A conversation featuring Sharon Salzberg, angel Kyodo williams, and Robert Wright.
How can we harness meditative practice and the principles of Buddhism to more effectively engage in political arenas ranging from social justice to foreign policy?
buddhism
Beyond Privilege: a Q&A with angel Kyodo williams
To make diversity real, says Zen teacher angel Kyodo williams, Buddhists must look deep into their own hearts.
Brooklyn Zen Center executive director Greg Snyder has spoken of a mind-meld that’s gone on between you and he, and BZC guiding teacher Teah Strozer. Let’s talk about that connection.
I’m a New Yorker. I lived in Fort Greene and had a little sitting group, an offshoot of my main practice home of Village Zendo. Coincidentally, I called it Brooklyn Zen Center because I believed that the practice could arise in the community, from the community. Most places of practice that I saw didn’t feel like that. They had a feeling of separateness. I knew that in order for Buddhist practice to take root amongst peoples not defined by a particular Western, white, middle-aged, middle-to-upper-middle-class construct, the practice had to go and meet people and not just expect them to come and find it.
I eventually went to California, and coming back and finding that this Brooklyn Zen Center was really doing the work of welcoming was an incredible relief to me, especially because they were doing it in such a compassionate, humble, present, and transparent way.
How does that way manifest?
Many centers say, “Oh, we want to include people so let’s invite them to come.” But because we, as Western-worldview, dominant-paradigm folks have not done our work, we actually don’t know how to be welcoming. An invitation is a gesture. Welcoming, though, is open-armed hospitality. It’s in the heart. I think that what Brooklyn Zen has that many places don’t is in its leadership: people who continue to truly examine their own hearts and are willing to address the barriers and the hindrances to being welcoming.
How can we make fundamental changes in ourselves so that we can be welcoming, not just inviting?
Meditation is awesome, but it’s not fast enough. People need to get trained. Training amps up the intensity, bringing things intentionally into our view so that we can work on what’s there to be worked on.
What will that training help address?
The paradigms and the worldviews of white Western privilege, which have been developed for no other reason but to bestow privilege on a very small group of people and to create separation. That’s what the construct of whiteness was for right from the beginning.
This is not about bashing anybody for who they are or for their skin color. This is about a construct that was developed purely and solely in order to create separation and now that construct needs to be deconstructed. If we don’t do that, that separation will live on and it will do so, shamefully, in the midst of teachings that are so profoundly gifted with a language, with an approach, with a methodology, to unseat separation.
It’s been some fifteen years since you presented these issues in your acclaimed book, Being Black. Are you writing?
I am. [You can read an exclusive excerpt of william’s book, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation, written with Lama Rod Owens and Jasmine Syedullah, inside the September 2016 Lion’s Roar magazine. —Ed.] One thing I’m working on, that speaks directly to all this, is a book about my own shocked recognition that I have spent many years—in the vernacular of black folks back to the days of slavery—keeping my head down.
How so?
By trying to stay smaller than was organic to the situation and to my experience, because I didn’t want to draw the ire of folks in the dharma world. And even though we don’t have any singular institution of Zen or Buddhism, there’s a power structure, one that is often unspoken. We can recognize it if we look at the Buddhist media and see who’s there—who are we being told to look at and listen to, and who is wielding those structures and who seeks to influence them. Many people I’ve spoken to say they don’t feel free, particularly folks of color and, in some traditions, women—each tradition has its own stuck place.
The apparent hierarchy that exists in some of our spiritual structures is there to support us but it’s being leveraged as a mask for power structures and privilege. In some places of practice it’s very male or heterosexual; in some places it’s other things. But pretty much all over the place, it’s pretty white.
So is what you’re writing part memoir, part guidance for feeling empowered enough to no longer be quiet, or, as you put it, “small”?
Part memoir, part guidance, and a lot of critique. I’m also working on a collection of observations on our society, through what people would call a Buddhist lens. I would just say a lens of liberation. I look at what gets in the way, including the parasitic capitalism that we have not just as an economic structure but also as a religious structure. Capitalism has become a religion—many religions actually deify it at this point—and because of that, we’re letting it run amok with no real thought about how to change it.
