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If your mind wanders here and there, you must be more mindful. In Pali this is called yoniso manasikara, which can be translated into English as “attend to the root.” You must always learn to go to the root (yoni). The Buddha gave a meaningful simile regarding this starting place for all that is. If you threw a stick or rock, a dog would likely run after it. That dog would either bite it or bring it back to you. A lion would not run after the stick or the rock. He or she would run after you instead! The lion goes to the root, while the dog runs away from it. Unmindful people go after sensory objects and get bewildered. Those who are mindful, on the other hand, want to find the root of the entire process.

♦

From Impermanence in Plain English by Bhante Gunaratana and Julia Harris (Wisdom, 2023). Reprinted with permission.

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I have found a simple image from one of my teachers hugely helpful: “The mind will get filled with qualities like mindfulness or lovingkindness moment by moment—just the way a bucket gets filled with water drop by drop.” As soon as that image appeared in my mind’s eye, I clearly saw two powerful tendencies. One was to stand by the bucket lost in fantasy about how utterly exciting and wonderful it would be when the bucket was filled, and while lost in the glories of my someday enlightenment, I am neglecting to add the next drop. The other tendency, equally strong, was to stand by the bucket in despair at how empty it was and how much more there was to go—once again not having the patience, humility, and good sense to add one drop exactly in that moment.

Because I’ve used this image in my teaching, I’ve heard variations on my own fantasies. Often people come to me and say “I tend to completely overlook my own bucket to peer into someone else’s to see how well they’re doing. Is theirs fuller than mine? Is it emptier? What’s going on over there?” 

Comparison is disempowering. It dissociates us from our own potential. 

Often people say “I think my bucket has a leak.” My response: “These buckets don’t leak.” 

Mindfulness and lovingkindness are not objects we can either have or not have. We can never lose them. We may lose touch with these qualities of heart, but right here and now we can recover them. It is each moment of recovery that adds a drop to the bucket. In every single moment, regardless of what is happening, we can be mindful, we can be compassionate. In an instant, the mind can touch these qualities again, come to know them again. In that sense, the bucket is completely full with every drop. 

Excerpted from Finding Your Way: Meditations, Thoughts, and Wisdom for Living an Authentic Life by Sharon Salzberg (Workman Publishing) © 2023.

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A year ago, I was on a retreat led by Joseph Goldstein, and I admitted to him that I’d been feeling lonely. “I’ve got the antidote to that!” he said, as delighted as I’ve ever seen him.

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes. Write poetry! It comes out of the same space.”

The same space: What could that mean? And how did Joseph come to write poetry? We ended the conversation with his promising to send me some poems and encouraging me to send him mine. So here we are now, he with pages of his poetry and I with a pile of questions.

“Joseph,” I start, “I was so excited to have you prescribe an antidote to loneliness—and to discover you were writing poetry—that I didn’t ask what you meant. What is that space?”

Joseph Goldstein (JG): There’s a line that’s relevant
here . . . [he rifles through his pages]. It’s the title of my poem “Love of My Lonely Hours.” That’s the feeling.

Years ago,
winter brought joy.
Now,
love of my lonely hours
fills the winter grey silence
and poems,
like Christmas candles,
illuminate the night.

Amy Gross (AG): So the poetry comes out of loneliness?

JG: We need to parse what loneliness means, because for me loneliness has more to do with the feeling of aloneness than feeling diminished or abandoned or contracted . . .

AG: . . . which is what most people would associate with the word lonely?

JG: Yes, but when loneliness transfigures into aloneness, there’s a poignancy to that space and an emptiness and a stillness and a gentleness—it’s all those qualities that give rise to poetry.

AG: After that retreat, when I would feel a stab of loneliness, I’d remember what you said, get interested in the feeling, and almost immediately feel that I was not alone. There was a sense of communion in that space, of listening, waiting and listening. I was in some kind of dialogue. I wasn’t alone.

JG: So this ties into my one- or two-paragraph book [he grins] called “The Myth of Intimacy.” The myth of intimacy is that you need two people to have intimacy. But “intimate” is another word for this space—it’s so intimate the way it’s experienced; it doesn’t need another person.

AG: You’re reminding me of a line from Rumi: “There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen.” What are we listening to?

JG: To quote another poet, Pessoa,

Live, you say, in the present;
Live only in the present.
But I don’t want the present. I want reality.

So in a way it’s listening to—I was going to say messages, but it’s not exactly a message. It’s just opening to some underlying reality that may be obscured in the busyness of our lives. When we’re in this quiet space, we are very intimate with what’s going on. So, for example, one of the poems goes like this:

Bird song
in the open sky
of my mind

That came when I was doing walking meditation outside. The normal understanding of reality is that the birds are up there in the sky, and I’m here and I’m listening to the bird. But in that moment there was no separation between up there and in here. I think one other quality of the poetic mind space is that it’s very sensitized. It’s very delicate and sensitive to things that are normally covered over. It can be a moment of seeing something new or having a new perception. In aloneness, it has the space to flower. And it’s appreciating the stillness and quiet in which the words can sparkle.

AG: Which reminds me of your poem about how you started writing poetry:

The Muse
Something happened
in my seventy-fifth year—
a channel opened
to oceans of space,
where words sparkle
in their sparse delight
calling, calling, calling.

You’re being called. And you notice being called. In your teaching, you’ve often talked about Noticings Per Minute—“NPMs”— how, with practice, the number of thoughts, sensations, emotions noticed goes up. The more we practice, the more mind space is available to be aware, to notice. “The Muse” is saying that when you’re alone, there’s an openness, an undistractedness, so when phenomena arise, you’ve got the mind space not only to notice them but also to let them flower—flower into poetry?

JG: What I love about the practice of poetry is crafting language. That itself—there’s great satisfaction in it. There was a big turning point when I first started writing. I showed some of the work to a really accomplished poet friend of mine, and she said something that changed my whole attitude toward writing. She said it was all about revision. I had been in this very enthusiastic, rather sophomoric state where I thought every word that came out of my mind or my pen was perfect from the start, which is ridiculous.

AG: That brings me to something I read in preparing for this conversation with you. In an anthology called Beneath a Single Moon: Buddhism and Contemporary American Poetry, the Zen priest and poet Norman Fischer mentions Allen Ginsberg’s famous writing instruction: “First thought, best thought.” Philip Whalen questions that, saying “‘First thought, best thought’ is different from ‘first word, best word.’” Leading Fischer to confide to the reader: “Allen does a lot of rewriting.”

JG: Exactly. I can see “first thought” as that spark of insight you might get about something. For example, I was just sitting with morning coffee, quiet, in that space of enjoying the solitude, and my mind and body went into noticing and feeling how everything was continually disappearing. That was the first thought for a poem, noticing that everything is swirling down the drain of time. But then there was a long process of building out from it and a huge amount of revision. So the final thing—final for now—was completely different from the first draft.

AG: When a moment of noticing arises, do you start playing with it in your mind, or do you pick up a writing instrument and go to a pad?

 JG: I’ll start off often with an insight, an abstract insight. Like with “The Drain of Time,” the first thing I wrote was the line that you’ve heard many, many times: “The thought of your mother is not your mother; it’s just a thought”—and then I noticed that that thought too had gone down the drain. So I was trying to build around that. But then I realized—and this is part of my own learning—it’s a little too philosophical or abstract. For a better poem, I needed to bring it down into the stuff of the world.

