Rev. angel Kyodo williams

"love and justice are not two. without inner change, there can be no outer change; without collective change, no change matters."

dharma

Buddhist Statement on Racial Injustice

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Buddhist Statement on Racial Injustice

-delivered to the White House by Buddhist teachers May 14, 2015

“If you have come to help me you are wasting your time. But if you recognize that your liberation and mine are bound up together, we can walk together.” – Lila Watson

As Buddhist teachers and leaders we are distressed and deeply saddened by the killings of unarmed African-Americans by police–most recently brought to light with Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, Eric Garner in Staten Island, NY, Walter Scott in North Charleston, SC, Freddie Gray of Baltimore MD and too many others–and the frequent failure of the courts to bring justice to these cases. Most grievous is that these tragic events are not isolated incidents. They are part of a systemic injustice in the United States that is rooted in centuries of slavery and segregation, and manifested in continued economic and social exclusion, inferior education, mass incarceration and ongoing violence against African-Americans.

The Buddhist teachings are grounded in a clear recognition of suffering, an ethical commitment to non-harming and an understanding of interdependence: We can’t separate our personal healing and transformation from that of our larger society. The historic and continued suffering of people of color in this country of African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans and others is our collective suffering. The harm caused daily is our collective responsibility. Once we see this suffering, our freedom unfolds as we respond with a wise and compassionate heart.

Right now, we believe there is an immediacy and urgency in focusing our attentions and efforts on the pervasive and ongoing violence done to people of color in our country. We are inspired by the courage and leadership of the people of Ferguson and many other communities in recent months in drawing a line in the sand and saying, “Enough”, “Black Lives Matter”, and calling for deep-rooted changes in our economic and justice systems. As Buddhists we see the timeliness of adding our voices to theirs, knowing it will take a dedicated focus to recognize how the hidden biases and assumptions of our society deprive people of color of their basic rights to justice, opportunity and human dignity.

Our collective aspiration within the Buddhist traditions is to become truly inclusive and beloved communities. In this process we are committed to honestly and bravely uncovering the ways we create separation and unintentionally replicate patterns of inequity and harm. In the same spirit, we are committed to engaging with other faith and social justice groups in support of undoing racism throughout our society.

In the midst of tragedy, grief, and anger, we see the seeds of profound possibilities for healing the wounds of separation and building communities based on respect and love. Since their inception, Buddhist teachings and practices have been explicitly devoted to liberation. In his time the Buddha was a revolutionary voice against racism and the caste system: “Not by caste, race, or creed, or birth is one noble, but by heart alone is one a noble being.” The Buddhist trainings in mindfulness, wisdom and compassion, create the grounds for wise speech and wise action. These teachings and practices free our hearts from greed, prejudice and hate and serve an essential role in societal healing, and in the awakening of all.

With prayers for healing and peace,

Waking Up From the Mind of Whiteness

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akw_dharma“once you recognize that there is something else operating that is beyond your ordinary sight, don’t bother with the content. watch the pattern. the content is a distraction from you being able to see the vastness of the construct because if you could see it, it would begin to fail. PAY ATTENTION. this isn’t about ONE INCIDENT. #BlackLivesMatter “

-written as a comment in response to a white Buddhist practitioner’s inquiry about knowing when racism is present –aKw

as a Buddhist, you may get this: just as the ego-mind is a construct that constantly reinforces itself, building structures & systems of control and develops attitudes & views that maintain it’s primacy and sense of solidity so that it can substantiate its validity, so, too, does the construct of whiteness. one could think of it as the Mind of Whiteness. you live inside that Mind, such that you cannot see—yet—outside of the reinforcing perspectives that affirm and perpetuate the White Superiority Complex. that complex would disintegrate if it could view the vastness of the presence of racial bias. so you and the vast majority of progressive whites, and i daresay especially buddhists, remain blind and thus ask questions that are very much a part of the need to escape the sheer anguish of how pervasive it is, how you participate and how seemingly inescapable it is. but just as the ego-mind cannot be used to work it’s way out of it’s own construct, so too can the Mind of Whiteness not be used to see through the veil of its own construct. so we sit. and we feel. and we let what arises do so until the resistance is worn down, or moved through or even overwhelms us. on the other side, we see a glimmer of something that we couldn’t get a handle on for our desperate need to avoid it. we see Truth. and when we catch a hold of it, we see the patterns of our participation in not-Truth emerge. but with a steady mind and true heart, what is apparent to others begins to reveal itself and emerge from behind the fog of our Ego-Mind of Whiteness (that btw, plagues non-whites just as much in different, but debilitating ways). i tell my students: once you recognize that there is something else operating that is beyond your ordinary sight, don’t bother with the content. watch the pattern. the content is a distraction from you being able to see the vastness of the construct because if you could see it, it would begin to fail. PAY ATTENTION. this isn’t about ONE INCIDENT. it is about the overwhelming pattern that forms the fabric of our lives here in America and cloaks our individual and collective humanity. we have failed ourselves. don’t get caught in the trap of the sifting through the fascinating sparkly details when the whole thing is a failure. divest your interest in this failure so that you can begin to develop Right View so you can even begin to see the forest rather than holding on for dear life to a tree. the simple answer: race is rarely all of the story and ALWAYS some of the story in America. period. he should have been indicted because he killed an unarmed person. of any color. but because of the PATTERN, i woke up from the slumber of believing i might finally be safe. i am not safe. my brother is not safe. my father is not safe. because we are wearing this color of skin. if we do not simply submit, we may be killed and not even a jury of so-called peers will have to wonder. having to simply submit, though, means we are not safe. we live in a constant state of low/med/hi-level fear as a people and it is validated on a daily basis. here is the impact of the pervasiveness of the Mind of Whiteness as it is expressed from bodies white, black, brown and yellow and red: because of what i have been taught, shown, experienced on a daily basis in my own fairly privileged life, i don’t assume all cops are racist…i assume all white people are.

and in case it’s not abundantly clear, i know plenty of other colored folks are racist, too. we are ALL working the pain, suffering and misery that the inhumanity of this system of oppression has cast upon us. i also know that as the dominate group that benefits from the perpetuation of said system, it is good, well-meaning white folks’ complicity that keeps in place.

