On September 25th, the Japanese American National Museum (JANM) in Los Angeles will launch an interactive project that expands and reimagines what a monument can be. Led by USC Ito Center Director Duncan Ryuken Williams and Project Creative Director Sunyoung Lee, the Irei: National Monument for the WWII Japanese American Incarceration aims to address the erasure of Japanese American incarceration in the US. At the heart of the Irei Monument is the first comprehensive and accurate list of over 125,000 names of every person of Japanese ancestry incarcerated during World War II. Now, the list will be shared with the public through three distinct, interlinking elements: a sacred book of names as monument (慰霊帳 Ireichō), an online archive as monument (慰霊蔵 Ireizō), and light sculptures as monument (慰霊碑 Ireihi).

The Irei Monument project draws inspiration from the history and traditions of monuments built by Buddhist priests and incarcerated individuals in internment camps, such as the Manzanar Ireito monument (Consoling Spirits Tower) in Inyo County, California, and the Rohwer Ireihi monument in Desha County, Arkansas. “The Ireito monument is always in my mind as a reminder of this history and a Buddhist way of understanding memory,” Williams told Tricycle. “It was not just for remembering, but also for repairing. The monument was just as much for consoling those who have gone before as it was for those who remain. It’s through that spirit that we’re building these new monuments in the 21st century.”

Following an installation ceremony with community members on the 24th, the Ireichō will open to the general public at the JANM on the 25th. The Ireizō—an interactive, searchable archive—will also become available online on the 25th. Hosted by the USC Shinso Ito Center in partnership with Densho, a Japanese American educational resource that specializes in digital archives, the Ireizō will provide a digital archive of all those listed in the book of names, as well as additional research materials about the lives of the incarcerees. Further down the line, in 2024 and 2025, the Ireihi light sculptures will be installed at various sites of incarceration. These dynamic light displays will project the names of all those who experienced wartime incarceration onto monumental towers. 

Based on the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, the interlinking aspects of the monument are intended to be interactive and shifting. “Even monuments, memory, remembrance, and repair work are dynamic and changing,” Williams said. “If we think of monuments in this way—that they are, in fact, meant to be shifting and not permanent—we can have a different conception of what a monument is.” 

On launch day, the public will be among the first to view and acknowledge individual names in the Ireichō. The large book of names aims to not only memorialize the past but repair the fractures caused by America’s racial karma. Over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in the US Army, Department of Justice, Wartime Civil Control Administration, and War Relocation Authority camps. “Incarceration was about excising a whole community from America and seeing them as a threat to security. Whether they were a citizen, a baby, or a grandmother, it didn’t matter,” Williams said. “One effort of trying to repair this history is to give people back their personhood by naming them.” The Ireichō is sequenced from the oldest person to the youngest, and embedded into the very materiality of the book are ceramic pieces made from clay that contains soil from 75 former incarceration sites. Over the course of a year-long installation, visitors will be asked to interact with the monument by leaving a permanent mark on it using a special Japanese hanko (stamp) as a way to honor those incarcerated. By leaving a mark for each name, visitors will change the nature of the monument, and in turn, their own experience of the monument will be changed. 

“The Ireichō is reflective of both a static past—which is usually how history is seen—but also this Buddhist sense of seeing the past as something that continues on. Past karma is dealt with today,” Duncan said. “The past is interlinked with the present, different communities are interlinked with other communities, and the racial karma of America can only be resolved if we do some of that repair and healing work in conversation with the past.”

The post A New Monument Addresses the Erasure of Japanese American Incarceration appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At a new exhibit inside the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles, a beautiful wooden altar dedicated to Shinto deity of war Hachiman Daimyojin sits next to two hand-carved wood panels, one engraved with psalms and the other with a Buddhist devotional phrase. Built from scrap material, the altar originally occupied the Judo dojo at Tule Lake Segregation Center, an internment camp in Newell, California, just south of the Oregon border. Written on the dojo, and showcased in the exhibit, are the words “ju yoku go o seisu,” or “softness subdues hardness.” 

The altar is just one of many moving artifacts on display at Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration, an exhibit curated by Duncan Ryuken Williams and Emily Anderson. On view until November 27, 2022, the show carefully guides visitors through the experience of Japanese Americans before, during, and after the forced removal and mass incarceration that occured at the issuance of President Roosevelt’s 1942 Executive order 9066. Showcasing altars, statues, prayer books, and more, the exhibit reminds us of the power that religion, faith, ritual, and community carry in all circumstances, but especially in the most trying of times. At this heartbreaking moment that we must keep remembering, religion—both Buddhism and Christianity—provided what was needed above all else: resilience.

After Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were forced to hide or destroy any personal items that were made in Japan or contained Japanese script for fear of being seen as a threat or as disloyal. When the over 120,000 people were incarcerated in internment camps, they weren’t allowed to bring any religious artifacts with them. Buddhist and Christian laypeople and priests had to rely on memories of scripture and formed study groups in barracks to practice ritual and create community. Some made their own religious relics by hand, taking materials like wood from mess hall crates to create objects of worship, or even rocks from the ground, as evidenced by the ink-inscribed Heart Mountain Sutra Stones.

In 1956, a man named Bill Higgins, who was an employee of the Bureau of Reclamation, unearthed a metal drum that had been buried beneath the cemetery at the Heart Mountain concentration camp in Wyoming. It contained two thousand ink–inscribed stones. The meaning of these stones remained unknown until 2001, when scholars revealed that the characters together formed the first six volumes of the Lotus Sutra. Since the Nichiren lineage of Buddhism is most closely associated with the Lotus Sutra, scholars suspect that Reverend Nichikan Murakita, who was the only ordained Nichiren priest incarcerated at Heart Mountain and also a master calligrapher, was the person responsible for the stones. Hundreds of the Heart Mountain Sutra stones went missing in the years since they were discovered, but the Japanese American National Museum now holds the largest collection, and they’re on display in this exhibit.

Copying sutras is a form of meditation and a devotional Buddhist practice dating back to late seventh century Japan. The Lotus Sutra itself explains the importance of copying down words of sacred text as a form of practice. The Heart Mountain Sutra Stones represent the enduring power of this practice, which endowed thousands with resilience when they needed it most. 

