Radical imagination is a concept and action. It is our capacity to imagine the world as it might be otherwise. For us to practice this concept, we cannot do it alone. As individuals we cannot daydream and call it an act of radical imagination, no matter how uncommon or atypical the thoughts. Radical imagination is collectively generated, through our shared encounters and exchanges. It is an act of collaborative creation. 

It’s analogous to sharing the same dream, but not a dream generated by one person that features various characters. It is more like one big dream that holds space for billions of dreams that each imprint on each other to form the space of that one big dream.

We need to practice the activity of radical imagining as a community to develop the necessary actions that would radically transform an inequitable system. We need to practice this activity of radical imagining, if for no other reason, then to create transformative systems.  

For us to dabble in radical imagination, we are going to need transformative learning. All that means is the expansion of consciousness through the transformation of our basic worldview and specific capacities of the self. To engage in transformative learning, we must evaluate the unconscious parts of ourselves and analyze our underlying assumptions.

Transformative learning involves experiencing deep, structural shifts in the premises—of the very beliefs—of our thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is a shift of consciousness that dramatically and irreversibly alters our way of being in the world. 

Such a shift involves understanding ourselves and the positions we occupy, our relationships with other humans and with the natural world, our understanding of relations of power in the interconnected structures of class, race, and gender, our body awareness, our views of alternative approaches to living, and our sense of possibilities for social justice, peace, and personal joy.

What does all that have to do with meditation? What is the relationship between the radical imagination and meditation? How can meditation bring about transformative learning, which creates transformative systems?

The breath is insight—it is the very embodiment of self-existing wisdom. 

Through consistent meditation practice, we come to realize that, in essence, there exists only the breath. It is the breath of the universe that flows through all. You can think of the breath like one big dream. 

Imagine that.

♦

This article was originally published on June 18, 2021.

The post Radical Imagination: A Teaching for Juneteenth appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhism has a sexual ethics problem. In 2018, the Dalai Lama admitted as much when he said on Dutch public TV that he had been told of sexual violations occurring in Tibetan Buddhist communities as long ago as the early 1990s. His admission was the result of a petition by a group of abuse survivors in the Netherlands. Their efforts are part of a larger trend of students speaking out publicly about their experiences. While international Buddhist groups are beginning to respond seriously to the problem of sexual abuse, the norm for many in positions of power remains closer to the Dalai Lama’s original response 25 years ago, which was to do very little. Indeed, some Buddhist teachers, including Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche and Lama Zopa, have defended colleagues accused of multiple counts of sexual abuse, drawing on Buddhist doctrine to do so.

The mixed record of Buddhist teachers responding to abuse raises some questions. Where should our sexual ethics be coming from as Buddhists, if not from Buddhism and Buddhist teachers? Do the Buddha’s teachings include adequate ethics to answer cases of sexual abuse? Practitioners and groups hoping to address the issue of sexual violation are looking at how other Buddhist and non-Buddhist communities are responding. They are also exploring what classical Buddhist ethics have to say about sex and consent. This, however, is not as straightforward as it sounds.

The Buddha did not, for instance, teach about sexual consent, at least not as we understand the concept. While sex without affirmative consent is the definition of assault on college campuses today, the early Buddhist suttas (discourses) of the Pali canon did not define ethical sex between adults in those terms. Of course, such concepts would be anachronistic, but the issue runs deeper than that. The ordinary expression of sexual desire is not considered compatible with the higher goals of the Buddhist path. Lust and sensual enjoyment lead to craving, disrupt concentration, and result in many unwholesome actions. According to the Buddhism found in the earliest scriptures and developed in the commentaries and philosophic texts of the early tradition, the most realistic path to awakening or freedom from suffering is the celibate life of a monk or nun. (Certain threads of thought in Mahayana Buddhism allow for spiritually advanced beings to combine sex with the pursuit of enlightenment, or even use sex as a tool to achieve enlightenment, but few are thought to be capable of such feats.) The high value placed on celibacy in the early tradition means that discussions about adults incorporating sexuality into their lives in a responsible, loving, and positive manner is relatively undeveloped.

While a modern understanding of consent is largely absent from the suttas, one can find in canonical texts—in particular, the Vinaya or monastic discipline—another notion of consent, one based more on inner affective states than verbal permission. As a clear standard for ethical sex, this Buddhist consent falls short of the affirmative consent upheld by many institutions today, but it also challenges our contemporary approach to sexual ethics in healthy ways. Indeed, each idea of consent reveals the other’s strengths and shortcomings.

One can find in canonical texts a notion of consent based more on inner affective states than verbal permission.

To their credit, many contemporary Buddhists have taken steps to improve the state of sexual ethics in the sangha. In doing so, they have drawn from various streams of the tradition to address the issue of abuse in thoughtful and helpful ways. Senior Insight teacher Jack Kornfield has been a central figure in the development of ethical guidelines for the Insight community. At Kornfield’s Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, he established a Teacher Code of Ethics that centers Buddhism’s third lay precept of non-harm as a guiding principle for ethical behavior in the realm of sexuality. The Spirit Rock guidelines state, “A sexual relationship is never appropriate between teachers and students,” and adopts a zero-tolerance policy for hookups or flirtation between teachers and students during retreats.

Kornfield is not the first to draw this connection to the third precept. Early formulations of the precept do attempt to guide ordinary Buddhists away from committing sexual misdeeds. But they fail to robustly address abuse or sexual harm. Of course, the precept developed in the context of ancient South Asian cultures which propagated patriarchal ideas. So it should come as no surprise that gender hierarchy is assumed in Buddhist texts, which define violations of the third precept largely in terms of the sexual rights and duties of men with respect to one another. A man shouldn’t sleep with another man’s wife or daughter—not because it is so wrong to cheat on his own wife, and not because sex for pleasure or outside of marriage is deemed immoral, but because of the harm to the other man and his sexual and/or ownership rights. The experience of the women is not discussed in any sustained manner in early formulations of the third precept.

Beyond the third precept, Buddhist sexual ethics is overwhelmingly focused on the cherished monastic value of celibacy. The Vinaya includes detailed descriptions of various sexual acts, ranking them according to how serious a transgression they represent. There, sexual misconduct is not defined in terms of harm or inappropriate boundary crossing. The trauma that sexual violence inflicts on victims was apparently of little concern for the monastic authors. (One part of the Vinaya recounts the story of a monk who abuses a child and is found not guilty of the most serious category of sexual transgression because the abuse did not involve the necessary type of sexual contact, namely, penetration of an intact orifice by the penis.) What was of concern was whether or not monastics were indulging in sexual behaviors and thoughts. The main purpose of the parts of the Vinaya that address acts of rape was to establish what counts as an actionable sexual transgression, and guilt is based on a subjective attitude of consent.

According to the Vinaya, nuns and monks who are sexually forced may be regarded as transgressing the law of celibacy if their bodies and minds accepted, in some sense, the sexual contact. Such thinking resembles some socially conservative interpretations of rape, like that of the former Republican congressman from Missouri, Todd Aken, who proclaimed in 2012, “If it’s legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down.”

On the face of it, the patriarchal, monastic, and enlightenment-focused nature of early Buddhism does not seem too helpful in generating a robust sexual ethic suitable for our time. The Buddha did not teach consent— at least not in the contemporary sense—but the Buddhist monastic code can help us moderns understand better ways for responding to sexual harm. While acknowledging that these traditions come from a specific historical context, we can interpret or adapt some of the Vinaya’s ideas to complicate our notions about consensual sexual interactions. In particular, Vinaya notions of consent serve as a useful counterweight to formulations of affirmative consent—those that place too much emphasis on verbal permission. 

Early Buddhism covets sexual purity as a high ethical value and prerequisite for the path to awakening, but it is not prudish or naïve about human sexuality. This is clear when one takes a closer look at Vinaya descriptions of sexual transgressions. These descriptions enumerate a wide variety of sexual behaviors and probe the complexities of sexual response. The Vinaya tradition also frankly acknowledges the many ways in which those of higher religious status may use their positions of power to exploit those of lower status as part of its elaborate case law.

Perhaps the most valuable insight to be gleaned from the Vinaya is tied to its most problematic passages. In holding monastics responsible for their sexual feelings even during a rape, it assumes consent to be something psycho-emotional, spontaneously arising, and below the level of conscious decision making. In the Vinaya, a consenting attitude arises in a person in the course of a sexual encounter and manifests as pleasure combined with a sense of owning or giving into the experience. Moreover, consent may occur at any time during the encounter: at the beginning, the middle or the end.

