when every possible intervention seems inadequate. There is no easy fix; all she can do is listen and be present. Yet sometimes, impossibly, presence is enough. Her honest and tender vignettes of bedside visits illustrate the intimacy that can emerge from holding space for another without rushing to offer a solution. Her patients trust her with their despair and heartache—and with their hidden joys. (“No one told me this work would be full of love stories,” she muses.) Through listening openheartedly, Han bears witness to the fears, delights, shames, and regrets that make up a life.

This is challenging work, and Han frequently finds herself on the verge of burning out. In her first written assignment as a chaplain resident, she “waxe[s] poetic about the chaplain as bodhisattva,” striving to offer herself fully to her patients, sometimes losing herself in patients’ stories as a means to “forget [her] own hauntings.” Soon, though, she realizes how untenable it is to attempt to accompany every patient through their existential distress without also tending to her own. At a friend’s urging, she begins to give herself “permission to fall short of limitless generosity,” accepting that she, too, is in need of support. As she lets go of her expectations, she comes to experience the mutuality of spiritual care, allowing herself to be transformed—and cared for—by the patients she meets. Sitting at the bedside of a dying elderly Chinese man, she is transported to her own uncle’s deathbed; visiting a Buddhist writer who is undergoing chemotherapy, she receives a blessing not to give up on her own writing. These moments blur the lines of who is caring for whom, and Han comes to recognize that “we are each other’s bodhisattvas.”

This lesson becomes all the more poignant as Han finds herself in the throes of her own grief. As she sits at her dying friend’s bedside, Han notices all the ways that her friend is caring for her and teaching her how to go on after her death. After her friend dies, Han comes to view their friendship as “one long listening.” And though she initially finds herself livid with the “listening-bereft world” after her friend is gone, eventually Han discovers that she is still listening—and her friend is too. Honoring her friend’s memory becomes a way of opening up to the everyday wonder of the world, and Han is often startled by the beauty she encounters—and the care she receives—when she sheds her expectations and follows what she views as signs from her departed friend.

In a poem written after her friend’s death, Han quotes the Upaddha Sutta’s refrain that “admirable friendship is not the half but the whole of the holy path.” In this light, one long listening is a testament to the ways that friendship can guide us through grief, cataloging Han’s companionship with patients, friends, strangers, oceans, trees, and the world itself. For its readers, the book serves as a companion, orienting us to the intimacy of not-knowing, the sustaining power of friendship, and the importance of honoring the losses in our lives. Through listening to Han listen, we might learn to listen to the world—to its cries and its silences, its sorrow and its pain, its joy and its despair—and to find beauty in it all.

♦

The post Each Other’s Bodhisattvas appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2016 and 2018, conservationist William deBuys joined Roshi Joan Halifax and a team of medical clinicians as they trekked through the Himalayas providing basic medical support to the residents of the region. A lifelong environmental activist, deBuys set out on the expedition with an unusual question: How can we apply the ethics of hospice to the environmental movement? Over the course of six weeks, he accompanied doctors and nurses through northwestern Nepal as they cared for patients whose illnesses were incurable, doing what they could to provide relief from immediate suffering.

In his latest book, The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss, deBuys reflects on how the expeditions transformed his understanding of hope, grief, and loss, as well as what it means to care for the planet. Tricycle sat down with deBuys to discuss his time in the Himalayas, the role of awe in the environmental movement, and how we can harness and honor our rage.

Can you share more about your expeditions through the Himalayas in 2016 and 2018? I had to go on the second expedition to make sense of the first—the first was just so full of new experiences that I couldn’t process it all, let alone squeeze the real learning from it. In the first expedition, we [the members of the Nomads Clinic] were on the trail for about six weeks. We traveled about 150 miles on foot and on horseback through the Himalayas. We held six major clinics, and the doctors and nurses also provided a lot of medical care incidentally as we went along. We treated about 900 patients, and we provided acupuncture and foot massages to hundreds more.

Along the way, the trip was also a pilgrimage. We visited many gompas, or monasteries, and holy places. We participated in a number of rituals, and we interacted with lamas and village leaders. Often, as a way of thanking the clinic for the ibuprofen and the antibiotics and the foot massages, a village would collectively put on a cultural performance, which consisted of singing and dancing, often under the starlight on a cold, cloudless night at 13,000 feet above sea level. It was a spectacular experience.

You originally set out on the trip with the intention of applying hospice ethics to how we care for the earth. How did you come to this notion of hospice for the earth? For most of my adult life, I’ve worked in land conservation and environmental work. In recent decades, I’ve lost some friends and supported them on their way out of this world, and so it became natural to blend the various things I was thinking about into a consistent set of themes. Hospice for the earth arose from my hunger for a way of thinking about how we can continue our efforts to make the planet healthier and curb our own negative influences on it. In hospice care, you accept the trends of where things are going, and instead of focusing on the big fix, you focus on making things as good as you can, right here and now, for as long as you can. It requires you to relinquish attachment to outcomes and to focus on the fullness of the present. I find a lot of relief in that shift.

One of the phrases that you repeat throughout the book is “care over cure.” Can you share more about how this philosophy played out on the medical expeditions to the Dolpo region of Nepal? I learned the phrase “care over cure” from Roshi Joan Halifax, who led the expeditions into Dolpo. That was her injunction to the doctors and nurses and health practitioners who were part of our clinic: not trying for a “big fix,” which was, in most instances, impossible anyway because we didn’t have blood labs and X-rays and surgical operating rooms. We were working with limited tools to try to help people get through the days and the weeks and the months ahead more happily than they would have otherwise. That was one of the unifying ethics of our entire effort in Dolpo: there was no big fix, so we had to focus on the care we could provide.

