This podcast is offered by the San Francisco Zen Center on the web at www.sfcc.org. Our public programs are made possible by donations from people like you. I'd just like to say thank you to Linda and David for the invitation to speak here. I really appreciate it. It's nice to be in a non-academic setting. I'm used to kind of talking in university spaces. I also wanted to thank Mary and Roger and May, who helped me with the practicalities of being here and hosting me and my wife. And thank you all for coming and spending a Wednesday evening with me. So... Just a little background on the talk. The talk is derived from research, ethnographic research, that I completed for my monograph, American Dharma.

[01:01]

There's a chapter in American Dharma on racial justice work, mostly in the insight community. This talk is a kind of overflow from that research and focuses on Soto Zen Buddhism. And it's essentially a shorter version of a longer chapter that's in Buddhism and Whiteness, an editor collection that just came out by George Yancey, a famous African-American philosopher, and Emily McRae, who's a scholar of Tibetan Buddhism. So yeah, so I'm going to give the paper. It's a formal academic paper. I've tried to break it down. I know that there's probably very few academics in the audience. There's a lot of images. So hopefully it will be accessible to everyone. Okay. All right. So, near the closing of a Buddhist Peace Fellowship workshop held at the New York Insight Meditation Center in November 2017, Katie Lonk and Dawn Henney, the co-facilitators, asked participants to invite their spiritual ancestors into the room.

[02:09]

African and Asian American grandmothers, the prophetic figures of Martin Luther King and Cornel West, and feminist visionaries such as Octavia Butler entered into the space, bringing a palpable intimacy with them. The exercise captured three distinct features from the event. First, it reflected the significant range of demographic diversity in the group. Second, it highlighted the strength of community underlying that diversity. And third, it identified and embraced the specific context that Buddhist teachings were being put into dialogue with. As well as capturing much of what was unique about that weekend, the closing welcoming the ancestors exercise also stood out to me as symbolic of significant shifts underway in North American convert Buddhist lineages. The first generation of convert practitioners made up of an overwhelmingly white and upper middle class demographic explicitly brought the discourses of psychotherapy and liberal feminism to their encounter with

[03:24]

an already modernized form of Asian Buddhism. With communities such as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a much more diverse demographic is bringing previously excluded, neglected, or entirely new conversation partners into the dialogue. One result of this has been the illumination of a more insidious discourse that has been introduced into Buddhism by the third generation converts, namely whiteness. In this paper, I examine how whiteness has been reproduced within convert meditation Buddhism and the ways in which Buddhists of color and their white allies have challenged it. First, I'll consider the way in which whiteness functioned in the construction of Buddhist modernism in Asia and has become further amplified in its North American iterations. Next, I'll glance at some key attempts by Buddhists of color to overcome such whiteness before turning to a detailed examination of the work of Zenyu Erflin Manuel from the Soto Zen lineage, some of you likely know Zenyu, to forge an alternative Buddhist hermeneutics of embodied differences.

[04:39]

In conclusion, I'll situate such work as reflecting critical, collective and contextual turns in North American Buddhism that signify a wider shift from Buddhist modernism to Buddhism in a postmodern and postcolonial climate. Before proceeding, however, a few words on the concept of whiteness. As Eric Tramby and Douglas Hartman know, critical whiteness studies is an ever-expanding field, but some of its key analytic insights include the recognition that one, the Jim Crow era of white supremacy has been replaced by a subtler legitimation of structural dominance. Two, the maintenance of white Anglo-American identity and culture is normative and dominant. Three, the taken for grantedness of white power and the hidden nature of white identity. I am particularly interested here in how whiteness is maintained and reproduced through modern liberal values of individualism and universalism and how such principles intersect with and are amplified by religious commitments.

[05:52]

So a number of sociologists of religion, for example, have pointed to connections between Christian evangelicals and whiteness. Emerson and Smith, for instance, have documented how white Christian evangelicals' strict, uncompromising adherence to individualist meritocratic, anti-structural ideals prevents effective responses to structural racism. They identify three lens through which evangelicals view reality, free will individualism, relationalism and anti-structuralism, showing how each reduces both the causes of and solutions to racism to individual responsibility or interpersonal actions. Extending Emerson and Smith, Tramby and Hartman argue that evangelical values of individualism are shared by both American conservatives and liberals and are at the very core of white identity in America.