AG: “No ideas but in things,” William Carlos Williams said.

JG: “Show, don’t tell,” said one of the poets giving me feedback. So that’s part of my learning. Because my mind is so philosophically oriented, my first scribblings often start with the more abstract, but then I cut that away. I really love that part of the process. I think of Michelangelo, who said that he cut away through stone to reveal the figure that was there. With writing, it’s almost like sculpting space through words. Deletion is the best because then the poem gets pure and sparse.

AG: That taste for the pure and sparse seems to be a mark of contemporary poetry. In an essay in Beneath the Moon, Allen Ginsberg wrote “For most of the Moderns [Pound, William Carlos Williams, Jack Kerouac] . . . the motive for poetry has been purification of mind and speech. . . . Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with a phenomenal universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it.” Poetry writing certainly sounds like a meditation practice: You go into the silence. Rilke says “you walk into yourself. . . .”

JG: Or walk into nonself or walk into emptiness.

AG: Rilke writes that solitude was the necessary condition for his poetry, and then, interestingly, he says this: “What is happening in your innermost self is worthy of your entire love.” That’s how I’ve come to understand meditation—as meeting every little thing that arises with love. Here’s Rilke again: “There is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, and difficult to bear. What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, a vast inner solitude to walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours is what you must be able to attain.”

JG: I think people who are somewhat experienced in meditation have already gone through what is “vast, heavy, and difficult to bear.” For me, not only is it not difficult or hard to bear, it is a joy. I love that space. And that also could be a link between the meditative process and the creative process of writing.

AG: I happened to open Maxine Hong Kingston’s book To Be the Poet. She had decided she had written her last long book—now she was going to become a poet. She was going to be in the moment. She asked two of her poet friends how to get the poems coming, one of the friends being Tess Gallagher. Both said you have to clear a day. No distractions. It sounds like retreat.

JG: Clearing space is a beautiful image, but I’ll say that having done many retreats and so cleared a lot of days already, I think it need not be a whole day—clearing the morning would work, and sometimes it’s simply the quiet space of a few moments. The mind needs to be quiet, and depending on how much training one has had in quieting the mind, it takes less or more time to do it.

AG:  For you, Joseph, in this space, what often arises is contemplation of aging.

JG: Which was not planned. That itself was interesting. I didn’t have it in my mind with a thought like “Oh, I want to write about the aging process.” These moments are just what came up.

AG: You’re asking a lot of questions. Here’s “Lazy Day at 76”:

Morning coffee
and a first glimpse
into the unknown day,
waiting for that pulse of life
to push through the pale joy
of sitting,
doing nothing.

Going for a walk
is almost too much
on this day of questionable ease:
Is it simply resting up
to save the world
or the faint glimmer of decline?
I’ll decide tomorrow
if I awaken in the morning light.

I remember your saying, decades ago, that meditation is practice for dying. I think about that a lot, more and more every year. One thing you’re doing in these poems is embodying ways to face the signposts with a level head, opening to the uncertainties around death.

JG: Yes, I just recently came up with “The Harbingers” as a title for the first group of poems because they were all harbingers of aging, dying, death. To me, practice for dying is implicit in all the questions about aging. There may be an unacknowledged acknowledgment of the fact that it’s coming, but it’s in there even if it’s not named explicitly.

AG:  I teach mindfulness to a group of elders, and, frankly, I’ve been afraid to share your idea that meditation is practice for dying. I dodge it by saying it’s practice for aging.

JG: Right, but in your class, it would be interesting to test the waters, and drop the D-word a few times, because my impression is that people, as they get older, are very aware of death and that it’s coming. It may be a huge relief for them to talk about it. It’s like something Sharon [Salzberg] said early on. When she first came to Buddhism, she was so relieved to hear the first noble truth—that suffering was acknowledged. It’s kind of the same thing with death. I think people may be relieved to have that opened up. Especially as they get older, in one way or another people know that they’re going to die, whether they really let it in or not. How can you be a certain age and not think about it?

AG: I’m going to try it.

JG: I’ll be interested to hear how it goes, and maybe you’ll say “Boy, Joseph, that was a stupid idea.” Since we don’t know how people will respond, you put it out and have to be very sensitive to the response. Some people won’t go there, and that’s fine. But other people may want to.

AG: Another remark about writing struck me as relevant to what you’re doing. Here’s the Native American poet Joy Harjo: “Poetry is going to the places that have no words and finding the words.” And that too can describe what happens on retreat, in meditation. You can be overtaken by a feeling and respond with curiosity: What is it? Where’d it come from? And then you find the words to understand what arose.

JG: Well, I think that one of the experiences people have on retreats is a very intimate experience with the breath, with the body, with emotions, because there’s no separation. That’s kind of the essence of intimacy: nonseparation. It’s just oneself getting out of the way. The Chinese poet Li Po ended a poem with these words: “We live together, the mountain and me, until only the mountain remains.” So that’s kind of meditative. When we take ourselves out of the picture, then all that’s left is everything. To me, that is the definition of intimacy.

AG: This ties right into Norman Fischer on what meditation can do. “The grip on self can very naturally loosen, the grip on meaning loosens, and there is the possibility of entering wholeheartedly into a dark or unknown territory.”

 JG: Or into a light and unknown territory.

AG: Yes! Once again, you’re reframing the emotional tone from frightening to delightful. In fact, Fischer goes on: “An interesting footnote is that it is not a struggle. It is the release from struggle.” After that retreat with you, I was sitting at my table facing the water and sky. The table is white, it’s shiny and reflective—and a bird in the sky streaked across it. It felt like it streaked through me too. There was a recognition of nonseparation, and the possibility of doing something with that sensation—it was a poetic moment. There wasn’t the agony of writing or the anguished-writer self. It was a gift.

JG: Yes, that’s exactly my experience. Something happens, or there’s a perception or an insight, and it sparks that interest in expressing it. So where’s your poetry?

 AG: I have nothing to show—I make notes, I pull away from them. But our conversation gave me the courage to be curious: When a friend who is a poet and meditation teacher offered an evening of teaching poetry, I actually dared go to it. And then I signed up for a Ruth Ozeki writing workshop at the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. Before our conversation, I would have been too writing-phobic to participate. At the end of the retreat, Ruth asked us to say what our plan for writing was. I said “I am never going to write something for publication, and I’m going to really enjoy writing.” She looked a little startled.

JG: That makes perfect sense. 

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I once fell in love with a person who interrupted our stroll in the middle of a crowded street, took my face in his hands, and told me that he never wanted to spend any time apart from me. We’d been a couple for nearly half a year and had decided to take a day trip to New Haven (where I’d gone to school) to explore the city’s art museums and my old haunts. We walked down Chapel Street on a bright spring day and ducked into a bookstore where we kissed in the nonfiction section and bought cards to write to each other. We caffeinated at a coffee shop where I used to study, and I took him to each dorm where I’d lived. We gazed up at the windows and he kissed my forehead, telling me he wished he’d known me then.