This lack of a “big fix” is a major theme in the climate movement as well. How can we work with this sense of futility or impossibility without turning to despair? I’d like to change the word from futility to impermanence. I believe that as long as it’s done with care, nothing is futile. And so you do the best you can and relieve the suffering that you can, and you know that nothing is going to last forever. Part of my meditation going through the Himalayas was to look at how young the landscape was and to know that those mountains had risen from sea floors over millions of years. To be aware of that on a daily basis really shook my worldview. Applying that understanding of change to human affairs can be liberating. Nothing is going to remain the same. But it does not follow, logically or emotionally, that because nothing lasts forever, we should stop doing what we can in the present moment to make this moment richer and happier and less painful.

Throughout the book, you write about the deep sense of wonder that being in the Himalayas inspired in you. Can you speak to the role of awe in the climate justice movement? In particular, how can awe support us in protecting the environment? One of my goals in writing the book was to make it a celebration of the beauty of Earth. Celebrating the beauty of Earth is also a celebration of the awe we experience when we behold it. The book tells the stories of Charles Darwin and of various Earth scientists who came up with the theory of plate tectonics. For me, these scientific narratives are stories about the pursuit and acquisition of full-time awe, of delight and admiration and wonder at the marvelousness of life on this planet.

As we struggle to protect life on this planet from climate change and the erosion of biodiversity, I think we need to renew our awareness of the beauty of Earth. Our species has only been around for about 300,000 years. We’re newcomers. There are so many mammal species that have been around for a couple of million years, and the reptiles and birds have been here even longer. When we think about the beauty that we have inherited, we have a moral obligation to preserve that beauty. We will fail to some degree. But we can also succeed to a considerable degree. We know that more species will be coming along. We know that our own species will eventually die out, as all species will over time. But for now, we’re part of a big experiment in the vastness of the universe, and given our gift of consciousness and awareness, we need to live up to our role and the benefits we have received from this creation of which we are a part.

When thinking about the destruction of the climate, it can be so easy to get angry. In the book, you write about sacred rage and how we can harness our anger productively. What do you mean by sacred rage, and how can we work with our anger to enact meaningful change? I think that a person would have to be fully anesthetized not to feel angry about the chain of events that has taken us to such a critical point in the climate crisis: the buying of politicians, the spread of disinformation, and the role of Big Oil and Big Coal in diverting society from doing what has clearly been needed for a long time. But just being angry isn’t good enough. We need to channel that anger and focus it. I borrowed the concept of sacred rage from my friend Terry Tempest Williams, the environmental activist and author. Sacred rage is a rage that is focused. It’s not just letting off steam. It’s using steam the way a steam turbine uses it, focusing its heat and velocity to do work in a physical sense: to achieve something and get things moving. That’s how we need to use our rage: not just to blow off the steam but to focus it so that we accomplish something with it. That, to me, is living up to the sacredness of that kind of rage.

You also write about how the physical act of walking can teach us how to process and hold our grief. What have you learned from the act of walking? One day as I was walking, a realization came into my mind: The right way to carry the grief is the right way of walking. It was like a metronomic reminder or a mantra. The rhythm of this mantra matched my steps, so I marched to its beat. Then I reversed the phrases: The right way of walking is the right way to carry the grief. That idea unlocked the deepest discovery in the expedition for me. We had walked together for six weeks. We had formed a community through walking, and the trail became home. We were on a big circular journey, which in Tibetan Buddhism is called a kora. In a kora, you return to the point where you began, but with every revolution, you learn how to walk just a little bit better. Since the trip, almost every day, I realize that here I am, I’m 72 years old, and I am still learning how to walk. I apply that idea all the time: Just try to walk a little bit better.

Do you have any recommendations for practices we can engage in to facilitate awe and connection with the earth? Once in a while, we have the gift of encountering an animal in a non-hostile way, and that can give that sense of connection. But I think just being in place and being genuinely alert and aware, being still and quiet enough to allow a wild place reveal itself to you: that, to me, is a skill that is really healthy to cultivate. It’s not fundamentally different from preparing yourself to allow beauty to come into yourself on a regular basis.

I was originally attracted to the stories of Darwin and plate tectonics because they’re really stories driven by awe, by this desire to make sense of this spectacular world in which we live—and to do so without resorting to magic. To me, that’s part of the spectacular moment in history that we now inhabit: we can tell ourselves the biography of Earth without relying on magic. We’re the first people who have been able to do that. This is the great irony and paradox of our time: we have this knowledge, which opens the gates of wonder and spreads them wider than they’ve ever been spread before, and at the same time, we’re doing so much to destroy this marvelous creation of which we are a part. In a way, The Trail to Kanjiroba is my attempt to reconcile those two irreconcilable facts. It’s an attempt to find grace amid the grief.

[This article was first published on July 31, 2022]

The post Finding Grace Amid the Grief appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Last month, Harvard Divinity School celebrated the tenth anniversary of the Buddhist Ministry Initiative (BMI), a program that aims to train future Buddhist religious professionals for the modern era and the first of its kind within a divinity school at a research university. The school marked the occasion with a hybrid in-person and online public event hosting former fellows including the Venerable Priya Rakkhit Sraman and Maria Azhunova. 

The BMI was formally founded in 2011 after Harvard received a grant from the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation to develop a program in Buddhist ministry. The following year, the program began to take shape: the BMI hired a full-time coordinator, hosted its first colloquium, and welcomed its inaugural international fellows.

One of the primary goals of the initiative is to strengthen connections between American universities and Buddhist ministerial movements in Asia. To this end, the program offers special scholarships each year to individuals who are deeply engaged in Asian Buddhist communities. Since the first cohort in 2012, the BMI has hosted over twenty international fellows, many of whom have gone on to complete graduate degrees at Harvard before pursuing careers in Buddhist ministry.