Does something like the People’s Climate March, which BZC was quite involved with, suggest that things are starting to turn around?
Hopefully the climate march is a disruption of a system that is consuming itself and all of us with it. The march did come from “the people”—it originated out of environmental justice organizations, not out of typical green groups and NGOs. It came out of brown and black and economically disadvantaged white communities, and indigenous peoples. It’s about across-the-board disruption. It’s about understanding that climate change is a leverage point for us to look at all of the failures, limitations, and places of separation and breakdown in our society.
What does “disruption” mean? Does it mean voting with our dollars? Does it mean that if we don’t like what’s going on in the media, we become the media? What kinds of forms will disruption take?
Everything. First and foremost we need to take back our power, and our power exists in our participation in all of these structures. It will be a challenge because we were weaned on this system. We are bred to consume. And, so, for us to break our own chains is just as difficult as it was for blacks to resist the slavery that they’d been born into for generations and was all they’d ever known. The idea was that that system would continue forever because, once you had bred someone into the system, they didn’t know anything else.
Are you hopeful?
Not in the sense of tomorrow, but I’m hopeful that the seed has been planted, that the irrelevance of the systems that continue to privilege small groups of people is laid bare now. We’re in this wonderful moment of going, “Oh, this doesn’t work. There are no winners in this.”
How are we going to convince the captains of industry that they’re not winners?
I don’t think we need to. It’s like, “How are we going to convince the plantation owners to let go of their slaves?” We didn’t. We had to snatch the slaves from their arms.
There’s no such thing as being neutral. You’re either playing along with how things are or you are disrupting them and turning them on their head. Those are the only options.
Pursuing the possibility of a new monastery, as BZC is doing, seems like a major step forward.
I don’t think I’ve ever been excited about a monastery before. [Laughter].
Why you are excited about this monastery?
Because I can see myself there, whether that’s my physical body or not. I think that Greg and Teah and the leadership will plant the seeds for a deep practice home. The Western Buddhist world has spent too much time saying, “Oh, if we want people of color to participate, we can’t expect them to do real, deep practice.” With that attitude, people of color will never be fully accepted. As soon as Being Black came out, I was completely chagrined that I had invited people of color, through the book, into a place that was not welcoming. The good news is that BZC rings true. And the monastery, if it happens, will also be a place that is welcoming, and that’s a start.
Read the original interview here: http://www.lionsroar.com/beyond-privilege-qa-angel-kyodo-williams/
How to Lead Like a Spiritual Warrior An Interview With angel Kyodo williams
An Interview With angel Kyodo williams
Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace angel Kyodo williams says we can be the kind of leaders that reduce burdens not create them.
Omega: To be a spiritual warrior—an archetype in all traditions—you’ve said we need to “transcend the stories we make up in our own minds about ourselves and our shortcomings…. It’s the labels that we apply and that are applied to us that box us in, break us down, and wear us out.” How does this apply to women, specifically, who want to act in service to the greater good?
angel: We all get handed these stories, right? Every one of us—we’re born into a family, a time, a region, a culture. We get handed a story about what we look like. As we express our capacities we get stories about whether we are more or less capable. Not only do we get individual stories, we get collective stories. We miss a great deal when we only pay attention to the story that’s been handed to us and we’re not intimately connected to the deeper story of who we really are—as Buddhists say, before our mother was born. We come encoded with a deep memory of who we’ve always been but when we arrive on the scene our focus is turned toward the external. We forget we have that operating information about who we always are.
In this society and age—even as we have fought and pushed back and challenged it—women have taken on the story of being inferior to men, of the inability to accomplish things without men. Many of us have taken on the story of needing men in order to feel complete in a sexual or romantic way, and the story of the impact that the treatment of men and fathers have on us. This is something that we carry forward with us and there are limitless possibilities of what kind of stories those could be, good and bad.
But we have been uniquely gifted as women with an embodiment of receptive energy—the ability to be receptive where stillness can arise. Feminine energy enables containing and holding and opening up the space to allow more and others in. Because—whether we do it physically or not—life ushers forth, creativity ushers forth, from the feminine. And because of that we are intrinsically oriented against destruction of life and of creativity.