The Vinaya authors seem to get at the subjective aspects of consent in a way that may prove helpful to survivors who have experienced saying yes but feeling no, feeling yes but then suddenly feeling no, or some other combination of yes and no.  An acknowledgment of consent as something dynamic, affective, and rooted in the body is missing from the contemporary discussion of affirmative consent as a verbal act of permission. Feminists have interrogated the very real ways in which our current emphasis on affirmative verbal consent as the measure of ethical sex silences survivors stuck in the grey areas of sexual violation. For instance, victims sometimes give verbal consent or tacitly give in to sexual contact because they are in an unequal power relationship with their abuser, or because they fear something worse will happen if they don’t.

This question of verbal consent arose when allegations of sexual misconduct, sexual violation, and rape were brought against meditation teacher and founder of Against the Stream, Noah Levine. Levine has denied the claims, arguing that criminal charges of rape against him—which were later dropped—stemmed from a communication breakdown, not from a fundamental problem with his sexual behaviors. Jack Kornfield, Levine’s former teacher, later revoked his authority to teach in the Insight Meditation lineage. Levine has continued to teach meditation. In fact, he has since spoken often on the third precept, insisting on several occasions, wrongly according to this analysis, that the Buddha taught affirmative consent.

Though developed in a very different context and to a very different purpose, Vinaya articulations of consent could inspire a richer language for articulating the experiences of individuals who feel pressured to verbally consent to sex while feeling violated by it, or whose level of compliance changes over time. At first, the Vinaya conflation of consent and giving into desire does not seem to serve progressive feminist concerns about sexual violation, but it may help us to better understand and assess the ethics of some situations. For instance, by the Buddhist understanding of consent, someone that verbally consents but does not psychologically accept the encounter, intend for it to happen, or fully embrace their physical response, cannot be counted as a consenting sexual agent.

When someone takes advantage of a power dynamic to coerce someone into sex, loving or benevolent background thoughts do not lessen their culpability.

Early Buddhist accounts of sexual ethics also further introduce the closely related notion of intention (often cetana in the early texts), which is found in the Vinaya but is more fully articulated in the Abhidhamma (systematic philosophical) texts of the canon. In this Buddhist context, intention is not really the feeling states or psychological attitudes that motivate an act. It is simply the thought or mental purpose that directs the action. One can have background thoughts or feelings that are kind or dharmic, but still intend an unskillful action and, therefore, still be accountable for that action.

In applying this understanding of intention to contemporary abuse situations, we can say that when someone takes advantage of a power dynamic to coerce someone into sex, loving or benevolent background thoughts do not lessen their culpability. Rebecca Jamieson’s encounter with the ex-Shambhala teacher, Lodro Rinzler, a frank account of which was published in the online magazine, Entropy, is an example of such a situation. According to Jamieson, a devoted Shambhala student, she sexually pleasured Rinzler as a means of safely ending an unwanted intimate encounter. Despite some level of compliance, Jamieson describes her inner state as one of refusal and disassociation throughout the interaction. Her ultimate experience of the encounter was trauma. Rinzler has publicly denied being involved in any inappropriate sexual interaction.

When making ethical assessments, most English-speaking Buddhists simply rely on the English sense of the word intention, which emphasizes the feelings and thoughts motivating an action. For instance, after it was revealed in 1989 that the former Shambhala Vajra Regent Ösel Tendzin (Thomas Rich) knowingly infected a student with HIV,  a student defended him, saying, “The Regent never intended to hurt anybody, and my religion has taught me to never, ever reject anybody who does not intend harm.” The Abhidhamma authors would disagree with such an analysis. Ösel Tendzin may not have been an evil-minded person, but he certainly intended to have sex with a student while infected with HIV. He can be held responsible for that intention.

Of course, we should not equate rape or the egregious carelessness of Ösel Tendzin with less violent forms of sexual violation. At the same time, the similarities in the dynamics involved in a range of sexual boundary violations teach us something. Vinaya articulations of consent help us to understand the experiences of individuals such as Rebecca Jamieson, caught, as she describes it, in a “wasteland between yes and no.” And early Buddhist accounts of sexual ethics would hold Rinzler accountable for the intention to have sex with an inappropriate person that had expressed unwillingness. According to this view, any benevolent background thoughts Rinzler may have had while allegedly pushing Jamieson to have sex are not relevant for assessing his behavior.

Many Buddhists are working together to develop a more complete Buddhist sexual ethics. For instance, the Delhi-based International Buddhist Convention, a Buddhist umbrella organization, has formed a working group on sexual abuse that includes prominent Buddhist teachers such as Mingyur Rinpoche, Jetsunma Tenzin Palmo, and Ayya Tathaloka.

In a 2017 essay published in Lion’s Roar, Tibetan Buddhist teacher Mingyur Rinpoche addresses the issue of Buddhist sexual ethics as a response to an open letter written by eight former students of Sogyal Lakar (founder of the Rigpa network of dharma centers) accusing him of abuse. He puts limits on what can be viewed as ethically acceptable behavior for a teacher, particularly in situations in which the Vajrayana principles of samaya and pure perception are operating. He does this by affirming that Vajrayana practice must be grounded in the Buddhist ethical principles of nonviolence and altruism and governed by wisdom. He still allows that where the bond between teacher and student is very mature, unusual teaching methods may be beneficial. “The results of genuine ‘crazy wisdom’ are always positive and visible,” Mingyur Rinpoche asserts. “When a teacher uses an extreme approach that is rooted in compassion, the result is spiritual growth, not trauma.” 

Dr. Nida Chenangtsang, a Vajrayana teacher and Tibetan medical doctor, also stays within Buddhist frameworks in his more controversial response to abuse. Nida’s 2018 English-language book, Karmamudra: The Yoga of Bliss, offers a corrective to the potential for sexual harm within Vajrayana communities. In his introduction, Nida explains his view that the secrecy and mystique surrounding sexual yogas (karmamudra), originally meant to minimize risk to unqualified people, at this point only lead to harm. This is because “without proper education and understanding about these practices, wrong views become rampant, especially in the age of the internet and social media where all kinds of information spread like wildfire. My book is really intended to provide clarification and increase transparency about karmamudra practice which I think is timely given the recent exposure of so many sexual scandals.” Here, Nida refers to the fact that Vajrayana teachers have sometimes manipulated students into having sex by inviting them to practice karmamudra. Dr. Nida proceeds to provide detailed instructions for practicing karmamudra techniques within the context of the ordinary sexual relationships practitioners already have in their lives. His intention is to undercut opportunities for teacher abuse by demystifying sexual yoga.

Calling in Buddhist principles like non-harm, wisdom, and compassion for guiding principles, as Mingyur Rinpoche does, seems benign. The way these principles are invoked is often too vague to really be helpful, however, and may actually create confusion when, for instance, victims of abuse are told that their teachers are showing them special kindness by initiating an intimacy. Similarly, harm and non-harm can be difficult to distinguish when a student experiences pressure from a teacher.

Nida’s demystification of karmamudra, as well as Kornfield’s practical guidelines for teacher/student romance, is better keyed to the realities of sexual abuse. They see the potential limitations and potential wisdom of the traditional Buddhist teachings when it comes to sexual ethics.

Wisdom and compassion are wonderful as broad ideals, but they are too easily drafted into empty virtue signaling. Sexual abuse relies on complex dynamics that are both interpersonal and institutional. Combatting it demands power-aware, trauma-informed, psychologically pragmatic responses. No, the Buddha didn’t teach consent, at least not in the contemporary sense, but Vinaya lawyers have something to offer on the subject.

The Vinaya literature is obscure; most American Buddhists know it only as a set of rules for monks. Technically, the Vinaya is for monastic eyes only, a restriction that protects monastic communities from lay criticism. If carefully framed so as to acknowledge and neutralize the tradition’s baked-in androcentrism and misogyny, Buddhist legal thought might support appropriate Buddhist responses to sexual abuse. In particular, Vinaya notions of consent are a useful counterweight to contemporary formulations of affirmative consent that place too much emphasis on verbal permission. Early Buddhist ethics is not equal to the task of confronting sexual violation on its own—something that is apparent from the inadequate responses of traditionally educated Buddhist teachers—but that doesn’t mean the Buddhist ancients don’t have anything left to teach us.