One former international fellow, the Venerable Priya Rakkhit Sraman, was recently appointed to be the first Buddhist chaplain at Emory University. An ordained monk in the Theravada tradition, Venerable Priya began his monastic studies at the age of 11, and he lived and trained in Buddhist communities in Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong, Myanmar, and China prior to coming to HDS.

Reflecting on his time at Harvard, Venerable Priya told Tricycle, “One good thing about the BMI is that it supports different types of Buddhist ministry. It enables students to imagine new possibilities and empowers them to engage with different communities as they attend to societal needs. Students are encouraged to engage with Buddhism a lot more practically, keeping in mind the real-world issues happening all around us.”

Maria Azhunova, another recent international fellow, came to HDS in order to do just that. “I wanted to learn how to thrive in multireligious communities and organizations,” she said in a press release for the BMI’s tenth anniversary.

Azhunova, who is from the Buryat Republic in Southern Siberia, currently serves as director of the Land of Snow Leopard Network, an organization that focuses on the conservation of snow leopards and their ecosystems and the revival of Indigenous cultures in the region. While at HDS, she started the Indigenous Knowledge Seminar Series as a way of establishing dialogue between Indigenous culture practitioners and Western educational institutions. 

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Land of Snow Leopard Network has shifted its focus, and Azhunova has worked to support Indigenous refugees fleeing Russia’s military conscription of ethnic minorities.

Both Venerable Priya and Azhunova’s paths illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of the BMI and the careers that can follow. Rev. Dr. Monica Sanford, assistant dean for multireligious ministry, believes that this is at the heart of the program: “Buddhist students [at HDS] benefit from the rigorous academic study of Buddhism, the deep spiritual learning and skill-building of a divinity program, learning from other religious traditions besides Buddhism, and also a variety of coursework in other disciplines—from business to education to science to law,” she says. 

With the BMI’s support, students and fellows are able to train in a variety of settings, completing field education in hospitals, prisons, and nonprofit organizations, as well as more traditional retreat centers and monastic institutions. As the initiative has expanded, HDS has also built up its Buddhist studies curriculum, offering courses on Buddhist textual traditions and practices, social activism and engaged Buddhism, and spiritual care and counseling.

“What we’re doing isn’t new,” Sanford says. “The Buddha served the needs of the community in his age. But where and how we’re doing it is certainly new.”

When Sanford began training as a chaplain, there were relatively few Buddhists working in the field. Now, Sanford feels like she is “watching a professional field emerge”: “The early graduates are now in a position to give back, to share what they’ve learned, and to help shape the next generation to face new challenges. I feel like I’m watching the bud of the lotus emerge from the water and waiting to see what color it will be.”

Janet Gyatso, the Hershey Professor of Buddhist Studies and a core member of the BMI faculty, shares a similar sentiment. Reflecting on her hopes for the future of the BMI, she stated, “We need to learn from each other. We need to envision what wisdom and practical knowledge we can take from Buddhist traditions to apply to the world problems we face today. And we need to think about Buddhist leadership stepping up to the stage in terms of ethical contributions that we can make to living on our planet now.”

The post Training the Next Generation of Buddhist Religious Professionals  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In Akil Kumarasamy’s debut novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, an unnamed AI programmer begins translating a Tamil manuscript in the aftermath of her mother’s death. The manuscript, written in the late 1990s, follows a cohort of young female medical students living on the edge of the Sri Lankan civil war who attempt to develop an ideology of “radical compassion.” As the programmer delves deeper into the students’ collective treatise, she slowly becomes unhinged by the question of what it means to care for another.

Kumarasamy grew up in a South Asian community in an area of New Jersey formerly known as Dismal Swamp, and from a young age, she was interested in questions of compassion and how communities can care for each other after catastrophes. Her short story collection, Half Gods, directly explores the impact of the Sri Lankan civil war on South Asian diasporic communities, but in Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, the war takes on a more spectral presence. The novel swirls between a near-future Queens and the shores of South India, slipping through time and space—and between consciousnesses. Characters investigate how to take on another’s suffering, whether through self-inflicting pain or through physically extracting and ingesting others’ traumatic memories. Along the way, Kumarasamy offers a poignant and at times unsettling meditation on friendship, climate change, artificial intelligence, grief, and memory.

Tricycle spoke with Kumarasamy about the novel, the border states of compassion, the ethics of translation, and how literature can help us bear witness to suffering.

To start, can you tell us about your childhood growing up in a South Asian diasporic community? I grew up in New Jersey. My parents came from South India, and my mother was really influenced by Zen Buddhism. She was particularly drawn to Thich Nhat Hanh’s teachings on using Buddhist practice to navigate the Vietnam War and using compassion to enact social change. I also grew up reading the Buddha manga series, by Osamu Tezuka, so from an early age, I was learning about how the Buddha challenged the ideas around him, as well as how compassion and social justice can come together.

At the same time, I grew up in the South Asian diaspora, so there were a lot of interfaith conversations happening. People were practicing Buddhism and Hinduism simultaneously. From a young age, I practiced Vipassana meditation and was surrounded by different forms of religious practice. All of these practices and conversations affected my formation in how I think about writing and engaging with the world.

Can you share more about the relationship between your practice and your writing? How has that interfaith grounding influenced your approach to your work? A big question in my work and in my life is what we do with suffering. How do we reach out to other people as we navigate the seas of suffering? Zen Buddhism has influenced how I approach this question, particularly in thinking about impermanence and interconnectedness, and this shapes how I form books.

My first book of short stories, Half Gods, deals with the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and asks how different diaspora communities can heal and connect with each other. In my new novel, Meet Us by the Roaring Sea, my main question was how we can practice compassion in modern society. Both books are concerned with how we can care for others when we ourselves are deeply suffering. These questions also show up in my own practice, particularly in thinking about temporality, death, and grief.

