Guess Who’s Coming to Dharma: Black Women Embrace Western Buddhism

by Carol Cooper published: June 26, 2001


In the half-century since Buddhism re-entered American pop culture via the Beats (having first enjoyed a passing vogue during the 1890s), more and more black females—children of the civil rights movement, champions of black nationalism, feminist iconoclasts, and intellectuals—have been finding their way to Buddhist practice. Quietly, without much visibility or commercial fanfare, these women meditate daily, then take the insights they receive "on the cushion" into their lives as mothers, mates, social activists, and career women. From Tina Turner's autobiographical hat-tip to Nichiren Shoshu to bell hooks's describing her personal synthesis of Buddhist meditation, Christian prayer, and Sufi mysticism in 1999's Remembered Rapture to Alice Walker's outing of herself as a practitioner last year in The New York Times, black women have unwittingly become the world's most spontaneous lay Buddhist preachers.

The public face of convert Buddhism in America is predominantly white and male and middle-class. Historically, the presence of blacks and women within this developing scene has been largely glossed over or ignored, much like the black Beats that contemporary historians are always "forgetting" to include in new anthologies. Martin Baumann in the Journal of Buddhist Ethics estimated there were between 3 and 4 million American Buddhists as of 1997, and concluded that only 800,000 of them were "Euro-American." Lack of official representation belies the truth, and one of the central goals of this week's Tricycle conference in New York City on Buddhist practice and inquiry is to make American Buddhism more comfortable with its own inherent diversity.

From Friday, June 29, through Sunday, July 1, Buddhists from around the world will gather at the Marriott World Trade Center to tackle the secular and esoteric concerns of those clinical psychiatrists, Harvard professors, theoretical physicists, and other contemplative types who subscribe to the abstruse doctrines formulated some 2500 years ago by a Nepalese prince-turned-itinerant-philosopher. (The term Buddha is an honorific title not unlike Christos, and simply means one who has awakened from confusion into clarity.) Among the 40 experts Tricycle's editor in chief, Helen Tworkov, has recruited will be bell hooks and Dr. Jan Willis: two African American scholar-practitioners who each have at least 30 years of Buddhist praxis. Yet Willis and hooks hardly represent the entire scope of black involvement with the dharma (or "wisdom teachings"), and they'd be the first to point out how suspiciously slow Western-convert Buddhists usually are to recognize potential or genius among the black dharma students in their midst.

"I have been fascinated in general," hooks observes wryly, "[by the fact] that white folks have shown themselves willing to follow men of color from Tibet and other places—who barely speak English—but I don't think that white people in America have shown themselves willing to follow any black guru."

Willis, a tenured professor of religion at Wesleyan University, includes issues of class as a factor in this odd reluctance: "I think all of us are affected by our backgrounds, and I think it doesn't occur to people of privilege that they should extend themselves to other people. And I don't think you can really expect that Buddhist sanghas ["communities"] are going to be any different than the people who comprise them."

Although hooks has lectured at Naropa University and Willis gives guest teachings by request, neither woman is yet a formally recognized dharma teacher with a school and/or disciples of her own—unlike a majority of the conference panelists. Traditionally, teachers are expected to anoint their successors—in other words to tell students when they're ready to teach. Thus far no high-profile white lama, guru, or sensei (with established financial resources and pedagogic influence) has chosen a black dharma heir. "I think that people are disturbed," says hooks, "not by a black presence, but by a black presence that seeks to revolutionize" and democratize the power structure of American Buddhism.

Positioned somewhere between philosophy, religion, and psychotherapy, Buddhist practice can be very slow and difficult going. Depending on the school or style of practice you choose, there can be mantras to memorize, mudras to learn, and complex mental pictures to visualize. Not to mention the demanding discipline of sitting-meditation, which leads to a depth of introspection that can be by turns painful, tedious, or exhilarating. Choosing among a plethora of schools and styles—from the austere rigor of Zen to the straightforward efficacy of Vipassana to the seductive complexity of Tibetan tantra—highly motivated black female Buddhists instinctively develop syncretic meditation exercises prompted by the same impulse that made black pianists turn classical music into ragtime.

Willis has been teaching Tibetan visualization techniques to inmates of the all-female York Correctional Institute and has found them as eager and able to benefit from these empowering tools as anyone—anointed or otherwise. "For me the issue is accessibility. So I take it to places where it wouldn't ordinarily go."