[06:57]

I'm concerned now here with a parallel investigation of how Buddhist modernist discourse, the kind of question of the talk, particularly the focus on individual meditation practice, the distinction between essential and cultural Buddhism and the presentation of Dharma as universal truth, have intersected with whiteness in a North American liberal individualist context. So North American... based convert lineages are expressions of what scholars call Buddhist modernism, an historically new and distinct form of Buddhism that resulted from the encounter between traditional Asian Buddhism and Western modernity under the conditions of colonialism. Scholars such as Don S. Lopez and Donald Suera and others have examined the modern reformation of Buddhism across Southeast Asia in the late 19th century, simultaneously demonstrating accommodation and resistance to colonialism, the vision of Buddhism that emerged from these reforms selectively privileged aspects of Buddhism compatible with modern Western discourse.

[08:12]

particularly science, and discarded elements that are seen as incompatible. Common characteristics include, one, a claim to return to the original, authentic, pure teachings of the Buddha that have been distorted by cultural and institutional overlays. Two, a reframing of Buddhism as a rational and scientific religion. Three, a blurring of the roles of the laity and the monastic. Four, a revival of meditation practices and a claim that nirvana is an attainable goal in this lifetime for both monastics and the laity, and five, an interest in social reform issues. Robert Scharf, who is actually just down the road in Berkeley, offers a close examination of the historical and ideological emergence of New Buddhism, the distinctively Japanese iteration of Buddhist modernism, what he calls New Buddhism. The early years of the Meiji period witnessed dramatic political and cultural changes and rapid modernization and industrialization.

[09:20]

Against this backdrop, Shinto government officials mounted a strong campaign called Abolishing Buddhism against the Tofugawa Buddhist establishment. They accused Japanese Buddhism of being anti-modern, being as institutionally corrupt, superstitious, and holding the plan back, and also anti-nationalist, the foreign religious import that did not reflect the innate cultural and spiritual sensibility for Japanese. So in response to the dual challenges of Shinto government, opposition, and Western discourses of modernity, A group of the least university educated Japanese Buddhists fashioned a distinctively modern form. Buddhism, they recognize that Buddhism is being corrupt. but attributed this to institutional and cultural overlays that have distorted the pure spiritual core of the tradition.

[10:25]

Reformers presented a picture of a pure Buddhism that was rational, empirical, and compatible with modern science and social reform. One proponent was cos and so on. For example, he promoted a non-sectarian and socially engaged form of Buddhism and actively encouraged lay participation. So his student was Shaku Soen, who presented his vision of Buddhism as a universal, scientifically compatible religion at the World Parliament of Religion and devoted much of his time to training laymen. And this is one of, this is his lineage, one of the Zen modernist lineages. Sharf points out that the typically cosmopolitan and intellectual proponents of new Buddhism were educated in universities that were highly influenced by Western modernity. And he identifies the determinative influence of romantic critiques of institutional religion and enlightenment values of universalism, science and reason.

[11:32]

Scharf claims, for example, that the framing of Zen as pure experience reflected the understanding of the core of religion as an unmediated experience in the works of Schleiermacher, Otto and William James. This Western influence reconstruction of Zen as... Pure spirituality was then presented to unsuspecting Westerners as an historically authentic picture of Zen, which, moreover, was claimed to be superior to Christianity. According to Scharf, therefore, Nege... Buddhist reform figures subversively appropriated key values of Western modernity to form a modern picture of Zen that was then used to challenge the religious and cultural hegemony of the West. Shaath has shown that the new Buddhism was distinct from traditional or classical Zen on multiple levels.

