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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

⧫

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

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

From the writings of ecologist Joanna Macy to the strategies of climate action group Extinction Rebellion, environmentalism in the West has long been nurtured and informed by Buddhist perspectives.

Dekila Chungyalpa now clearly sees how the dharma that she grew up with shaped her path to becoming the director of the Loka Initiative, a climate change outreach program for faith leaders—but she wasn’t always able to reconcile her career as a conservationist with her identity as a Tibetan Buddhist.

“I had to have this moment of reckoning, because I knew I would lose credibility among peers who thought that what I was doing was too touchy-feely. People said that it would affect my reputation as a scientist and field conservationist,” she told Tricycle.

She had just started a promising career at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) in the early 2000s, when a meeting with the Karmapa, one of most influential Tibetan lamas, changed everything.

At the time, Dekila was the youngest director at the WWF, and she and her fellow scientists were waking up to some of the alarming truths that now make up the devastating headlines and despairing reports of the contemporary news cycle. Seeking a vacation from the mental anguish, Dekila went with her family on a pilgrimage to Bodhgaya. It was there, at the site of the Buddha’s awakening, that she had an audience with Ogyen Trinley Dorje, one of the two claimants to the title of the 17th Karmapa and the head of the Karma Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism. He asked Dekila to create environmental guidelines for his monasteries in northern India.

It was a karmic offer she couldn’t refuse.

“I thought, OK, great—my next lifetime is secure. I’m about to add so many karma points to my karma bank,” she recalls. “I’ll draft up these guidelines and go back to my normal work.”

But the Karmapa’s vision went beyond a simple handbook about recycling for monastics. “He was clear that the monks and nuns should not remain on their brocade mats. He wanted them to go out into the community and start grappling with floods, droughts, and abnormal monsoons—the very real environmental changes that they were seeing outside their windows.”

“He was ready to start a plan of mitigation: making the carbon footprint of these Kagyu monasteries as small as possible.”

Khoryug, as the project became known, is a network of monasteries in the Himalayas working to protect the environment and institute practical measures, like installing solar panels, rooftop rainwater harvesting, and growing vegetables. Dekila still serves as the environmental advisor to the Karmapa, facilitating reforestation efforts and disaster management strategies for over 50 monasteries and nunneries.

Her involvement in Khoryug led Dekila to found WWF’s Sacred Earth in 2009, a program that expanded Khoryug’s vision beyond the Tibetan Buddhist community, building relationships with religious institutions—including churches, monasteries, and indigenous communities—toward the goal of solidifying conservation efforts around the world.

***

Although the twists of fate that led to a career transition happened naturally, it wasn’t always easy for Dekila to own her decision to bridge the gap between environmental science and personal faith.

“For most of my education and career, I was made to feel like it was unscientific to subscribe to spiritual beliefs, and that it was unprofessional to bring your religion into the workplace. Being a brown Himalayan woman, I also felt this unspoken pressure to display my culture but suppress my spiritual identity.

“When I began to work in an interfaith context, it was first and foremost a healing experience for me, because I was finally able to bring the science and my own faith together and say, ‘I am these two things wholly and completely’—that there doesn’t need to be a contradiction,” she said. “But it took some time for me to get there.”

Dekila was born in Sikkim, a state in northeastern India nestled among Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. Around the time Dekila became a teenager, her mother left home to start a three-year solitary retreat, a practice common to serious Vajrayana practitioners, but unusual for women at the time.

“My mom was really careful to explain to me that she was doing it out of her love for me, and out of a drive to reach the level of meditative equipoise she had been practicing toward. She felt that there was no other choice, that this had to be the next step.”

Her mother, Ani Dechen Zangmo, was a Buddhist nun who chose to live by herself instead of in a nunnery. She later became the root teacher of American lama Justin von Budjoss. “She was a powerful female presence in a predominantly male dharma world,” he said, reflecting on Ani Zangmo’s willingness to shake up the status quo. “She knew that there was a politics to that, but it wasn’t born out of politics.” 

Dekila grew up with her mother and the rich familial love offered by her extended family (“all of my family’s houses were clustered right next to each other; it really was a kind of ‘it takes a village’ situation”), as well as her grandmother (also a nun), who encouraged the young environmentalist’s passion for the natural world. “Probably by the time I was six or seven, my place of comfort and refuge had become the trees outside.”

While the war on climate change is sometimes framed as exactly that—a war, with either the earth or humans in the role of relentless attacker, the metaphor never resonated with Dekila. “I grew up knowing that the earth cradles me and cradles humanity. At no point have I felt that my relationship with nature is an adversarial one.”

This wholehearted trust has led Dekila down a path of lifelong ecological service.  

“Working with monks and nuns helped me awaken to the truth of interdependence scientifically, spiritually, and professionally. It helped unite the pieces of my identity, and made me realize that this unity was a source of strength that could benefit others,” she explained.

***

Dekila now heads the Loka Initiative, a new project which she co-founded with Buddhist scholar-researchers Dr. Richard Davidson and Dr. John Dunne of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds. Launched in 2018, the initiative hosted its first symposium last year, uniting religious leaders with environmental experts in an effort to spark new dialogue, and bolster climate activism by tapping into existing forms of community resilience that are already the bread and butter of many religious institutions.  

“The thing is, I found that religion was a way to reach people. Framing the problem of climate change in terms of people’s own spiritual mission—their mandate for why they chose a religious life—helps me connect them to the reality of ecological devastation and the things we can do about it.”

The Loka Initiative has worked with a variety of faith groups, including American evangelicals, who Dekila said get a bad rap. “There’s a tendency from the science side to look at evangelicals in particular and say, ‘They’re all climate deniers.’ But I think this attitude comes from a place of deep attachment to our own identity and an unwillingness to imagine that the people we don’t agree with are motivated by the same things we are—by a desire to be happy and healthy.”

Overlooked by the media, Christian groups that organize on the ground and promote sustainability are a growing trend. “Churches have always been the first responders, and often function as a kind of coordination hub during a crisis,” Dekila observed. “In the US, churches are consistently the most generous group when it comes to giving after a disaster.

“So, while an evangelical leader may not believe in climate science, he is still part of the climate solution. He still has a role to play in helping his community prepare for the effects of climate change and minimize their carbon footprint.”

Dekila’s efforts haven’t gone unnoticed. She earned the prestigious Yale McCluskey Award for conservation innovation in 2014, has published multiple papers, and frequently speaks about her work at places like the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. She remains a fellow at WWF and sits on the board of the Society of Conservation Biology’s Religion and Conservation Working Group.

Today she reflects on the sense of wholeness she now feels.

“When I first started conceptualizing Sacred Earth, I received some advice from Martin Palmer, founder of the Alliance of Religions in the UK, who told me that as long as I could be authentic in presenting myself as a person of faith first and a scientist second, no faith leader would turn me away.

 “That’s proven to be the case so far.”

The post How Dekila Chungyalpa Draws on Faith to Protect the Planet appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

When interfaith chaplain Sarah Bowen tells people that she is also an animal chaplain, the reaction is often the same: “You have a church for cats?” 