But even during our first week together, amid the fever pitch of our early relationship, a sentence arose, unbidden, in my mind: All things contain the seed of their own destruction. I was startled. The voice was kind, not dire; the words felt more like wisdom than a warning. I paid attention but ultimately dismissed them.

I had heard this lesson, expressed myriad ways, ever since I was a child. My parents, both devout Hindus, taught my brother and me that change is life’s only constant: the sky would always darken after a sunset, green leaves would always burn crimson in the autumn, and our bodies would grow feeble as the years passed. My father still reminds me that suffering ensues when we expect things to be permanent though they are not. 

As a palliative care doctor, I encounter the most marked manifestation of impermanence every day: that of bodily illness and death. There is the young man with end-stage stomach cancer that had shrunk with chemotherapy only to invade his liver and lungs quite suddenly; the older woman with Parkinson’s whose tremors were manageable until one day they grew so severe that she couldn’t walk anymore; the gentleman with heart failure who gasped when he spoke, his breathlessness worsening each day. My patients often share photos of who they used to be, their bodies fuller, their smiles wide. Sometimes memory is their sharpest pain: I felt so good a few months ago when the chemotherapy was still working. Why did it stop working? I’m taking all of my medications, so why is my breathing getting worse? 

Dying is a series of incremental losses: We become newly dependent on others to walk or change our clothes. Our appetites fade. Pain forces us to part ways with activities that once brought us joy. My patients and I often talk about living amid the chilling uncertainty that accompanies illness, and they tell me how they have coped with intense change in the past. Most haven’t deeply considered the philosophy of impermanence, but those who embrace it tell me about the freedom it confers. A body that grows weaker is slightly less shocking. Shifts in relationships are normalized. When receptivity to change supplants resistance, grief can feel like a gentler presence.

Yet everyday life is also a series of losses. And outside the hospital I couldn’t easily translate the philosophy I discussed with my patients into my daily life. My partner and I read each other poetry in each of our native languages and laughed when my dog gave him endless kisses. He didn’t want to disclose our relationship to an ex-girlfriend; I wondered whether I could trust him. We cooked elaborate meals for each other and sent the other home with leftovers. We talked seriously about how we’d combine our families’ traditions on our wedding day and discussed when we might have a child. When we fought about our differing communication styles, I grew distant and unable to express my concern for fear of seeming needy.

What made the relationship real was also what made it unbearable: the constant presence of change. 

While I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

Much of what I do as a doctor and a writer depends on observation: How do people behave when everything is on the line? What do they do when they think that nobody is looking? Who do they try to be, and why? Both practices demand control, the opposite of surrender. I’d told myself a story about my partner and our relationship, clinging unintentionally to a static image of each. Yet I’d forgotten that every story is ultimately about change. And while I could accept the idea of impermanence when helping my patients contend with dying and suffering, I couldn’t do the same when living my life.

A few months later I flew to New York to attend a friend’s wedding. I sent my partner photos of the newlyweds and the cake; he sent back pictures of himself cuddling my dog. The day I returned, his texts were distant. When he stopped by that night, he gave me a brief hug and spoke to me in a detached voice, as though I were a stranger. 

“I don’t think we should be together anymore,” he said.

I couldn’t find my words. I could barely feel the couch beneath me. I made sure that I was awake, that this was actually happening, that the person who couldn’t meet my eyes was the same person whose voicemail yesterday had said he couldn’t wait to see me. Shock rendered me silent: I couldn’t think to ask what went wrong, or whether he thought our relationship was worth at least a conversation about what happened. And though we agreed to take some time to consider the best path forward, he texted me a few days later, his tone formal, professional. Though he respected and cared for me, ending our relationship was the rational and logical thing to do, he said. I didn’t know what to say. I never wrote him back.

We don’t know when the diagnosis will come. We don’t know when the disease will worsen. We don’t know when love will arrive. We don’t know when it will fade. We can only know that the unexpected will happen, that certainty is a falsity, and that things will be impermanent regardless of how tightly we clench our fists around them. We mourn the brief lives of solitary moments, hoping that running reels through our minds might resuscitate them. And no matter how often my own life has shown me this truth, I relearn it in new ways each time loss arrives.

The loss of a relationship is not the same as the loss of a life. Suffering a sudden betrayal is not the same as dying from heart failure. Yet both can teach us how to cultivate a new relationship to surrender and acceptance. This doesn’t require forgetting or denying the past. It requires only that we examine it like a series of photographic stills, impressions we can retain and learn from with compassion instead of judgment.

In the days after our conversation, I lost my appetite and lay awake at night alternately crying and devoid of emotion. As I drove to work each morning, I tried to corral my emotions by remembering what I knew intellectually but couldn’t yet feel: Surrender is the path to salvation. Experiencing equanimity requires welcoming change. Embracing the ubiquity of transformation can offer transcendence. Yet I still searched for the reasons why the relationship had ended so abruptly, though this effort was nothing more than submission to an undertow: I found myself floundering in the depths, the search for an anchor perpetually elusive.

Not long thereafter, I sat with an elderly woman who hadn’t seen a doctor for fifty years. She felt her back snap one afternoon while gardening. Lung cancer had spread to her spine. She was too frail for chemotherapy. “I was fine until I suddenly wasn’t,” she said, looking out of the window at the gray sky that blanketed the city. I thought of Joan Didion’s famous lines: “Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant.” 

As I left her room, I realized that in between the moment he’d left me a longing voicemail and the moment he knocked on my door, the only certainty was change. The way I’d felt in our first month together could never last, because it was the way we felt together in that first month. The second month existed only because the first had passed. And as time marched on, so did every sweet and hard moment of our relationship. The times when we saw in each other an unvarnished goodness coexisted with the times when the pain between us made it hard to look at one another. 

All things contain the seed of their own destruction—including the confusion and shock I initially felt. For even finitude offers gifts: though we will lose the things we can’t release, we will also lose the things we can’t wait to let go of. As I loosened my grip on the relationship I’d lost, as accepting its mystery became more important than understanding its demise, I began to feel how surrender begets both freedom and forgiveness. 

He would always be the person who bought me a beautiful card he’d never write, the one who said he’d never told anyone besides me about his depression, the one who accused me of holding him at a distance when I didn’t share my every feeling, the one whose mother had never met any of his other girlfriends, the one who gave me books I still reread, the one I’d see around afterward, both of us knowing I’d chosen to say nothing about something that had once meant everything. 

In the months that followed, when I thought of him, new lines came to mind, these from Mary Oliver: 

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift. 

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The Buddhist and the Ethicist: Conversations on Effective Altruism, Engaged Buddhism, and How to Build a Better World
by Peter Singer and Shih Chao-Hwei
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 264 pp., $21.95, paper

The Buddhist and the Ethicist is the culmination of a five-year conversation between Peter Singer, a utilitarian ethicist and animal liberation advocate, and Shih Chao-Hwei, an engaged Buddhist nun, academic, and activist who champions gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Ethics is active—something to be done rather than a fixed opinion—and in this fascinating book, Singer and Chao-Hwei explore dynamic topics, including animal welfare, capital punishment, gender equality, and the foundations of both Buddhism and ethics.