Aiming to provide a balanced and informed response to these revelations of sexual violence in Buddhist communities, Amy Langenberg and Ann Gleig (an ethnographer of contemporary American Buddhism) have been collaborating on a book project (under contract with Yale University Press) that they hope will be of value to scholars, advocates, and practice communities. This article introduces some of the approaches we will be using in our work together.

♦

This article was made possible in part with support from Sacred Writes, a Henry Luce Foundation-funded project hosted by Northeastern University that promotes public scholarship on religion.

The post The Buddha Didn’t Teach Consent appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Americans remember the civil rights icon whose words inspired a nation. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” he said in his most celebrated speech, delivered from the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. While he dreamed of a future where people are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” Dr. King also had in mind a more just and loving world. A few lines later, he alludes to Isaiah 40:4: “I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.”

For decades, scholar and award-winning author Charles Johnson has worked to bring attention to King’s spiritual and philosophical concerns, which often have been overshadowed by the impact of his nonviolent civil disobedience and political organizing. In 1998, some eight years after his novel Middle Passage won the National Book Award for Fiction, Johnson published Dreamer, a fictional account of the last two years of Martin Luther King’s life. (He was named a MacArthur fellow that same year.) Already having earned a doctorate in philosophy and a longtime student of Buddhism, Johnson recognized the rigor of King’s thinking and has sought—through Dreamer and other writings and talks—to restore this philosophical dimension of King’s work to his public image.

Here, Tricycle speaks with Johnson about his writings on Martin Luther King Jr. and what Buddhist practitioners, or any spiritual seeker, can learn from King’s message and vision. 

At what point in your life did you realize that your interest in Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. might be more intense than the average person’s? How did that interest lead you to write a novel about the last two years of his life? Even though I grew up in the 1960s, and even though I remember the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, it wasn’t until the 1980s that I realized how little I knew about this man at the center of a civil rights movement that changed America, despite the fact that I invoked his name often. I felt the private man we call Martin Luther King Jr. had over time become a cultural object difficult to grasp in his individuality, in his humanness, and in the minutiae of his daily life, and this troubled me because those are the very foundations from which a public life arises. As a storyteller, the best way for me to correct these gaps in my knowledge was to make King the subject of my fourth novel, Dreamer, but I also co-authored with civil rights photographer Bob Adelman The Photobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., delivered many speeches across America on his eponymous holiday, and composed a short story and essays about his vision after seven years of research. By the time I was done, I’d devoted a fifth of my life to King’s memory and achievements, and I felt I could discuss his philosophy—he was a theologian and philosopher—as well as I can the positions of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Marx, or Heidegger.

You have noted many times throughout the years that most Americans have an incomplete picture of Dr. King. What do you think is the most detrimental misconception that people have about him? I feel any life in its totality is impossible to know. But what Malcolm X’s daughter once said of her father is also true for King: We selectively take pieces of him. So far too many Americans just see King as a civil rights leader for just black people. His vision was, of course, greater and more expansive than one with only political concerns.

In “Dr. King’s Refrigerator,” you wrote that Dr. King’s dissertation research “ranged freely over five thousand years of Eastern and Western philosophy.” The story goes on to portray him as having a revelation about what Buddhists would call interdependence. What was his relationship to the dharma? And how much of your own philosophy did you put into your depiction of him? The Buddhist experience is simply the human experience. What we Buddhists call interdependence, Pratitya-samutpada, or what Thich Nhat Hanh calls “interbeing,” is not an experience exclusive to the East. The dharma can be experienced anywhere. King is fully aware of our interbeing. In his sermon “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” he reminds his audience that our lives are best seen as a We-relation, because “before you got here to church this morning, you were dependent on more than half the world. You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom, and you reach for a bar of soap, and that’s handed to you by a Frenchman. You reach over for a sponge, and that’s given to you by a Turk.” That vision does capture how I see things and leads to my feelings every day of thanksgiving, humility, and gratitude for the precious gift of life, which is immeasurably enriched by other lives from the moment we are born.

Dr. King may have had broad influences, but his faith was firmly placed in Jesus. How should Buddhists and other non-Christians approach his explicitly Christian sermons? What should they make of his instructions, say, to meditate on the life and teachings of Christ? How should Buddhists and non-Christians approach King’s Christian sermons? I’d say with an open mind. A mind free of prejudice and presuppositions. After one of my King talks decades ago, a philosophy teacher in the audience asked me a question during the Q&A. (I’d been forewarned about him by other professors.) He said, “Can we have King without the Christianity?” I gave him the obvious answer: No. You might have a well-meaning social or political activist of some kind, but my question is whether he or she lives by a moral code, one we can use to judge their actions. Will they kill, lie, or steal to realize their goals and desires? Will they have the fortitude of a King, whose faith in Jesus’s emphasis on love—his certainty that love could lead to a Beloved Community—sustained him through being stabbed in a Harlem bookstore, physically assaulted often, and forced to live with a $30,000 bounty on his head. To ask such a question would be like asking, can we have Buddhism without the four noble truths and the eightfold path? Meditating on the life and teachings of Jesus is, for me, as valuable for gaining insights as meditating on the lives of Shantideva, Bodhidharma, Francis of Assisi, Catherine of Genoa, or Martin de Porres.

What do you think has been the biggest change with regard to Dr. King’s dream in the more than two decades since Dreamer was published? During the last two decades (and longer), I’ve watched with growing sadness Americans insulting and tearing each other down. During the last four years of the Trump administration, our divisions of race, class, and gender, our divisiveness, and our Them vs. Us attitudes, have only increased, leading to the tragic assault on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, where five people died. I believe King would still argue for the importance of love in our social relations. But at this painful present moment he might feel love is asking for too much and instead insist that we must begin more simply with a basic respect for each other. We must start by speaking respectfully to each other, listening respectfully, and behaving as if the ephemeral life of every sentient being is as precious to us as our own.

America is a less religious country than it was during the life of Dr. King (though certain pockets may have become more dogmatic). What has happened to the role of faith in social action today? Do you expect, or hope, that role will change in the coming years? Rather than hold forth on faith, I’ll simply say that I believe in the importance of everyone having some form of spiritual practice. As a friend of mine once said, we human beings are not just “meat moving around.” We are consciousnesses. As the Buddha observed long ago, “All that we are is the result of what we have thought.” I would like to see more people achieve, through any spiritual practice of their choice, greater mastery over their minds, emotions, and their thoughts. No one is born with that ability. It must be cultivated daily if a person wants to create his (or her) life mindfully as an artist does a work in progress, shaping their character into the sort of person they want to be, engaging in our social relations with metta [lovingkindness] and, above all else, being of selfless service to others during our brief time on this earth. Is this “religion?” I would simply call it the love of wisdom, which is the literal meaning of the word philosophy.

The post Love, Wisdom, and Dr. King appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the section under COVID-19 safety precautions, the Department of Homeland Security letter addressed to me mandated facemasks and banned guests for my newly rescheduled naturalization ceremony. Given fears that the virus might serve as a pretext for a complete shutdown of immigration and naturalization, it was a huge relief to find out that the ceremony would take place at all. The original date for the ceremony was March 19, the very day that California Gov. Gavin Newsom issued a statewide stay-at-home order.

I had always imagined the conclusion of my long path toward citizenship would take place in a room full of people from all corners of the world, all of us celebrating together with our loved ones. Instead, when I arrived at the Federal Building in Los Angeles, California, at the appointed hour on June 19, I was told to observe the prescribed physical distance—marked out on the floor in tape—from the others waiting, like me, to be naturalized. The line was short: one person in front of me and one person behind me. 

Standing there, waiting my turn to go in front of an official seated behind a piece of Plexiglass, it occurred to me that what this version of a citizenship ceremony lacked in scale and pomp, it made up for in organizational clarity. Before the person ahead of me in line was another, no longer visible person who had likewise gone through this process. And behind the person behind me was another not-yet visible person who would undergo this process after me.

Because we were all wearing masks, I could only hazard a guess as to what circuitous path might have brought these fellow applicants to the Federal Building that day. In turn, they might have wondered who I was. I come from a family of entangled roots—a Japanese mother and a British father. Born in Japan, I crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan, the country of my birth, to the United States, the country I would come to call home, 33 years ago. I’m an ordained Soto Zen priest, and I had decided the best way to comply with government directives for formal wear would be to wear Buddhist robes. It would be a small but significant way for me to assert my right to the religious freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution at the very moment I pledged to support and defend it.