In the new novel, an AI coder begins translating a manuscript that revolves around the notion of radical compassion. Can you say more about the idea of radical compassion? In the novel, the main character has just lost her mother. There’s something about death that just cracks open reality. It makes you realize the illusion of everything, and it forces you to question how you’re engaging with the world. As she is grieving, she starts translating a manuscript about a group of medical students who are coming up with a new idea of radical compassion.

The students are living through a drought at the edge of a war, so they’re suffering themselves. The only way for them to leave their own suffering is to reach out to other people, to see that they are connected to the refugees coming to their shoreline, and to see that their suffering is not a singular thing but something larger.

The Zen Buddhist priest Joan Halifax talks about the edge states of compassion. For example, let’s say someone falls onto the train tracks and someone else jumps to try to save them. If the second person lives, we would say, “Oh my gosh, you were so compassionate, you jumped to save them.” But if they die trying to save the person, then we would say, “You’re delirious. You’re crazy.” So there’s this border state of compassion. Compassion can have a turbulent edge to it. 

I was interested in thinking about characters being pushed to these edge states—pushed to the point where compassion can become self-destructive. I wanted to explore the borders between people and also how comfortable we are in being open to other people’s suffering.

Throughout the book, the medical students veer toward different edge states: for some, radical compassion becomes self-destructive; for others, it turns to cruelty. How do the students navigate these dangers, particularly in finding a balance between self-mortification and total hedonism? In the inner manuscript, the medical students are trying to figure out what it means to care for each other. They’re constantly negotiating the balance of how to open themselves to the suffering of others in a meaningful way.

But within the collective, there are three schools of radical compassion. Some students self-inflict pain, seeing how much they can tolerate as a way to open themselves up. Some starve themselves and give away food. All of them have this goal of awakening and collective liberation. But they approach what it means to be compassionate very differently.

We’re not separate from the pain of others, and the book is trying to show that entangling yourself with the suffering of others has a cost. Characters lose things: physical objects, houses, belongings. Is that part of compassion? To gain this understanding of another’s pain, do you have to shed something? There are a lot of burnings in the book, as well as rebirths. Characters are constantly negotiating these borders.

One question the novel raises is how you can come back after entering into another’s suffering. What is the process of return? Has writing the book given you any insight on this question? When you witness something, are you forever altered? Can you go back to a time before you’ve witnessed something? In the outer story, witnessing becomes embodied when characters physically ingest other people’s memories and traumas. These experiences become part of them in a physical way. Can they return to what they were like before?

In some ways, you can’t fully return to the place that you used to be. Now that you’ve seen something, it has changed you, and you cannot go to that earlier version of yourself. I think this goes back to the idea that there is a cost.  

These characters are forced into situations where they finally have to see, look, and break down the veil that’s in front of them and reach out. I don’t think there’s any going back from that.

I’m curious as to how you view the role of literature in relation to the act of witnessing, particularly in your choice of pronouns. How can literature help us bear witness to another’s suffering? In this book in particular, I was very conscious of the pronouns I chose to use. The inner manuscript is written in the first person plural, and the outer story is written in the second person. They’re unusual points of view, and both call for the reader’s participation. I think the second person invites the reader to step into the narrative space, which is almost a liminal space between first and third person. The book is addressing you. With the first-person plural, it feels like you could be part of that we, too.

“To gain an understanding of another’s pain, do you have to shed something?”

For me, literature is like an opening. It can open someone’s mind to other ways of thinking, other ways of approaching the world, or seeing people in their lives. Literature can create a wedge in someone’s mind, and that can be an opportunity for someone to think differently and possibly to act differently in the world.

I think literature is the closest you can get to someone’s psyche. Reading a novel, you get to see a character in the whole span of their lives: the public moments, but also the private moments you can’t normally see. If we got to see all these different facets of people, we might feel more compassionate toward them than we do toward the limited versions we get to see in passing.

You also touch on the power of art in moving through grief: two of the characters take up writing or sculpture after losing their parents. Can you say more about how creative practice helps them in navigating these losses? The main character studied Tamil in college. After her mother dies, she begins translating as if it’s a road to salvation, as if the manuscript is helping her climb out of her grief. For her, the act of translation is like an act of resuscitation, bringing these young women back from anonymity. 

The character’s childhood friend Sal has also just lost her parents, and she uses art as a vehicle of social change and social justice. She has all this pain, anger, and grief; what is she going to make of it? Her instinct is to use these feelings as a way to create something larger that might speak to others.

I think, in some ways, art is this weird transformative vortex where you put your anger, grief, sadness, happiness, everything, and through this alchemy machine, you’re able to mold these feelings into something else. Art can be a way to channel grief and reach other people in the process. It’s at once an act of reaching out and an act of recognition: I see your grief, I hear it, I feel it. Reaching out to other people can be a way to rescue yourself, too.

One of the questions that the main character wrestles with is whether the women in the manuscript want to be resuscitated or brought into the English language. How do you examine the ethics of translation, particularly the ethics of sharing a story that isn’t your own? This is a tricky line for her, because by bringing these young women into English, she’s broadening their audience so more people can read about them. But the text itself is a very anticolonial text, and the women are specifically pushing against the British Empire and its influence on Indian society. So it does feel like this monstrous thing: these young women might not want to be in English, but at the same time, now their message has a broader audience.

I think this gets to the moral question of translation. Sometimes, a text might not be meant for a larger audience. Maybe it’s not meant to be read by everyone. And maybe there’s certain knowledge in a text that is not meant to be shared. By sharing this knowledge, there’s a possibility that it will be taken and used and commercialized.. So there is a strange trade-off in translation.