Angel Kyodo Williams is a thirtysomething New York-based student at the Village Zendo, studying under its white, female founder, Pat Enkyo O'Hara. Williams adores her teacher and her sangha, but feels neither can adequately support her desire to spread the dharma into the black community. She recently published Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace (Viking Compass), her own introduction to the practical aspects of Zen thought for the curious but unconverted. Written in the unpretentious, conversational tone black people tend to use among themselves, Being Black is no more informal or "irreverent" than many books white Buddhists write to attract new people to the religion. Yet little things like Williams's calling the "Four Noble Truths" the "Four Simple Truths" to minimize the aura of elitism that hovers around an archaic term like "noble" in the 21st century makes conservative elements within American Buddhism reject her presentation as heretical. Many Buddhist bookstores have already refused to stock it, claiming "it's a black book, it's not a Buddhist book."

"I think we need interpreters, communicators," Williams says about her style of teaching Buddha dharma. "I thought of building a bridge, but it's not a bridge into the practice of how white Americans practice Buddhism, but a bridge into developing our own language around the practice."

As a young woman of the hip-hop generation whose first exposure to Asian philosophy (like thousands of blacks and Latinos since the '50s) came through the martial arts, Angel Williams is as conversant with Wu-Tang Clan as with the message of the Dalai Lama. She feels a strong connection to both and would love to use Buddhism's profoundly anti-elitist, anti-authoritarian, and antisectarian essence to revitalize black political activism in this country. "Before, when we joined a movement—be it SNCC, NOW, or Greenpeace—we were trying to dismantle something outside ourselves, when we really needed first to have a revolution from within." Later Williams adds, "What Buddhist practice does for black Americans is it solves the identity crisis for us. How? By slowly eliminating our need to be externally defined."

Although it's a fact that every people or nation that has embraced Buddhist thought has added something of its own to the teachings, not everyone can accept the notion that black folk might "jazz up" Buddhism. Nevertheless "black dharma"—for lack of a more descriptive term—is emerging from black practitioners whether the white Western Buddhist hegemony is ready or not.

Willis managed to sidestep the sense of alienation some black students have experienced with white teachers—or even with white-identified Asian teachers—by learning Sanskrit and Tibetan, then studying Buddhism with male Tibetan teachers in India and Nepal. Her memoir, Dreaming Me (Riverhead Books), centers around her "Baptist-Buddhist" conversion and chronicles Willis's hegira from her working-class origins in a KKK-plagued Alabama mining town, to a collegiate flirtation with the Black Panther Party, to her 15-year-long discipleship under a Tibetan lama. It is a contemporary namthar ("inspirational parable of enlightenment") that is no less "Buddhist" for its black American context.

Talk to any black female Buddhist long enough and you will get the sense that they see a straight line of evolution from the galvanizing power of the black Christian church during the civil rights movement to the dormant potential of an entire population of emotionally whole black Buddhists. Was it purely accidental that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. adopted the notion of ahimsa ("nonviolence") from a Hindu holy man or that he nominated the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh for the Nobel Peace Prize the year before he was assassinated? bell hooks, who frequently quotes both King and Hanh in her books, describes her ongoing friendship with Hanh as a communion of spiritual equals. "It was very deep when I met Thich Nhat Hanh. He embraced me as a fellow teacher, not as if 'Oh, you're coming to bow down to me.' He had no difficulty [giving me] that expansive sense of 'Your work has been doing the work of dharma, and I see that.' "

http://www.villagevoice.com/content/printVersion/165232

The Eight Vicissitudes

According to the Buddha, we will experience these vicissitudes throughout our lives, no matter what our intentions or actions.

* Pleasure and pain
* Gain and loss
* Praise and blame
* Fame and disrepute

Someone suggested the image of these vicissitudes as winds that come and go. I like this because it says that like the winds, the coming and going of these vicissitudes have nothing to do with us as individuals. Imagine trying to stop the wind from coming or trying to make it come. This would only cause frustration. We just accept and try to adjust to the wind and so we should do the same to these vicissitudes (there has to be an easier word than this).

Reflections on growing up

My mother told me that when I was in elementary school and we still lived in Queens, one day I ran home from school because all these kids were chasing me and making fun of me being Chinese. She said I ran into the apartment, grabbed a baseball bat and before she could say something, ran back out.

I don’t remember this happening, but I do remember many times where I fought kids who made fun of my Chinese ancestry. I had one consistent tormentor, Anthony. He was a kid from a neighbor’s family whom I had fought many times and he would still call me, “chink” even though he knew if he did, I would be waiting outside for him after school. The word “chink” would summon a rage so white hot that sometimes I would attack the other kid right there in class.