Commentary: I May Not Stay Here With You

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angel-kyodo-williams_bethanie-hines
Photo by Bethanie Hines

By the time this article reaches you, I will have been empowered as an independent teacher in the Zen tradition through a ceremony and process called dharma transmission. While Zen has flourished in the West long enough to bear witness to the passing of pioneering teachers who have, in turn, seeded a substantial network of second- and third-generation teachers in America, my own rite of passage remains noteworthy for dubious reasons. As the second African-American woman—and only the third black person in America—ever to receive this empowerment in Soto Zen Buddhism, I am acutely aware of the conflicting viewpoints with which I hold it.

Arising out of the cultural needs and priorities of seventh-century China, the Zen school places significant emphasis on mind-to-mind transmission. The transmission ceremony affirms one as a successor in a lineage reputed to be unbroken from the historic Buddha to Mahakashyapa in India, through to Bodhidharma and Huineng in China, to Dogen in Japan, and in my case, Taizan Maezumi Roshi and Bernie Glassman Roshi in America. One of the essential rites of this passage is to hand copy and receive back a stamped bloodline document that traces this lineage in a chart of swirling lines ending with your own name, effectively “sealing” one’s authentic place of belonging in this eighty-plus-generation family.

While it has long been established by scholars that the lineage as written couldn’t possibly be historically accurate and therefore literally true, any teacher undertaking the ceremony would be hard-pressed to deny that a mysterious and visceral comfort attends the affirmation of one’s belonging, regardless of its being symbolic and maybe even precisely because it is.

In this way, I am no exception. After ten years of mostly avoiding the Buddhist mainstream while dealing with the demands of starting up a small dharma community and being a full-time residential teacher, I had become accustomed to going it alone. The public acknowledgement of what one already is, what is already so, is very much like getting married to a long-held beloved: at the end of the ceremony, you return to the place you’ve always lived, but now it is truly your home.

Still, I observe any system of perpetuating a special transmission with the wary eye of a justice-seeking person who has existed in a multiplicity of categories that are famously marginalized in America: black, female, queer, working class, non-degreed, and under-resourced. It doesn’t take deep analysis to recognize that inherent in the tradition passed through this lineage are handy tools for keeping in place the structures that hinder healthy diversity because of the unwelcoming conditions that exist when black folks and other people of color find themselves trying to pierce the veil of all-whiteness we still find in the vast majority of convert dharma centers. This transmission system—different from formal participation and merit-based curricula such as the Community Dharma Leaders program offered through Spirit Rock—also has embedded within it the potential to foster, then obscure, discrimination under the guise of authenticity.

To this end, when establishing the New Dharma Community as a home for people committed to deep practice of the dharma and also to deep change for a more equitable and just society, we took up the story of the historic Buddha touching the earth in the bhumisparsha mudra, facing down the darkness of Mara, as our symbolic transmission. In doing so, we affirm our belonging to the lineage of awakening that precedes even the historical Buddha, much less that of white teachers who have withheld such belonging, if for no other reason than because the dullness of their unexamined privilege has prevented them from being able to see those who are unlike them.

Mara challenged Gautama’s right to ascend the seat of enlightenment, just as the dominant white paradigm showers arrows of comparison that challenge the culture, beliefs, and ways of other people, viewing them as inferior to their own. While many people wish to paint over the blight of racism that permeates the Buddhist community by casting it under the rug of a misguided fixation on identity, it was the Buddha himself who expressed an awareness of the need to address race, caste, gender, and class oppression by modeling the path to liberation. In reaching down and touching the earth, the Buddha of that time, and all of the buddhas who follow his radical example, are witnessed by the earth itself and join a sacred, timeless, and unshakeable lineage of liberation—one that is evidenced both inside and out. The earth shudders in approval.

I will continue to view the mantle of being an “authenticated” teacher with equal parts wariness and humility, as yet uncertain about whether it is best to crash the “sameness” party with healthy doses of difference or if it is of greater service to simply remain on the outside. To paraphrase Martin Luther King, Jr., “I may not stay here with you.” But no matter my personal choice, it seems the challenge established by the virtues of wisdom and compassion, and the very integrity in our practice—not to mention the radically changing world we are in that clamors for true justice—demands that the greater Buddhist sangha vigorously and wholeheartedly takes up the question. If we do not, the powerfully persuasive draw of these ancient teachings will be overwhelmed by the deep misalignment of racism and oppression. But if we do, our collective transmission will be that much more radiant, powerful, and true.

First appeared in Buddhadharma Magazine: The Practitioners’ Quarterly on November 12, 2013

Read the essay here: http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/web-archive/2013/11/12/commentary-i-may-not-stay-here-with-you.html