Even though we can all agree that would be incredibly cute, Bowen and other animal chaplains primarily help people with end of life care and the grieving process for the animals who often become an integral part of our families but whose deaths we tend to not process as fully. The job can also entail working with animals in shelters, addressing behavioral problems through interspecies spiritual practices, and animal advocacy. 

Bowen, a faculty member at the One Spirit Interfaith Seminary in New York, has been a Buddhist practitioner for 20 years, though she has branched out to draw inspiration from and cater to all faiths. Her blend of influences and chaplaincy work is the subject of her latest book, Spiritual Rebel: A Positively Addictive Guide to Deeper Perspective and Higher Purpose (June 2019, Monkfish Publishing).

Here, Bowen speaks with Tricycle about what being an animal chaplain entails, the importance of including non-humans when we talk about all sentient beings, and how we can meditate with cats.

What is the day-to-day work of being an animal chaplain? There are four different areas that I’m working in. The first one is supporting animals. We have eight million dogs and cats that are surrendered to shelters each year. Those animals have needs, including spiritual needs. They’re lonely. They’re confused. Many of them have been abandoned. So I spend time with those animals at shelters, sanctuaries, and pet stores, and I address their need for love, for touch, for attention, for being seen, for being cared for. That’s one way to ease the suffering of the animals themselves. 

The second piece is the human-animal bond. I teach interspecies mindfulness practices, which helps the animals in our homes ease their anxiety. This can address a lot of what we consider behavioral problems, but are often a result of those animals’ needs not being met. 

The third piece is what I call sacred sendoffs—working around end of life and death. People can be very perplexed about what to do when an animal is coming to the end of their life. So I help them navigate questions about end-of-life care. I also do memorials, I’m present at euthanasias, and I perform rituals to help people pass that animal onto whatever is next—and that differs based on someone’s belief systems. 

Related: Putting Spot Down

The fourth piece is advocating for nonhuman animals. That involves education and awareness about our food systems, which is out of alignment with a lot of our values. 

Let’s go through those four pieces one-by-one. What’s the grief counseling aspect of it like? What services do you offer? That’s a huge piece of this work and all chaplaincy. Our animals become members of our family, and we go through the same stages of grief. It can be especially important for older people who may have lost a spouse and that animal becomes their primary relationship in their home.

I do individual grief counseling and family grief counseling, which is very similar to what I do with human grief counseling. I normally do four to six sessions with someone. First, we honor the relationship with the animal. We look at the joyous moments and process the grief or the loss using Kübler-Ross’s Five Stages [denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance]. We also will do a ritual or a memorial to honor that pet’s life where we wish that animal a most auspicious next time around. And that can look like a lot of things. It can be anything from doing an actual burial to doing a releasing ritual with flying wish paper. 

Why is the ritual important to the process? There is a letting go piece that is important in our grief and loss, and something happens to us when we make physical or somatic gestures. That’s the reason we bury humans. But what happens in our history with animals? A child’s goldfish gets flushed, and there’s nothing for the kid to deal with. But these things can be very traumatic.

At One Spirit Interfaith Seminary, when we start to discuss grief, we create a timeline of our loss—from the first up to the most recent loss—and then unpack all of those losses. The first loss on most people’s grief timeline is a pet, but we don’t necessarily help our children understand. It can be a wonderful opportunity to help young people understand the cycle of life. But instead, we rush out and get a new pet to replace it. So it’s important to be able to honor the life of that animal through some sort of experience.

You also mentioned that you work with animals who are up for adoption. How do you approach the shelters, and what do you do there? It can work a number of different ways. For some people, the words chaplain or spiritual are comfortable. For other people, they are not. So in some cases, I come as a chaplain, and in some cases, I’ll just be a volunteer. In other cases, I may be a donor or supporter of an organization. 

I’m mainly there to support the animals. Many shelters have animals they consider that are unhomable, who are most likely not likely going to be adopted because they’re special needs. Shelters usually have a room for potential adopters to meet a particular animal, and I go into those spaces with the unadoptable pets to just spend time with them. The experience can be very heartbreaking. Seeing an animal in need who feels your compassion can be joyous, but it’s also sad because I can’t take them all home. 

Related: Jataka Mind and Cross-Species Compassion

People don’t have to be chaplains or do anything special to do this work. We’re all capable of having compassion and love and easing the suffering of animals. I recommend that people go over to the adoption area at Petco or to a shelter and ask if you can spend some time with the animals. 

Can you tell us more about practicing mindfulness with a pet? How does that work? My specific area of expertise is cats. I especially like working with cats who are very skittish, who have trauma. I teach a type of mindfulness that I call cat gazing. Cats often don’t like to be looked at directly in the eyes. They see that as a challenge. The practice is to look just off to the side of them, watch their breathing, and then start to match your breathing to theirs. And you’ll start to feel a non-dual moment where you’re breathing with the cat and the cat is breathing with you. (This practice also can help us explore our concept of the self: Where is self? Where do I end?) 

Once you have that connection, the cat may perk up and start to come up out of it. This is analogous to when you’re meditating with a group and the guy next to you starts to get the itch and he starts to come out of his state. Animals do that too. They lose the moment. They lose that present moment piece. At that point, you can bring yourself a little bit up out of it, too. And then, when they settle, you settle back with them and match their breathing again. And you just continue to do this. 

It’s based on a mindfulness practice called The Trust Technique, which James French developed with horses. It can be really beneficial. One cat who has lived in my home for about two years could not be touched for the first six months because of his trauma. Now, he comes running over because he wants to do mindfulness. We think it’s just a human thing, but my experience has been that it’s not. 

Where did you learn about this type of practice? My training with cats and dogs comes from the veterinary school at the University of Edinburgh. The behavioral science around animals has changed significantly over the last 70 years. But we don’t necessarily get very educated on their needs or keep up with what science is telling us. For example, when dogs start to yawn, you need to back away a little bit. That’s the first point on their ladder of aggression. It’s a way that they try to relieve the stress that they’re feeling within their bodies somatically by yawning.

I learned about not looking cats in the eyes while meditating with lions in South Africa. Linda Tucker runs a preservation called the Global White Lion Protection Trust, where she has been almost single-handedly trying to keep a group of white lions alive. Two years ago, I went and spent time meditating with them, and there’s nothing like connecting with a lion in that mindfulness state. It’s remarkable and a little scary too. And I, for sure, learned not to look the lion in the eyes. I was taught to lower my head, keep my gaze down, and make sure that the lion knows that I am not a threat.

Do you consider your advocacy work to part of your role as an animal chaplain? Most of the people that I know that are doing work in this area are involved in the bigger picture—both the micro and the macro. There’s the individual work with animals, with the human, between the animal and the human, and then we have to look at our system. I think of it like lovingkindness meditation, where we extend out beyond ourselves to all beings. 