Despite the physical distance between us, the anticipation of whatever transformation citizenship entails was palpable. An invisible thread of connection—as immigrants to this country, waiting for our chance to walk into a new sense of possibility and belonging—was all too apparent even behind those face-obscuring masks. We had not planned this crossing of paths at this particular place in this particular moment. Yet here we were: in relationship with one another.

What struck me most at that moment was how this line toward citizenship illustrated a central truth of Buddhism: interconnectedness. We might not choose every aspect of how or why we are connected, but that doesn’t weaken the link, which extends backward and forward in time, through people and generations and histories. Who we are right now is the karmic linkage between the past and the future.

There’s an image from the Buddhist tradition’s sacred texts that is often used to help explain this concept of interconnectedness: Indra’s net, the universe as an infinite net of jewels. Each jewel has been cut in such a way that if we care to look deeply enough, we can see reflected in it all of the other jewels. Likewise, each of us is also reflected in the mirrored surface of every other jewel. This image of a net of jewels teaches us that we are constituted by everything and everyone around us. Understanding this demands a certain acknowledgement of mutual dependence and responsibility. Regardless of whether or not we are affirmed by governments as citizens of a nation, we inherit the legacy of those who have lived there before us.

This collective karma necessarily leaves an imprint on our present moment. The oath I took to defend and support this country took place on Juneteenth. And not just any Juneteenth, but Juneteenth 2020, a date marked nationwide and worldwide by protests demanding justice for Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, David McAtee, and so many others whose lives have been extinguished by police violence and vigilantism, undergirded by anti-Black racism.

What is revealed by looking deeply into the mirrored jewel of this moment? Juneteenth as a holiday was originally created to celebrate news of emancipation finally reaching Galveston, Texas, the last corner of the nation where it had yet to penetrate, a full two years after it had been signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln. In the jeweled mirror of Juneteenth 2020, and the protests that it was marked by, we can see the reflection of that first Juneteenth, in both the systemic disregard for the lives of Black Americans and the struggle for transformation that has come in response to it. In the mirror of my citizenship is the realization that the Constitution to which I was pledging my loyalty is shaped as much by a legacy of delay, of independence deferred, as the promise of freedom.

It took former slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass to interlink the struggle for emancipation with immigrant inclusion, two years after the first Juneteenth. In his 1867 Boston speech on the “character and mission of the United States”—given as his response to rising agitation nationwide against the “heathen Chinee,” that would ultimately lead to the Chinese Exclusion Act, the first federal immigration ban targeting a particular race or religion—he made a powerful argument for America as “a composite nation.” Douglass’ vision of the United States was one that welcomed the Chinese and immigrants of a multitude of races and faiths to the “duties of citizenship,” while reminding us that slave labor was foundational to the wealth of our nation, a prosperity that makes the US an attractive destination for immigrants in the first place.

In Douglass’s recognition of the interdependence of slavery and exclusionary immigration policies, he intuited the dangers of seeing the nation as unchanging and static. American-style chattel slavery, the commodification and enslavement of individuals and their descendants in perpetuity, requires belief in the fundamental immutability of race in order to legitimate segregation and exclusion. The anti-Blackness of our times, just like the Muslim travel bans or the calls to build walls on the southern border, are merely the latest manifestation of a long tradition of conflating American belonging with a singular or supremacist racial and religious identity.

For me, as a person of Japanese ancestry who chose to become an American in these uncertain times, it’s impossible not to think of my citizenship in the context of the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. Buddhist priests like me were the first people picked up for internment by the FBI, one of the more egregious examples of religious or racial targeting of a particular group on the pretext of national security. After the community leaders came the mass incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of whom were US citizens, into concentration camps. It didn’t matter if you were an elderly grandmother or someone who had served in the US military, the architects of the ethnic cleansing of the West Coast proclaimed that anyone with a single drop of Japanese blood, including mixed-race babies from orphanages, was subject to indefinite incarceration in camps surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

This too is a part of my karmic inheritance—yet another link in the story of what it means to be American. All part of a single net of jewels, none of it extricable from any other part. So when I look into the mirror of George Floyd, murdered by a police officer who knelt on his neck in 2020, I simultaneously see Kanesaburo Oshima, a store owner shot by a guard in the back of the neck as he longed for home at the Fort Sill Internment Camp fence line in 1942. George Floyd left behind five children; Oshima, eleven children. Through them, we see other children, separated from their families and detained on the US southern border, and we see Johanna Medina Léon, an El Salvadoran transgender nurse and asylum seeker who died in an ICE immigration detention facility after being denied medical care. And when we look into the jeweled mirror of Léon, we can also see Bawi Cung, stabbed in a Sam’s Club in Texas by a man claiming that Chinese people were spreading COVID-19.

But along with struggle comes support. Being interconnected means that however isolated and autonomous we might think we are, we are not alone. We are interdependent. When Japanese Americans returned to the West Coast as the US concentration camps began to close in 1945, many faced lingering racial animus. In Los Angeles, they found an unexpected friend in Roy Loggins, a Black business owner who ran a food catering company for Hollywood studios. While people of Japanese heritage were being refused housing and job opportunities by white landlords and employers, Mr. Loggins went out of his way to share leftover food from catering events and even offered part-time work to members of the Senshin Buddhist Hostel, a refuge for former Japanese American incarcerees who had nowhere to call home. His acts of kindness were so seared into the memories of those whom he helped that not only they but also their children, remember him with gratitude more than fifty years later.

We think freedom is about independence, but actually freedom is about interdependence. As I celebrate my first Independence Day as a US citizen, I join a lineage of American ancestors, some celebrated and others, like Roy Loggins, less well-known, who have taught us that the project of emancipation in America cannot be accomplished alone. That the journey to liberation extends across generations and communities. Even if we are masked and standing apart, without friends or family in a line to become a citizen, we are simultaneously surrounded by all those who have come before us and all those who will come after us. All of us inexorably tied together, every single one of us implicated in the struggle to actualize freedom.

The post The Karma of Becoming American appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Meeting on monthly video calls, several people sit together, close their eyes, and after several minutes of silence, turn their attention to Brexit. On another day, the topic may be the Syrian civil war, climate change, North Korean nuclear capabilities, or migrants at the US border. The meditators are engaging in a practice called “global social witnessing” (GSW), and their aim is to become more present to the pain of these events.

The idea is that we have unprecedented access to information about tragedies occurring around the world, but rather than become more informed, we allow the data to overwhelm us. We experience compassion fatigue, end up feeling numb or depressed, and retreat into indifference. The danger is not only inaction. By turning away from the world’s traumas, GSW proponents argue, we also perpetuate, albeit unconsciously, painful cultural shadows that underlie global trauma. Collective and historical trauma, they believe, lies at the heart of many of the atrocities and conflicts in the world today. Global social witnessing practice groups create and experiment with a kind of “relational space,” in which participants can cultivate a greater depth of understanding about their own responses to traumatic experiences of other communities. 

The idea for GSW came out of the Pocket Project, a nonprofit whose mission is to support the healing of collective trauma through education, training, and other programs. In a recent weeklong training session, participants divided into triads each afternoon to unpack and digest together some of the emotionally taxing issues reverberating in our global culture today: oppression, sexual abuse, colonialism, slavery, racism, and genocide. 

“Collective trauma is not an idea; it’s a tremendous amount of energy that hasn’t been processed yet but influences our daily thinking and feeling, and our relationships,” said author, spiritual teacher, and Pocket Project founder Thomas Hübl during one of the training sessions, which was part of a part of a yearlong program. “It has created shadow structures in society that we assume are normal. The only way to address this is to create conscious structures that will support resourcing and awareness processes.”

Trauma, Hübl believes, has effects similar to karma. When two people argue, then move on without a resolution, this unconscious material becomes “carry-on baggage” they transfer from one moment to the next. But while the consequences of a single argument may be relatively minor, a mass atrocity can lead to emotional scars that are passed from generation to generation. And it’s this large-scale historical trauma that we have all been born into no matter where we live. 

Related: Healing Trauma with Meditation

In an article on collective trauma for the journal Spanda, Hübl wrote, “We must be willing to consistently and consciously resolve those energies that have been left stored and undigested. In essence, we must open the carry-on baggage of our world, sort its contents, unpack.”