[12:33]

He disputes a notion of a pure experience that can be uncoupled from its institutional and doctrinal constraints, noting that classical Zen is one of the most scholastic and ritualistic forms of Buddhist monasticity. and that enlightenment in Zen is, quote, constituted in elaborately choreographed and eminently public ritual performance, end quote. He has also questioned the legitimacy of these new Buddhist proponents, pointing out that they were largely lay people who were not trained in traditional monastic settings. Nonetheless, this modernist vision of Zen was largely embraced by Western scholars and lay practitioners as an historically accurate picture of traditional Zen until recent studies such as Shaftes illuminated its specifically modernist and nationalist contextual origins. Now, a number of scholars have critiqued

[13:34]

Buddhist modernism because of its colonial origins and departure from traditional forms of Asian Buddhism. Shah, for example, problematizes particularly the modern emphasis on individual meditation experience, which he argues has resulted in a loss of connection with traditional Buddhist lineage, community and ritual. Donas Lopez's pointedly titled The Scientific Buddha is Short and Happy Life suggests that it is time to retire the highly selective modernist vision of the Buddha as an early empiricist and its reduction of Buddhism to a scientific paradigm. Joseph Chia argues that racial hierarchies played a foundational role in the construction of Buddhist modernism and sees white supremacy at the very heart of American Buddhist modernist communities, such as the Vipathana movement, which have been founded upon an ethnocentric distinction between essential, i.e.

[14:36]

modern Western, and cultural, i.e. traditional Asian Buddhism. So, given the colonial heritage of Buddhist modernism, it is attempting to dismiss it as an inherently white project. Such an approach, however, fails to acknowledge the agency of Asian Buddha in the creation of Buddhist modernism. the subversive ways Buddhist modernism functioned against colonialism and risked assimilating Asian Buddhists themselves to whiteness. So as McMahon notes, Asian Buddhists played a key role in fashioning Buddhist modernism and employed it to undermine Christian claims of superiority. McMahon argues that Buddhist modernism is neither... unambiguously there in classical Buddhist texts and lived traditions, but nor is it merely a fantasy of an educated white Western elite population. Rather, this new form of Buddhism has been fashioned by both modernizing Asian Buddhists and Westerners deeply engaged in creating a Buddhist response to the dominant problems and questions of modernity.

[15:50]

Similarly, in The Birth of Insight, Eric Braun has recently documented how the Theravada meditation revival in Myanmar, formerly Burma, formed as a form of resistance to colonialism, while Natalie Cooley has also cautioned that scholarly critique of the inauthenticity of Buddhist modernism to often fetishize Asians as the carriers of the traditional and Westerners as the carriers of the modern, thereby merely reproducing stereotypes of the passive Asian and the active Westerner. So given these above considerations, I differentiate between Buddhist modernism as a complex phenomena which has served both radical and assimilative ends for Asian Buddhist and whiteness as a component of Buddhist modernism. As I will now discuss, this component becomes problematic when Buddhist modernism became problematic, sorry, when Buddhist modernism took root in a North American context and its core characteristics were adopted and re-articulated in a white dominant cultural context.

[17:03]

marked by an ongoing legacy of racial discrimination. So here I am indebted to Joseph Chia's distinction between cultural and racial re-articulation and his argument that there are numerous places of slippage between the two in American Buddhist modernism. So Chia adopts this distinction from Michael Ommy and Howard Winness and extends their work to define cultural re-articulation as quotes, a way of representing religious tradition from another's culture into ideas and practices that are familiar and meaningful to people of one's own culture. Such a process is inevitable when religions travel across cultural contexts. And there are many examples from Buddhist history, such as when Buddhism was adopted in China. By contrast, racial rearticulation is, quote, the acquisition of the beliefs and practices of another's religious tradition and infusing them with new meanings derived from one's own culture in ways that preserve prevailing systems of racial hegemony, end quote.