Of course there are natural, creative destruction cycles. But because creativity ushers forth from the space of the feminine we know that it isn’t our role to interrupt the creative flow. So it is women that are much more likely to insist on the justice that is necessary for us to have a thriving society that is spacious and equitable for all people. Because the energetic life force ushers forth from us, we understand that it all has a right to be here and a right to thrive until it’s natural, organic cycle comes to an end.
So women have a responsibility to set these stories—that hinder our responsibility and limit our role as the carriers of creativity, as the generators of a greater and greater container that can hold all of life—aside.
Because these stories are fairly random, right? I got born this time to these people in this culture in this society. And I would have been someone different had I taken up the stories of another time, another set of parents, another region, another culture, another side of the country, speaking another language. So how much really of that is you? So why don’t we start choosing the stories that we’re going to take on? Why don’t we choose the stories that most enable and empower us to meet the fullness of our role and responsibilities as the energetic force that supports life and thriving and creativity?
Omega: Is this kind of spirituality an antidote to the “individualistic materialism” you say has become a form of religion in Western culture?
angel: Yes. Like a spiritual warrior, you have to get trained in the skills to interrupt this incredible organism of destruction. So I’m not saying people should just run out and start doing any old thing, but rather develop one’s capabilities. The capacity of the heart and the skill sets to be able to say, “I’m not going to be slayed by playing the game with a fantasy that that’s how to stop it.”
When we withdraw belief in the destruction, it will collapse. We have a deep habit. All the new books in science say if you want to stop a habit the best way is to replace it with a new one. If we can begin to work on strengthening the habit of tuning into, and moving, in love and self-care—healing the places of generational pain and suffering; healing the places of division in our own hearts that keep us separate from the people in our lives, and the people across the road, and across the border—if we develop those habits it will be much easier to divest ourselves of the habit of belief in this system of destruction.
Omega: How do leadership, power, and hierarchy function together in an equitable and holistic community?
angel: I think we’re naïve when we try to flatten something. Hierarchy is a natural response to the diversity of needs that exist in society and the diversity of attention in social orders. In order to focus attention and advance the needs of societies, communities, organizations, homes, families, etcetera, true leadership is a relief. Because it frees each of us to pursue the things we love with a sense of being able to entrust the steering of the ship—not over the edge of the world but pressing forth into the glory of the horizon and the possibilities of new oases of nourishment and places where we can have shelter and be creative and thrive.
So the best placed leadership reduces burdens rather than being a form of oppression. That’s the relationship I have to leadership and hierarchy in its best expression.
In the best situations leadership is not a fixed idea—one person leads forever. Rather an emergent leadership in which whoever is most suited toward the task at hand is the leader, people that came before or have particular capacities in that moment, and we all are developed and well socialized enough to follow well, be responsive to that leader, and relate to leadership not as something that hinders us but something that moves us forward. So we give over our full resources to make that leadership successful because the leadership is acting on our behalf. It’s not separate from us.
In terms of like social organizations, any organizations that want to engage in a just society that is in any contact with people that are marginalized must have those populations within its decision making body. Not just to act or advise but in decision making, meaningful capacities to exact power. Or those organizations and institutions are irrelevant. They’re just waiting to find out, because they’re already irrelevant.
It’s a very Eurocentric Western paradigm—we know what people need, so we know how people think. No, we need to know how people move in a space, how they sit at a table. Do they sit in circles or across from each other or in rows? All of that teaches the cultural expression and diversity. Diversity opens new windows of insight into how can we organize space for the whole. Everybody gives up a little bit of room so we can all fit into the circle comfortably.
As it turns out, we all don’t need the same amount of space so it doesn’t have to be equal. It has to be equitable. We don’t drink or eat the same amount. Some of us need to be in the sun more often. Some of us need access to art. We’re really different.
If we’re willing to be complex in our solutions and our willingness to look at things, and not be slave driven by economic imperatives, and slow down and meet each other—we can do this.
We forget. I fully trust that the people that seem like they don’t want to meet us have just forgotten. And we should hold space for them so that when they come to their senses and they remember, it’s safe for them and we’re not against them. We’re for them.
Read the interview here: http://angelkyodowilliams.com/talks/how-to-lead-like-a-spiritual-warrior-an-interview-with-angel-kyodo-williams/
Threading Anger Through Love
angel Kyodo williams, Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, describes how we can practice shifting anger from a destructive to a generative force.