The billions of animals each year that are being systematically abused in our food system is horrific. And if you look at the planet and climate change, our issue is not our cars, it’s our cows. The amount of PTSD being caused by the people who are working within factory farming right now is a human issue as well. They’re interlinked. You can’t look at one without the other. It’s very Buddhist. It’s all interrelated.

It would not be holistic for me to be to be dealing just with the animals that live in my house or with the ones with my friends or with my clients. If I truly believe in interdependence, I need to work as much as I can for all animals.

What reaction do you get when you tell someone that part of your work is in animal chaplaincy? The first response is a little bit of a joke. People say, “You have a church for cats?” Then, when I explain what it is about, people do a 180. Then, they almost immediately share a story of their grief and loss of a pet (though the term we prefer is companion animal). They tell me about how they experienced suffering when this happened, but there wasn’t anybody to help with it. Then they get it, and the conversation might open up and move beyond their companion to a discussion about all beings.

How do you support this work financially? None of us become clergy or chaplains or monks or spiritual people to get rich I have found. So it necessitates that we have additional things that we do. I write books, and I write for companies. I also teach. This allows me to work with clients on a sliding scale, based on what they have. Of course, it is helpful when people are able to pay, which allows me to cover my office space and other expenses. When I do a funeral service for someone, I also ask that they send 50 percent of the fee to an animal organization of their choice instead of me. I do the same with human funerals—50 percent is my fee and 50 percent is toward a charity.

How many clients do you see on average? I have probably three to four clients around animals each month. I also spend a lot of time removing dead animals from our roads. I drive a Jeep and keep a shovel, bags, gloves, and flower seeds in the back. I stop for roadkill. I move them to the side of the road. I do a blessing for them: May you have a most auspicious next lifetime. And I put flower seeds on top of them. I probably do that 50–60 times a month.

Roadkill breaks my heart the most because we continue to hit animals and leave them on the side of the road. And if they were our babies, our children, we certainly wouldn’t do that.

You also talk about speciesism. What do you mean by that? Speciesism is the privileging of human animals over nonhuman animals. Just like racism is the privileging of one race over another race, or sexism puts one gender over another gender. 

Some people may object to comparing the suffering of animals in shelters to, say, starving children across the world. People often say that. Very much so.

What is your response? My response is that our compassion is not a pie to be divvied up. Having compassion for the animals in the shelter doesn’t take away from the compassion that I have for the children who need food as well. That would be a very binary view. 

But my job is not to browbeat anyone for their beliefs or suggest that someone should have beliefs different than the ones they have. This is not a right or wrong conversation. Rather, we need to understand that our choices matter. If we are people who consider ourselves either spiritual, religious, on some sort of wisdom path, we need to consider that our choices have an impact. If your work is with children around food insecurity, awesome. Someone needs to do that work. My work happens to be here with animals. And we need all of us.

[This interview was edited for clarity and length.]

The post “You Have a Church for Cats?” The Service of an Animal Chaplain appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We might be a bit biased, but if anyone can enlighten you on Buddhism’s journey into Western culture, it’s Tricycle’s editor and publisher, James Shaheen. In these bite-sized episodes, you’ll also hear highlights from our Tricycle Talks podcast, including activist Roshi Joan Halifax and Why Buddhism Is True author Robert Wright. 
hearspoke.com

Interfaith Voice | “Keeping the Faith for Accountability in a #MeToo Era”

Launched by a nun-turned-radio-host three days after 9/11, Interfaith Voices continues to offer inquiring conversations about religion and spirituality. This episode explores how the #MeToo movement is rocking religious institutions, including Shambhala International, and considers the active role of practitioners in seeking accountability from leaders who abuse their power.
interfaithradio.org

Criminal | “All the Time in the World”

Much more empathetic and far less gratuitous than your average crime podcast, Criminal takes a look at the causes and conditions lurking behind the sensational “Headless Body in a Topless Bar” headlines. Buddhist listeners might especially enjoy this episode from 2017 about Texas State University’s “body farm,” the final resting place of some 50 donated corpses that decompose en plein air for the benefit of forensic researchers.
thisiscriminal.com

Everything is Alive | “Louis, A Can of Soda”

Does a generic cola can have buddhanature? Find out in this new, unscripted show featuring Wait, Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me and Fresh Air alum Ian Chillag “interviewing” inanimate objects. (Other interviewees include a lamppost, a pillow, and a bar of soap.)
everythingisalive.com

On Being | “Wondrous Doubt”

She’s everyone’s go-to podcast host for deep spiritual questions. He dropped the bodhisattva gods after years living as a monk in Asia. Krista Tippett and Tricycle contributing editor Stephen Batchelor meet in this episode to discuss how Tibetan Buddhism initially filled a mystical void in his life, and how a secular approach to the dharma continues to provide a robust starting point for exploring the unknown.
onbeing.org

The post Podcast Picks appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The Buddhist monastery of Nalanda was founded in northeast India in the early 5th century. Over time it became the premier institution of higher learning in Asia and, much like leading universities today, had a world-renowned faculty working on the cutting edge of the theoretical sciences and a student body drawn from across the Buddhist world. This prestige also brought with it ample gifts from the rich and powerful. At its height Nalanda had an extensive faculty teaching a diverse student body of about 3,000 on a beautiful campus composed of numerous cloisters with lofty spires that “resembled the snowy peaks of Mount Sumeru.” Then, suddenly, the serenity of this Buddhist institution was shattered. In the fall of 1202, Muslim soldiers on horses rode in and hacked down teachers and students where they stood. The once majestic buildings were left in ruins: the savagery was so great it signaled the end of Buddhism in India.

This powerful story has been told countless times. Today it is ubiquitous, appearing in everything from scholarly mono- graphs to travel brochures. Indeed, by its sheer pervasiveness, this one episode has in many ways come to encapsulate and symbolize the entire 1,300-year history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction. As a result, anytime the topic of Buddhism and Islam is mentioned it almost invariably revolves around the Muslim destruction of the dharma.

This is problematic for many reasons, not the least being that the story of Nalanda is not true. For example, not only did local Buddhist rulers make deals with the new Muslim overlords and thus stay in power, but Nalanda itself carried on as a functioning institution of Buddhist education for another century. We also know that Chinese monks continued to travel to India and obtain Buddhist texts in the late 14th century. In fact, contrary to the standard idea promoted by the story that Nalanda’s destruction signaled the death of Buddhism, the historical evidence makes clear that the dharma survived in India until at least the 17th century. In other words, Buddhists and Muslims lived together on the Asian subcontinent for almost a thousand years.

Why are these facts not better known? There are numerous possible explanations, ranging from Buddhist prophecies of the decline of the dharma to the problems of contemporary scholarship. However, I find it most fruitful to begin with the power of story. As noted above, the destruction of Nalanda offers us a clear-cut narrative, with good guys and bad. It avoids entirely the complex shades of gray that most often color the messy fabric of history. And this is certainly what the Buddhist historians who cobbled together this story wanted to do as they tried to make sense of the dharma’s demise in India. Rather than explore the complex economic, environmental, political, and religious history of India, or even Buddhism’s institutional problems, it was clearly much easier to simply blame the Muslims.