The Lost Art of Silence: Reconnecting to the Power and Beauty of Quiet
by Sarah Anderson
Shambhala Publications, December 2023, 304 pp., $21.95, paper

Sarah Anderson, a painter and writer who opened the famed Travel Bookshop in London’s Notting Hill in 1979, provides a thorough meditation on silence: its essentialness and elusiveness, as well as the very human impulse to fill our worlds with “vacuous sound.” The book includes sections on religion and spirituality, the arts, and “darker” silence realms like war and prison. Woven through are histories and anecdotes from great thinkers, artists, contemplatives, and other silence enthusiasts who can inspire our own quest to find silence in the unlikeliest of places.

Buddhism and Loss: Navigating Grief, Adversity and Change
by Diane Esguerra
Mud Pie Books, 2023, 114 pp., $8.95, paper

The first noble truth reminds us that life contains suffering, and Diane Esguerra—a psychotherapist and Soka Gakkai practitioner—very skillfully writes about the many different ways loss comes into our lives, from the deaths of those closest to us, to our youth, to the funds in our bank account. Through Buddhist wisdom and contemporary case studies, Esguerra demonstrates how practice can help us through the losses we’ll inevitably experience, and how mindfully navigating loss can help us better appreciate all aspects of the human experience.

Scholar’s Corner

Buddhist Masculinities
edited by Mega Bryson and Kevin Buckelew
Columbia University Press, September 2023, 352 pp., $35.00, paper

Buddhist literature is full of idealized sacred and mundane physical perfections; often, those aesthetic ideals refer to men. Examining a wide range of Buddhist maleness—from narratives of morally superior monks and demon-taming tantric heroes to depictions of irresistible buddhas and bodhisattvas with sensuous bodies and jeweled smiles—Buddhist Masculinities expands on contemporary gender and intersectionality studies, merging a variety of methodological approaches. This much-needed transdisciplinary book pays critical attention to how ideas of masculinity have embodied, defined, and legitimized power and virtue in diverse Buddhist contexts. A must-read for practitioners and scholars alike.

WHAT WE’RE REREADING

Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha
by Tara Brach

Now approaching its twentieth anniversary, this modern classic by Buddhist teacher and psychologist Tara Brach continues to find new audiences. “Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” Brach writes, offering readers a path to freedom and fulfillment through the eponymous practice. Utilizing a mix of psychology and Buddhism, the book aims to guide readers out of the strictures we create for ourselves with guided meditations and a discussion of the Jungian shadow self, the repository of our negative emotions.

–Philip Ryan, executive editor

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The architect of the Indian constitution. The drafter of the Hindu Code Bill, which permitted Indians from different castes to marry and extended equal rights to men and women. The man who believed Buddhism was the only way to liberation, leading hundreds of thousands of Dalits (“untouchables”) to convert to Buddhism and escape the oppression of the caste system. What Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891–1956) achieved was in many ways unthinkable given the tremendous discrimination he faced as a young Dalit. But, had Ambedkar not met and married a young doctor named Sharada Kabir, it’s unlikely that he would have been able to accomplish nearly as much as he did during the last decade of his life.

Kabir, who became known as Dr. Savita Ambedkar after their marriage in 1948, published her memoir in the Marathi language in 1990. In 2022, nearly twenty years after her death, Babasaheb: My Life with Dr Ambedkar was published in English for the first time. Translated by Nadeem Khan, Babasaheb gives English speakers an insightful look into Savita’s complicated commitment to serving her husband—whom many consider a bodhisattva—as a companion, caretaker, and trustworthy confidante during watershed moments in modern Indian history. 

Savita was born in 1909 to what she described as a progressive Brahmin family. Graduating with a bachelor of medicine and surgery from Grant Medical College in 1937, Savita worked as a junior doctor for Dr. Madhavrao Malvankar in Mumbai before accepting a position as chief medical officer of a women’s government hospital in Gujarat. But facing some health issues, she returned to Mumbai and resumed her work with Malvankar. 

Enter B. R. Ambedkar. Savita writes that she wasn’t familiar with him before meeting him at a friend’s house. He was “deeply concerned about women’s progress” and congratulated the young doctor on her accomplishments, Savita Ambedkar writes; they also discussed Buddhism in their early meetings, leaving her “literally goggle-eyed with wonder.”

Though Ambedkar had the elegance of a German prince and the stamina of a high-ranking politician, he was suffering from a number of significant health issues (including diabetes, rheumatism, high blood pressure, and neuritis), which were put on the back burner while he worked on the constitution in 18- to 20-hour stretches. He sought the medical advice of Dr. Malvankar, whom Savita Ambedkar worked with as a junior doctor. 

The Ambedkars’ marriage started as more of a medical commitment than a romance: Savita had offered to live with him to oversee his treatment, diet, and rest; Ambedkar instead proposed, in part because “for the sake of millions of my people, I have to live on.”

“His personality, his work, his sacrifice, his scholarship, they were all mightier than the Himalayas. Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon. How was one to turn down a great person like Dr. Ambedkar?” Savita writes. “The doctor inside me was prodding me to go and serve him medically. The government had placed upon his shoulders the historic responsibility of drafting the Constitution of free India, and therefore it was utterly imperative that his health should be well looked after, and he should be given appropriate treatment.” 

She accepted, and they were married on April 15, 1948, less than three months after Gandhi was assassinated. “From then on till the last moment I stayed with him ceaselessly like his shadow,” she writes.

“Placed against his lofty personality, I was an utterly shrunken phenomenon.”

Over the past several years, I’ve had a number of conversations with a dharma friend about the faults of applying modern thinking to the lives of ancient Buddhist women. She is working on a book about the Buddha’s birth mother and views Mayadevi as the goddess she is; to compare her to an earthly woman makes no sense, because she was divinely chosen to be the Buddha’s mother. We can take inspiration from her qualities, but to try to think of her as a woman in our world is futile.

In that sense, it was more comfortable for me to think about Savita Ambedkar’s life as a dharma story rather than the biography of a modern woman. When I begin viewing her life through a feminist lens, I see only what she gave up to be the “shadow,” the constant companion and caretaker of one of the most important men of independent India. 

The few glimpses we get of Savita are inspiring and fierce: when Ambedkar was so ill that his constant stream of visitors would not help his condition improve, Savita cut meetings short, or refused to let them start in the first place, so that he could rest. Although they employed a cook, Savita would prepare his food with healing in mind; she taught him yoga asanas and made sure he had oil massages to help with circulation. Savita kept Ambedkar on a strict schedule, helped bathe and dress him; Savita made it possible for him to read and write into the night and work on legislation that affected millions of people at the time (and all the generations to come). Indeed, the ink was still drying on edits and corrections to The Buddha and His Dhamma when Ambedkar died in his sleep on December 6, 1956. 

Yet following Ambedkar’s death, Savita was forced into obscurity. Some of Ambedkar’s followers even alleged that she had murdered him, and a significant amount of the memoir is spent establishing Ambedkar’s health history and how she likely prolonged his life. Though she was effectively blocked from politics, Savita found friends among the younger generation of social reformers in the seventies and eighties, garnering respect from the Dalit Panthers, radical anticaste thinkers who were inspired by Ambedkar, Karl Marx, Buddhism, and groups like the Black Panthers in the US. 

Early on in the book, Savita compares herself to Yashodhara, the Buddha’s wife. Like Yashodhara, about whom we know little from Buddhist literature, Savita’s innermost thoughts and dreams remain a mystery. We are instead left wondering what we might do if a bodhisattva came into our lives. Would we set aside everything to serve them too?