Anger is capable of pointing us back to love. It arises as a result of an offense to what we love. If we can use anger to reconnect to love, then that anger—the response that we have to injustice, pain, and suffering in the world—can be a generative force rather than a destructive one.
When we thread anger back through the core of what we love, the response can be fierce and powerful but not consuming. This is a very subtle point that is often not understood—that we can, in fact, have fierce responses that begin from a place of anger about injustices and pain that are greater than any person or community should have to bear. But, that anger must be taken and threaded through and then anchored and rooted in what we love. When we anchor it in love and allow ourselves to also be cognizant of the suffering that we are experiencing as a result of our loss, pain, and the injustice, we get back again to that place that doesn’t want anyone to suffer like we are.
So when yet another black child, teenager, or young person is killed, the response should be fierce. But if it’s rooted in love and that love is connected with a deep touching into our suffering, whatever the reaction, there’s no wish for destruction of life or for the suffering of others. Love has a wish for the deconstruction of that which is false and that which harms. That’s the right place to go. Love never expresses itself as wishing harm.
The nuance is challenging because anger is a fire energy. And it often burns so hot we’re not able to see through into love.
Looking Beyond Practice to Cause
I want to say, especially thinking about Martin Luther King’s quote about riots as a voice of people that have not been heard, that I’m making these observations within a privilege of not having had that amount of injustice hoisted upon me.
I would like to believe that if I were directly touched in a material way by these injustices, that having a practice and an understanding that arises out of that practice, would enable me to root my anger in love. To anchor it and take that thread and loop it in love so that my activity would manifest as a loving expression. But I cannot imagine or speak to what it means for people that haven’t had that practice and have had that kind of injustice. I can speak from the seat of comfort and privilege, but I’m not prepared to denounce in any way what it does to the human psyche, the human heart, when your humanity has been so denied.
I think we have to be careful about asking a humane response from people who have been dehumanized so often for so long, from the beginning of the building of this society.
We should endeavor to know what it is that produces serial killing at the rate at which it’s produced in this country, in this society. Do we blame the serial killers or do we blame the society when we know that the percentage is so high and so specific to our country?
I have a friend who says, “There is no personal experience.” There’s no such thing. And so I can’t demand of anyone a merely personal response. We can’t keep going along and saying, we are collective, we’re connected, and then say, but individually they should do X, Y, and Z. You’re not an individual. No one’s an individual. We’re all active in the web of actions, reactions, and experience.
Read the interview here: https://www.eomega.org/article/threading-anger-through-love
“Social Justice & Buddhism” — an Interview with Omega Institute
An Interview With angel Kyodo williams
In this interview, Zen teacher, activist, and author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace angel Kyodo williams talks with Omega about the path from inner work to social change.
Omega: You’ve said, “The heart that hurts is the very same heart that heals.” How do we build a bridge from personal to collective healing, and apply inner gentleness to systems and structures that urgently need to alter?
angel: I think it’s incumbent upon us waving our flags about inner work during such a pressing experience of social ills and destabilization to respond—at least as best we can.
One main challenge of approaching transformation in society through inner work is that people think it means focusing on others: “If I feel this way about that person….” Then we’re up against a struggle to navigate all the people not in our tribe or chosen collective. Our society is broken and we are challenged with a systematic structure that has kept us divided. We mistakenly think the way to get beyond it is to have compassion for other people in a sort of bland way and it’ll all get better, but that hasn’t been working.
My sense of the path from inner work to social change is for each of us to be much more intimate with our own self, and the brokenness and suffering that we ourselves experience.
That’s not to be mistaken with a fixation on me, me, me, but rather a true, intimate relationship (which is Buddhism’s stamp) with our own suffering. When we touch suffering deeply, it becomes very apparent that we would not want anyone to experience the suffering. So that we’re not saying, “I know the suffering of my broken heartedness. I know the suffering of being witness to prejudice and people being marginalized and mistreated and denied opportunity. But I can’t touch them because it’s too hard.” It takes courage and practice and a developed capacity to really touch the heart of our own suffering because it feels uncomfortable. We’re not taught to tolerate discomfort—but quite the opposite—to get away from discomfort as quickly as possible and paper it over with television and Facebook and all manner of things.