In this regard the Buddhists established a precedent that was subsequently to drive South Asian history. The British, for example, used the same claims established by Buddhists concerning Muslim barbarity and misrule to justify the introduction of their supposedly more humane and rational form of colonial rule. Indeed, the story of Nalanda was a powerful component of imperial propaganda. In turn, even as Indian nationalists questioned the moral righteousness and glory of the British Raj, they nevertheless maintained the historical model of blaming the Muslims. The humiliating imposition of colonial rule was thus not the result of Indian weakness per se, but rather the fault of the morally inferior, effeminate, and voluptuous Mughals. It is a view that is readily perpetuated in the rhetoric of today’s Hindu nationalists who want to recreate some imagined Hindu utopia by eradicating all traces of Islam in India, by violence if necessary.

This pervasive anti-Muslim view is, of course, not unique to medieval Buddhist and contemporary Hindu historiography. It has also been a part of the Jewish and Christian traditions ever since Muhammad received what Muslims regard as God’s final revelation through the angel Gabriel in the early 7th century. Many scholars have argued in addition that the modern Western construction of itself as the paragon of righteousness was often done at the expense of Islam. Yet even though such “orientalism” has been roundly critiqued by decades of scholarship, these earlier views persist. In fact, the attempts by contemporary scholars and museum curators to overturn such stereotypes by means of books and lavish museum exhibits highlighting Muslim tolerance and periods of Islamic exchange with Christian Europe have been unable to diminish the West’s orientalist fear. Today’s highly charged environment has further obstructed such a reevaluation, no matter how necessary it may be. If we take into consideration all these disparate strands, it is perhaps not at all surprising that the story of Nalanda and the attendant narrative of Islam destroying Buddhism are so readily accepted by Buddhists in much of Asia and the West. To many they just make sense. Moreover, they fit popular preconceptions about two religious traditions: whereas Buddhism is a good, rational philosophy with post-Enlightenment values, Islam is an inherently violent and irrational religion.

In the popular imagination, there are probably no two traditions more different than Buddhism and Islam. One is synonymous with peace, tranquility, and introspection; the other, with violence, chaos, and blind faith. One conjures up images of Himalayan hermitages and Japanese rock gardens; the other, primitive and dirty villages with men brandishing AK 47s as casually as briefcases. While Buddhism is seen as compatible with a modern mind-set, its teachings even in tune with the most pioneering science, Islam is largely looked upon as backward, its teachings and punishments redolent of the Middle Ages. And yet, just like the whole enterprise of orientalism and the construction of Islam as innately evil, this image of Buddhism as the perfect spirituality for the modern age is equally a Western fantasy, a construction of the 19th century. In fact, it was during those heady days of empire and modernity that Buddhism came to be conceived as a philosophy that could solve all the world’s problems.

Modern Buddhism had many authors, from British colonial officers to Asian nationalists and from German philosophers to Russian Theosophists. All, however, agreed that this tradition shorn of rituals, doctrines, and communal structures was clearly the spiritual philosophy for the age of secular humanism. Such a philosophy was not what Buddhists in Asia actually practiced, of course, but to the modernizers Buddhism’s traditions had lost touch with the true teachings of the Buddha and had instead descended into a morass of ritualism and superstition. It was hardly coincidental that their view dovetailed neatly with Protestant apologetics—namely, that the teachings of Jesus had been deformed by paganism and papism and then redeemed by Martin Luther—as well as with 19th-century debates about Aryans and Semites. It provided a powerful narrative arc and presented Buddhism, seen as the meditative path for individual liberation, as the very antithesis of Islam.

Given the influence of these background elements, it makes sense that so few question the story of Nalanda’s destruction. It is a perfect story, with the requisite and familiar actors playing their appropriate roles. Moreover, in recent years this story has emerged as not simply some event long lost in the fog of history, or an abstract frame with which to map and order the chaotic progression of history, but rather as a concrete reality. In March 2001, it played out on television screens around the world when the Taliban used tanks and antiaircraft weapons to demolish the colossal Buddha statues of Bamiyan.

This wanton act of destruction not only reenacted the story of Nalanda but also reaffirmed Western, and often Buddhist, stereotypes. What better image could one have to represent Buddhist-Muslim history than that group of fanatical Muslim militants senselessly mauling the peaceful and passive representations of the Buddha in the name of Islam? That is invariably how it was presented in the international media. Little thought, however, was given to the possible historical contingencies shaping the event. Perhaps most important, there was little recognition that the statues had until then somehow survived 1,300 years of Muslim rule—another of those inconvenient facts that somehow muddied the story. It was perhaps better not to think about it, since if one did, it opened the door for the whole messy reality of history to come rushing in, which in turn could very well challenge, possibly even shatter, the conventional narrative that has been told over the past millennium.

Over the years, shining a light on the history of Buddhist-Muslim interaction has been a scholarly focus of mine. I have been especially interested in how this history played out along what is often called the Silk Road, or more precisely Inner Asia, the wide swath of territory stretching from Afghanistan to Mongolia.

In the course of studying this often overlooked chapter of human history, I have been intrigued by how both Buddhism and Islam were reshaped by their encounter. A most telling example of this can be found in some of the developments in Mongol Iran, when Muslims started to represent Muhammad in imitation of Buddhist visual culture, and Muslim clerics and Buddhist monks engaged each other in theological discussion that brought to both religious communities new ways of thinking, such as the adoption by Sufis of the Buddhist idea of rebirth. Indeed, it is precisely by exploring the meeting of the two traditions in unconventional spaces—such as Mongol Iran—that many assumptions are challenged. Furthermore, in this way some of the conventional divisions that shape our understanding of the world—such as notions about East and West and the Middle East and East Asia—are revealed as conceptualizations that have often distorted historical realities and our sense of the world, especially our limited views about actual possibilities of cross-cultural understanding.

Far from being diametrically opposite, Buddhism and Islam have much in common, and Buddhist and Muslim thinkers alike have long tried to solve the tensions that arose between their communities. Yet it is clear that the problems of prejudice and suspicion and intolerance still often characterize relations between Islam and Buddhism. Recent theoretical frameworks—such as ecumenicalism, multiculturalism, pluralism, and cosmopolitanism—offer hope, but the fundamental issue of how one should deal with “the other” remains as pressing as ever. How such difference is to be articulated and dealt with is not only an ongoing process but also a fundamental aspect of the human experience. By understanding and challenging the common narrative, which pits the peaceful Buddhists against the militant Muslims—precisely the view used today in Myanmar to justify the genocide by Buddhists of the Rohingya—we can see our way clear to leaving them behind.

In the encounter of Buddhism and Islam there has been and continues to be conflict. But there has also been much else. An appreciation of not only the history of conflict but also that of cross-cultural exchange and understanding overturns the common narrative. And this tells us something about history itself, about its power to reveal truths that have been covered over by prejudice and forgotten because of suspicion of difference.

♦

Adapted from Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road, with permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.