Elsewhere in the exhibit stand tall wood toba, or Buddhist memorial tablets, with names of Nisei soldiers who died at war. Reverend Mitsumyo Tottori of the Hale’iwa Shingon Mission in Hawaii, who was one of the only Issei Buddhist priests not arrested and interned, handwrote around 420 toba and placed them within his temple to make sure that each soldier who died in battle was properly honored. Just nearby are photographs of memorial services conducted in concentration camps by Christian clergy to mourn and provide religious ceremony for lives lost both in combat and at the internment camps.  

Beneath a plexiglass display, surrounded by well-worn rosaries, a prayer for soldiers at war: 

O God, I beseech Thee, watch over the souls of those who are exposed to the horrors of the war, and to the spiritual dangers peculiar to the soldier’s life. Give them such strong faith that no human respect may ever lead them to deny it, or fear to practice it. Do Thou, by Thy grace, fortify them against the contagion of bad example, that, being preserved from vice, and serving Thee faithfully , they may be ready to mee death whenever it may happen. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.

The exhibit also features scenes where ritual bestowed a sense of normalcy for prisoners: rhythm in a time of chaos and purpose in the face of senseless imprisonment and dehumanizing conditions. One large, colorful photograph captures a gathering of women and children dressed in beautiful kimonos. Next to it is a drum framed in a plexiglas case. The photograph and drum were used for the Obon ceremony held at Honouliuli Internment Camp in Hawaii on August 15, 1942. As curator Duncan Ryuken Williams said in his virtual exhibit opening remarks, “Resilience is the practice of skillfully adapting to a changeable and sometimes distressing world grounding oneself in enduring truths.” 

Or, “softness subdues hardness.” At a time when the world is still at war, Sutra and Bible reminds us how religion and faith—Buddhist, Christian, or otherwise—connect people and fortify them to endure turmoil, pain, and uncertainty. It shows us there is compassion in community, and resilience in yearning for something beyond. At the same time, it shows us the freedom in being present and awake to the world as it stands. In faith and religion, the path is no longer separate from our footsteps, and we can tap into the wisdom of presence—even in our darkest hours. 

♦

Join the August 13 event, “For Every Generation: Recovering and Sharing Family Histories,” virtually or in-person to hear Dr. Gail Y. Okawa, Mitch Homma, Elizabeth Nishiura, and Laura Dominguez-Yo talk about the efforts they made to preserve their own family histories, including artifacts that are part of Sutra and Bible. Learn more here.

The post Inside Sutra and Bible at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The summer I came home to farm full-time with my father on our small organic farm, an odd rainstorm broke through the usually arid temperatures of the Central Valley of California. I wrote a poem about the grief and struggle caused by the brief storm:

invisible drops stained
the swollen cheeks of our fruit like tears,
as if to lament nature’s timing.

We had been only days away from harvest, and
it never rains in June, it
can’t rain in June,
it’s not supposed to rain in June.

Rain this close to harvest damages the peaches. If the drops do not dry quickly, the skin of the fruit degrades, and the moisture in the fields creates ideal conditions for rot. Even in a short storm, a whole year of work and investment can seem to vanish. The uncertainty of a life in farming reiterated itself brilliantly in this inaugural summer. If there was ever a Buddhist welcome to my return to farming, this was it: here is your harvest of struggle.

I grew up on the same land I have returned to, a small eighty-acre family farm just south of Fresno, California. The Masumoto Family Farm has been home to four generations of my family. I walk the same fields and touch the same shovel carried in my jiichan’s (grandpa’s) weathered hands. Inside my grandparents’ home where I now live is a small hand-carved butsudan inset into a wall of the family room. The house was built specifically to integrate this shrine. Much like the butsudan’s unassuming and gentle presence, Buddhist practice has been ever-present in my life.

I have inherited a rich lineage of unconventional practices, from organic methods to meditating on tractors. As a young farmer (both in embodied age—I am twenty-eight—and in experience), I still consider myself an apprentice to my father, and I imagine I will for at least a decade. I daily turn to the interwoven lineages of agri/cultures of my family.

This year, three years into my journey of learning and practicing, we find ourselves in an unprecedented drought after and during one of California’s warmest winters of the last century.

I have begun to tally the extraordinary circumstances in lists of “never”: we’ve never irrigated in January, we’ve never irrigated so often, and we’ve never harvested our peaches and nectarines so early.

As a critical thinker, I know better than to draw wide conclusions from my experiences alone. But placed in the context of scientific consensus and historical records, it seems reasonable to believe that I am bearing witness to the manifestations of climate change on our farm. Despite the organic methods we’ve used for decades and our continual attempts to diminish our harmful effects on the land, climate change doesn’t stop at any border or property line. I believe it will become one of the defining forces the next generations of farmers will wrestle with.

I try to imagine what the future will hold on this land. If I let my imagination run wild, it quickly fills with worry. Big challenges tangle themselves into knots: can I do this on my own? Will I secure health insurance? Can I farm in a rapidly changing environment? Will we have access to water? Can we farm more sustainably? Will I be able to measure sustainability? Can we farm more equitably? Can I feed people?

Eventually, when I calm myself (and instead of trying to answer this litany), I invite uncertainty to sit with me for a while. While I sit at the table of my emotions, challenges transform themselves into something else. Uncertainty becomes a teacher who points to the generational context of my life.

I remind myself that I am the fourth generation to touch this plot of land in the United States. To this day, I work with the tools of my jiichan, who bought the first acres after being released from Gila River concentration camp, where he’d lived during World War II. Before him, my great-grandparents worked as farm workers in the Central Valley. Even during their imprisonment in Gila River, many Japanese Americans at that camp worked together to grow vegetables for all the concentration camps. From within a most awful context—a concentration camp—they could grow food to nourish their bodies, and I believe the practice of farming in turn nourished their souls.