In fourth grade a friend taught me how to uppercut and the next time Anthony and I fought, I landed a couple of uppercuts right away. I could see he was very surprised by this change and also hurt. He clearly didn’t want to fight anymore. My friend was very excited, jumping up and down and telling me to hit him again, which I did. Anthony stopped fighting back and tried to leave but other kids blocked him since they were really into seeing someone getting beat up. I remember feeling sick to my stomach but I kept hitting him until a grown up broke up the circle of kids surrounding us and Anthony ran away.

This experience changed the equation and Anthony did not want to fight or call me names anymore. There was a cruelty in my heart though and rather than letting it go, I would follow him home from school while hitting and kicking him. This happened regularly until his older brother started to walk him home. I remember still following them trying to get at Anthony until his brother firmly pushed me away.

Victim/aggressor, how quickly that equation changes. From being hurt and wounded to hurting and wounding someone else. The line was so thin as to be imperceptible and unnoticed when I crossed it.

In high school a white friend got into a fight with a football jock over a girl. The jock had many of his buddies there and for some reason I went up to Chris, the biggest guy there and hit him. Probably because of his total surprise, I came off pretty well against a much bigger opponent. Some bystanders broke up the fights. Afterward though he was incensed and wanted to fight again. We were supposed to go outside to fight but he jumped me from behind, threw me down the stairs and then gave me a good beating. A teacher who saw what happened took his time stopping the pummeling and the school suspended me for a week while Chris got off with a warning. I was a troublemaker and hung out with a trouble making crowd. I had the feeling the school authorities were glad to see me get what they felt I had coming.

Afterward much of the football team would pick on me, taunting me with racial slurs and hitting me. Once about 15 of them hunted me in the halls since none of my friends were in school that day. I ran and eventually went home rather than face them. I remember the word “chink” would feel like a whiplash across my back.

Now when I do metta meditation, I cannot feel anything when I remember these people. No compassion, no loving kindness, no forgiveness.

Later in college when I was a different person, someone from my high school and only peripherally related to these football players showed up at a party. I saw him and without thinking I immediately threw him on the floor. Then I started stomping on him until I was pulled off. The rage was intense and so was the pleasure I felt as he collapsed and curled in a fetal ball. I followed him out into the night telling him to get a knife, get a bat, get a gun, anything but I was going to kill him. Later friends told me he hid in someone’s room until dawn and then left. I never explained to my friends what had set me off.

On Race & Buddhism by Rev. Alan Senauke

On Race & Buddhism

Rev. Alan Senauke


Zen Master Dogen wrote "Gourd with its tendrils is entwined with gourd." This means we are all intimately bound up, wound up with each other. Truly inseparable. So this morning I would like to speak about the complexities of diversity, race, zen practice, and our community. Something we've been talking about at Buddhist Peace Fellowship, San Francisco Zen Center, here, and more and more around sanghas and centers in the United States. This is not just about "political correctness," it is about practice and awareness. I must confess that my own thoughts are not entirely clear, but I will try my best not to mislead you. If I sound critical, it is a voice of self-criticism. My own efforts have fallen short and I think we need to work on this together. So I will leave some time for discussion at the end.

After six years of practice, homeless among householders, wayseekers, and teachers, the Buddha sat under the Bodhi Tree with the firm intention of awakening. After seven days of zazen he perceived the true nature of birth and death, the chain of causation and awakened to realization with the morning star. At that moment he spoke these words: "Wondrous! I now see that all beings everywhere have the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of misunderstandings and attachments they do not realize it."

Allowing his understanding to ripen, allowing Bodhicitta, the mind of compassion to ripen, he took up the responsibilities of teaching, sharing his experience in a way that unlocked the mystery of our own experience. As the Buddha came to express it, "I simply teach about the nature of suffering and the end of suffering." This is a radical teaching, true to the meaning of radical, getting to the root. And his understanding that all beings everywhere have the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones leaves us with a great responsibility. As the wheel of Mahayana Dharma turned , our own Zen vehicle, that responsibility was further clarified by the Bodhisattva vow to save all beings. We constantly affirm this vow.

And yet this vow was there from the beginning. Why else did the Buddha rise from the comfort and joy of enlightenment and freedom to teach? Why else did he offer teachings like the Metta Sutta,where he says:

May all beings be happy.
May they be joyous and live in safety.
All living beings, whether weak or strong,
in high or middle or low realms
of existence, small or great, visible or invisible,
near or far, born or to be born,
Let no one deceive another, nor despise any being in any state;
Let none by anger or hatred wish harm to another.
Even as a mother at the risk of her life watches over
and protects her only child,
so with a boundless mind should one cherish all living things,
suffusing love over the entire world, above, below,
and all around, without limit;
so let one cultivate an infinite good will toward the whole world.