The post When the Monks Met the Muslims appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

What makes a place or an object sacred? How does one engage with and reap the benefits from that quality?

Artists Ghiora Aharoni and Arthur Liou take on these questions in “The Road to . . .,” part of the Rubin Museum of Art’s ongoing “Sacred Spaces” exhibition.

Over the last 12 years, Aharoni has documented his pilgrimages to several holy sites in India. Aharoni’s original inspiration came from the study of Buddhist stupas [large, hemispherical structures that contain relics of the Buddha or Buddhist saints], as well as the way that Buddhist devotees activate these blessed sites through circumambulation.

Aharoni’s artwork at the Rubin, called “The Road to Sanchi,” plays footage from his pilgrimages on screens that are attached to vintage rickshaw meters encased in glass. The art’s semi-spherical layout purposefully invites the viewer to engage in sacredness through their own circumambulation.

“I want the viewer to actually activate the site,” Aharoni said in an interview with Tricycle. “Without people, the installation isn’t active.”

Aharoni’s art captures moments from his travels to Sanchi, the north Indian site of a 3rd-century BCE Buddhist stupa; Varanasi, an ancient epicenter of Indian religions; and two other sites of Hindu, Jewish, and/or Muslim significance. He emphasizes the journey instead of the destinations, and the actual landmarks never appear in the footage.

Aharoni’s sculptures are complemented by Kora, a 14-minute video by digital artist Arthur Liou. The video focuses on the circumambulation, called kora in Tibetan, around the base of Mount Kailash, a Buddhist pilgrimage site in western Tibet. Cold, snowy, windy, and barren, Kora is a slowed-down meditation on the meaning of inner sanctuary amid life’s challenges.

Shot from a first-person perspective, Liou’s intent is for the viewer to experience being at Kailash, a trick that demands what Liou described as the “skill to express the auspicious quality of sacred pilgrimage.”

Liou, who was raised in a Taiwanese Buddhist family but does not identify as a practitioner, told Tricycle that he formed a deeper interest in Tibetan Buddhism after his 4-year-old daughter died in 2007. In 2011, after researching Buddhism and developing a personal vision of pilgrimage, Liou left his hometown in Bloomington, Indiana, and made the arduous journey by plane, automobile, and foot to Kailash.

Liou and Aharoni’s artistic expressions of pilgrimage differ in their end goal.

For Liou, making the film allowed him a “safe place to deal with” the loss of his daughter. The filmmaker described placing a picture of his daughter, stitched onto a Tibetan Buddhist prayer flag, on Mount Kailash, a practice viewed by many traditional Himalayan Buddhists as a way to usher in a favorable rebirth. “That was one of the most emotional experiences of my life,” Liou said.

The crux of Aharoni’s “The Road to Sanchi” is captured in the final sculpture. Gold-leafed and set aside from the arc created by the other eight sculptures, “When All Roads Are One” displays footage from all four of his pilgrimages. Night, day, rural, urban—all settings and times are stitched together in a “mayhem of experiences” to blur the boundaries among the labels that identify us—Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and so on.  

“We’re all on one path, one pilgrimage,” Aharoni said, “searching for the same divine that I personally find to be within us.”

Aharoni and Liou’s art will be on display in the Rubin Museum’s “Sacred Spaces” exhibition until October 15, 2018. (Liou’s second film, Saga Dawa, which depicts a Buddhist fire ceremony at the foot of Kailash, will replace Kora at the Rubin on May 1.)

The post Two Artists Explore the Sacred Qualities of Pilgrimage at the Rubin Museum of Art appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Question: Most weeks I visit a local temple in my town, where Theravada monks hold a brief service before spending about 45 minutes meditating. This then makes me feel that maybe I should have made the effort to travel to the temple of my own form of Buddhism in a more distant town for the service there. It is quite difficult for me to travel so far at the moment because of work and other commitments. I suppose the problem I have is clinging to one practice rather than allowing myself to absorb all of the Buddha’s teachings. However, as the Buddha that I am devoted to is never mentioned in the Theravada services, I feel as though I’m not staying true to my faith. The alternative is that I don’t go to any service and don’t meet with other Buddhists. Yet meeting with others with the same or similar beliefs helps me to learn, and I feel a warmth that only my faith gives. I’m trying to be a good person and learn about my faith, and I have been learning the way that others celebrate. I hope that this is a right action.

Short answer: Mix and match.

Longer answer: All Buddha’s teachings are good, and there is value in having flexibility in one’s practice. There is nothing wrong with singing hymns in a Christian church. At the same time, there is a great value in associating with those who have a form of practice and faith similar to the one you follow. The solution, therefore, is to do both. Sometimes go to the convenient temple and sometimes make the effort to go to the one that has the best fit. One can learn everywhere, and as a Buddhist, you can practice devotion to the Buddha in any Buddhist temple.

The presentation of the dharma may vary from place to place. Some presentations may go deeper than others, and none is perfect. The best course for you as a lay practitioner is to learn everything you can from every opportunity that presents itself, but also to align yourself with a sangha that, as best you can judge, most truly represents the path in a manner that works for you. I have often been in this position myself. There are not so many Buddhist temples, and the nearest may not always be the one you need most, but that does not mean that one cannot make excellent friends there and participate in the good spirit, even while, whenever possible, you go elsewhere in order to cement your main sangha connections.

Here in France we have the reverse situation. Each week I hold a Pure Land service and give a teaching at Oasis, a Buddhist community nearby where most people follow Tibetan Buddhism. A Zen master also gives teachings at the same center. This ecumenical spirit is excellent. When they can, the core group of community members go to see Tibetan teachers who live farther away. Last weekend they went all the way to Strasbourg to hear the Dalai Lama. This is all fine. Buddhism should give an example of friendship to the world, and this means friendship between sanghas as well as between individuals.

The post A Practitioner Asks: Can I Mix and Match My Practices? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Early on New Year’s Day morning I walked to Muir Beach for a ritual first dip in the winter Pacific. The coast was empty, the lips of the tide drawn back. Ready to say good-bye to 2016, I entered the hiss of sea at the mouth of Redwood Creek where salmon-laced water joins the briny surge of the ocean. I dipped my face into the waves to welcome home the iconic silver salmon and then plunged deep into the frigid ocean.

I have lived and practiced in the Redwood Creek watershed at the edge of the Pacific for 40 years. My blood, brain, bones and gut are made of the cells of my home place. Still, I wonder—how does Zen practice authentically convey the mind and body of a living watershed?

Last autumn I took up this inquiry with the lead Zen farmer at Green Gulch, Qayyum Johnson. We set up a five-week immersion seminar in Buddhism and ecology. Along with Zen farm apprentices and avid practitioners, we studied systems theory and engaged Buddhism, wrote and read together, tasted raw food pulled from the bottomland of the gulch, walked in silence at night on the coastal headlands under the full harvest moon, and sat zazen outside at the rough edge of the known world. We also made a pledge to participate in some direct action designed to meet the challenges of our times.