How do these questions impact how you think about your audience? I try to be aware of the fact that the English language has so much power. Only three percent of literature from other languages gets translated into English. I am writing in English, and that’s probably the language I will continue to write in. I wanted the book to wrestle with the currency of the English language. What does it mean to be writing in this language of power?

The main character is translating a manuscript from Tamil, and the medical students draw from Tamil texts in crafting their notion of radical compassion. Can you share more about how Tamil literature influences your work? When we think of the classical languages of South Asia, we tend to talk about Sanskrit, but we don’t often talk about Tamil. Many of the ancient Sanskrit texts are about gods, but Tamil texts are often about people: people who are lovesick and go through all the stages of love and heartbreak. So I was very interested in thinking about the lives of everyday people, using these Tamil texts as a launching point.

In ancient Tamil literature, there are the Five Great Epics, and two are by Tamil Buddhist writers. One of these epics, the Manimekalai, is about a Tamil Buddhist nun. She was a fiercely independent woman, and she was really influential in how I envisioned the young women in the manuscript. The young women draw from the ancient texts, but they’re also building from them and taking them into their present moment. In writing this book, I was reaching back into ancient Tamil Buddhist texts and bringing them into the present.

The post The Border States of Compassion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Christopher Jinkan Powers had always harbored dreams of becoming a priest. But when he was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in 2016, he feared he would have to abandon his aspiration. “I had already had two open-heart surgeries, and because of the cancer I was mostly bedridden,” he told Tricycle. “I couldn’t go to a temple, let alone ordain.” Looking for a way to continue his practice while in the hospital, he began to sit with Treeleaf Zendo, an online Soto Zen community. As he became more deeply engaged in sangha life, he worked with his teacher and Treeleaf’s founder, Jundo Cohen, to develop a plan for ordination. For the past few years, Powers has served as a novice priest at Treeleaf, sometimes leading ceremonies from his hospital bed as he receives chemotherapy.

Founded over a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic normalized online retreats, Treeleaf has been at the vanguard of virtual Buddhist practice. Cohen formed the community in 2006 as a practice space for people who could not leave their home because of illness or disability. Soon, though, the sangha expanded to include practitioners around the world who couldn’t attend in person because of schedules, geography, natural disaster, or war.

Over the past decade, Treeleaf has ordained several of its members who, like Powers, demonstrate dedication to the dharma but are unable to pursue traditional monastic training. This year, the organization is piloting the first formal nonresidential path to Soto Zen ordination. Called the Monastery of Open Doors, the program is designed for committed Zen practitioners whose circumstances prevent them from participating in residential training.

One novice priest, Sergey Washin Tsarenko, lives in Odesa, Ukraine, where the closest Zen center is 500 kilometers (311 miles) away. After meditating without a community for a couple of years, he joined Treeleaf in 2014 and eventually ordained with Cohen in 2019. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Tsarenko was determined to continue his priest training. “I feel I need to be connected to the sangha more than ever,” he wrote. Even during curfews he continues to host daily sits each morning so that people from around the world can practice together. “This would not be possible without Treeleaf.”

Kokuu Andy McLellan began practicing Buddhism in 1997 after he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. Because of his illness, it is difficult for him to leave his home, so he cannot participate in residential monastic training. In 2017, he received shukke tokudo, or novice ordination, and he has been helping Cohen develop the Monastery of Open Doors to support others who hope to deepen their practice but face similar physical challenges. “There shouldn’t be one pathway to being a priest,” McLellan says. “We’re trying to open up alternative paths for those who can’t go the traditional route. If you’re chronically ill or living with a disability, that is another form of training. Through your illness, you learn to cultivate compassion and understanding of suffering without being in a monastery.”

Cohen agrees, noting that “illness and other hardships may be life’s most powerful koan, and a hospital bed or wheelchair can be a monastery.” In collaboration with the novice priests, he has worked to build an awareness of illness and disability into every aspect of training, including how students learn Zen liturgy, Buddhist history, ethics, and pastoral care.

“If you’re chronically ill or living with a disability, that is another form of training.”

At Treeleaf, as in most monastic training programs, novice priests are expected to lead sits and ceremonies for the community. But at the Monastery of Open Doors, they also learn how to adapt components of each ceremony so that all members have a way to participate regardless of the physical challenges they may face. Because many members have limited mobility, priests have developed ways to perform rituals while seated or, like Powers, while lying in a hospital bed. “We want to show that even if you’re disabled or chronically ill, you can still practice,” McLellan says. “And not only can you practice, you can ordain.”

McLellan and Powers have worked together to find ways to preserve the reverence and sincerity of ritual acts while reducing the physical effort involved. For instance, many ceremonies involve full prostrations with the forehead brought all the way down to the floor, but this can be difficult, if not impossible, for sangha members. Now, they have the option of lifting a bowing cloth, or zagu, up to their head instead. In addition, Powers developed ways to don the kesa, the ceremonial cloth that symbolizes the Buddha’s robes, so that the movements require less physical strain and the wearer’s arm is left open for IV medications.

Soto Zen practice also emphasizes the importance of seated meditation, but the traditional seated posture isn’t always accessible to Treeleaf’s members—some need to recline during zazen, especially during longer meditation periods. To normalize lying down as an acceptable meditation position, Cohen began referring to the posture as “lion’s pose,” recalling the iconography of the Buddha reclining in his final days as he prepared to enter parinirvana. During Treeleaf’s annual retreats, all members recline for some of the meditation periods, regardless of their ability. As Cohen noted, “It doesn’t matter if you have perfect posture. It’s a question of what your body needs.”

Like Cohen, McLellan feels that it is important to change the narrative around what meditation practice should look like. When he meditates with Treeleaf, he often sits with his wheelchair in the camera frame so that others living with chronic illness can see that they are not alone. “We like to get images out there of people in wheelchairs practicing with the same sincerity and love to show that disabled people have a place in the dharma too,” he told Tricycle.