[18:21]

So North American meditation-based lineages have their immediate origins in the cross-cultural flows and exchanges between Asia and North America in the 1960s. There is, of course, a longer history than this, but I'm just picking it up from this fuzzy point. So during this period, Asian Buddhist teachers came to the US and founded major convert lineages, such as the Japanese Thotho Zen teacher, Shunri Suzuki, who established Tathahara, the first Zen training monastery outside of Japan in the San Francisco Zen Center, where we all find ourselves. Similarly, Americans traveled to Asia where they trained in Buddhism under monastic and lay teachers before returning home to start their own centers. Joseph Goldstein, Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzberg, and Jacqueline Schwartz-Mandel, for instance, co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in 1975 after spending

[19:22]

several years practicing Theravada Buddhism in Asia. So the first wave of academic scholarship on these communities was published around 20 years ago. as the study of Buddhism in America emerged as a distinct subfield from the wider field of Buddhist studies. Scholars noted, in books like this, scholars noted that converts tended to downplay the ritual devotional and cosmological aspects of Buddhism and present it through a heavily... psychological lens. Cutting across Theravada Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, these communities were characterized by a strong focus on meditation practice and Buddhist philosophy. They were highly individualistic with participants showing little interest in community building. Participants demographically were overwhelmingly white, middle to upper class, highly educated, and tended to be politically liberal.

[20:23]

Within these communities, there has been a democratization of power structures seen in a move towards gender equality with an increase in numbers of women in positions of authority and the further blurring of lines between monastic and lay populations. Despite having unprecedented levels of female teachers, convert communities, however, come under sustained critique or their lack of racial and class diversity. So in June 20, sorry, June 20,000, sorry, a small group of Buddhist practitioners of color and their white allies compiled and distributed a booklet titled, Making the Invisible Visible Healing Racism in our Buddhist Communities to the Buddhist Teachers in the West Conference at the Spirit Rock Meditation Center. And I just want to acknowledge that we actually have one of the authors and pioneers of the movement right here, a friend, treasured friend of mine.

[21:28]

This compilation declared that for many years Euro-American middle-class singers had been resistant to the efforts of people of color to raise awareness of the reproduction of oppressive racial and socioeconomic conditions. Within them, interweaving personal experiences of racism with Buddhist teachings and critical race theory, this landmark collection offered a number of resources to combat racism ranging, excuse me, from institutional diversity trainings to addressing racism in Dharma talks, making the invisible visible is one of a number of attempts and initiatives by POC Buddhists over the last two and a half decades now to overcome whiteness in American Buddhism. So I'm just going to give you a survey of some of the areas this work's being done. Okay, so one major area has been to raise awareness through forums and literature. Examples here include the 2004 Dharma, Color and Culture, New Voices in Western Buddhism collection, which was the first collection to bring together the voices of Western practitioners of color.

[22:41]

Buddha Dharma's 2011 forum, Why is American Buddhism so White? And the 2016 summer issue on Free the Dharma, Race, Power and White Privilege in American Buddhism. A second area is the emergence of people of colour specific retreats and sitting group. One example is that in August 2002 Spirit Rock hosted the first African-American Dharma retreat and conference and they have held POC specific retreats almost annually since. A third area is the emergence of prominent teachers of colour who are actively promoting diversity, inclusion and racial justice initiative. Pioneers include Tibetan Buddhist Jan Willis and Lama Rangdrol, Insight teachers Marlene Jones and Ralph Steele, Zen teachers Zenyu Erslan Manuel and Mushin Patricia Ikiyeda, as well as Gen X teachers Reverend Angel Kyodo Williams and Lama Rod Owens.

[23:45]

Closely related is the development of... communities with specific attention to issues of multiculturalism and racism. Of course, at the forefront of these is the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. Other examples include New York Insight, Flowering Lotus Meditation and Retreat Center in Mississippi, the Brooklyn Zen Center, and the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. Similarly, there is the impact of non-sectarian Buddhist organizations that have taken up racial justice work as a major concern. The Buddhist Peace Fellowship has a long history in racial justice initiatives. And more recently, the North American Buddhist Alliance has adopted Buddhists for racial justice. as one of its primary initiatives. A sixth area is the adoption of diversity and inclusion plans and staff and teacher trainings in diversity and anti-racist work. Buddhist centers such as the Insight Meditation Society and the San Francisco Zen Center.