I think about the context in which my jiichan purchased and started farming our farm: he was about my age, he had lost his home, he had been imprisoned for no reason, then drafted into an army to fight for a country that had wronged him and his entire community. He had lost his older brother in the war and thus became the de facto head of household, and he had almost no money. It was his charge to carry the family forward. I imagine uncertainty haunted him too.

Then he returned to the Central Valley to work in the fields and saved enough to purchase a small piece of land. He made a place for himself and my family to plant roots, to belong and to grow. The spirit of resilience is the greatest legacy I believe he has left for me.

In the face of the future challenges in climate change, I do not know the path. But I believe that one of the greatest resources we humans have is to turn to our spiritual hearts and nourish resilience. It may not look particularly glamorous or extraordinary, but resilience is what I breathe in the dust. It’s the acceptance of challenge, struggle, and uncertainty. It’s the realization that these experiences give us depth of meaning in life. The spirit of resilience has taught me to stop asking myself “Can I . . .” and instead pour my energies into experiments of “How” (How can I farm? How can I answer the call of sustainability? How can I feed people?). While “can” requires a yes-or-no answer, “how” invites a response in practice.

As I begin to respond to the many uncertainties of farming and the specific challenges of climate change, I will remember that while the specificity of my time and place is unique, the story of struggle is not. My family history reminds me that others before me stood at the feet of seemingly insurmountable odds, others before me carried the weight of uncertainty, and others before me survived incomprehensible injustices. In my family, farming has been a practice of resilience.

Every summer, two rituals remind me why I farm. When I take the first bite of peach, I reaffirm my commitment to farming. The first splash of sweet tangy nectar reignites a slow roaring hunger. Yes, I say to myself. Joy, shared sweet joy, pleasure—this is why I farm. Then, when it’s time to harvest Sun Crest peaches, I pick one, I cradle it in my hands, and I leave it at my jiichan’s gravestone. I don’t eat the peach, I give it as an offering. I have more work to do, I tell myself. Sitting with my jiichan, I just breathe.

♦

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “Sitting at the Edge of a Melting Glacier”
• “Dukkha for Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner” 
• “Interview with Mayumi Oda: Pilgrimage to the Sun Goddess”
• “Footloose: Meditating with Mountains and Rivers”
• “Land is Relationship”

The post Planting the Spirit appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week and next. 

Thai Designers Fashion Buddhist Amulets From Recycled Materials

During Bangkok Design Week 2022 (February 5–13), two Thai companies unveiled co-designed recycled Buddhist amulets. The amulets, made of nine different types of recycled materials ranging from plastic bottles to nylon fishing nets, are blessed by monks and available in exchange for one kilogram of plastic or 100 baht ($3.07 USD). All proceeds are donated to charitable organizations. “The idea of the plastic amulet is a result of finding a connection between the environment and Thai culture,” said Krit Phutpim, a director at Dots Design Studio, one of the companies behind the project launched at Bangkok’s Design Week exhibition.

Magha Puja Day Celebrated in Southeast Asia

On February 16, Theravada Buddhists observed Magha Puja Day, a holiday that is particularly important in Southeast Asia. Magha Puja commemorates several important events in the Buddha’s life, including the announcement of his death. Observers visit temples to accumulate merit, observe the eight precepts, recite prayers, and release lanterns into the sky. Read more about Magha Puja Day, also known as Sangha Day, in Tricycle’s Buddhism for Beginners section.

Parallax Press Offers a Limited Time eBook Bundle Honoring Thich Nhat Han

Parallax Press, the book publisher founded by Thich Nhat Han, and Humble Bundle, an e-commerce platform that puts together bundle promotions and supports charity, have released a collection of books by Nhat Han and his disciples called The Art of Happiness. The bundle features over 25 titles and is available until March 5. Read an excerpt from No Mud, No Lotus, one of the books in the collection, here.

Soka Gakkai International Publishes the English Translation of Daisaku Ikeda’s 2022 Peace Proposal

Every year, the president of Soka Gakkai International publishes a peace proposal, and this year’s, which came out in late January, has just been fully translated into English. Titled Transforming Human History: The Light of Peace and Dignity, the paper focuses on the inequalities heightened by the pandemic, the climate crisis, and the abolition of nuclear weapons. Read the full proposal here.

A Khmer Buddhist Foundation Donates $1 Million to Buddhist Digital Resource Center

A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the culture of the Khmer people, announced last week that it has provided one million dollars in grant money to the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC). The donations have helped BDRC restore and digitize the largest collection of Cambodian Buddhist palm leaf manuscripts in the world — over 1.5 million pages in total. After two years of locating, cleaning, organizing, digitization, and scanning fragile palm leaf texts, the BDRC has made a total of over 7,600 manuscripts freely available on their website. The remaining 2,500 will be processed and released online in the coming months. 

Palm leaf manuscripts have been the main medium for Cambodian literature for hundreds of years. The dyed and hand-etched palm leaves, bundled together and tied with colorful strings, are used to transmit Buddhist rituals and teachings from generation to generation. Over 95 percent of palm leaf texts were lost to the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia between 1975-1990. Lyna Lam, the founder and executive director of A Khmer Buddhist Foundation, said the restored manuscripts “offer a snapshot of the fascinating cultural and spiritual landscape that existed in Cambodian society before the country was ravaged by war.”

Coming Up:

February 24: The Shin Buddhist Path of Boundless Compassion

Fourteenth-generation Shin Buddhist minister Mark Unno joins Tricycle editor-in-chief James Shaheen for a virtual conversation on the concept of compassion in Shin Buddhism, collective karma, balancing formal practice with freedom and creativity, and more. Register here.

February 26: Sutra and Bible, an Exhibit on Faith and the Japanese American Internment, Opens with a Virtual Curator’s Preview and Gallery Talk

On February 26, an exhibit at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles titled Sutra and Bible: Faith and the Japanese American World War II Incarceration will open with a virtual preview and talk by curators Duncan Ryuken Williams and Emily Anderson. The exhibit, sponsored by the Museum and the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture, features never-before-seen artifacts that showcase the role faith played for Japanese Americans during incarceration. The preview runs from 10 am to 11am PT, and the museum doors open to the public at 11 am. On April 2, the museum will host an in-person grand opening program and reception, and on August 13, a procession of interfaith clergy, mainly Buddhist priests, will carry the Ireicho Book of Names, a book containing the names of the victims of incarceration, for a formal installation in the museum’s atrium as an addition to the exhibit. Williams has been compiling the list of names for the book, which are meant to be chanted as a form of remembrance. Sutra and Bible runs until November 27, 2022. Stay tuned for more coverage.