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When regrets about my failures and misfortunes begin to overwhelm me and my life feels disappointing, I have learned to seek guidance from two of my spiritual heroes, the Zen master Taizan Maezumi Roshi (1931–1995) and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Maezumi Roshi once responded to my expressions of remorse for opportunities lost as he had to many other practitioners at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. Smiling gently but unable to resist the urge to tease me, he said that I had so far failed to appreciate my life. “Please encourage yourself,” he had also written, “so that your practice is fully to appreciate this transient, frenzied life as the whole self-contained, self-fulfilled life.” And Nietzsche, whose suffering and loss were exponentially greater than mine, came to believe that the ultimate challenge in life is amor fati, to love your fate. Think of “fate” here as the simple, unchangeable “given”: what simply is, whether we like it or not. For Nietzsche, self-pity, disabling regret, and disappointment that reality is the way it is or that the past was what it was were clear signs of spiritual weakness. In Ecce Homo, he writes: “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: . . . not just to bear the given, the necessary, still less to conceal it . . . but to love it.”

Excellent advice from both Maezumi and Nietzsche, but without serious reflection, I would have probably responded by saying something like, “Oh, sure. Of course I appreciate my life. There have been amazingly good times, times of plentitude and peace, times of friendship, love, and laughter. I reflect back on these with gratitude and appreciation.” But this response wouldn’t have satisfied these two contemplative spirits. Maezumi would most likely have sighed in loving disappointment; Nietzsche would have scowled in open condemnation. They hadn’t exhorted me to appreciate and love only the good things in life—the pleasures, successes, and victories. They had challenged me to appreciate the whole mess—pleasant and painful—and to love what can’t be changed, no matter how debilitating it has been. They had directed me to love it all, the good, the bad, and the ugly, because there it is: reality, staring me in the face.

But is that feasible—to love and appreciate my injuries and sicknesses, my humiliating weaknesses, my dishonesty, greed, and egocentricity, and the numerous acts of cowardice by which I have hidden all this from everyone? Am I somehow to love everything I should have done but didn’t, everything I shouldn’t have done but did? I cringe every time I bring any of that to mind. Even though I would prefer to be oblivious to all of these weaknesses of character and pretend that they don’t exist, they frequently come unbidden to mind, often accompanied by a growing sense of disappointment. Regrets, guilt, and shame don’t necessarily outnumber the successes, pride, and pleasures in my life, but they do weigh more heavily on me.

So if Maezumi and Nietzsche meant loving the whole of my life, including the humiliating failures of spirit, the challenge is magnified enormously. But why should I appreciate the unappreciable? Why even attempt to love the seemingly unlovable dimensions of my past, my character, and whatever life has doled out? Even if this demand were intellectually plausible, it would still strike me as viscerally unpalatable. But taking their admonitions seriously, given my respect for these two insightful teachers, I realize that what they were teaching was their realization that spiritual depth and human shallowness are inseparable. They are always found together.

If we have imagined that the great Zen master and the world-renowned philosopher didn’t face excruciating failures and setbacks or experience suffering or make mistakes as we have, we would be dead wrong and would have missed the point of their teachings. In fact, the tales of woe in these two lives approach tragic dimensions. They both faced extreme hardship, suffering, even humiliation, but in visionary moments, they broke through to the other side of these difficulties, tapping into an enormous reservoir of personal power. In that awareness, they witnessed the magnificent beauty of all life just as it is, encompassing, as it does, inconceivable difficulties, hardships, and challenges. They experienced the miracle that this present reality has unfolded precisely as it has.

The crucial point is this: Because we are finite beings, pain, failure, and depression are inevitably woven into the very fabric of our lives. To accept that basic fact is to finally come to terms with what it means to be human. This fundamental self-acceptance is the basis of self-respect, and self-respect is the seed and substance of an awakened life. Because the past is what it is and, as a result, I am who I am, my task is to embrace the whole of my life without denial or revulsion. Lacking that level of self-integration, I’m not really working with who I am, thereby disabling the only chance I have to make skillful, transformative moves in life. As both Nietzsche and Maezumi knew, the most vibrant individuals are those who have learned to smile upon all aspects of their experience with open, honest inclusion.

Recognizing who you are and learning to be at ease with it is the essential, nonnegotiable point of departure for any greater profundity in life. It is only through a disciplined integration of all dimensions of our past that we learn to work through the problems that have been so disabling and, on that basis, to work creatively with the world. Nietzsche called this reintegration of the past “knowledge acquired through suffering,” and it’s what Buddhists contemplate in their meditations on human suffering. These practices demand unflinching honesty, a level of truthfulness and openness about our lives that is not easy to acquire. The Perfection of Wisdom sutras upon which Maezumi’s Mahayana Buddhism was founded stress the idea that the capacity to tolerate the truth about oneself and the world—to set aside self-placating delusions and face the way things really are—is absolutely essential to the awakening of freedom in life. Nietzsche frequently wrote that one measure of spiritual strength is how much truth you can bear. Being able to maintain a courageous inner dialogue between successes and failures, joys and suffering, strengths and weaknesses requires the capacity to face the truth and to gather all aspects of your life into an intelligible whole. Love the truth, Maezumi and Nietzsche seem to be saying, whatever that is, because the truth will set you free.

This truth about my life includes far more than my own choices and decisions. It also encompasses aspects of my life that I had no role in creating—the imprints of family, community, culture, language, and the long and complicated history of our species. All of this just happened—it is my fate or destiny. It includes accidents that have befallen me, humiliations and suffering that have come my way through no particular fault of my own. We must somehow embrace not only what we did or didn’t do but also what’s been done to us and what simply happened for whatever reasons. To regret or deny or resent any part of this is what Buddhists call delusion. Maezumi and Nietzsche exhort me to embrace it all as the essential content of my life—not just to accept it but to appreciate and love it.

With that in mind, we can see that what both Maezumi Roshi and Nietzsche were pursuing was something much larger than just appreciating or loving their own individual lives. What they both aspired to appreciate and love is life itself, the agonies and the sublimities of all living beings. For Maezumi, this is the basis of the bodhisattva’s vow to absorb the suffering of all sentient beings and take the challenge to redeem it, to make it right. Maezumi called this “wisdom sought for the sake of everyone.” Beyond the Zen master’s own personal awakening, then, is the depth dimension of that goal—the awakening of their community, of the entire species so that all human beings might participate in the creation of a new world. By extending their sense of responsibility as far as possible beyond their individual lives, Maezumi and Nietzsche imagined themselves embracing all humanity and all life. And they aspired to do this not just in thought and intention but in everything they do.

Still, I wonder how to go about loving what I quite honestly don’t love. Where do I even begin? Nietzsche suggests the answer in a paragraph in The Gay Science entitled “One must learn to love.” He starts with our love of music, showing how that love wasn’t simply innate but was cultivated over long stretches of time through much listening. We listen repeatedly until the music becomes part of us. And it is not just love of music that is acquired this way, Nietzsche says. We had to learn to love everything we now love through patience and discipline until gradually a space opens within us for that new love to reside. “There is no other way,” he tells us. “Even love has to be learned.” Even the love and appreciation of oneself. So Nietzsche challenges himself: Amor fati—to love the given, what cannot be changed. “Let that be my love from now on,” he writes. “Someday I want only to be a Yes-sayer.”