Treeleaf is committed to showing that people with disabilities have always had a place in the dharma. When novice priests learn about Zen lineage, they also learn the stories of people throughout Buddhist history who dealt with illness and physical challenges. This aspect of training was spearheaded by Powers and McLellan, who developed a “differently-abled ancestor ceremony” as a means of increasing the visibility of people with disabilities in the history of Buddhist practice. During retreats, the whole sangha chants the names and stories of these individuals, honoring “those who may have been met by exclusion or fear, those for whom the path was filled with obstacles and barriers, those for whom entrance was so often denied.” The names of these figures are included in the lineage charts that members receive when they take the precepts or ordain.

In addition to studying Zen liturgy and history, novice priests learn how to be supportive members of their community, both within Treeleaf and beyond. “Today, Zen priests have become more like ministers,” says Cohen. “This is beyond zazen. Modern Zen clergy need to know how to respond to sangha members’ crises and concerns.” To this end, priests complete courses in pastoral care, grief counseling, and healthy boundaries, and receive guidelines on when to refer someone to a mental health professional.

McLellan has found pastoral care to be the most meaningful part of his role as a priest. Outside of Treeleaf, he moderates online support groups for people living with chronic illness. “One thing I’ve learned from these groups is how many people out there feel scared and alone,” he says. “If you can just listen and be there for someone, it can make a huge difference.”

For Powers, too, service forms the heart of his work as a priest. Following his open-heart surgery and cancer diagnosis, he began volunteering at his local hospital, providing emotional support and guidance to people facing new diagnoses or complex procedures. A self-proclaimed “big-time nerd,” he also runs Dungeons & Dragons nights at the public library in his hometown of Fresno, California to help kids with intellectual disabilities learn math. “Being a priest means being of service,” Powers believes. “And it’s not just service to our sangha but service to the sangha of the whole world.”

Tsarenko originally sought ordination for this very reason. Through Treeleaf, he leads weekly meditation sessions called “Sitting for Peace,” where individuals from around the world come together to chant the Heart Sutra in English, Ukrainian, and Russian and dedicate their practice to those injured in the war.

“Zen practice is difficult even under normal wordly conditions,” Tsarenko reflects. “In times of war, it is even more difficult because we are constantly under threat. Sometimes we enjoy silent days where there are no attacks. But other days are full of grief because we lose people. So how do we stay balanced? It all starts from zazen. Zazen is the core of our practice. It’s the marrow in our bones. So we sit zazen, and we try to enter deep samadhi [meditative concentration] and generate compassion. Then we get up from the cushion and try to bring this compassion into the world.”

After leading online sits each morning, Tsarenko volunteers at food distribution centers, packaging resources to send to the latest “hot areas” impacted by attacks. He also plants trees by the seaside with a team of volunteers. To date, they have planted and cared for over 1,500 trees. He sees this as fundamentally connected to his role as a priest: “In our practice, we care about all sentient beings. Trees are also sentient beings, and they have a lot to teach us.” Particularly now that bombings have ravaged much of his country’s landscape, Tsarenko feels more committed to planting trees than ever. “Even in war, we can’t forget about beauty.”

Cohen believes that these types of service, though untraditional, are valid forms of training and help priests cultivate wisdom and compassion in the context of their everyday lives. “The point of the Monastery of Open Doors is to train good priests, no matter what winding road gets them there,” he says. “Many of our priests can’t go on ango, the traditional three-month residential retreat required for ordination. But another kind of ango is to be in a battlefield helping load trucks with food or to be nursing your dying spouse at their bedside. That is Zen training. That is abiding with the great question of life and death.”

Cohen acknowledges that Treeleaf’s approach is unconventional, and he still encourages those who are able to pursue residential training to do so. “If every priest were trained like we train our priests, it would be a disaster,” he jokes. “We would lose all the traditions that can be taught only in a residential setting. But there’s room for all of us: the Western monasteries, the monasteries in Japan, the hermits in their caves, and now, the Monastery of Open Doors. We have a place too.”

The post The Monastery of Open Doors appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Perhaps one of the most pernicious misconceptions about Buddhism is that it requires practitioners to reject and eliminate emotions. The Theravada tradition in particular tends to be characterized as austere and emotionally flat. Maria Heim, a scholar of classical South Asia at Amherst College, is determined to challenge this stereotype. For Heim, Buddhist texts provide some of the most intricate and nuanced examinations of human emotion available to modern readers. In Words for the Heart: A Treasury of Emotions from Classical India, she presents 177 terms for emotions drawn from three classical Indian languages: Sanskrit, Pali, and Prakrit.

Heim’s book continues in the longstanding literary tradition of treasuries, or koshas. One meaning of the Sanskrit term kosha is a “storehouse of gems,” but the term can also refer to a collection of words, poems, and literary passages. Since the 5th century, Indian poets and scholars have compiled treasuries of words to catalog different aspects of human experience, treating each entry as a jewel. Heim’s treasury consists of words used to describe and evoke emotions within classical Indian texts, ranging from “simmering wrath” (Skt. manyu) to “dispassion and disenchantment with the world” (Skt. vairagya).

Each term in Heim’s emotional storehouse is conveyed using illustrative passages and anecdotes from a great variety of genres and traditions including ancient medical texts, political treatises, epic poems, guides to aesthetic theory, and the lists and lexica of the Pali canonical texts known as the Abhidhamma. The diversity of source material (combined with the alphabetical arrangement)  provides for unexpected and sometimes delightful juxtapositions: entries from the Kama Sutra sit alongside Buddhist instructions for charnel ground meditations, and the sublime attitudes of the brahma-viharas are sandwiched between the malicious and the macabre.