The post <i>Sutra and Bible</i>, a New Exhibit on Faith and the Japanese American Internment, Opens with a Virtual Preview appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Join Japanese American director Renee Tajima-Peña on her road trip exploring the Asian American cultural landscape at the end of the 20th century. My America…or Honk if You Love Buddha tackles topics of racial politics, xenophobia, and immigration with curiosity and irreverence, as Tajima-Peña tries to answer the question “What does it mean to be Asian American?”

This film will be available to stream until midnight EDT on Friday, October 1.

Learn more about the film and director Renee Tajima-Peña at https://www.reneetajimapena.com/my-america

A young Renee Tajima-Peña on a family road trip | Image courtesy of GOOD DOCS

Civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama | Image courtesy of GOOD DOCS

Victor Wong protest photo film strip | Image courtesy of GOOD DOCS

Mardi Gras queen Mae Burtanog | Image courtesy of GOOD DOCS

Image courtesy of GOOD DOCS

The post My America…or Honk If You Love Buddha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

So writes Duncan Ryuken Williams, author of American Sutra, a historical account of the dark chapter in US history when 125,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated in concentration camps during World War II. In addition to serving as an ordained priest in the Soto Zen Buddhist tradition, Williams is Professor of Religion and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Southern California.

He’s also a member of Tsuru for Solidarity, a group of Japanese American activists who have mobilized to protest the treatment of immigrants both in the United States and at its border. Last summer, the group staged a demonstration at a notorious family detention facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Dilley, Texas. There, they hung more than 25,000 paper cranes—tsuru—on the fence that surrounds the facility, which is just 45 miles from one of the camps where Japanese Americans were interned. As a reporter covering immigration, I’ve been to both sides of the border a number of times in the past few years. Restrictive policies meant to hurt and exclude aren’t new, but the total elimination of compassion toward asylum seekers at our border has been shocking. I spoke with Williams about the work of Tsuru for Solidarity and what a Buddhist ethic of confronting that brutality might look like.

Are there parallels between what happened to Japanese Americans during World War II and how asylum seekers and families trying to immigrate to the US are being treated now? When the internments took place, the US was at war with Italy and Germany. So why was it that only the Japanese American community experienced that kind of mass roundup and incarceration? I think the obvious, simple answer is the racial and religious animus of the time: Buddhism was seen as un-American or even anti-American.

Today, whether it’s with the travel ban or what’s happening at the southern border, there’s still this larger question that my book is trying to tackle, which is about two different visions of America. One says it is essentially and foundationally a white Christian nation. And then there is a different vision that says it’s multiethnic in character and religiously pluralistic.

The struggle Japanese Americans went through back then is interlinked with what’s happening today, where these issues of race and religion—who belongs, who’s included, and who’s excluded—are unfortunately still live questions.

I’ve been contemplating the notion of borders lately, and how they are in some sense a physical manifestation of one approach to identity. What do you think the dharma can teach us about how we approach our national identity? The founder of Soto Zen Buddhism, Master Dogen, wrote a text that says “To study the Buddha’s way is to study the self.” The second line is “To study the self is to forget the self.” And the third line is “To forget the self is to be actualized by the 10,000 things”—a Taoist term referring to everything in the material universe.

What it means is that you are actualized when you recognize that you are made up of everything and that you are not alone. Everything in the world is interconnected. The Buddha taught that anyone who thinks their self is permanent and static as opposed to dynamic and changing is going to fall into suffering, because that’s not how reality actually works.

This means that if we apply the idea of identity beyond one’s self to the world writ large, then we have to take a look at our other identities. What is America? What is Japan, or any place where we say there’s a boundary or a border? When we say there’s an identity that’s set and not subject to change or being interconnected with everything else, we actually create suffering.

As Buddhists we have the responsibility of alleviating that suffering with whatever skillful means we have available to us. So for me, dharma can help us notice that America is not a white Christian nation: it’s actually made up of migrations. There was the westward movement of Europeans, but for Asian Americans our story has been one of eastward movement. For Central Americans, their story is one of movement toward the north.

There’s not just one direction or story of what it means to be American, and until we recognize that America is composed of these different migrations and people interconnecting together in this space, there’s going to be suffering.

Parts of this interdependent soup are fueled by a sense of entitlement and control. How do we confront white supremacy in America? White supremacy is not a new thing. It’s been around in other kinds of immigration policies, starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and going on to the Immigration Act of 1924 and the alien land laws of the early 20th century. This isn’t a new topic. Concerning survival and finding ways to persist, sometimes the best way is to simply create the alternative.

There’s what we might call Anglo-Protestant normativity, where there’s a kind of norm or standard of who is American. When we allow that to remain at the center of the discourse, then it’s all about trying to widen the circles of inclusion. Anglo-Protestants are at the center, while others may be given an opportunity to join that circle.

But what I find, from an Asian American Buddhist perspective, is that we can never join that circle. Buddhism is too far outside the center. It can’t be included in that widening of the circle. So I feel Buddhists have a role to play, as do other Asian-originated religious traditions like Hinduism—not in trying to assimilate into that circle, but rather in creating a different vision of America that is from the start about multiplicity and not singularity, from the start about interdependence, not protection of some kind of purity.

I find that presenting a model of a different way of doing things rather than trying to directly attack the old one can change the discourse and people’s sense of possibility and imagination.

As Buddhists we’re taught that introspection and self-transformation are vehicles of skillful action in the world. But on the other hand there’s a real imperative to do something about what’s surrounding us. How do we strike the right balance? There’s a joke in the Buddhist community that goes, “Don’t just do something, sit there.” The point is that sometimes just sitting there can be doing something very good. It’s not that there’s a one-program-fits-all approach. Some people need to do quiet sitting—maybe that’s their contribution to the world. And for other people there may be more outwardly manifest ways of trying to alleviate suffering.