Becoming a “Yes-sayer” means affirming all past and present reality as the necessary starting point for creating a new future. But how is this affirmation to be accomplished? Through practice, Maezumi Roshi says. Daily, focused, mindful practice of mental-spiritual disciplines specifically designed to enable embracing reality as it is, without excuses, avoidances, or delusions. Embracing it fully allows us to work with it by bringing all positive powers at our disposal to bear on it: presence of mind, attentiveness, energy, kindness, patience, courage, generosity, wisdom, compassion—and finally, love. These can be learned, and even if this aspiration feels like it’s too far beyond us, for Maezumi and Nietzsche, the path of that transformative learning is simple and right here where we already are: Carefully designed intentions. Daily practice. Simple steps. Just do it.

The joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom.

Although in his era Nietzsche’s culture lacked the explicit and highly sophisticated practices of interior transformation that Buddhists had been developing for over two millennia, he had mastered the essential formula—“long practice and daily work”—and attempted to apply it in his own way. Nietzsche called this kind of self-discipline “a rare and great art” and knew from experimenting with his own life that through the everyday practices of self-acceptance and self-sculpting, human beings could “experience their most exquisite pleasure.” This pleasure, the joy of waking up to who and where you are—and loving it—is an ecstatic experience of freedom. So when Nietzsche asks himself “What is the seal of having become free?” he answers, “No longer to be ashamed before oneself.” That’s saying it plainly: the “seal,” or sign of freedom, is that you have learned to love your fate, to appreciate your life, and by pushing through debilitating shame, to tap into the selfless energy of openhearted living.

The post Why Should I Appreciate Life? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Did the Chinese beat you?” the little girl asked me. It was the first sentence I heard when I arrived in Dharamsala on a miserably cold December night in 1983. The bus shook and rattled up the winding mountain road. I was tired and my head felt swollen, but I said, “Yes.” It sounded right.

I was born in a remote village to the northwest of the immense Tibetan Plateau. We had no running water, electricity, or paved roads. The most advanced thing, to the wonderment of the villagers, was one family’s sewing machine. In the daytime, grown-ups dug canals or worked in the fields. In the evening, at the blow of the whistle, they attended meetings at the commune hall, where cadres made them recite from Mao’s Little Red Book. It was during these meetings that people were indoctrinated along the Party line to show absolute allegiance to the leadership of the Great Helmsman. At the end of each meeting, they strained their throats shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” Everyone learned to hold their tongue, to obey orders and instructions to the letter. No one had to think.

Occasionally, soldiers would arrive at our village on horseback, dressed in faded green uniforms and chain-smoking. They were treated with respect. Large meetings were staged in the village square, during which these important people made long speeches that were then translated for the villagers. The soldiers inspected the new canals, the commune’s prayer-hall-turned-donkey-sheds, and the barley fields where red flags fluttered. They were nice to kids, often giving us candies. They didn’t scold us or chase us away for begging them to hand out more.

Nevertheless, years later, on that wet winter night in India, I told the little girl that the Chinese beat me. “I know,” she said. “They are terrible people.”

Layers of confusion enveloped me when I was sent into exile. To begin with, I didn’t know that the Chinese were different from us. I couldn’t understand why my great-uncle hated the blue canvas shoes, steel mugs, and other items that my mother bought from the commune store; or why the Red Guards had destroyed the monastery in front of our house. I didn’t know why I had to be smuggled out of Tibet.

I have had decades to find answers to these questions, to dig into our history and the political dilemma we find ourselves in today. The years away from home have transformed me into a vastly different person from the small boy whom my parents—at my great-uncle’s advice—sent away to become a monk at the Dalai Lama’s monastery in Dharamsala.

My great-uncle was the abbot of the local monastery in Old Tibet, and his faith in religion was as unshakable as his resolution not to flee in the aftermath of the occupation. This belief was based on his understanding of Buddhism and trust that ultimately ley-gyu-dey: “The law of karma prevails.” Even during the worst years of the Cultural Revolution, when he became the commune’s shepherd, he continued to chant his daily mantras in the company of grazing sheep and goats, away from the prying eyes of the cadres. Until his death in 1988, he never betrayed his belief and steadfastly maintained his monastic vows.

When reality knocks at the door, other things flee through the window.

My father, on the other hand, was a product of the great historical upheaval that had turned his familiar world upside down and forced him into a new socialist world, where the old value system had no practical application in life’s daily struggle. His faith in religion was shallow and his understanding of the politics of occupation and suppression was even more limited. He smoked and drank. Worse still, he bought canned pork, fish, and chicken (Tibetans generally don’t eat these, and they were strictly prohibited in our house) while my great-uncle was away in the hills with the flock. My father also befriended some of the men who, I learned many years later, were the first to volunteer when Red Guards ordered the destruction of the monastery that my great-uncle had presided over.

Once, when our rationed stock of barley was running low, my father wanted to sell the bronze Buddha image that our family had managed to hide during the destructive years of the Cultural Revolution. A heated argument broke out between my great-uncle and my father. “You cannot sell it,” Great-Uncle said, sitting cross-legged, kneading his rosary. This was in the early 1980s when there was a slight relaxing of the policy over religion in Tibet.

“We need money to buy food,” my father said, rolling up the sleeves of his chupa like a butcher about to slaughter a sheep.

“It’s sinful. This will bring no good.” Great-Uncle didn’t raise his voice, but I noticed that his aged fingers were rolling hard on the beads.

Days later, the bronze Buddha was sold to a Tibetan merchant from Nepal for 200 yuan, a white nylon shirt, and a digital wristwatch. The watch stopped working a week later. We were, however, able to buy more barley with the money so that we didn’t go hungry.

The incident had a deep impact on me. When reality knocks at the door, other things flee through the window.

My belief in religion has been shaped by circumstances in exile that neither my great-uncle nor my father had to negotiate. When I was young, I held the naive belief that doing prostrations and chanting countless manis were the sole ways to accumulate merit, and that Buddhas, bodhisattvas, and deities would come to me in difficult times. Through my lonely and penniless years in school, I had never missed a single prayer session. My invocations, however, were met with silence. No deities jumped down from their gold-plated altars to assuage my pain. Doubt and skepticism soon took refuge in my impressionable teenage mind. I began to abhor the complex and often endless religious rites and rituals that consumed huge amounts of our time, energy, and limited resources. The more I tried to understand the association between the rituals and fundamental Buddhist philosophy, the more confused I became.

The lasting influence of Buddhism on my life is its principle—that everything is interdependent and that every action will have an equal consequence in this or the next life. This guides me through the perils of exile, and I try to conduct my life based on these values. In this sense, perhaps I am closer to my great-uncle’s understanding of Buddhism, and yet I certainly don’t share his unshakable faith. Though I don’t wave away Buddhist symbolism as easily as perhaps my father did during those terribly difficult times, my eyes always glance cynically at the rituals involved.

Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, often remarks that we have had enough elaborate religious ceremonies over the years since Buddhism was introduced in Tibet in the 7th century. He advises that the time has come for us to focus on its practical values. “My religion is simple,” the Dalai Lama has famously said. “My religion is compassion.” Even then, His Holiness still performs many rites and rituals. Furthermore, his remarks to simplify some of the extremely elaborate rituals have caused confusion and anxiety in the monastic community. Monks have been unable to decide which ceremonial rituals to discontinue and which aspects to retain.

Despite Buddhism’s newfound popularity, only a handful of parents in my generation want their children to join monasteries as opposed to the traditional practice of putting at least one child from each family in robes. We may still visit monasteries or light butter lamps on special holy days, but we do these with a pinch of salt, a dose of doubt. A friend complains that his very religious friend makes offerings of soft drinks and wine by opening them and placing them on his altar. “Such a waste,” he says. “We can’t drink them afterward.”

Born and raised in exile, today’s youth are equipped with the linguistic skills and technical know-how to absorb the shock of harsh reality far more maturely than the generation that came into exile in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This gives them the confidence to venture into other communities and to migrate to places that the older generation never dreamt of. The interactions with diverse groups of people and exposure to other spiritual practices make our beliefs less conservative. We ask more questions and rely less on faith.

However, the common dream etched in the collective consciousness is to go back to a free Tibet. Connected by the invisible thread of our common history, culture, and language, each of us has created a mini-Tibet within. As Salman Rushdie writes in his essay “Imaginary Homelands,” we know this is “one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions.” For the moment, this mini-Tibet in our heart is the home we inhabit in our dreams even as we transport ourselves into newer environments and more unfamiliar circumstances. 

From The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, edited by Tenzin Dickie © 2023. Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House India.

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Japanese Buddhist temples throughout Hawaii and North America have a secret. Move past the usual public spaces—the hondo (main hall) and the social hall—and you’ll quickly discover it. Lurking behind the altar area, squatting in the minister’s office, and hiding in libraries, closets, and random corners are innumerable dark wooden boxes. Shiny with black lacquer, dusty with age, some smaller than a breadbox and others big enough to crawl into, there are the mortal remains of fading Buddhist devotion. They are butsudan (sometimes spelled with the honorific “O,” meaning “respected”): home Buddhist shrines filled with sacred objects, religious icons, loves, fears, and maybe even a ghost or two. Their presence in the back spaces of temples reveals much about changing Buddhist patterns in the West.

Historically, the majority of Buddhists have been ordinary householders with home-based practices. In many Buddhist cultures such as Japan, domestic Buddhism has centered on a home shrine or altar. That family Buddhism was brought to Hawaii and North America with the early Japanese immigrants, providing an anchor for Asian Buddhists in an often hostile land without Buddhist culture or Buddhist ancestors.

Most Japanese Americans and Canadians can call to mind a family butsudan, whether their own or their grandparents’. Ordained Jodo Shinshu minister Alice Unno is an important mentor to generations of Shin Buddhists. As she was growing up in California’s Central Valley in the 1930s, the family butsudan often occupied her imagination:

It was really important to my parents that we had an Obutsudan at home. My parents always told us that if ever there were a fire, the altar was the first thing we had to take out of the house—that and the drawer underneath it, which contained the sutras and important papers like birth certificates. I was always scared of dusting the altar because it was so special and sacred. My mother always said you shouldn’t just use an ordinary rag. There was a special cloth to clean it with. We bowed to it in the morning and in the evening before we went to sleep.

Butsudan remain cherished items in many Japanese American and Canadian homes. But many others have become orphans as patterns of religious belonging and practice shift, and they ultimately end up sheltering in nearby temples. Refugees of a secularizing society, these cast-out sacred objects wait to be adopted by new generations. But if they can’t find a new family, they face eventual destruction.

Buddhist cultures often have a tradition of domestic altars. The butsudan became ubiquitous in all Japanese households, from the lowest peasant to the royal family, during the long Tokugawa period (1603–1867) that preceded Japan’s forced entry into the modern world. Their basic shape is a wooden cabinet, taller than it is wide, with double doors on the front that open to reveal a mini-world of buddha statues, scrolls, and ihai (ancestral tablets). There are candles, memorial books, incense burners, stands for offerings, and other items that cluster around or within the altar. Butsudan range from humble to grand, with gold leaf, black lacquer, delicate carvings, hanging adornments, and other flourishes suggesting levels of devotion, sectarian affiliation, and, frankly, conspicuous wealth in some cases.

Butsudan historically held an honored place in Japanese homes, often with a separate shrine room. Devout family members gathered daily before the butsudan to pray, make offerings, chant scriptures, and commune with the spiritual figures enshrined within. Monks would visit the home on memorial days and Buddhist holidays to perform services at the butsudan.

The lack of clear distinction between buddhas and ancestors is a key aspect of the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Buddhist funeral rituals involve dressing the corpse as a monk and bestowing an ordination name on the departing spirit so that they become enlightened in the afterlife. In this way, the ancient tradition of ancestor veneration melds with the long-ago-introduced practices of Buddhism, accommodating both religious impetuses. The butsudan is the primary tool and site in this Japanese spiritual blend. Memorial plaques for deceased parents and grandparents are placed near the central buddha image, and all receive offerings and devotion. Family members take on the patina of awakened tathagatas, and buddha figures may be considered ultimate household patriarchs.

The swirl of forces that centers on the butsudan is complex. Rituals help to placate the spirits and send them away on their journey to the next life. Rites also help to hold on to missing loved ones and rebind them to watch over the family. Dharma practices inculcate values of selflessness, nondual wisdom, and transpersonal perspectives. And learning and repeating the lineage and religious procedures cultivates family identity and cultural continuity.

As such, butsudan are more than boxes. They are storytellers and lineage holders. They act as meeting places for the living and the dead, for foolish beings and compassionate buddhas. Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation. As sites of practice, mourning, and renewal, they are visible reminders of the competing forces that comprise the lives of ordinary people in an imperfect, challenging world.

All of this was magnified in the initial immigrant generations. Cut off from their homeland, Japanese immigrants set up butsudan when their parents died far away on the other side of the ocean. Unable to be with them in person, the butsudan provided a portal to lives and loved ones separated by water, nation, and death. The butsudan provided a way to care for departed elders, calm the mind, and hold on to a private symbol of Buddhist commitment in a place where Buddhists were often under suspicion or attack.

Given the importance of butsudan in Japanese Buddhism, why are so many coming to live at American and Canadian temples? Primarily, abandoned butsudan arrive at a temple in the wake of a death. An older family member has died, and the next generation inherits their property, including the butsudan. In the past, the newly deceased would be enshrined with an ihai. The inheritors would use the butsudan as the focus of their devotions, teaching their children the ways of respect so that they might one day receive and carry on the butsudan and its traditions.

But religiosity has decreased in newer Japanese American and Canadian generations just as in most non-immigrant populations; already into the fifth and sixth generations, Japanese North Americans and Hawaiians are not a majority immigrant group. More and more Americans and Canadians of every background are dropping out of formal religion, sometimes opting for a more diffuse spirituality or simple secularism. Even among those who retain an interest in Buddhism, the older traditions are often lost as economic and social forces cause people to live far from family in nuclear units. It was mainly the more senior, often retired generations who actively used the butsudan; they also did much of the childcare, and thus wisdom and practices were naturally passed down through the generations. Now that so many live apart from their parents and grandparents, these transmission lines are weakened or broken. Thus, when they inherit butsudan, many people are clueless about their purpose or how to use them.

Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation.

As such, the arrival of butsudan at temples represents a decrease in Buddhist practice in the Japanese American and Canadian subcultures. But it’s also a sign of trends far beyond the Buddhist community: the fraying of family ties, weakening of social bonds, and rise of a distracted, drifting society increasingly out of touch with the valuable aspects of its heritage.

There’s another factor to account for too: some people view butsudan as creepy. They’re dark boxes within which spirits perhaps dwell. Not knowing their function, people with minimal Buddhist training may fear that bringing one into the home invites bachi (bad luck). Rather than a source of love and respect, butsudan can provoke fear in those who only know that Grandma used to kneel and mumble in an unfamiliar language before this strange cabinet when they visited her.

But suppose the accumulating butsudan at temples indicates a decrease in Buddhist devotion and weakened family ties. In that case, their presence also indicates the staying power of Buddhist material culture and respect for family, no matter how distant. After all, lots of furniture, clothing, and knick-knacks that people inherit go immediately to the thrift store or garbage bin. But many butsudan and their associated items are recognized as sacred—if not to the new owners, to someone—and are carefully (if sheepishly) deposited at Buddhist temples in the hope that someone else will care for these things.

Ministers have mixed feelings about the tide of butsudan washing up at their doorsteps. Their immediate reaction is to try to make the family feel comfortable and to express gratitude to them for not tossing the butsudan in the trash. Ministers accept that the butsudan’s journey with this family has ended and rarely try to persuade anyone to keep it.

Their gratitude exists alongside some sadness as well, as Reverend Matt Hamasaki of the Sacramento Buddhist Temple expressed:

I appreciate that people have the respect to put it someplace that it belongs. But it does make me sad that people don’t want to keep it. Within my own family, I don’t think anyone has an obutsudan except for me, and I inherited my grandparents’ because no one wanted it. It makes me sad that no one would want it. But like I said, I appreciate that they bring it to some place instead of just throwing it out.

Some ministers experience frustration over the clutter that results from so many butsudan huddling in the back of their temples, occasionally taking over whole storage rooms and crowding out other possible uses of the space. Many butsudan languish for years, with no one to take them home yet reluctance by the temple to dispose of them.

When the time comes, the decision to get rid of old, often broken-down butsudan presents its own challenges. Most ministers are unwilling to toss them in the dumpster. In Japan, the usual method for disposing of sacred objects is to burn them, mirroring the respectful cremation of bodies. Many ministers carry out a funeral ritual for aged butsudan, chanting a sutra and offering thanks for the shrine’s work to uphold the buddhadharma and care for families. Burning the butsudan can be a problem: most temples are on the West Coast, where strict fire laws prevent easy disposal. One temple used to get around this by using them as fuel for beach bonfires when they were still permitted—but even that possibility has been cut off in the new age of extreme climate change. Thus, respectful funerals for old butsudan may become another casualty of global warming.

Not all butsudan end up cremated. Some temples run butsudan adoption programs, advertising available shrines in their newsletters, displaying them at community events, and showing them to new members. In March, the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple displayed a dozen butsudan, and all found new homes.

The community’s youngest members are also not always indifferent to butsudan and their practices. The Young Buddhist Editorial (YBE) is one of the most dynamic initiatives to recently emerge from Japanese American temples. A collective of primarily young Japanese American Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, YBE ran a special feature titled “Home is Where the Buddha Is.” Dozens of people contributed photographs of their butsudan with short remarks. For example, YBE editor Gillian Yamagiwa wrote:

My Obutsudan was inherited in 2005 from my great uncle after he passed away. Both of my aunts felt that I would appreciate the sentiment and importance of the Obutsudan the most, coming from a family that regularly practiced Buddhism. As a kid, I never really understood why we had an Obutsudan, but as I got older, I began to see it as a way to honor and remember loved ones that have passed.

Most of the butsudan in the YBE photo essay are traditional black wooden boxes, like Yamagiwa’s. But a significant minority are little handcrafted ones made as dharma school activities from materials like kamaboko (fish cake) boards or shoeboxes. Some freestyling interpretations of butsudan also exist, using statues, personal mementos, and even light-up buddha images. The less traditional shrines suggest that even if some butsudan complete their life cycle and are cremated, the impulse to maintain personal sacred space lingers. The karma of butsudan practice hasn’t been extinguished.

That ability to be reinterpreted and reborn through individual meaning-making may provide the longest staying power for butsudan in a rapidly changing world. As domestic religious objects, butsudan have often existed in tension between the orthodox views of organized Buddhist sects in Japan and the quotidian desires and needs of regular laypeople. Stored within homes rather than temples, butsudan have always had the potential to be adapted to their families’ preferences. Two stories from Reverend Henry Adams of the San Mateo Buddhist Temple illustrate the push and pull of orthodoxy and domesticity.

Rev. Adams had a traditional monastic education in Japan and recalled a story about his teacher being taken to a home to conduct a service at the butsudan. The family had set a cup of tea in front of the butsudan, probably as an offering to an ancestor who enjoyed tea during their life. This isn’t orthodox Jodo Shinshu behavior, and the officiating minister dropped a match into the teacup after lighting the candle as if to say, “Surely this is why this teacup is here—what other purpose could it serve?” As a trainee, Rev. Adams was impressed by this story, which suggested that the head minister was bold in righteously fulfilling and passing down the proper tradition from 800 years ago.

But his attitude changed after becoming a minister. He was invited to conduct a memorial service at a temple member’s home and was surprised to find several glasses of water laid out in front of the butsudan, another violation of the orthodox practice. As he noticed that the people being memorialized all had the same date of death and remembered that the member was from Nagasaki, he realized that she had lost most of her family in the atomic bombing. She told him the people injured by the bomb were terribly thirsty and called out for water as they died. So, she remembers her loved ones lost to war and offers glasses of water to honor them.

Usually, we think of ministers instructing laypeople. But here the layperson showed the minister the true potentiality that the butsudan possessed. As Rev. Adams related:

That was very eye-opening to me, you know—it meant that I needed to be much more flexible and open to appreciating the ways in which the obutsudan can serve as a focal point for people in their home spiritual lives. And in the case of this woman, it’s really her lifelong process of navigating the grief from that traumatic event of her childhood.

The ever-growing number of butsudan at temples suggests that Buddhist devotion and traditional practices are losing their grip on people’s hearts and imagination, even as some manage to find new homes and some young people work to maintain and reinvent their religious heritage. Those discarded butsudan all have stories to tell like the one from Nagasaki. Some were assembled from scrap wood during the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and Canadians. Others have less dramatic, yet no less poignant, origins in the everyday lives of immigrants and their children discovering how to be American and Canadian Buddhists. All watched over generations of Buddhists as their families grew, played, quarreled, and went about their daily lives. Resting in the dim corners of temples, away from the bustle and chanting of the main hall, they wait to see what karma has in store for them.

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To learn more about the contemporary fates of butsudan, see Jeff Wilson’s chapter “The Afterlives of Butsudan: Ambivalence and the Disposal of Home Altars in the United States and Canada” in Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption, edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

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