And true to that teaching, he offered refuge to everyone he met on the path. Kings and paupers, ascetics and householders, people of all castes, brahmins , outcasts, and criminals. After some strenuous convincing, he even offered refuge to women. That's a long story in itself, not unrelated to the issue at hand today, suggesting that patriarchy has deep roots running through many if not most cultures.

Taking refuge means committing your life to waking up, to taking on the problem of suffering and the end of suffering for all beings and ourselves. This is what zazen is about. Sitting upright in stillness to see oneself in complete interdependence with all beings, with the rocks and trees and ocean and sky. The emptiness we so often talk about is not some kind of negative space. It is total interdependence. "Gourd with its tendrils entwined with gourd." True reality is empty of any one thing, empty of self because all things, all people co-create each other.

Seeing through and beyond dualistic thinking is the direct experience of zazen. I undescore the word experience, because if it we are just caught by an idea or an idle wish, we slip back into the tide of duality. All of us have such experiences from moment to moment, time to time. A moment of merging with someone or something we love, a moment of doing something completely, a moment of losing oneself in just sitting. And at times in zazen we settle fully into the realm of nonduality and recognize that this is our true mind, our true state of being. All the great spiritual traditions express an understanding of this natural way of life.

But the way we often live, by habit we see a world thoroughly conditioned by duality. Driven by doubt and fear, by a lack of trust in our true Mind, we see things as self and objects, as us and them, as other. It seems so hard to recognize the truth that Tibetan Buddhists preach: that every being was at one time my own mother. The root of racism is denial of this truth. It is about seeing people as other in a systematic way that is such an entrenched habit we are not usually aware of. I would underscore the word systematic, because as ideas like a virus in society they have a power that goes beyond individual like and dislike. Racism is a system of domination that is economic and political as well as personal. It runs deep in the oppressor and the oppressed alike, though the damage caused is different.

Even though I have the privilege of a good education, middle class male upbringing, white skin, I find in myself deeply ingrained and systematic survival responses as someone born Jewish. Several years ago at a meeting of international Buddhist activists in Thailand I realized that in the first day I had figured out who (among the westerners) was Jewish. And even stranger I realized that all the Jews were doing the same thing and had "signified" to each other. We knew who each other was, and we were more comfortable for it. This, I am sure, is a pattern that goes back through centuries of being ghetto-ized, of being the other. It's not a genetic thing. I can remember my mother telling me how to watch out for myself. That some people would exclude and threaten me just for being Jewish. It's so deep that sometimes I find myself looking around the zendo and counting those I think are Jewish. Some of you may find yourself making a similar census. From talking with them, I know that people of color do this.

And yet, let's where our Buddhism come from. Our ancestors come from India, China, and Japan. In June I visited Suzuki-Roshi's temple, Rinso-in and I walked in the graveyard where the old priests of the temple were buried. How amazing it is for Zen to leap oceans and cultures and be so generously offered to us. We should accept it humbly, recognizing the price of suffering paid to plant the Dharma seed here. And we owe it to our teachers and ourselves to share this practice with the same generosity and openmindedness. Keeping in mind that most Buddhists even in America don't look like me. They are Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Vietnamese, and so on. I come to Buddhism out of suffering. They come to Buddhism as a birthright.

So how does it feel to come to Zen practice as a person of color? And they will come; they do come. My friend Sala Steinbach says an African-American woman at SFZC says, "If it is about liberation, people of color will be interested." They are. The Dalai Lama draws stadiums full of people in Mexico. In South America there are Zen and Tibetan teachers with very strong lay sanghas. So I ask my Asian, and Latino, and African-American friends about how it feels to come here, to San Francisco Zen Center or Spirit Rock. And I ask myself what feelings come up. Dogen suggests we take a step back to turn one's light inward and illuminate oneself. What I see there in myself is then reflected back into the world.

The answer to how it feels to anyone largely depends on two further inter-related questions. First, does one feel safe and seen in the community? Are the conditions of your life acknowedged, welcomed, explored in the sangha? I suspect that this is sometimes yes, sometimes no. Thoughtless words can turn people from the temple and from the practice. I have seen this happen here and elsewhere. An offhand comment is made about the white, middle class makeup of the community with people of color sitting right there. Again, through the unintended eye of white supremacy (hard words, I know) people are made to feel invisible and uncounted. Maybe I should say something about white supremacy. It is a building block of racism, part of my blindness to my own privilege as a white man. It is at once personal and systematic. If one wants to see it, the practice of individual mindfulness, of turning our light inward needs to be blended dialogue with friends and sangha members who don't carry this very particular privilege.

The same kinds of painful things happen if you are homosexual, or if because of injury or fact of birth you can't get up the steps of the temple. These blindnesses hurt and turn people away. That's what it might feel like from one side.