The Buddhist tradition is so full of amazing teachings on the diversity of medicine that the Buddha, the great physician, gave to people depending on their situation, condition, age, and circumstance. We have a lot of tools we can draw on to take on that big task of alleviating suffering.

The world is so full of what seem like crises, including global climate change. So there are these questions like “Shouldn’t our attention go to that instead of what’s happening at the border?” But everything is interconnected. When you are alleviating suffering in one area, you are inevitably reducing suffering as a whole. What you choose is up to your karmic situation and inclination and temperament. If you do it well, that will have an impact broadly.

I often feel very angry about what’s happening at the border. As practitioners, how do we work with these strong emotions that come up when we see what’s happening in places like Dilley and northern Mexico? There’s a metaphor we often use in Japan, which is a very volcanic country that’s well known for its hot springs. Those hot springs are where volcanic eruptions meet water, which is why they contain different minerals and become healing. If the volcano comes out without any modulation, it can be quite harmful and a lot of destruction can occur. But if you modulate it with some water, then you turn it into something else. It doesn’t disappear, and you aren’t repressing it, but that slight modulation takes the same energy and makes it into something that is beneficial and helpful for beings.

The challenge is to find what will function like the water to modulate our anger, outrage, and disgust—which are all just energies—to help us transform and make the world better. We need to think clearly about what will help make that transformation happen.

That’s a lovely metaphor. Is there such a thing as a Buddhist approach to confrontation? I think there’s a way that we can find the right teachings and practices to engage in confrontation and stand up for people who are suffering, to be in the world in a way that actively advocates for beings regardless of where they come from. But if that’s our mission, the way we engage should align with our path. It’s not like we take up activism and then say, “We’ll get back to Buddhist practice afterward.” We have to do it in a way that is in line with and draws on our teachings, because so many of them allow us to do that kind of modulation work. We’re going to fall off the path, but our practice is to stand up again. When we fall down, we stand back up. The biggest monastery is our world, with all the difficulties and raw emotions it contains.

Working in immigration, I’ve noted that Christian churches have a long history of sheltering immigrants. What do you think we, across the spectrum of American Buddhists, can be doing better? In the long history of Buddhism, there are many great examples of practitioners doing social work and caring for the sick—for example, Buddhist temples taking on the administration of hospitals in medieval Japan, or sanghas in India that cared for the homeless or people affected by natural disasters. In North America, we just don’t have a strong tradition like that, simply because we haven’t been around as long.

An important starting point for us to think about Buddhist involvement in immigration issues would be to contemplate what it means to take refuge, and what it means to provide it. Finding ways to create refuge is actually at the very heart of Buddhism. All the tools are there; we just have to start practicing and honing them so that we really are a religion of refuge. But not out of pity or thinking that we are separate, or different, or above, like we’re looking down on all these poor people. We have to develop a Buddhist ethic of doing this work that isn’t about pitying but simply about recognizing that when we help each other we are contributing to liberation and freedom for all beings, including ourselves.

I have a friend, Reverend William Briones, a third-generation Mexican American serving in Los Angeles at a Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist temple that’s over one hundred years old. The presence of a Latino teacher at a historically Japanese American temple reflects a new configuration of American Buddhism. Similarly, the Orange County Buddhist Church, a Shin Buddhist temple, now has a sizable Latinx membership.

One of the interesting things about American Buddhism is that, in the religion’s 2,500-year history, there was never a time when there were Laotian Buddhists next to Tibetan Buddhists next to all the other lineages of the tradition. We have an opportunity to interlink across communities in a way that never could have happened in all the previous centuries.

In this moment we can create something really exciting and new called American Buddhism, a form that recognizes the multiplicity of lineages, ethnicities, and experiences. As we do that, I think we will organically want to get involved in the issues about immigration, because we will see that they are about us as well.

♦

Before the US outbreak of the novel coronavirus COVID-19, Duncan Ryuken Williams and the group Tsuru for Solidarity had planned to gather in Washington, DC, from June 5 to June 7 for a “National Pilgrimage to Close the Camps.” They were to bring 125,000 paper cranes, representing people of Japanese descent who were interned during World War II, as a symbol of solidarity with immigrant communities. Tsuru for Solidarity postponed these demonstrations until spring 2021 and will instead hold an online gathering in June. Visit the Tsuru for Solidarity’s website for details.

The post Never Again appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

At Akiko Masuda’s Zen Buddhist bed and breakfast on the Big Island of Hawaii, the host offers a few words of guidance for guests: “Leave no trace… leave only a ‘presence,’ a feeling that for a moment you loved a place so deeply that both you and the place were transformed, and both became more beautiful.” 

The transformative power of place is the theme of August at Akiko’s, one of the New Yorker’s best films of 2019, which follows Alex Zhang Hungtai playing a fictionalized version of himself as a jazz musician searching for his late grandparents’ home in Hawaii. Alex’s search for his ancestral roots coincides with a personal transformation brought to fruition through his friendship with Akiko. 

Tricycle spoke with Akiko Masuda and director Christopher Makoto Yogi about the significance of ancestral callings, their contemplative approach to filmmaking, and how a place can embody its history.

August at Akiko’s is Tricycle’s Film Club selection for the month of March. Watch the film here before April 3.

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How did the film’s setting, Wailea Village on the Big Island of Hawaii, become central to the story? 

Christopher Makoto Yogi (CMY): I first visited Wailea when I was location-scouting for another film, looking for areas that reminded me of the Hawaii of my childhood in Honolulu and Oahu. Because of development, much of that feeling of old Hawaii is gone. We ended up in Wailea, and I found it so beautiful and welcoming. We stayed at Akiko’s [bed and breakfast], and I thought Akiko was amazing, such a great storyteller. When I stepped into her B&B, I was taken back to my grandfather’s small, wooden Japanese house. The feeling of connection to the place was central to deciding to return and shoot there. 