So touching inner work to social transformation is about willingness and touching the heart of our own suffering, out of which arises an organic understanding that we would not want anyone else to experience such suffering and, therefore, we wish for their well-being. The deeper we go into our suffering the more fervent the wish for the well-being of others. We act. We act because our inaction is felt as a participation in that suffering.
Omega: Communities around the country are struggling to respond to violence with grace. How do you reach for curiosity as a tool to access courage and vulnerability in difficult moments?
angel: I access curiosity by being curious about my own feelings. When I enter a situation and notice that I’m experiencing discomfort or I’m disassociated or cut off from my feelings, I become exquisitely curious about that. Where is that feeling of disconnect arising from? What could it be? I follow it with the curiosity of a child. They don’t just run in and throw the closet open but follow the breadcrumbs of this tiny piece of experience: this way that my stomach feels clenched; this way that I notice the room got darker and more narrow; this way that I notice that dark face in front of me brings a little bit of quickness to my breath. What is it about this dark face that should bring a quickness to my breath? What is actually there?
You’re following breadcrumbs, not saying, “Hey, you’re some person I’m feeling some anxiety and fear about. I don’t know where it comes from, but let me come and hug you.” Rather, what is this experience of contraction or disconnect with the human being in front of me?
If I really feel out of sorts, I might get in touch with the grief that generally attends our loss of contact. If we’re feeling disconnected, right behind it—if we can stay planted right where we are instead of running away from the feeling and the space—we’ll notice that hidden behind that experience is a very subtle sense of grief. Because we’re fundamentally oriented to be connected to one another, so we can’t experience anything but grief when we are disconnected. Our anger and reactivity, our running away and taking flight—all of that is a result of being mortified that we’re having an inappropriate experience of our humanity. We are experiencing loss—a moment of disconnect from our own humanity.
If we are not trained, we may react by lashing out. Just like small children react to being frightened by screaming, crying, hiding in a corner, or running away. It is maturity that enables us to stay put and notice the sensations and be curious about where they’re coming from and follow the breadcrumbs back to the connection.
Omega: People often walk a self-conscious line between belonging in, or even “representing,” a larger community and expressing their individual uniqueness. Diversity is a strength, but many movements, and individuals, experience internal fracturing. How do we practice holism as individuals and collectively?
angel: Problems arise when someone gets the idea they have the right understanding or view on how the whole should express itself and doesn’t allow for the unique permutations that are the gift of diversity. We become controlling about how people ought to show up or do things.
On the other hand we can become obsessed with expressing our uniqueness precisely because we don’t feel like we belong. We can get overly engaged with the need to express ourselves. That’s a direct response to not feeling seen.
These two things are connected. When the whole doesn’t try to make everyone conform but realizes a plethora of diverse expressions of the whole as valid, then individuals can soften because they truly belong and they don’t have to assert an obsession around identity.
All we’re grappling with fundamentally is our sense of overwhelming separation. We’re just kicking and screaming and thrashing because we want to belong. And we need that, as a socially organized primate, right? We need to belong.
This society was built on division right from the beginning—division was not only fostered, it was constructed, then fostered, then institutionalized, and then concretized in law, in all ways.
Imagine a family unit—what would it be like for children to feel so cut off from what is now their family? To be told in so many ways, you are not really a part of this family. You don’t really belong here. We didn’t really want you. And if you are going to be here, the only way you can be here is at a great disadvantage, so that your lack of belonging is assured.
At the heart of what ails so much of marginalized communities, is how much they want to belong, which we never really say, and we don’t say that what ails so many white, hetero, cis-gendered men is their wanting to belong, and not. What if we could say, “Oh, here’s what’s happening: We are brokenhearted because we feel forced in this society to cut ourselves off from our humanity in order to maintain this outdated, always demeaning, dehumanizing structure that was designed to afford privileges and economic advantage to a few on the backs of many”? We all are graded in that way, and in pain as a result.