Heim categorizes all the texts she pulls from as “classical,” a term she uses to refer less to a particular historical period and more to a class of literary and philosophical works that speak to us across time and space, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be human. Rather than simply appealing to a universal set of experiences, these classical texts confront us with difference, illustrating and evoking particular experiences that may be unfamiliar to the modern reader.

Indeed, the treasury’s celebration of the particular gives rise to its most surprising and engaging moments: the “petulant, surly sulk” (Pali appaccaya) of grumbling monks who rebel against the stringency of Buddhist monastic codes; the “stinginess and spitefulness” (Skt. matsarya) that sends one to an afterlife as a hungry ghost, doomed to wander through their own excrement in perpetuity; and the “morbid desires and pregnancy cravings” (Skt. dohada) of a pregnant crocodile that must be obeyed at all costs—not to mention the blast of “joy” (Pali piti) that once sent a young pregnant woman soaring through the air to a moonlit mountain shrine. Such entries will likely land the reader somewhere on the spectrum of the “smiles and laughter of mirth” (Skt. hasa), which range from a restrained smile befitting the gods to convulsive, violent, and sometimes paroxysmal laughter.

Emotions are deeply embedded in—and produced by—their specific contexts and environments.

In presenting illustrative examples for each of these emotions within particular contexts, Heim takes what she calls an ecological approach. Just as a tree exists within a vast ecology of other species, emotions are deeply embedded in—and produced by—their specific contexts and environments. Sometimes these contexts are socially conditioned: anger and jealousy, for instance, are categorized and perceived differently according to the gender, class, and relative power of the person experiencing the emotion. The entry on anuraga (Skt., “affection and attraction”) contains 64 subvarieties identified by the 11th-century scholar King Bhoja—“fickle attraction,” “faithful devotion,” and “violent agitation,” to name a few. Each shade of attraction is then divided into subcategories such as “eternal or temporary,” “disclosed or hidden,” and the like, ultimately providing 12,228 shades of attraction—and even this list isn’t exhaustive. After all, as the author of the Kama Sutra states in the entry on kama (Skt., “sensual pleasure”), “the things people can imagine are infinite . . . who could survey all the forms?”

And just as emotions are best examined in their social contexts, so they also must be understood in relationship to each other. After all, in a chest of jewels, each gem illuminates the others, sometimes in unanticipated ways. To emphasize this interconnectedness, Heim closes each entry with a list of related terms, encouraging the reader to skip around and follow threads of particular interest. In this sense, each entry is an entry point into further exploration, not complete within itself. Sometimes suggested terms point to similar affective states; others are considered enemies or possible antidotes to the emotion in question. Guiding the reader through these intricate ecologies of emotion, Heim lays out some of the therapies that Buddhist texts suggest for uprooting the desires and afflictions that keep us trapped in samsara and paving the way for true joy. Sometimes the pathways to freedom are unexpected: the 5th-century commentator Buddhaghosa suggests that shame and scolding can snap us out of our own hatred and that cultivating disgust can counter lust and vanity. Such paths of emotional cultivation are often contagious, as states like the brahma-viharas tend to break down barriers between self and other so that all may get swept up in the spread of delight.

This contagion can also take place on the page. Many of the treasury’s entries not only describe particular emotions but also evoke them. One such entry is adbhuta (Skt., “wonder, the fantastic”), which Heim defines as stunned amazement. In literature and drama, adbhuta is evoked through fantastic, otherworldly occurrences and images of heavenly beings. But as Heim notes, sometimes wonder can be evoked by something that seems much more mundane. In one sutta, the Buddha’s cousin Ananda is asked to recite the “wonders and marvels” of the Buddha, among them his miraculous birth and his past lives spent in pleasure heavens among the gods. After listening to marvel after marvel, the Buddha adds yet another: that for him, “feelings are known as they occur, as they are present, as they disappear.” He advises Ananda to remember this, too, as a “wonder and marvel of the Buddha.” As Heim glosses this sutta, being fully aware of one’s own emotional experience is a wonder, a miracle. In this light, Words for the Heart offers the reader 177 entry points to wonder. By mining its depths, we may be able to draw closer to the everyday marvel of sharpening our awareness of our own emotional landscape and, in the process, expand our capacity to feel.

♦

Read an interview with Maria Heim by Sarah Fleming here.

The post A Storehouse of Feelings appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In August 2022, the Institute of Buddhist Studies announced that Dr. Paula Arai will join the IBS faculty as the first Eshinni and Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies. The position was established in November 2020 by the IBS Board of Trustees to support a professor specializing in the academic study of women in Buddhism.

Lady Eshinni (1182–1268) was the wife of Shinran Shonin, founder of the Jodo Shinshu Buddhist tradition. Kakushinni (1224–1283) was Eshinni and Shinran’s youngest daughter. Both women played crucial roles in supporting the development of the Jodo Shinshu tradition, both during Shinran’s lifetime and after his death. The IBS board created the position to honor Eshinni and Kakushinni’s contributions to Shin Buddhism and to support contemporary scholars researching women in Buddhism today.

Dr. Arai will assume the position in January 2023. She currently serves as the Urmila Gopal Singhal Professor of Religions of India at Louisiana State University, and her research focuses on the ritual practices of contemporary Japanese Buddhist nuns.

Tricycle spoke with Arai to learn more about her research on the ingenuity of Japanese Buddhist women, why this position is so important right now, and how the field of Buddhist studies can heal from its own constrictions.

Why do you think that this position is so crucial right now? The basic Buddhist project is to stop suffering, and the way to stop suffering is to practice nondual wisdom and cut through ignorance. The history of women in the Buddhist tradition is fraught with a lot of ignorance, particularly about women and women’s bodies. Within the academy, many of the dominant methods, concepts, and categories have arisen out of a limited view of what is worthy of scholarship. It hasn’t been that long that gender has been recognized as an important topic of scholarly inquiry. Right now, I think it’s important that questions of gender are more publicly discussed, particularly in the context of recent legislation regulating women’s bodies and constricting who has the right to be a woman. 

