Radical Dharma Conversation @ Omega
Radical Dharma Conversation
It’s time to create the conditions that reimagine a path of healing, reconnect with authentic community, and manifest true justice. Radical dharma (“complete truth”) is a way to enter the critical conversation about how the legacy of racial injustice and white supremacy plays out and prevents our collective awakening. We can only accomplish shifts in awareness by creating conditions for radical honesty, where we drop our need for perfection to speak and act from a place of deep vulnerability and authentic presence. This deep dive Conversation offers the critical guidance, practices, and experiences we need, but were never taught.
Rev. angel Kyodo williams Sensei and guest teacher Jasmine Syedullah help us navigate grief, apathy, alienation, and burnout and engage in an intimate practice of bold, authentic, and inclusive conversation. Together we will:
- Identify and disrupt patterns of internalized oppression and collusion
- Learn embodied practice of Centering in Presence to build internal capacity
- Learn to recognize and disrupt social patterns that play a role in silencing ourselves and others
- Unearth and dismantle myths that deny the history and context of our conditioning
- Practice skillfully engaging across lines of difference to continue the conversation in your own community
As we align our values with our behaviors, we become equipped and empowered to respond to the urgent need for action. All people looking for ways to deconstruct rather than amplify systems of suffering are welcome.
**We ask that participants read the book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love & Liberation in advance of the program.
To generate informed experience, we request the following information
- racial identity
- age
- gender/pronoun
American Buddhism & Diversity – 15 years later
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: https://www.thebuddhadharma.com/web-archive/2013/11/12/commentary-i-may-not-stay-here-with-you.html
Download the PDF here:akwilliams-buddhadharma_winter2013
I May Not Stay Here With You: Transmitting Dharma Beyond Race
real and not real: on border and divisions
i have to make a confession…
i’ve been holding up the publication of this month’s journal version of transform. for almost two weeks now. and it’s because i’ve had a block.
not an ordinary writers’ block—which, while annoying, unproductive and sometimes even painful, is generally unwanted—as that would be preferable to the block i’ve been having.
i’ve been having a heart-mind block.
i have found the thinking, choices, behavior and resulting consequences of our people so incomprehensible at a heart level, that my mind has refused to put words to a phenomena that seems beyond them.
when i say our people, i mean OUR people. all of them. the ones that every single human that ever lays eyes on this—from now until the end of time—have a relationship to:
– the people in the Tea Party
– the people never invited to the Party
– the people in Arizona (made up of lines)
– the people of Arizona (made up of lineage)
– the people (and wildlife) within the Gulf Coast
– the people (and profiteers) far away from the Gulf Coast
– the people in the White House
– the people thrown out of their house
– the people of God
– the people that own God
– the people in Israel (that won’t let up)
– the people in Gaza (that can’t get out)
with each upside-down turn of events, my heart has broken further and has threatened to take my mind with it because my mind wants to make sense of something that my heart knows full well it cannot.
and should not.
what i can do instead is try to sort out what is real and what is not. that’s an illusion of sorts too, i know, but this is what i came up with:
Nine Things Real and Not Real
- we, the People, are divided by fear, lack of vision and imagination is real.
- the so-called border that divides this land from the people we took it from by force is not real
- the horrific show of how deep this country’s racism runs, masking itself as it’s very own Party of hatred, is real.
- the idea that a President of any race, color, gender or creed can rise above and act beyond a corrupted system that put them there to begin with is not real.
- the toxic waste hemorrhaging onto the land from 5000 feel under the sea—laying waste to the life in its path—is real.
- the will to stop feeding off of “ancient hours of sunlight” and converting fossils into a fuel that drives death and destruction worldwide is not real.
- the cordoning off of nearly 1.5 million people like so much cattle that amounts to a New Millenium Apartheid is real.
- the resolve of America and the world to stop financing state-sanctioned war crimes and now international law breaches is not real.
- the deep divisions of our society, people and planet, based on the peculiar illusory constructs of race, class, privilege, supremacy and superiority is real. and for this, we will all pay.
genocide is real.
greed is real.
destruction is real.
“illegals” aren’t real.
Mexicans aren’t real.
Americans aren’t real.
Muslims aren’t real.
Jews aren’t real.
fairness is real.
justice is real.
love is real.
People are real.
—yours in truth, aKw
dedicated to all the people that show up for real.
—
copyright ©MMXI. angel Kyodo williams
changeangel: all things change. (sm)
angel Kyodo williams is a maverick teacher, author, social visionary and founder of Transformative Change.
she posts, tweets & blogs on all things change. permission granted to retweet, repost, repast & repeat with copyright and contact information intact.
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Real and Not Real: On Border and Divisions