One of the training participants was Flavia Valguisti, a former defender and judge in the juvenile court system of Buenos Aires. For her, framing this process in the context of karma and Buddhist practices clicked. 

“When we talk about karma, it’s not just personal, we’re all part of it,” she said. “In healing collective trauma, we move from karma to dharma. Dharma is the path.”

The Pocket Project is based in Oldenburg, Germany and aims to heal collective and intergenerational trauma. The organization is led by Hübl, who completed nearly four years of medical school during the 1990s in his native Austria, when he felt a calling to drop out and dedicate himself almost entirely to meditation during what became a four-year independent retreat in Czechoslovakia. His retreats and online courses, many of which he teaches in collaboration with academics, center around both science and what he refers to as mystical principles, derived from wisdom traditions including Taoism, Buddhism, and the Kabbalah. He launched the Pocket Project in 2017, and since then, similar initiatives have formed in the US, Israel, and Argentina to explore country- and regional-specific trauma.

Many of these groups emerged during the yearlong Pocket Project training on collective trauma from June 2017 to May 2018. Most of the training was conducted via video conference except for two in-person modules that bookended the course. In the modules, trainees participated in five days of mindfulness-based meditation, movement, group discussions, and vocal-toning sessions, a sound-based group activity inspired by religious chanting. (The course fee for the year was €1,900.00 [around $2,130.00]. Several scholarships were made available.)

While trauma was familiar territory for the psychologists, scientists, and physicians in attendance, few had studied collective trauma. This isn’t surprising, considering that a recent PubMed search for literature on collective trauma yielded just over a thousand results, compared with a search for publications on post-traumatic stress disorder, which generated more than 13,000.

When he returned from his meditation retreat in 2000, Hübl taught meditation in Germany and found that symptoms of trauma would arise in the group, which he believed could be traced back to historical and intergenerational trauma around the Holocaust and the horrific legacy of World War II. 

Over the next couple of years, Hübl began inviting Israelis and Germans—often up to a thousand people—to meditate together and work through their respective histories. The idea of cultivating “pockets” of clarity throughout the world inspired Hübl and his wife, the Israeli artist Yehudit Sasportas, to choose the name “The Pocket Project.” Students from his early training courses launched the offshoot initiative Witnessing in Empathy, which hosts meditation retreats at the former Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camp sites.

And in the US, monthly practice groups meet to discuss the roots of trauma in America’s history which manifest as “symptoms” such as violence, racism, and political divisiveness. In July, Dr. Christina Bethell, a board member of the Pocket Project and a professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, provided testimony on science and policy around childhood trauma during a House Committee hearing on this topic.

Global social witnessing groups create and experiment with a kind of “relational space,” in which participants can cultivate empathy for the traumatic experiences of other communities. The role of relationships in integrating trauma was a central theme of the Pocket Project training sessions. 

Voices of those who work in war-ravaged communities expressed their pain and fears. Others explored their buried hurt, rage, and guilt as soldiers who harmed and injured others on behalf of the US, South Africa, and Israel. And those from countries that have perpetrated genocide explored the shame and culpability woven into their culture’s psyche. Emerging from a space of deep compassion, genuine apologies were conveyed by citizens of countries that had inflicted war onto those of others.

As facilitator, Hübl encouraged people to open up about the emotions behind their words. This is a key feature of the method he employs to both encourage individual healing and to strengthen the witnessing capacity of the larger group. A key lesson from the training was the importance of translating spirituality into action. 

Participant Mukara Meredith, a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism as part of the Nyingma lineage since 1984 and a leadership consultant based in Colorado, said the training reflected the three refuge vows: Buddha, sangha, and dharma. 

“I love the principle of integrating the temple with the marketplace. We do live in culture, not in caves, and we need practices to help us digest our experience of culture to truly live in an interconnected way.” 

Meredith, who participated in the training with the blessings of her teachers, is currently developing a trauma program for women in China, and Valguisti has started a “pocket” group in Buenos Aires.

For each individual, trauma can become a roadblock, a shadow that prevents the expression of future possibilities. The same applies to our global culture: In witnessing our own blocks, we embrace our collective responsibility to work toward restoration and healing. Participants in global social witnessing and other Pocket Project initiatives see it as the tool we need to keep moving forward. 

The post A New Initiative Grapples with Collective Traumas appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

All people should have the right to pursue happiness. This is a truth that seems to be self-evident for both Americans and Buddhists alike. America promises to protect the personal freedom in which happiness can be pursued, and Buddhism offers a spiritual framework. Both approaches are highlighted in Call Me American, a memoir by Somali immigrant Abdi Nor Iftin, who describes his harrowing, heartbreaking, and uplifting journey from Mogadishu to Maine in search of this basic right.  

Iftin grew up in a country torn apart by civil war. As competing factions destroyed his homeland, the then-schoolteacher found solace in American movies and learned English. The shifting powers in Mogadishu often made his language skills a capital crime, but Abdi felt compelled to share his story, secretly reporting on the horrors of the war between the al-Qaida-linked terrorist group al-Shabaab and government forces for a National Public Radio segment. This ultimately connected him with Sharon McDonnell and Gib Parrish, a couple that heard about his plight and provided logistical, financial, and emotional support along the way, ultimately serving as his host family in America years later. Upon arriving at their home, Iftin writes in his memoir, “A sculpture of Buddha sat quietly on the floor. I didn’t know who Buddha was, but I soon learned Sharon and her family believed in Buddhism.”

This line piqued my interest. Compassion is central to Buddhism, but it is something that can seem abstract, a concept more than a practice. Yet here was an example of a Buddhist family practicing compassion in the truest sense of the word: by extending themselves fully in the aid of another. It made me want to know more about Sharon and Gib, both as Buddhists and as Americans. When I reached out to Abdi to ask about interviewing them, he said, “Buddhism was something I heard of, but I never knew Americans could be Buddhists. I watched and learned from this family, and I was so impressed with the kindness, love, and compassion Sharon, Gib and their kids exercised.” Their interview is a prescient reminder that our country has thrived thanks to its openness, and that we can’t restrict our borders without closing off the best part of ourselves.

How did you hear about Abdi, and what about his plight inspired you to reach out?

Sharon: In 2009, we lived in northern Vermont, and I was teaching at Dartmouth College. Abdi was featured anonymously on a Public Radio International program called “The Story” with Dick Gordon. He is a born storyteller—I could smell the gunpowder in his tale. He was anonymous because if he had been caught speaking English and reporting on Western radio, he would have been killed. That is how much it meant to him to tell his story of surviving in a country that lacked a functioning government.

There is always a lot of background as to why something or someone touches and inspires us and then how it becomes important and actionable. Having lived in Afghanistan and Pakistan, I knew how dangerous it would be for Abdi  [who already had been threatened to drop his nickname, Abdi the American, which he was given because of his ability to speak with an American accent]. Or, I could say it was because my son was at college, and the notion of a young man about his age being wasted felt intolerable. I knew that foreign news bureaus were being disbanded and that places like Somalia would go quiet with no one reporting on them. And, I had been working with graduate public health students about how to promote “citizen journalism,” which is meant to give local people the means to tell their own stories and have them heard more widely. Abdi’s radio stories pushed a lot of buttons.

Why did you ultimately decide to aid him to the extent that you have?

Sharon: Really, all I did was write a letter to the radio show to thank them for finding and supporting Abdi and citizen journalism. In the last line of my note, I said something like “if there is anything I can do, let me know.” It’s a throwaway line, right? They sent my note to Abdi, and he wrote me back, and this began a conversation that we have maintained to this day. You have to meet Abdi to know that there are few people in this world more open-minded, generous, and intellectually interested in life. When people express wonder at how deeply our family ultimately got involved, I tell them that each new step forward followed a previous step that was built on friendship and shared interests.

What makes me laugh is to read Abdi’s book and see how much the minimal financial support that we provided meant to them. Let me say that I didn’t want to be some rich American just sending money. I provided money when it seemed like the most useful thing to do, but I never sent money out of guilt. In fact I didn’t send that much money, and sometimes I felt a bit guilty that I couldn’t. But I know that Abdi and [his brother] Hassan came to know that they were not alone. For example, one night I talked to them on the phone for hours when they thought the police might come and haul them away for deportation. There was so much I could do nothing about. 