If we can’t belong, then we want to be special. We want to be a celebrity. We all have our own personal media platforms. How crazy is this? I’ve got four of them myself. It’s like The angel Show and I’m always directing and producing and writing and projecting out this angel critter. We just really want to belong and be seen. The social media and technological moment that we find ourselves in is such a very strong expression of exactly what is going on with us. We want to be heard. We want to matter.
Read the interview here: https://www.eomega.org/article/social-justice-buddhism
Waking Up From the Mind of Whiteness
“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.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams | Beyond Idiot ompassion
Rev. angel Kyodo williams is an ordained Zen Buddhist priest, spiritual maverick, author, activist, and founder of CXC (Center for Transformative Change), in Berkeley, California, which is dedicated to “changing the way change is done.” Rather than exhort spiritual seekers to become more politically active, CXC supports social activists in becoming more spiritual. This is the only way, Rev. angel believes, we will “flip the switch” in people’s hearts so that we treat each other and the Earth more compassionately. She sees “the application of inner awareness practice to broad-based social change as America’s next great social movement.”
I came across the Center for Transformative Change while searching the Internet for an alternative to a ten-day meditation retreat at Spirit Rock, which—work and finances being what they were—I couldn’t afford. CXC offered a no-cost “virtual” retreat called “27 Days of Transformative Change.” I was intrigued. I could pursue social change and spiritual growth simultaneously? Excellent! No need to clear my schedule and go on retreat; my activism would be my spiritual practice. Having experienced the benefits of cyber community while living in rural Washington, where my closest friends were like-minded people in cyberspace, I wasn’t dismayed by the idea of participating remotely. It was sweetly empowering to think there would beings of like intention three hundred miles away doing their work while I did mine. Still, when the virtual retreat began I was surprised at how touched I was by my remote sangha’s support: knowing that our practice leader blessed our intentions every day in the practice hall and feeling part of an intentional community stretching to be a little kinder, a little clearer, a little more grounded, more fearless, and ultimately, more effective.
The 27 Days also included weekly dharma talks by Rev. angel, which we downloaded as podcasts. While Zen is known for being inscrutable, Rev. angel’s dharma talks were clear. More to the point, they were helpful—addressing the actual challenges I was facing in embracing the humanity of people to whom I was politically opposed. So it made perfect sense to learn that Rev. angel’s dharma name, “Kyodo,” means “way of teaching.” She has a gift for making profound teachings relevant to daily life.
In addition to being the founder of CXC, Rev. angel is the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace, which has been called “a classic” by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield, and “an act of love” by novelist Alice Walker. The Library Journal has named Rev. angel “the most intriguing African-American Buddhist in America.” She was kind enough to speak with me by phone on four separate occasions. — Leslee Goodman
The MOON: Why were you drawn to Zen Buddhism?
Rev. angel: I stumbled across Zen Buddhism in my early twenties and really resonated with it, as if I was connecting with something that was already true within me. The underlying philosophy and feel of Zen, with its sparseness and precision, its supposed disregard of texts and of dogma, the silence of zazen—seated meditation—spoke to me very deeply. Also, my grandfather had recently passed, so I was in an especially quiet and internal place. I’d started my own little homemade practice and then found this container that could help me hold the depth of grief I felt, without a lot of interference from other people.
I became quickly enamored of the practice, dodged around and got connected with a community, and had a very strong, clear sense that I wanted to ordain—which I think might have been a holdover from women not being allowed to ordain within the Christian traditions I was familiar with.
I was particularly drawn to the aspect of service—specifically the service of keeping the liturgy. There was something profound for me about holding the space that keeps tradition alive. So I was ordained as a Zen priest within the Peacemaker order—and within a larger Zen tradition of being of social service. I knew this work landed squarely where I wanted my focus to be—the nexus of spirit and social service in the world.
Read the interview here: http://moonmagazine.org/rev-angel-kyodo-williams-beyond-idiot-compassion-3-2014-01-05/
I May Not Stay Here With You: Transmitting Dharma Beyond Race
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 main- stream 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.
This essay was written as Commentary for Buddhadharma, Winter 2013 issue.
Original article appears here: http://www.thebuddhadharma.com/web-archive/2013/11/12/commentary-i-may-not-stay-here-with-you.html
Download the PDF here:akwilliams-buddhadharma_winter2013