On the other side, the Buddha's understanding is "all beings have the wisdom and virtues of the enlightened ones, but because of misunderstandings and attachments they do not realize it." This understanding is so precious that we are obligated to share it. I don't mean proselytizing, but keep in mind, the Buddha never stopped preaching Dharma. But now we have centers and institutions. To make zazen and Dharma available, we need to tell people they are welcome and invite them to practice with us. Already we are taking practice to jails and hospitals, to people who might not be able to come to us.

The next obvious step is to find ways to open our doors to those who can come to us. I hear that some San Francisco churches have created a kind of covenant of "open congregation." This means that in their literature and at their services, classes, and events they make it known that they welcome people of color, gays and lesbians, and so on. Being pro-active rather than passive on questions of diversity and inclusion.

This is necessary because in America, passivity means white supremacy. It's subtle and pervasive, conditioned by and conditioning our magazines, movies, tv, our clothing, all the things we buy. It is a virus infecting my mind as a person with so-called privilieges, and the mind of someone who might not have such privileges. Last week I was invited to talk about Buddhism and race to a diverse group of teenagers doing an interfaith social action internship in San Francisco. Now maybe I did a good job talking to them, but I was the first Buddhist choice that came to mind for the organizers. There is some irony in that. Buddhism in America gets defined as and by people like me. I have to watch myself carefully not to buy into this.

But the wondeful thing about what the Buddha taught, what we can experience in zazen, is that each of us can go beyond duality. It can't be done just by reason and talk. We have to get the reality of the world deep in our bones and then bring it back out again into the world. We must make a lot of mistakes. Maybe like this talk. Suzuki Roshi said giving a talk is making a mistake on purpose. Make our mistakes, learn the lessons and go back at it. bell hooks, the African American scholar/practitioner writes about this in "Buddhist Women on the Edge":


In a culture of domination, preoccupation with victimhood and identity is inevitable. I once believed that progressive people could analyze the dualities and dissolve them through a process of dialectical critical exchange. Yet globally the resurgence of notions of ethnic purity, white supremacy, have led marginalized groups to cling to dualisms as a means of resistance....The willingness to surrender to attachment to duality is present in such thinking. It merely inverts the dualistic thinking that supports and maintains domination.
Dualities serve their own interests. What's alarming to me is to see so many Americans returning to those simplistic choices. People of all persuasions are feeling that if they don't have dualism, they don't have anything to hold on to.
If we are concerned with dissolving these apparent dualities we have to identify anchors to hold on to in the midst of fragmentation, in the midst of a loss of grounding. My anchor is love....


I like to think that love and compassion are anchors of my practice. But they depend on mindfulness too. Zazen is rooted in mindfulness, breath after breath, thought after thought. This kind of training carries over into life outside the zendo. I try to uncover my own thought patterns. This is sometimes painful and embarrassing, but it is the essence of saving myself and all sentient beings. It is amazing to see the stories one can make up about other people, and how these stories are conditioned by race, or class, or privilege. Check it out for yourself. When you meet someone you consider different from yourself, do you think you know something about them? Would you think you know the same kinds of things about another white person or someone more like you? This is mindfulness practice, watching one's thoughts about race, or any kind of difference. And it is for our own sake. Not for the sake of political correctness. I think that this is where our personal practice begins.

Then we can take it further into our extended communities. Ask your friends of color how they experience the practice and the community. This is entering the realm of not knowing, a little risky, but ultimately necessary. In the wider Buddhist community, it might mean making some excursions and visits to Asian Buddhist temples. They are friendly places. The same Dharma resides there, though it may take some different forms. We think nothing of going to restaurants featuring Asian cuisine. This is just another form of basic nourishment.

Maybe when we have closely examined ourselves, and begun to look around and share our thoughts with others, then we have created the conditions for change. If our American society could take such steps, it would be the start of a wonderful, hopeful era. Could there be racial peace for the first time in history? This is no pipe dream. It is the Bodhisattva Vow, the working of our Way Seeking Mind.

If each of us and the sanghas we cherish could nurture this process of mindfulness, the change could come much quicker. Compassion and peace could blossom in very surprising ways. And zazen would be a golden wind blowing across a meadow of wildflowers. How can we take up this work together. I welcome your thoughts.

From a talk given at Berkeley Zen Center, Berkeley, California August 23, 1997

Rev. Alan Senauke (Soto-shu)
National Coordinator
Buddhist Peace Fellowship
Berkeley, CA, U.S.A.

From: http://www.bpf.org/tsangha/senaukerace.html
Photo from: http://www.upaya.org/about/bio/alan-senauke