Gib: Sharon often told me stories about Abdi and her correspondence and friendship with him, and I gradually got to know him. So when Sharon decided to help him financially and, ultimately, to offer him a place to live when he arrived in the United States in 2014, I “decided” to help, too. My contribution has been to be Abdi’s friend and occasional guide to making one’s way in the US, from opening a checking account to stacking firewood.

Sharon: Gib is being modest. He is the best person ever to learn how stuff works here in the US. My family was remarkably good-humored about the idea of providing support for Abdi and Hassan. Our daughter, Natalya, walked him all over town to make sure people met him and knew where he lived. She introduced him to all of our neighbors and even the policemen.

It is amazing how many things are obvious to us as natives. But to see them fresh from the eyes of a generous outsider has been wonderful. I remember explaining that the leaves on the trees would change color and fall off, that snow would fall, and that the mail-person would come to leave important papers in our box. It is all miraculous when viewed from the outside.

Did your Buddhist background influence your actions at all?

Sharon: My background is a potpourri of spiritual influences, which I think is truly American. I am a member of the Society of Friends (Quakers) in Maine’s Portland Friends Meeting, and I have studied Buddhism as a meditator, retreat junkie, and avid reader since I was 13. Pema Chodron and Jack Kornfield have been excellent teachers for me, because both of them approach the serious issue of spirituality with from an experiential rather than academic angle. I call myself a Quaker Buddhist.

Related: What Would William Penn Think?

I find guidance from the Quakers for social action, where it is taught as pragmatic steps, and the community supports me. Each week, we have an hour-long meeting where we stay quiet. In that meditative silence we try to find our “center,” where divinity (as each of us knows it) resides. From Buddhism, I have another practice that I can bring to my quiet time at the meeting. It gives me a light touch to deal with the clatter and seductive drama playing in my mind.

Another important guide to making compassion actionable for me was Ram Dass and his 1985 book with Paul Gorman, How Can I Help? Stories and Reflections on Service. We have to be very careful with our urges to “help” other people. I need to gently probe my intentions to see how attached I am to being a helper, and I have to make sure that I am not trapping another person into needing my help so that I can feel good. Both the person helping and the person being helped are bigger than those roles.

Has this whole process informed your practice or taught you anything about compassion? 

Sharon: Compassion comes when I stop thinking about myself. Forgetting myself is grace. During Abdi’s journey—at every step—I reached out to people that he knew or that are friends of mine. We networked our way to success and formed “Team Abdi.” Team Abdi found ways to send funds, advocate for Abdi with reluctant immigration officials, and help with endless paperwork. I could go on and on with the names of others who stepped up and offered assistance. I wonder who helped whom? I, too, was and continue to be the beneficiary of this compassion. 

A friend recently sent me an email I wrote in 2014 to other Team Abdi members, as we were fretting over his upcoming interview at the U.S. Embassy to Mogadishu for the Diversity Visa Lottery. I think it best explains what I learned about the nature of compassion:

I was cleaning the chicken coop today, a job I like better than you might think. It’s all real in a chicken coop. All the metaphor is concrete and amusing. I treat these chickens well—not extravagantly but decently. I cannot save the world of suffering chickens through these particular chickens but I can acknowledge that they deserve it and I do my part in the ecosystem. There is something in how this all adds up in my mind that speaks to why it makes any sense to pick one Somali refugee and say, “Come, we will try to help.” It is not a program or even a project, it is just one live being that would be better off secure and able to work within his capacities and nature.

How has this experience shaped your view of America and its current attitude towards immigration?

Sharon: Being a refugee usually means you cannot work, you cannot go to school, you cannot participate in the world, and life is not safe. Before coming to America, Abdi managed to reach Nairobi, Kenya. At the time we thought, “Now he will be safe and can go on with his life.” Wrong. Most doors were closed: his life was less dangerous, but it was still hopeless. Hopelessness is dangerous. Why should we in America have so much hope for our families, yet so many in other parts of the world have none?

Through Abdi I have met many immigrants living in my area, and I appreciate how complex their lives are legally, culturally, and economically. As a country, we have not clearly articulated our immigration policies. We need to do that. We have government agencies with little or no guidance and mixed messages. Chaos is not policy.

But at the local level, if there are immigrants—or “people from away,” as we say in Maine—living in your area, go visit them. Talk to them at restaurants, go to English language courses and offer to have conversations with students, invite them to your home. Relocating can be scary for them. Ask people working in programs for immigrants (teachers and social workers) to connect you with someone that will enjoy the opportunity.

Gib: My experiences with Abdi and his long journey had made me much more aware of the plight of millions of people around the world who seek to escape danger and persecution and find safety, peace, and a better way of life. America is a country of immigrants. Most of the current administration’s immigration policies don’t recognize the humanity and actual motivations of immigrants seeking a better life in America. Immigration policy should be based on compassion and understanding, not fear-mongering and hatred.

Sharon does consulting work in public health and epidemiology and teaches public health to graduate students. Gib has worked in public health since 1982. He has been interested in Buddhism since the mid-1990s. Call Me American was published in June by Penguin Random House, and is available at your local independent bookstore.

The post How a Buddhist Couple Helped a Somali Writer Find Refuge in America appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We all need to have roofs over our heads and enough food and comfort to stay in good health. And we should do whatever is necessary to come to the aid of all the people on earth, numerous indeed, who are still deprived of these things. Remedying the inequalities and the poverty in the world is an essential duty.

Being content with simplicity is the need of getting rid of what is superfluous. I have to acknowledge that that is easier for me. I have taken monastic vows and possess neither house nor lands nor car. I have chosen a lifestyle that makes it possible for me to leave on a moment’s notice for the other side of the world without shirking my responsibilities to a family or to work colleagues. I can do it without slighting anybody.

The notion of lack and privation is very relative. For thirteen years, I slept on the ground in my master Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche’s bedroom, wherever he was in the world. In the morning, I folded up my sleeping bag and put it in a sack with my toothbrush, my towel, and a few other small items. After Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche died in 1991, I slept in his anteroom on a carpet. In the morning, I stowed my things in a little cubby. After three years of this, somebody said, “Wouldn’t you like a room?” I accepted, and it was rather nice. But at no time did I consider my previous situation a privation. Quite to the contrary, what was foremost for me was the joy I felt at the extraordinary good fortune of living close to Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche, of benefiting from his presence and receiving his teachings.

I still use the same sleeping bag today. There’s really no reason to be attached to this sleeping bag, which is losing its feathers, but I see no reason to replace it as long as it still keeps me warm in the winter.

Attachment complicates life. One day, at the end of a conference, as I was signing books, I found myself with a Montblanc fountain pen in my hand. I looked around. No one claimed it, so I kept it. The problem is, I tend to lose pens. With ballpoints, that’s not a big deal, but a Montblanc, on the other hand, is no ordinary fountain pen—it would be a shame to lose it! So since then, it sleeps in a drawer, and I never use it. I would do better to give it away. But is it a good thing to give away a fountain pen that represents 5 percent pen and 95 percent meaningless attachment?

It’s not objects, people, or phenomena themselves that pose problems, but the attachment we have to them. A great Indian Buddhist master said, “It’s not appearances that enslave you but your attachment to them.” The story is told of a monk who was so attached to his begging bowl that he was reborn as a snake coiled in that bowl and let nobody come near it. So stripping away is not a question of wealth or poverty but rather how strongly we cling to things. Even the richest man, if he is not attached to his riches, is not enslaved by them and can use them for the benefit of others.

That said, it’s unbelievable that, in spite of myself, I end up hoarding. I have a small room, which is three meters by three meters, in the Shechen monastery in Nepal, and a retreat place in the mountains that is even smaller. In each of these places, I have a shrine with some books and a few statues, and beneath them, two small storage spaces. And I end up accumulating more than necessary. Then, once a year, I take out all the garments I have stored there and give away those that I have two or three of. At my workplace in the monastery, I take enormous pleasure in throwing out old files, which go to feed the fires in the kitchen.

Today, when people talk about a financial crisis in the rich countries, it usually means a crisis in the realm of the superfluous. If everybody contented themselves with only the necessary, we would never get into such crises. Recently in New York, I ran into a 500-meter-long line composed of hundreds of people waiting patiently in the street. Intrigued, I asked somebody what it was all about. “A floor-sample sale of brand-name scarves. They’re selling for $300 dollars instead of $500,” I was told.

I couldn’t help but think that at the same moment in Nepal, women were standing in endless lines in the street to buy a few liters of kerosene to cook food for their children. A financial “crisis” obviously looks different in different places in the world!