At the close of the class, around the time of the presidential election, I received a call for clergy to gather in prayer and solidarity with indigenous “water protectors” at the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota. The call came from Father John Floberg, an Episcopal priest who has been serving the Standing Rock indigenous community for the last 25 years. He encouraged clergy to “gather and stand witness to the water protectors’s acts of compassion for God’s creation and to the transformative power of God’s love to make a way out of no way.”

I made my travel plans immediately. The proposed action was radical and simple: religious leaders would gather for a day of non-violent training led by the indigenous faith community and then stand together for another full day of prayer and direct action near Backwater Bridge, at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri rivers. There, Dakota Access was excavating a 1,170-mile long pipeline to carry crude Bakkan Shale oil across the sacred burial grounds of the Lakota people at Standing Rock and under the vast Missouri River—the drinking water source for 12 million people.

More than 500 members of the interfaith community came to Standing Rock. We arrived dressed for prayer, joining the native community at the sacred council fire in the heart of the camp. This fire had been burning continuously since the camp was established in April 2016. We prayed there together, not far from Hunkpapa Lakota Chief Sitting Bull’s ancestral homeland.

During our vigil, 10 representatives of Christian denominations stepped forward to apologize for and repudiate the controversial 1493 Doctrine of Discovery that allowed for the subjugation of native peoples and their sacred lands. Standing Rock elders were given copies of this 500-year-old document to burn in large metal bowls, covering the ash of incendiary words with fresh prairie sage and blessing the clergy with the pungent smoke of burning sage. As we set out for Backwater Bridge, we passed in silence beneath the flags of hundreds of indigenous nations. Two hand-lettered banners held my attention: We are Unarmed and No Spiritual Surrender.

I will never forget cresting the Standing Rock road and looking down at the beauty and turmoil at the junction of the rivers. With one voice, 500 clergy began to sing Dona Nobis Pacem [a Christian hymn and message of peace]. Below us, on Backwater Bridge, a large gathering of water protectors stood in dynamic witness to the black gouge of pipeline construction. Blocked from advancing by a thick barricade of burned trucks, the indigenous community faced a menacing throng of militarized police in riot gear. Above the steady roar of the construction, we heard the Lakota chant for protection of the waters rise into the cold winter sky: Mni Wikoni! Water is Life!

We prayed together for five hours. The Cannonball and Missouri Rivers intoned their own water song, moving in stately grandeur through the sacred treaty lands of the Dakota and Lakota Sioux. The Missouri is the third-longest river system on earth after the Nile and the Amazon. Rising in the high Centennial Mountains of Montana, where a commemorative rockpile at Hellroaring Creek marks its source, the Missouri River traces the old contours of glaciation from the last ice age. This ancient river system drains almost all of the semi-arid Great Plains states to emerge 3,500 miles later, joining the mighty Mississippi just north of St. Louis.

Like the source waters of the Missouri, prayer continues to rise at Standing Rock. In early December, after the Army Corps of Engineers blocked construction on a portion of the pipeline slated to cross under the Missouri River, elders at Standing Rock extinguished the original council fire. Immediately, the next generation of indigenous water protectors stepped forward to light a new fire, pledging continuous prayer and spiritual resistance.

In late January, the Standing Rock community faced a new threat following President Donald Trump’s executive order that re-authorized the pipeline to be completed. The Standing Rock Sioux tribe pledged to legally challenge this termination of their human and sovereign treaty rights and vowed to rise above greed and corruption in protection of their homeland.

In these unsettled times I am inspired by the strong call for prayer and action recently issued by Brenda White Bull, great-great-granddaughter of Chief Sitting Bull. This courageous Hunkpapa Lakota woman served in the United States military for 20 years. In the height of tension at Standing Rock, she crossed Backwater Bridge to directly address the militarized police protecting the pipeline. Speaking as an unlikely ally, Brenda White Bull affirmed that water protectors are akin to North Dakota law enforcement agents, both working every day to protect their families, their human rights, and their land.

Since making a way out of no way is the practice of a lifetime, Brenda White Bull widened her prayer circle. She thanked the elders of the Standing Rock community and acknowledged the young indigenous leaders tending the Seven Council Fires of the Sioux Nation: “This is not a movement about ourselves,” she reminded everyone. “We come together as a team. This is a movement about humankind, about nature, and about peace and prayer that flows through us.”

It is raining tonight in Northern California. The artery of Redwood Creek pumps strong in the dark. In its pulse I feel the bloodline of the timeless Missouri. Water is life, whispers the long ancestral river. No spiritual surrender, answers the next generation of water protectors.

The post Standing with Standing Rock appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Anyone who was born after the 1960s has lived much of their life among at least some nonbelievers, doubters, and questioners. When the Pew Forum released the results of its multiyear study of religious life in 2012, the news that up to a third of people in their twenties, thirties, and forties described themselves as having “no religion” was about as shocking as discovering that we really like iPhones.

I am a Gen Xer who lives and works in San Francisco’s heavily secular Bay Area, and my social circle includes lapsed Jews and mainline Protestants, former Evangelicals, ex-Muslims, kids raised Quaker, and even a former Buddhist monk turned punk rock singer turned filmmaker. I may be running in a group of creative types who are more likely to reject institutionalized thinking, but my students at UC Berkeley also reflect these statistics. They are overwhelmingly uninterested in traditional notions of what it means to have faith. Instead of cleaving to one particular way of believing, many younger people engage in a kind of spiritual mix-and-match, blending several traditions and adhering strictly to none.

Many of these so-called nones are looking for something. But it might not be something permanent.

When I spent a year conducting in-depth interviews with dozens of young adults who choose no single religious practice, I learned that nearly half of them had discovered Buddhism at some point, via books, meditation, apps, or retreats. But there is not much statistical evidence that such seekers subsequently commit to a practice or community. Instead, many will mix Buddhist teachings or practices with those of other religious traditions. They often hesitate to call themselves Buddhists because they don’t belong to a sangha, because they have concerns about cultural appropriation, or because they don’t want to abandon the religions in which they were raised.   

In Their Own Words

Cassandra

Cassandra was raised in a Pentecostal family, and when she abandoned her childhood faith, Buddhism became another crossroad in her search for a spiritual path. Although she no longer practices Christianity, she says, “what I don’t want is to be antagonistic toward Christians. I still identify with Christianity very strongly. I’m Christian but not religious.” Cassandra has been reading the work of the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and “using tools from Buddhism” to supplement her Christian knowledge.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s work on using meditation as a way of channeling anger proved especially helpful to Cassandra in her early days as an adoptive parent of twins. “Adoption is emotional, and I wasn’t expecting [to go in] that direction, but I morally couldn’t refuse it,” she says. “Buddhism helped me be where I was. I don’t want to be a Buddhist, but meditation makes more sense than prayer does. I like the feeling of prayer, reaching out, but when I meditate I’m reaching out to everything around me.”

Cassandra told me that she doesn’t feel connected to Buddhist stories historically or culturally; instead she still feels connected to Christian stories. Buddhism for her, she says, is mostly about helping her navigate a transitional time in her life.