The development of this position is one way of centering this topic. When I was researching Buddhist women thirty years ago, it was as if I were talking in a vacuum and no one could hear. Now, it finally feels like the speakers are turned on. Studying women in the Buddhist tradition is now a valid scholarly topic. I think this is a great development for the field of Buddhist studies since there are so many assumptions that women have not played an active part of the tradition.

How did you first become interested in researching Buddhist women? Back in the 1980s, when I was working on my graduate degree in Buddhist studies, I was looking for a dissertation topic. Although I was studying Japanese Buddhism, I had an opportunity to go to Bodhgaya, India. There, I met a Japanese Buddhist nun. I was very confused: Here I was, about to write a dissertation on Japanese Buddhism, and I had no idea that there were living Japanese Buddhist nuns. I developed a relationship with the nun, and I went to live and study at a Soto Zen nunnery in Nagoya, Japan, where she was a teacher and Shundo Aoyama Roshi was the abbess.

When I was researching Buddhist women thirty years ago, it was as if I were talking in a vacuum and no one could hear. Now, it finally feels like the speakers are turned on.

At the time, there weren’t a lot of contemporary documents about Japanese Buddhist nuns. To get information about them, you had to talk with them, live with them, and learn how they saw the world. So I did just that. At that time, the highest-ranking nun was considered to be lower than the lowest monk. But these women fought for their own inclusion. They established forms of education and training in Buddhist texts and practices. Because they didn’t have institutional support, they had to work hard. When you have to work so hard with minimal resources, it clarifies your determination: What is worth working so hard for?

These women didn’t carry around a sense of being treated in an inferior manner, even though that was structurally what was happening. That thought didn’t help them get through the day. Their goal was to stop suffering. And so if they kept turning to the men for their cues about what they could or could not do, that wasn’t going to help them. Instead, they just studied the Buddhist teachings and found them liberating.

What were some of the challenges that you faced when you first started presenting your research, and what do you see as the major challenges scholars are facing today? When I first started presenting my research in the early 1990s, I was challenged that I only had anecdotes—I didn’t have texts. At that point, textual sources were seen as the mark of rigorous scholarship. Living and talking with people, especially women, was not respected as a serious method of study.

Although the field has opened up in looking at the embodied lived tradition, textual analysis is still the mainstay. We can still learn more from the text-historical material. But in order to grow the field, more voices should be heard and taken seriously. The challenge is for more scholars to be courageous and to question the assumptions about what it means for scholarship to be rigorous.

What types of questions are you paying attention to right now? Recently, there has been more scholarship about misogyny and male chauvinism in the Buddhist tradition. This is a worthy subject to explore. But that’s only part of the story. The question that I want to pay attention to is: How did women respond to this treatment?

The underdog has to know who’s keeping them down in order to survive. The creativity, ingenuity, commitment, and insight of the people who are held down—that’s what I want to look at. There is a powerful, creative force in the Buddhist tradition that can be traced to women’s responses to limiting ideas that are rooted in ignorance. And so I want to keep asking questions using Buddhist tools of analysis: Where’s the ignorance? Where’s the reification?

We can still learn more from the text-historical material. But in order to grow the field, more voices should be heard and taken seriously.

One of the main tenets of Mahayana Buddhism is “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” The particular forms of a body do matter. You can’t just live in the world of emptiness. We live in an embodied way. We see that so starkly in the case of regulations and restrictions imposed on the bodies of women and nonbinary people. So we have to face the particular. We have to examine the particular in the form body and see it through the lens of emptiness so we don’t get stuck in categories.

What excites you about what other scholars are doing to shape the trajectory of Buddhist studies? I’m excited about bringing as many lenses to bear as possible. The textual-historical lens has a lot of power and yields a lot of fabulous information. But looking at what Buddhists are actually doing, whether historically or in the contemporary context, can show us more sides of the tradition. Everything is so context-specific, and it’s hard to make definitive statements. I want to look at the mess. I think more people are doing that.

With human religiosity, there’s always a gap between ideals and reality. In the Buddhist context, there are the ideals of enlightenment and compassion, and then there are the heinous things that have actually happened. It’s important to never lose sight of both of these poles. I think it’s also important for people to feel empowered to use Buddhist teachings to critique parts of the tradition that are limiting or that cause suffering. If a doctrine is reifying a particular category, that will cause suffering. I’m excited that more people seem to be asking, “Is this a reified category? And if so, how do we unpack it and see if there’s another way to respond?”

What are your hopes for this position and for the future of Buddhist studies? I would love to see more people studying and working with the living traditions of Buddhist practice. Although the field has grown in the last thirty years, there are so many more treasures and insights to find. I hope scholars will be able to flourish in their careers and their lives by examining how Buddhists have responded with creativity to forces of oppression and domination.

Healing has been a major focus of my research. For the women I work with in Japan, healing is the aim of Buddhist practice. Enlightenment is very highfalutin, but healing is seen as more accessible and concrete. Healing focuses on practical actions that help remove obstacles that interfere with a fuller perspective of a situation, opening up creative space to breathe and expand possibilities. In a similar way, the field of Buddhist Studies can expand its purview by removing any lingering obstacles to researching and understanding the contributions of women, both in the tradition and in the academy. I hope to use my platform in a chair named after pioneering nuns to support and empower people to grow the field.

The post Dr. Paula Arai, the First Eshinni and Kakushinni Professor of Women and Buddhist Studies, Wants to Help the Field of Buddhist Studies Heal appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.