According to a Tibetan proverb, “Being satisfied is like having a treasure in the palm of your hand.” The truly rich person is one who is not greedy for superfluous things. A person who lives amid opulence and wants still more will always be poor. If you think that having always more will lead to your being satisfied, you are deceiving yourself. It’s like thinking that by drinking more salt water, a time will come when you will no longer be thirsty.

In Tibet, it is said that the true hermit leaves behind only his footprints when he leaves the world. In consumer societies, we accumulate, accumulate, and always want to keep it all for ourselves. My dear mother says that our civilization is centripetal because we always draw more things to ourselves. Traditional parts of Asia still contain many examples of centrifugal civilization, in which people share. I know a Tibetan nun who says when you give her a gift, “Thanks. I’ll be able to make offerings and give to the poor!”

Excerpted from In Search Of Wisdom, by Matthieu Ricard, Christophe Andre, and Alexandre Jollien. Sounds True, June 2018. Reprinted with permission.

The post Living Lighter with Less appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Kazuaki Tanahashi, 85, is a Japanese calligrapher, Zen teacher, author, translator, and activist, well-known for his “one-stroke” paintings and international environmental and peace work. Tanahashi has spent decades working to relieve suffering as the founding secretary of Plutonium Free Future, a fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, and the founding director of A World Without Armies.

His latest book, Painting Peace: Art in a Time of Global Crisis, is his version of a “letter to a young artist.” The stories and musings it collects are meant to help artists, activists, and others develop their own ideas for working effectively on behalf of people and the planet. Bringing about social transformation may seem like an impossible task at times, but Tanahashi’s down-to-earth hopefulness—and his willingness to practice what he preaches—suggest that it is possible to effect change if we’re willing to think outside the box and commit to doing what we can.

Do you think there’s a difference between art that comes out of times of crisis versus times of peace?
Yes, of course. I think when the world is perceived as peaceful, artists create personal, pleasing works; they aren’t as concerned with social issues. For instance, I first became politically active as an artist in the late 1970s because of the escalating nuclear arms race. I was living in San Francisco, and I did not know if I would wake up the next morning. I wasn’t sure if there would still be a world! There was a feeling of urgency, and I wanted to do something to change the situation, to become free from this horrible threat of global suicide.

In the Fall 2010 issue of Tricycle, you said, “When we’re approaching war or when a catastrophe is about to happen, artists have to make a choice. We need to choose our passions. We need to decide where we can do the most good with our art and our writing.” It seems that’s what you’re doing with this book. Can you speak about this?
Obviously, none of us can do everything. There are many problems and many things fueling those problems. So it’s important to make a choice about what we do. We can think about what each person is good at or passionate about—or what is most urgent. Based on this, we can pick a small number of things to be engaged with.

We need to learn to be effective. We cannot waste time or resources. We need to think and act deeply. Contemplation can be our action; maybe just sitting quietly and doing nothing. That is essential, because from there we might have some deeper insights. From there we can move into action. Action, at its most basic, starts with taking action in the mind.

In your new book, you outline the Four Commonplace Truths, which are principles to guide social engagement. Can you tell us about them?
When Engaged Buddhism was beginning to develop in the West, my Buddhist activist friends began thinking, do we need a new set of principles, or are the four noble truths, the most basic teaching of Buddhism, good enough? Can we simply use the four noble truths as the basis for our actions for social transformation? I thought, well, we don’t know, but it might be helpful to have some principles that just focus on social transformation. I talked to these friends, and we came up with the idea of the Four Commonplace Truths.

The first one is “No situation is impossible to change.” In a way, it’s the flip side of “Life is impermanent.” All things change. So often, we take this as something passive or negative—we have a good situation, but it can change quickly. But if all things change, this means we can help change current situations for the better.

The second truth asks, “How do we make our efforts effective?” [In Painting Peace, Tanahashi describes the second truth as “A communal vision, outstanding strategy, and sustained effort can bring forth positive changes.”] In the Buddhist community, we don’t talk about being effective. Sometimes we see it as a bad thing to talk about results. Especially in Zen, non-achievement is an ideal. But at times, non-achievement is arrogance. We can’t afford to be non-achieving. While achievement for selfish purposes can be bad, anything we do [for the greater good] needs to be effective and successful. So one time at a Buddhist Peace Fellowship meeting, I said that maybe we should learn from business people and the military—they are masters of being effective! [Laughs.]

This horrifies people. But, as a student of aikido, I observed my master and the martial art’s founder Morihei Ueshiba as he showed us how to move the body to get maximum results with the least force. To do this, you have to practice, practice, practice to the point that the body can move without thinking so much. I’d like to apply this principle to being effective in the social sphere. We need to have a common goal with other people. If we are working for social transformation, then we need to have the best kind of path, the best strategy and tactics. We have to maximize the results with limited resources and capacity.

The third truth is “We can all help.” Everyone can help create change. No one person can actually change society. But everyone can help—even people who are bedridden or weak or have very few resources. And if everyone can help, then “No one is free of responsibility.” This is the last principle for common action. We all bear some responsibility.

You write about the similarities of the art-making process and the way social movements take hold. What can activism learn from art?
Artists know that we have the power to create something unique, or beautiful, or powerful. And not just visual artists but writers, too. Writing can be very powerful. It can change people’s consciousness. It can change language. It can change society. Music can do that, too. So, artists know that any painting, any action, anything can bring forth change. Little by little, we become more confident in this.

One of the worst things to happen in human history was the nuclear arms race and the potential for global suicide. We have acquired this capacity, and we are not so far from the kind of all-out nuclear war [that we feared during the Cold War]. But millions of people worked to stop the nuclear arms race—we were able to change one of the worst situations in human history.

Today, we are facing a population explosion, and we don’t have enough food and water to feed everyone.  This and climate destabilization—water levels and temperatures rising—are our current great crises. But change is always possible. If we had the ability to avert the greatest crisis in the world, I think we have the capacity to deal with different aspects of these new global crises, too.

The post The Brush Is Mightier: Kazuaki Tanahashi’s Guide to Social Transformation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Earlier this month, the New York City Police Department became the largest police force in the United States to get on board with the latest trend sweeping law enforcement departments: mindfulness meditation.  

Reverend Qalvy Grainzvolt, lead meditation guide at The Shinnyo Center for Meditation and Well-being, is training officers at the New York City Police Academy to offer basic meditation practices to their peers. The meditation block is part of the Crisis Intervention Team training that is required of all of the approximately 36,000 officers on the force.

“[As police officers], they’re going to come across homeless people, criminals, people protesting the political landscape. If they can be in touch with their authenticity, their strength, their empathy, their compassion, to me that can only be a win-win situation,” Grainzvolt told Tricycle when asked about the benefits of meditation in law enforcement.  

Police departments across the country have been increasingly turning to meditation to help officers handle stress and increase resiliency in a job that often leads to poor physical and mental health outcomes. Cities such as Madison, Wisconsin, Tempe, Arizona, and Hillsboro, Oregon, already offer meditation training to their officers. After five officers were shot and killed in Dallas in 2016, the Dallas Police Department received a donation that has allowed hundreds of officers to go through a mindfulness and cognitive brain training program called Strategic Memory Advanced Reasoning Training (SMART), the Dallas News reported. And the New York City Department of Correction has been offering meditation to correction officers who work on Rikers Island since 2016.

Related: Meditating with Officers on Rikers Island, New York City’s Notorious Jail Complex

Grainzvolt, who served in the National Guard before joining the Shinnyo-en Buddhist order, traces his interest in wanting to work with police officers back to 2015, when a group of more than 125 Buddhist leaders met with government officials at the White House. Grainzvolt recalled two petitions circulating at that historic meeting: one against nuclear proliferation and the other against police brutality.

“When I read the petition on police brutality, it struck me as a little too polarizing . . . Yes, there are bad apples, but I’m not sure the way to solve a problem is to demonize everyone, and that was sort of the tone of it. So I was really trying to think: What can I do? Should I do nothing? Or can I work from within?”   

Grainzvolt thought he could be of service teaching meditation to officers. His first step was going through the Citizens Police Academy, a 10-week course that teaches a condensed version of NYPD training. Grainzvolt graduated at the top of his class in December 2016, and his valedictorian speech caught the ear of then-NYPD Transit Chief Joe Fox.