Nicole

Nicole was raised as a Seventh-day Adventist and grew up without much exposure to any other tradition. Adventists believe in the inerrancy of biblical scripture, do not ordain women, are staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage, and generally don’t mix socially with non-Adventists. Nicole left Adventism in college, when she realized she could no longer support her religion’s teachings about LGBTQ people. She then began an internship at an AIDS foundation that brought her into San Francisco a couple of days a week. She’d heard about Buddhism in a world religions class in college and visited the San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. She also began studying yoga, and slowly Buddhist thinking began to take the place of the Christian religion in which she’d grown up.

“What I love about Buddhism is that it’s a practice and a lifestyle and not a religion as it applies in my life,” Nicole told me. “When you grow up in a faith that’s very strict, it’s all or nothing. Questioning things and having doubts isn’t openly accepted; you have to believe it in exactly that way.” She added that she has a hard time “getting on board” with the biblical picture of Jesus. “And then there’s this fear piece. Your salvation is based on what you believe about the afterlife. So with Buddhism it was just a practice and a way to live,” one that also fit into the values of community that she was raised with: “Mindfulness can be Sabbath, being a day apart. A lot of things were actually parallel for me. It seemed more flexible, and some of the magical thinking about Christianity that I can’t quite buy into wasn’t as present in Buddhism.”

Anne

Anne, who was raised Catholic but drifted away from religious practice in college, read a quote from the Dalai Lama in a moment of religious crisis. She had learned about Buddhism and wanted to explore it, but worried about leaving her Catholic roots behind. She paraphrases the Dalai Lama, saying that it is better not to convert to Buddhism but to stay in your own religious tradition and bring Buddhist practice into it. That led her to a book called Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, by Paul Knitter, who taught courses in religious pluralism at Union Theological Seminary.

Speaking of Knitter’s book, Anne says, “he talks about how it’s OK not to get caught up in literalism, like the virgin birth and the Ascension.” For Anne, this new direction came as a relief. “It made me start to look at God in a different way. It talked about God as the interconnectedness between people. Love and peace, that’s easier to believe in than just some deity.” And she adds: “I don’t know if the Church would agree, but it made it easier for me to understand it.”

Joshua

Joshua, who was exposed to Evangelicalism, Catholicism, and the Episcopal Church as a child, had his first encounter with Buddhism through a teacher in high school “who was kind of both Catholic and Buddhist. He introduced us to a lot of things and was a big intellectual influence on me.” In Georgia, where Joshua grew up, this was “not normal high school stuff.”

As a college student, Joshua describes himself as “searching.” He says he attended Catholic Mass a few times, but it proved to be a bad experience. The priest, who was the college chaplain, was very conservative. “He told me that he thought God killed Thomas Merton”—a writer Joshua had begun increasingly to identify with—“to keep him from going astray toward Buddhism.” After this failed restart with Catholicism, Joshua enrolled in a Buddhist psychology class. His professor turned out to be a practitioner in the Tibetan tradition, with “teachers and a lineage and all that stuff,” and Joshua found himself immersed and engaged.

In the summer of 2005, Joshua moved into Haley House, a Catholic Worker community house and soup kitchen in Boston. While he’d also begun reading Dorothy Day and was starting to feel a pull toward her social justice­-oriented faith practice, Joshua “wanted to live in a Worker house that wasn’t super-Catholic.” Haley House, he said, is “kind of Buddhist. The founder is a Buddhist, and lots of Buddhists go through there.” At the house, the Workers had faith-sharing once a week, but rather than being a Christocentric event, Josh told me, it was more free-form: “Let’s talk about this issue, or let’s share my faith, or let’s do an Enneagram together.”

Today religious mixing is simply seen as yet another way in which people navigate the many choices our complex world offers them.

After college, Joshua applied to Harvard Divinity School after discovering it offered a Buddhist concentration. The economy was beginning to crash just then, and grad school seemed like a place of safety. It was also a time for exploring Buddhism as praxis. “Part of it was genuine interest in Buddhist ministry” and helping others to see dharma “not just in terms of practice or meditation or philosophy, but how Buddhist communities operate and meet people’s needs beyond just meditation or religious instruction.”

He graduated in 2010 with an M.Div. degree and planned to pursue a Ph.D. But “nothing about my story is simple,” he says in retrospect. Joshua wound up getting involved as a citizen journalist in the Occupy movement, and his plans for a Ph.D. fell away as he embraced the life of a socially engaged writer. In the midst of finding his way to a career, however, the wheels guiding his faith life began to fall off. At present Joshua says that he “goes to an Episcopal Church irregularly. I used to be very clear that I was a Buddhist, and now I’m not. It’s distressing and weird. I feel like an ambulance with its sirens blaring. I start praying to Tara, and then start saying Hail Marys, and I don’t know what to do.”

Nevertheless, Joshua feels less tied up, not having to “assert, defend, or authenticate” his Buddhism. He says he is no longer trying to be “a great Buddhist practitioner” or “a great Christian,” and for now “it feels nice to kind of lean into the uncertainty and indeterminacy of not really knowing.” For now, he’s redirected his focus from practice to consciousness. Instead of committing to one tradition or the other, he tries to maintain his “emotional connection” to both.

Although these are but a few individual profiles, each one represents the “in-between” space occupied by many who wind up categorized as nones. But whereas in the past religious mixing was frowned upon, today it is simply seen as yet another way in which people navigate the many choices our complex world offers them. Catholic priests quote the Dalai Lama in sermons. Protestant clergy go on Buddhist retreats. There’s been a long and fruitful connection between Judaism and Buddhism.

Increasingly, people who don’t belong to a single religious tradition see value in many religions, even as they hesitate to narrow themselves down to one. This is not to say that community-based forms of spiritual practice don’t matter. A good religious leader can guide doubters, seekers, and believers alike, and these kinds of leaders—priests, pastors, rabbis, dharma teachers, and imams—continue to exist, even if our notions of what religion means are shifting. Their persistence in following a vocational call in the face of difficult circumstances is evidence that institutional religion at its best still has the potential to offer meaning. It is still able to guide, nurture, and provide community and consolation.

So what does it mean that nones are reluctant to stay put in any tradition, even the most welcoming ones? Their hesitation reflects the larger sense of transience that has affected two generations of Americans. Past notions about stable careers, relationships, and places to live are no longer a guiding reality for millions. Nones tend to lean to the left politically, but they often feel that their voices are unheard in discussions about social progress. There is still a deep-rooted desire among many of them for community, but several of those communities have migrated online, which makes it easier to fall away from them.

The numerous people I spoke to said that what might bring them to a regular spiritual practice would be being known and understood as individuals, with all of their skepticism, all of their questions. Whether seen as spirituality or religion, what calls this generation of seekers—and what will keep them—is the vision of a movement that will offer community, integrity, and room for doubt.

♦

Portions of this essay were adapted from The Nones Are Alright: A New Generation of Seekers, Believers, and Those in Between (Orbis Books, 2015).