[24:50]

A seventh area is recent initiatives focused specifically on teacher training program. I'm actually going to do some work with the Spirit Rock teacher training program. Good for lovely beings tomorrow. Another important area is the development of specific practices to combat racism. One example is Ruth King training mindful of race. a stimulus for social healing and leadership, which combines mindfulness with diversity awareness training. And on a related note, we are also seeing the emergence of white awake trainings for white practitioners that explore whiteness in a Buddhist context. And I saw that you're holding a group here, I think, undoing whiteness. So for advocate, it's really important for advocate that racial justice work is not seen as a supplement to Buddhism, but is considered rather a collective manifestation of the deepest principles within the tradition itself.

[26:02]

So, to understand this, to understand what makes racial justice work Buddhist, let's turn to a closer examination of the work of Dengju Erplan Manuel. So Manuel is the first African-American to receive Dharma transmissions in Suzuki Roshi's Soto Zen lineage, and is a lead teacher at Still Breathing Sangha in Oakland, California, although I believe she's about to move. So here I will focus on the ways in which Manuel's Buddhist soteriology illuminates and undoes the entwinement of whiteness with Buddhist philosophy and offers an alternative liberatory model. So at the foundation of Manuel's Buddhist hermeneutics is the two-truth doctrine. Absolute truth, which refers to the ontological ultimate nature of reality, and relative truth, which refers to kind of conventional daily existence.

[27:08]

Manuel shares that when she first heard the teachings on two truths, She found it deeply liberatory as it reconciled different aspects of her identity. And she explained, when I was taught with the two, I heard the choir sing hallelujah. There are two basic truths in regards to the nature of life, the relative and the absolute. These teachings are vast, but briefly, the relative is that which you can sense about life, what you see, taste, smell, etc. While the absolute nature of life goes beyond those senses, seeing into the true nature that we cannot touch or see. So the tension between the two is inherent in our existence. We can find ourselves holding to the relative and not the absolute or vice versa. When I can be African or descended from Africans and be awakened to life, be Buddha within my darkness, the tension dissolves.

[28:12]

With Buddha's teachings of the two truths, I return to that expansive way of seeing myself before I was told that I could not go to a particular place because I was black. I return to that original moment when I was born free from the hatred placed on darkness and on dark things and dark people. Now, while Manuel experienced an immediate sense of personal liberation through the Tutorius doctrine, she soon observed that it and other Buddhist teachings, such as anathas, no-self and non-duality, were being misinterpreted in majority white American Zen angers. She points to numerous examples of how these teachings have been reductively translated to assert a basic sameness or universality amongst humans and to dismiss differences in identity as illusory and not as significant.

[29:15]

As Manuel correctly points out, however, such an interpretive lens fails to recognize that in an ongoing cultural context that is marked by racial discrimination and violence, the the lived experience of identity is not the same for white people and people of colour. For the latter group, the dismissal of identity conveyed by the unskillful presentation of these teachers can evoke the traumatic social and political erasure of their communities. As Manuel shares, quote, some suggested that if I, quote, just drop the labels... quote, end quote, I would, quote, be liberated, end quote. Some said to me, we are delusional, there is no self. Others said, we are attached to some idea of ourselves. If I could, if Manuel could, just let go of being this and that, my life would be freed from pain.

[30:17]

I thought for a time that perhaps I was holding onto my identity too tightly. Perhaps I thought, if I empty my mind, the pain in my heart will dissolve. What I found is that the flat, simplified and diluted ideas could not chase me from my pain. I needed to bring the validity of my pain, me, from my individual and collective background to the practice of Dharma. And I did not think of it. I want to shout. Quote. As well as causing significant emotional, social and political harm for Buddhists of colour, Manuel suggests that the dismissal of identity also forms a barrier to spiritual awakening because it is only through the relative that the absolute can be fully realised. By the relative, Manuel here means a lived experience of the body as both a physical and a social entity that is marked by differences of race, gender and sexuality.