Akiko Masuda (AM): Sometimes we can’t even voice our deep connection to a place, it’s just a very strong feeling, something that we feel in our na’au, our gut. It’s just something we feel beyond explanations, it’s very deep. 

When I go to newer subdivisions in Hawaii, everything is packaged; it’s all manicured, trimmed, and weeded. Wailea is pretty natural, there’s not much organization by human intention. Whatever survives all the rain and the sun, and doesn’t get cut down, grows. This is old Hawaii, still wild, still untamed, and very verdant.

Akiko, the film must have put a spotlight on the role you play in the Wailea Village community. 

AM: I’ve had people come up to me and say “Akiko, we saw your film!” At the Big Island premiere [of August at Akiko’s], I said, “This is not an autobiography or a documentary about me. It is not about me, get it? This is about the spirit of a place.” It’s the same for the community work I’m involved in; I like to avoid any kind of grandiose hero worship. In any organization, all you need is one person to say, “OK, you guys, show up.” That’s all I do. 

Here in Hawaii we have the word ʻohana, family. Most of us are transplants, and our family becomes the people we work with, eat with, and see on a regular basis. It was like that during filming: all the filmmakers lived and ate together in a house that is spirited with families who lived there in the past. 

What role did the ancestors play in the community and in the film?

CMY: After we spent some time at Akiko’s B&B, I returned to Honolulu and went on with my life. A few months later, I was building a family tree on ancestry.com, and I discovered that both sides of my family could trace roots back to Akiko’s area of the Big Island, just down the road. I had no idea that any of my family had ever lived on that island. I had been so moved when I was there; something in me was stirred but I didn’t know why. Learning that I had roots in this place was the genesis of this project. Something was calling me to go back and make something, but also to use the process of filmmaking to learn about Wailea and its community. The entire piece was born out of a kind of ancestral calling.

So I reached out to Alex, who is a friend of mine and someone I respect as an artist. He grew up in Honolulu like me, but left a decade ago and traveled around the world as a musician. The project was a homecoming and a reconnection for both of us, and we combined both our stories into his character’s journey.

You arrived in Wailea without a script, only a sense of how the film would begin and end. How did that process unfold?

CMY: Akiko played a big part in that. I wrote a ten-page treatment—basically a short story or poem—that captured the feeling that we wanted, but it didn’t break the film down scene by scene in a traditional way. We knew the general arc of the story we wanted to tell. But how we got there—we left it up to the place to guide us. Akiko described the film as a river that we were riding down. It was a process of trusting and keeping our eyes and ears open. Akiko would come up with ideas and suggest people for us to incorporate into the film. It also helped that Alex is an improvisational musician. It all just seemed to work.   

All the actors seemed unselfconscious and at ease on camera, though nobody was a professional actor. Was it difficult to get used to being filmed?

AM: No—there was no script to memorize. I just did what I’ve done with the hundreds of guests that come through my B&B. And I looked—or felt—for moments when dialogue would ensue and just followed with that. We were all just being ourselves! In the magic of filming and the editing room, they captured these moments and put them together into a piece. 

CMY: The intention was to try to capture life there as it is. We were a very small crew, so we tried to be as invisible as possible so that we didn’t impose on the real life that was unfolding in front of us. I can’t recall a moment in which anybody felt they were too aware of the camera. 

Akiko, I’d love to learn more about the Buddhist aspect of your B&B. How did you decide to make daily zazen (Zen meditation) practice a part of it?

AM: I’ve been sitting since 1980. I taught dance at the time, and one of my students invited me to an art show at a Zen temple. As I was walking up to the temple from my car, somebody yelled at me, “Go home, put on long clothes and get a brassiere on!” I thought, “Oh, what a nice entrance.” But I went home, put on a bra and long pants, and went back, and while I was there, I started sitting. Then it just became a way of life. I hadn’t been planning to start a B&B, but when I did start my business, I incorporated my Zen practice into it. In my life, there’s not too much forethought; something presents itself, and I respond.

Can you tell me more about the relationship that develops between Akiko and Alex? 

AM: The day Alex arrived, I drove home from town and looked across the street to a giant boulder, and here was a guy sitting on top of the rock, with his feet on it, a cigarette in his mouth, and a cellphone to his ear. I thought, “What the heck?” I parked my car and walked over, and he didn’t even look up. I said, “Excuse me. You’re sitting on a very sacred stone. Please.” He jumped off right away and was very apologetic, and I walked away. That was the beginning! I thought, “Oh my goodness! He lives here in Hawaii and he can’t recognize that’s a special stone?”

But on the first day of filming, we filmed the scene in the back courtyard, where Alex and I talked and I prayed and did a little oli, a chant, and he wept. I thought, “This is the beginning of a man that is going to really open his heart.”

CMY: A lot of it was just capturing their friendship as it developed over the course of the shoot. There wasn’t much scripting as to what their relationship should be. Luckily, they became friends, and that made a nice story! But if their relationship had gone another direction, that would have been the story. 

Alex says that when he watches himself on screen, he can see how much torment and anger he was going through at the time. Now he’s in a much different place, and he sits zazen every day.

There’s a brief shot where a rock on the ground begins to roll on its own. Does that scene have a meaning?

CMY: The film emphasizes the surroundings just as much as the subjects. In traditional filmmaking, the camera follows the characters around; whatever they do is what you’re supposed to get out of the shot, and the background is just that, the background. But we wanted to flip that. We wanted the film to foreground the elements that are normally put in the background, to make you spend time with a tree, or a leaf, or a cat. So a rock felt like an extension of that. We treat these natural elements with as much connection and empathy as we would a character in the film. The rock is a character in the film, that’s how I think about it. 

When I shot it, however, I had no real explanation for that scene. The thought came into my head, and we decided it would be perfect for this film. Now I can look back on it and intellectualize it after the fact, but in the moment, it was a very intuitive decision.

What do you want viewers to take away from the film? 

CMY: The main thing that I would love is for people to glimpse a story of Hawaii more rooted in the place, a story different from the normal depictions of Hawaii that are mediated through tourism or Hollywood movies, a lot of which feels very distant and unrecognizable. This film reminds me of my home, the people there, and that sense of family, ‘ohana, as Akiko said, and the spirit of aloha. It feels very genuine, very sincere, and a little bit different than what you would normally see on, say, Hawaii Five-0, or any of the other big-budget depictions of Hawaii made by people who aren’t from there.