The post Meet the “Buddhish” Nones appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Huston Smith, one of the most renowned scholars of religion of the 20th and 21st centuries, died on December 30 at his home in Berkeley, California. He was 97.  

The Christian Science Monitor once called Huston Smith “religion’s rock star.” The Dalai Lama, who met Smith in 1964, wrote that Smith knew the “real taste” of religion. Ken Wilber, Deepak Chopra, and Karen Armstrong have cited him as a major inspiration on their work. Bill Moyers, who produced a five-part PBS series featuring Smith in 1996, said that he had not only studied the world’s religions but “practiced what he had learned.” And Michael Murphy, co-founder of the Esalen Institute, has commented that of the many presenters the they’ve hosted over the last 50 years, “only a handful ‘glowed in the dark,’ and Smith was one of them.”

Smith was born in Soochow, China, on May 31, 1919. The second of three sons in a missionary family, he spent his first 17 years in Changshu, a small village near Shanghai. His father, Wesley, was originally from Missouri, and married Smith’s mother, Alice, who was born and raised in China, in 1910. From his mother, Smith learned open-mindedness, faith in the value of life, and music, since she played the piano for her sons every day as part of their home-schooling. Years later, Smith realized how much of his disposition had been shaped by his mother’s personality, including his belief that in gratitude for the gifts life has presented to us, “it would be good if we bore one another’s burdens.”

Smith’s entire life was devoted to service, whether he was championing the cause of Tibetan freedom, as he did in his award winning film, “Requiem for a Faith”; testifying for Native American rights before the U.S. Congress, and in his book, A Seat at the Table; or protesting for civil rights with Martin Luther King Jr., which he did in St. Louis in 1957.

Smith came to the United States in 1936 to study theology at his father’s alma mater, Central College in Fayette, Missouri. He was preparing to become a missionary, but was inspired by a philosophy professor to change his major to the philosophy of religion. Smith went on to finish his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago under philosopher and theologian Henry Nelson Wieman. He married Wieman’s daughter, Kendra, in 1943. During an interview about his advisor, Smith once remarked, “I couldn’t believe anything on earth could have topped Wieman’s philosophy, but then I discovered his daughter and realized I was mistaken.” Kendra Smith, an intellectual in her own right, helped Smith write all his important books, and together they had three daughters, Karen, Gael, and Kim.

Between 1947 and 2002, Smith taught at three major universities: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Syracuse University, and University of California, Berkeley. During that time he wrote 12 major books, including his breakthrough volume, The Religions of Man, which was published in 1958 and later renamed The World’s Religions. The book has sold more than two million copies and has never gone out of print. It’s easy to understand why the book is the most read—and most commonly assigned—text on religion ever written.

Smith changed the modern mind’s view that religion was a waste of time. No small task, especially given that he did it in the at the height of McCarthyism in the 1950s. Freud had said that “religion is a delusion we create to comfort ourselves in an uncertain world,” and argued that humans project a cosmic father or mother onto an indifferent universe in order to have someone to plead with for help. Marx, to cite another modernist who denigrated religion, argued that “religion is the opiate of the masses”—a drug fed to us by our oppressors to placate us in our misery. At the time, the job of every professor of religion was to explain religion as something quaint and outdated, something that we would be better off without. It was the fifties, after all, and some people thought it was high time we outgrew our irrational ways of making sense of the world.

But Smith changed all that. He saw religion as a set of traditional paths of meaning that still had significance and did not necessarily contradict science. While modernists and existentialists were telling us that the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth, Smith urged us to keep an open mind and to not throw out our traditional platforms of meaning just because some philosophical theories found religion suspect. Perhaps the problem was not so much with religion as with the theories about it. New theories, he contended, could yield other possibilities.

Not only did Smith take religion seriously, but in The World’s Religions (and later in Beyond the Post-Modern Mind and Why Religion Matters), he also gave us good reason to agree with him. He argued that religion can be useful in times of sorrow, inspire moral actions, and give viable reasons to believe life is more than a set of Darwinian events. In his comparative work, he showed us how each religion contains a message that, when looked at open-mindedly, can have appeal. One can even say Smith made the study of religion possible, because he showed us why other individuals and societies believe what they do, paving the way for interfaith understanding and tolerance.

Throughout his career, Smith worked with some of the major religious and philosophical figures of our time, including the Dalai Lama, Paul Tillich, Thomas Merton, Alan Watts, Stanislav Grof, D.T. Suzuki, Joseph Campbell, and Ram Dass. But nobody had a larger influence on Smith’s viewpoint than his friend and mentor, author Aldous Huxley, whom he first met in 1947. Huxley had theorized that there is a core religious experience at the heart of all religion and spirituality—a “perennial philosophy”—that rises in the human psyche for the simple reason that it is endemic to existence itself. Mystics of all religions—and those with mystical inclinations outside of religion—speak of what Huxley termed a “unitive knowledge.” This is a profound experience of absolute connection with all reality based on the cognition of what Meister Eckhart called the “Divine Ground of Being.” When Smith became aware of Huxley’s viewpoint, he embraced it immediately, seeking not only to articulate it philosophically (which he did brilliantly in Forgotten Truth), but also to cultivate it experientially. This led him to study Zen meditation in Japan, participate in sweat lodge rituals with Native Americans, meditate with Hindu swamis, and even work on the Harvard Psychedelic Project with Timothy Leary.

In discussions of religion today, there tend to be two significant groups of believers. Exclusivists maintain that their religion is best and that all other religions are bogus; inclusivists believe all religions are really saying the same thing. Smith, based on ideas he learned from Huxley, offered the world a third option, maintaining that religions say quite different things on the level of their teachings, values, and rituals (and these differences should be respected), but on the esoteric level of mystical realization they contain a surprising degree of overlap. For the mystics of all traditions, the most compelling insight is born of direct apprehension of the sacred, and this experience is the heart of all spiritual truth. Today, this third choice is primary for people who identify as “spiritual, not religious,” and has also become common among progressives inside the religions themselves. Furthermore, when we read the works of Deepak Chopra, Ken Wilber, Mirabai Starr, Andrew Harvey, Ram Dass, and many others, we find the stamp of Smith’s influence. In this regard, Chopra once wrote, “Smith has shaped my thinking and my lifelong quest, and guided me to where I am today.”

Like Joseph Campbell and Carl Sagan, Smith was one of the great explainers of our time. Marshalling an incredible ability to elucidate complex concepts in simple terms, Smith argued for a reembracing of metaphysical content in philosophy, partially to counteract the cynicism he saw growing in our society as the result of dogmatic materialism. Where science coaches us to look outside ourselves for meaning, Smith argued that we must look inside ourselves as well, and he made his case for that in brilliant language that anyone could understand. Today, academic conferences on religion are more nuanced and open-minded about the value of religion and spirituality than they were even 10 years ago, and we have Smith to thank for that.

Read “‘Spirituality’ versus ‘Religious,’” an interview with Huston Smith from 2001

The post Religious Scholar Huston Smith has Died at 97 appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.