“When I heard him speak I just got connected to him; I never met him before,” said Fox, who retired in January 2018 after 36 years on the force. “Here’s a man at an NYPD ceremony, with the chief [and other top officials sitting] behind him, who started by saying, ‘I want to let everyone know how beautiful your smiles look now.’”

The chief and the priest exchanged information, and Grainzvolt soon began offering meditation workshops to Transit Bureau officers and civilian personnel. During these sessions, Grainzvolt said he tried to “dispel the myth” that meditation can only be done in a quiet space, and taught that the hustle and bustle of New York City can be used to “cultivate compassion, mindfulness, and sensitivity to others.”

Grainzvolt said it was also important to him that the meditation instruction given wasn’t just about stress management—“do this so you can do that better”—and instead provides officers with the tools to enhance their own awareness.

Fox said he never would have thought to offer meditation training to his staff had he not met Grainzvolt, and said the workshops were one of the “best things to happen in the Transit Bureau.”

“Our brains are in many ways wired to protect us from threat . . . velcro for bad thoughts, teflon for good thoughts,” Fox said, recalling a recent meditation instruction he heard. “In policing, we need to be cautious, aware, and safe, but we also need to be able to turn that switch off.”

Related: Mindfulness in Prison and Beyond

Grainzvolt’s experience leading the Transit Bureau staff in meditation, coupled with another connection—a Shinnyo Center practitioner and social worker who teaches deescalation techniques to NYPD trainees—led to a year-long vetting process for the Police Academy gig. Grainzvolt officially started offering meditation at the Police Academy in College Point, Queens, at the end of January.  

“It is really beautiful to see the unique and authentic ways that each officer is making a connection with a practice that I hold dear. We can all share our perspectives while holding the common goal of promoting both inner peace and the peace of the greater community,” Grainzvolt said. “I am really pleased with the receptivity and grounded questions coming from the group of officers I’m teaching.”  

The post Shinnyo-en Priest Bringing Meditation to New York City Police Department appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In the days following the mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando there were vigils and protests all over the country. We were remembering the 50 people who had died, as reported in the headlines of the New York Times on Sunday morning. I attended a vigil on the plaza in Santa Fe, New Mexico, on the Monday after the massacre. At one point an antigun activist speaking at the podium mentioned the 50 lives just lost to gun violence. Someone from the crowd yelled back, “FORTY-NINE!” And the speaker corrected herself. “Yes, 49.”

Since then I have seen the reported number of those killed corrected in the news coverage. It wasn’t until later in the week that I realized that it wasn’t a correction coming out of the Orlando coroner’s office that led to the recount but a decision on the part of reporters and activists not to count the perpetrator himself among the dead. Fifty people lost their lives on that horrible night, and one of them was the murderer.

I mean no disrespect at all to the families of the scores of people who were killed by Omar Mateen that night. I fully remember these victims of gun violence, and I don’t want the loss of their lives to be overshadowed. Recalling each of their names moves me deeply to demand gun law reform in this country, as well as upgraded vigilance on hate crime legislation. The names of these victims should be held up, published, spoken out loud, and used effectively and respectfully by advocates and activists to insist upon the change that so many of us want: to get guns out of our communities and to make America a more accepting, kind, respectful, and nonviolent nation.

At the events I’ve been to in the past week, the names of the 49 killed during that night of dancing and celebrating with friends have been recited, like painful poetry to weeping listeners. They are now included among the very long collective list of names of America’s gun violence: the 1st and 2nd graders who were gunned down while attending school in Newtown, the moviegoers in Colorado, the disabled people at a service center in San Bernardino, the college students in Oregon and Virginia, the patients and workers at Planned Parenthood in many sites, and the churchgoers in South Carolina. The list doesn’t end there, of course. It is much longer than I can bear to write. We can and should speak all of their names, using them as form of what Buddhists call right speech. Zen Master Dogen says that right speech “has the power to turn the destiny of a nation.” These names become a litany prayer for the peaceful destiny of our nation. Please, may it be so.

And yet, there is the 50th name.

It is my practice as a Zen student to “bear witness” to every aspect of the situations I encounter. In this case, I bear witness to both the victims and the perpetrators of these horrific acts, as well as to the structures and systems that create the conditions for such violence. It doesn’t seem helpful to ascribe the label “victim” to shooters, and I want to avoid doing that. But the people responsible for the long list of mass killings I mentioned above are part of something bigger (and it isn’t radical Islam). They are the product of a culture that uses hate and violence as a means to an end. They are a people who, in varying degrees, got easy and legal access to military-grade assault rifles, did not get the mental health services they desperately needed, and were influenced by an increasingly violent Zeitgeist. Cultures do not spring forth from nothing. They are created by people. . . we the people. As such, these acts of violence, allowed for by our laws and lionized by our culture, reflect something poisonous in each of us.

There are many stories in the Buddhist texts about poisons. Some scholars have even implied that the Buddha and his earliest followers themselves might have been doctors and healers who were experts at finding antidotes to poisons. The ancient wisdom from those stories drives home a message: if we want a wholesome world, we must remove the poison from our own minds first. If we want peace, wellness, and intimacy in our world we first have to see it and cultivate it in ourselves.

Bearing witness is not only about understanding what drove “them” to do such terrible things. The practice is also to look deeply and with precision at the innumerable ways that they are us and we are them. Doing so allows us to observe the intimacy that naturally exists among all things. Likewise, in looking deeply into the whole catastrophe, the dividing line between “us” and “them” gets blurred, and we are able to see that each of us fully participates in creating and perpetuating a culture, albeit usually unwittingly. This kind of unwitting ignorance is one of the poisons of the Buddhist teachings, and I think we can easily observe that it is a poison in our society as well. Bearing witness practice reveals this unwitting ignorance to us, as well as the invisible intimacy we share, by looking deeply into the nature of things—beyond the headlines and into all of the aspects of a situation that results in a mass shooting at an Orlando night club.

In the course of our lives, we do many beneficial things; there is no doubt about that. But it seems that the world is inundated with events that cause us deep concern and leave us brokenhearted. I am digging deeper into my own heart-mind to bear witness to more of these situations, in an effort to prime the pump of healing, loving, compassionate, and responsible action. I count myself among the many who remain blissfully unaware of our participation in systems of suffering. Our actions, especially our unconscious ones, have the power to reveal our mind states: we purchase things from a consumer system that disregards human rights and basic ethics; we invest money for everything from retirement to philanthropy in order to maximize financial return for ourselves without regard for the social, economic, and environmental impacts of those investments on others. We are passive in the political system, relying on headline news for our information, often becoming despondent or making excuses for offloading our obligation for creating a healthy society to others.

So, I have an opinion about all this. As part of bearing witness to the suffering of this world, I think we should count Omar Mateen among the dead. Fifty, not forty-nine. We should say his name and the names of all of the other mass shooters out loud. Their tragic lives and violent actions tell us something about the world we are creating. By not saying their names, the deeper causes of the sickness of these shooters and the violence it manifests, as well as our participation in the systems that perpetuate this violence, remain invisible.

Some say that these killers want to be memorialized, that they are motivated by the desire for notoriety and that they want to be remembered for the mayhem and horror they created. It is reasonable to argue that by not mentioning them, we take away some of their power.

And yet, in Buddhism we practice seeing the worth and dignity of every person, even when the person has exacted unbearable suffering upon others. This is the radical stance of Buddhist practice, and it remains a challenging modern-day koan. It drives us further into the hard question of suffering in our world and our role in relieving it. We have to continue to live this question—that is our practice. Counting Omar Mateen among the dead is one way. Not saying his name is another. As the famous koan from the Blue Cliff Record asks, what is “the appropriate response?” And each of us has to stand on our own two feet to decide.

I think we have to challenge ourselves to say the killers’ names alongside those who were shot, and alongside our own names. There is so much that connects us to one another—victims, perpetrators, bystanders. We are all a part of the whole catastrophe. Putting our names together is one small step toward making these otherwise invisible connections visible, even though it would be easier to not see it this way.

Counting him among the ones who are suffering also begins to shine light on the systemic violence we all participate in and are victimized by: racism, homophobia, militarism, economic inequality, and so on. If we don’t shine the light in these places, too, the deep-rooted causes of suffering will remain in the shadows and then come into being in the cultures and policies that we create and live by. To count Omar Mateen among the dead is another way to bear witness to suffering, and to bring peacemaking into our minds, into our words, and into our actions, so that saying his name out loud might have “the power to turn the destiny of a nation.”

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