[31:24]

Here she references African-American philosopher George Yancey. George Yancey's understanding of the body is socially constituted within a particularly... particular, sorry, lived historical context and notes that as a lived embodied experience and not a mere label, identity cannot be casually sidestepped. As she explains, quote, our identities cannot be ignored for the sake of spiritual transcendence. We are not capable of being unembodied selves. End quote. For Manuel, then, a one-sided emphasis on the absolute produces a transcendental form of awakening that is removed from the particularities of the world. Rather than attempt such a misguided and impossible transcendent, the point of practice is to realize the inseparability of relative and absolute. So here Manuel presents an alternative path of embodied awakening based in what she calls the multiplicity

[32:25]

and oneness, and awareness of the sameness of being one does not erase difference. And for Manuel, the embodied differences themselves are the very gateway to such awakening. As she puts it, the challenges of race, sexuality, and gender are the very things that the spiritual path to awakening requires them to. So also central to Manuel's embodied awakening is the embrace of community. She links whiteness with individualism and an alignment between people of color and a collective orientating identity. As she explains, white people can only relate to things in an individual way rather than a collective point of view. People of colour mostly, and I can speak for black people, think of things more from the collective point of view because we have been collectively injured. She shares how this collective history opened up for her as a distinct experience of dukkha during a chanting practice.

[33:29]

After a quote, sorry, I'm going to quote. After about two years of chanting with this pain, I realized that the suffering I felt was part of a much broader suffering in the world. It was not mine, but a suffering that existed before my birth. I recognized that I felt separate from the rest of the world, that I did not belong and that I was not an acceptable part of the dominant culture because I was so different from the majority in terms of my appearance. The world had structured itself around appearance, the ways which I was perceived and treated depended on a structure of race, sexuality, gender and class. The perverse power of these structures made my embodiment unacceptable to others and myself. As a result, I was paralysed by feelings of isolation in my younger days." Manuel calls on Buddhists to recognise the multiple levels that the collective dimension of realities laid out in practice. To begin with, Buddhists must recognise that Dupa

[34:31]

not just refer to individual suffering, but also the collective suffering endured by vulnerable populations. Similarly, Buddhist analyses of three poisons must be extended to include collective and structural manifestations. Buddhists must realize that individual liberation is not sufficient to overcome such collective dukkha. Similarly, Manuel problematizes an emphasis on individual meditation practice within American Zen and affirms the importance of sangha and community. She also recognizes, however, how unsafe white dominant sanghas can be for practitioners of color and asserts the necessity of what she calls cultural sanctuaries. So... While Manuel has a history in social justice work, she does not understand her approach as being reducible to political action.

[35:32]

In fact, she shared that one of the main reasons she wrote The Way of Tenderness was because white Buddhists do tend to see race, sexuality and gender as political issues and not belonging in the spiritual realm. She noted that the compartmentalization of these dimensions of reality was further reinforced when buddhist organizations invited outside experts to present diversity and inclusion trainings for manuel it is essential to see that such work is not separate from or even a complement to buddhism rather is part of awakening itself um However, Manuel is more ambivalent about the specific label of Buddhism, identifying her approach rather as a way of tenderness which precedes Buddhism. And just as she situates the way of tenderness as exceeding institutional boundaries of the tradition, so she herself comfortably resides across multiple spiritual traditions.

[36:40]

Manuel describes herself as a practitioner of earth practices and is passionate about recovering indigenous aspects of Buddhism that were discarded through its modernization process because they weren't seen as compatible with science and reason. She sees Buddhism as an earth practice that was taken away from the earth, pointing to the enlightenment of the Buddha under the Bodhi tree and the touching of the earth, his touching of the earth. And she calls attention to sorry, she sees Buddhism, quote, as an earth practice that was taken away from the earth, end quote, and calls attention to the role of divination in Asian Buddhist traditions, such as Shingon, Japanese esoteric Buddhism, and Tibetan Buddhism, lineages that are often being ignored by modernizing Buddhists, because they were seen as too superstitious. So in reflecting on Manuel's work, it should be seen as a powerful religious insider challenge to the harmful ways in which a Buddhist modernist hermeneutical privileging of the absolute, the universal over the relative...