I loved introducing Akiko’s and Alex’s spirits to the world as well. Both of them have such beautiful presences and charismas. Akiko is such a great storyteller; Alex is such a great artist.

AM: After the screening in Honolulu, somebody asked, “What was the profound meaning of those long driving scenes?” That question was coming from another context. I don’t know what the context is. I asked the people at the film, “Please, all I ask is that you be present. Don’t worry about ‘profound this’, ‘profound that’, or ‘what’s the meaning of that?’ Just be present and let the film be.” If we can simply be present, like we are with a friend that’s getting ready to cross over, then we can see how deep that humanity is. That’s what I want people to take from the film: Be present.

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Nothing is permanent, so everything is precious. Here’s a selection of some happenings—fleeting or otherwise—in the Buddhist world this week.

Buddhists Continue to Respond to Coronavirus Outbreak

Dozens of new cases of Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) were reported in North America and Europe this week, as the virus continues to spread across the world. This week Asia Times reported that at least six people contracted the coronavirus after visiting the Fook Wai Ching She Buddhist temple in Hong Kong. The director of Hong Kong’s Communicable Disease Division at the Centre for Health Protection said that at least seven people who visited the temple in recent weeks have been sent to hospital, and 16 others have been quarantined. Lam Ching-choi, a member of Hong Kong’s Executive Council and the Chief Executive Officer of the Haven of Hope Christian Service, implored Hong Kong residents to stop attending any religious services for the time being. 

Chinese authorities have arrested seven Tibetans from Chamdo county in central Tibet on charges of spreading rumors or misinformation about the coronavirus, according to Radio Free Asia (RFA). One man reportedly posted a comment online that said that people from mainland China were “arriving in secret” in Chamdo, while another man, identified by the name Tse, was arrested for posting a WeChat message asking readers to recite a particular prayer ten times and send the request to ten others as a guard against infection. Meanwhile, Tibetan monks are working to prevent the spread of the virus by collecting donations at the Labrang monastery in Tibet’s Gansu region, one of the largest Tibetan Buddhist monasteries outside the Tibet Autonomous Region, and distributing face masks in the Kardze region’s Tawu (Daofu) county, RFA reported. 

In South Korea, the Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism announced on Monday that it would suspend operation of its Templestay program until March 20, according to the Korea Herald. An affiliate of the Jogye Order of Korean Buddhism, the Cultural Corps oversees the program, which offers overnight stays and cultural experiences at 137 Buddhist temples around South Korea. Head monk Ven. Wonkyung told the Herald that the suspension was due to the growing incidents of coronavirus in South Korea, which has the second-highest number of cases after China. “As people’s concerns about the coronavirus rise due to the number of confirmed cases increasing day by day, we have inevitably decided to suspend our operations. We also ask all the Templestay operating staff and head Buddhist monks to pay more attention to preventing the spread of the infection and their health,” he said. 

Since the start of the outbreak, Buddhists have turned to a variety of measures to help them stay safe and raise funds for those affected by the disease. In a statement on its website the Taiwan-based Buddhist nonprofit Tzu Chi confirmed that it had sent its second shipment of surgical masks, respirators, goggles, medical gowns, and other supplies to affected areas in China. Tzu Chi chronicled the challenges that the organization faced in delivering humanitarian supplies due to the widespread cancellation of flights to China. 

Dalai Lama Marks 80 Years as Tibet’s Spiritual Leader

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama last Saturday marked 80 years as the spiritual leader of Tibet, a position he has held since he was enthroned in Lhasa at the age of four. According to a report by the AFP, the office of the Dalai Lama said that there would be no commemoration of the anniversary. His Holiness suspended all public appearances and teachings earlier this month as a precaution against the coronavirus. A new book by Tibetologist Alexander Norman chronicles the life of the Dalai Lama, tracing the intersection of political strife and religious tradition of the world’s most recognizable Buddhist. In 2011 His Holiness announced that he may be the last incarnation in the Dalai Lama lineage, seeking to prevent Chinese authorities from naming a separate successor. 

Activist Buddhist Monk Thich Quang Do Dies at 91

Head of the banned Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, Thich Quang Do died last Saturday at the age of 91, according to the New York Times. A spokesperson for the Paris-based International Buddhist Information Bureau told the Times that Vietnamese authorities had held the dissident Buddhist monk incommunicado at the Tu Hieu Pagoda in Ho Chi Minh City. Thich Quang Do was a long-term champion of religious freedom and faced punishment from the Communist government for his views, spending the last 30 years of his life in prison, under house arrest, or in internal exile for refusing to submit his United Church to government control. According to the Times, he played a key role in connecting political dissidents in north and south Vietnam, and was also a respected Buddhist scholar who published over novels, poetry, and translations and studies of Vietnamese Buddhism. For his efforts he received many human rights awards and nods, including Norway’s Rafto Prize and a 1978 Nobel Peace Prize nomination. 

California Apologizes to Japanese Americans for Internment Camps 

Lawmakers in the state of California voted unanimously on Thursday to formally apologize for the role the state played in the incarceration of over 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II, according to the Guardian. California state assembly member Albert Muratsuchi, who introduced the resolution, said that he wanted to commemorate the 78th anniversary of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s executive order at a time when “our nation’s capital is hopelessly divided along party lines and President Trump is putting immigrant families and children in cages.” He added, “We’re seeing striking parallels between what happened to Japanese Americans before and during World War II and what we see happening today.” In 1988 the US government formally apologized to Japanese Americans and issued $20,000 to survivors of the internment camps. The new California resolution does not call for additional reparations but condemns the California state legislature’s support in the decision to incarcerate Americans of Japanese descent.

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At Akiko’s Zen Buddhist bed-and-breakfast on the Big Island of Hawai’i, the host offers a few words of guidance for guests: “Leave no trace… leave only a ‘presence,’ a feeling that for a moment you loved a place so deeply that both you and the place were transformed, and both became more beautiful.” The transformative power of place is the theme of August at Akiko’s, which follows Alex, a young jazz musician on a meandering search for his late grandparents’ home on Hawai’i. Hunting for his family roots, Alex wanders into a Zen B&B on a sleepy corner of the island, where he forms an unlikely friendship with its owner, a quirky old woman named Akiko. 

Starring Alex Zhang Hungtai and Akiko Masuda playing fictionalized versions of themselves, August at Akiko’s is a dreamy ode to the Big Island and its Japanese American communities. A striking visual meditation on Zen, memory, and creative inspiration, the film deftly navigates the zone between dream and reality, past and present, belonging and estrangement. The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody included August at Akiko’s on his list of “The Best Movies of 2019,” calling it “transcendently inventive,” while Variety described it as “a gentle paean to Hawaii, jazz and inner peace.” 

To learn more about August at Akiko’s, visit augustatakikos.com.

This film was available to stream until midnight on April 3, 2020. Tricycle’s screening has ended, but you can find the film on The Criterion Channel, Amazon, and Kanopy.

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At 2:30 in the morning on July 2, 1950, Hayashi Yoken, a 22-year-old monk, set fire to Kinkaku-ji, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. He held a match to a small bundle of kindling he placed near a wooden portrait of Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, the temple’s founder. Hayashi Yoken was going to burn himself with the temple but at the last minute lost his nerve and ran into the woods. He ran to the nearest mountain, Daimon-ji. He watched the Golden Pavilion burning through the trees, the fire reflecting in its pond. He downed a bottle of sleeping medicine, then stabbed himself in the heart. 

Some said he had been stricken by the temple’s beauty. Some said he despised its ostentation. Some said he wanted to take it away from the people who came to defile the relics of the Buddha with their gawking. Some said he was a paranoid schizophrenic. Some said he had dementia. His mother said he was short-tempered and shy.

He confessed: I used paper and mosquito netting to start it, and after seeing the fire catch, I ran away and drank sleeping medicine I had bought one week previously. Although I had planned this from the time I made the purchase, even now I do not believe I have done anything wrong.

Hayashi Yoken’s knife missed his heart. He had stab wounds beneath his left collarbone. He survived.

The Golden Pavilion was five centuries old. By 4:00 in the morning, it was gone. Firefighters were able to rescue Yoshimitsu’s portrait but with its head blackened and badly deformed. A fire alarm had recently been installed in a small room on the first floor of the Golden Pavilion, but it stopped working and had been sent out to be fixed.

Before seeing the Golden Pavilion for the first time, Mizoguchi, the Hayashi Yoken-inspired protagonist of Yukio Mishima’s The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, imagines it as both a “small, delicate piece of workmanship and a huge, monstrous cathedral that soared up endlessly into the sky.” The reconciliation of the two forms the basis for Mizoguchi’s obsession.

The Golden Pavilion was rebuilt in 1955. Hayashi Yoken, sentenced to seven years in prison, was released after five and died a year later.

It was a clear hot summer day in Kyoto. Hundreds of people passed before the Golden Pavilion. The trees were animated, in waves, with cicadas. Large, straggling tours trailed tour guides, old women, whose voices floated over the brown and green pond. The tourists were either extrapolations or betrayals of Hayashi Yoken. It was difficult—watching the people stare longingly, absent-mindedly, or not even raise their eyes—to tell the difference between reverence and disinterest, even disrespect. They were not, in their minds, watching it burn.

A young mother and father and their young daughter, three or four, stopped on the path before the Golden Pavilion. The mother was holding the girl. The girl was struggling, trying to wriggle free of her mother’s arms. Neither she nor the father spoke.They signed to each other. The daughter stared at them, watching their hands. Then she spoke, in a quiet voice—the quiet of someone talking to herself in a room. Her parents responded in sign language. The mother was Japanese. The father was white. They were deaf. The daughter was not.

Watching the young girl with her parents, I thought of my father. I can hear birds, sometimes water, he said, the last time I saw him. That was almost a decade ago, years after he stopped speaking to my sister, a few years before he stopped speaking to me.  

I am profoundly deaf in one ear and on the border of severely and profoundly deaf in the other, my father said. When I was growing up I knew that he was hard of hearing (the phrase we used), but I did not know what that meant, not exactly. He rarely talked about it, and when he did, he was elusive. Or, I could not hear it. Only that there was a time every night when his hearing aids came out, and sat like snails on the sink. That was when he disappeared, and I knew not to talk to or try to engage him. It did not occur to me that he might have looked forward, every day, to the moment when he took his hearing aids out, and that when the moment arrived, he experienced the most extraordinary relief.

The third floor of the Golden Pavilion is empty. The wooden floor is polished, a dark mirror.

Years after my family left the house where I grew up, I returned to it. The neighbors’ house had burned down. I walked through the ashes. I went up the front steps and rang the bell. The door opened onto an empty hallway. A young girl with blonde hair, no more than four years old, appeared. She was just tall enough to reach the doorknob. She looked up at me. I looked down at her. Have you seen anyone in my room? I wanted to ask. Have you followed anyone into my room? Her eyes were enormous. But she did not look scared. Behind me stood a row of tulip trees, then gray birch, thousands, interminable, forming a wall. Or . . . have you seen anyone strange, or unfamiliar, going up the stairs? 

A woman’s voice came from around a wall. Who’s at the door? The girl did not answer. Her mother appeared. I realized, or felt, that I was trespassing. I used to live here, I managed, suddenly unsure. I wanted to visit. The woman asked if I wanted to come in. Her invitation startled me. I did not know how to answer. I thought that maybe I was a ghost, and that part of being a ghost, was being invited into the house where I used to live, up the stairs, into my room, and into the wall. No, I said, I just wanted to see. See what? I had not seen anything. I thanked the woman, then the young girl, who, even as I walked away, continued to hold the door open.

♦

Excerpted from “The Temple of the Golden Pavilion” by Brandon Shimoda from The Grave on the Wall. Copyright © 2019 by Brandon Shimoda. Reprinted with the permission of City Lights Books, www.citylights.com

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