[37:57]

plays out in the specific racialized cultural context of North America. Whereas Buddhist teachings of absolute oneness might be and have been revolutionary in certain Asian cultural contexts marked by rigid social hierarchies, in North America these discourses have effectively functioned to reproduce and reinforce dominant cultural hierarchies by enabling whiteness to flourish under the guise of a false universalism or superficial oneness so there's a completion of the universalist with white identity essentially further Manuel's recovery of indigenous aspects of Asian Buddhism also resists a Protestant Buddhist privileging of canon of text which itself has been complicit in maintaining harmful distinctions between authentic and cultural Buddhism. So scholars have also played a big role in this, in that they've located Buddhist texts as the essential Buddhism rather than lived Buddhist practices.

[39:05]

So in conclusion, what does racial justice work signify in terms of the wider status of American Buddhist modernism? So I'm going to give you a little... cultural, historic context. So in my new book, American Dharma, I identify three emerging turns, the critical, contextual and collective. So the critical turn refers to a growing acknowledgement amongst participants of certain limitations within their communities, such as a lack of racial diversity and also the problematic ways in which ethno sorry, in which Western ethnocentrism has discarded aspects of traditional Asian Buddhist practices. The contextual turn refers to the fact that practitioners are becoming increasingly aware of how the specific historic and socio-cultural context in which Buddhist practice occurs shapes and limits it, particularly in relation

[40:11]

to issues of power and privilege. And the collective turn refers to multiple challenges to the individualism of meditation-based Buddhism, ranging from efforts to build more inclusive sanghas to the applications of Buddhist principles and practices to the collective dukkha caused by systems of oppression, such as racism and capitalism. So these three emerging sensibilities put pressure on the modernist foundations of American Buddhism. The critical reveals its ethnocentrism, the collective challenges its individualism, and the contextual undermines its false universalism. In earlier work on the East Bay Meditation Sangha, I argue that its emphasis on difference in sectionality and collectivity interrogated key components of Buddhist modernism and displayed characteristics more associated with the postmodern and the postcolonial.

[41:16]

I come to a similar conclusion here, seeing racial justice work as indicative of a growing postcolonial sensibility that attempts to decolonize Buddhist modernism from some of the more problematic aspects of its colonialist heritage, which have become amplified due to its recontextualization in a dominant white cultural context. Thank you. Time to finish. That woke you up a bit at the end. So you're floating into space there. All right. Is it time for questions? Yeah. Any questions? Can I ask a question?

[42:22]

Was the talk acceptable to non-academics? More or less? Some, no? Yes, some? No. All right, if it wasn't, I'm happy to talk your ear off tomorrow. I'm still here. Grab me if you want. Hi. Hi. Over here. Can you help me understand what whiteness is? Yeah, I'll try. So I'm going to switch back some slides to have a little help, I think. Should be. I might be easier to go this way. So whiteness is... So I think whiteness is a word that is confusing to a lot of people. I know that when I teach critical race theory to undergrads, whiteness is a word that nearly every student has an adverse reaction to.

[43:23]

Whiteness is a kind of social... I would say whiteness is a social and historical position in the world that has been an identity, a social and historic identity that has been formed, a way of thinking about oneself explicitly, unconsciously and unconsciously, that has, that I would say is not synonymous with white skinned people, literally white skinned people, but that white skinned people are socialized to be white subjects, but can be freed of conditioning. So I guess as a Buddhist, a way to understand it is to think Buddhism has a really an elaborate way of understanding conditioning, right? It's a religion that charts different types of conditioning that kind of impedes experiences of reality. Is that, are you following me with the conditioning?

[44:26]

it's probably best to kind of check in as we're talking about this because I might just talk for five minutes and you'll be none the wiser. So do you understand conditioning? Do you understand what it means to be conditioned as a subject in a certain way? I find that to be a very loaded question. Do you, were you conditioned to, do you identify as a male? I don't know what that means. Well, did your parents tend to dress you in clothes that society generally recognised as male? Yes. So that would be a form of social conditioning, the way that men are socially conditioned to dress in a certain way from childhood, right? I think that's a basic form of conditioning that we generally would all recognise as gender conditioning. You follow me with that? I can't tell.

[45:28]

Do you recognize that often when a female child is born, they're often, you know, given pink clothes and, you know, they put, you know those babies that you see like bald babies and they've got like a pink bow on their head? Have you ever seen a baby like that? Right. That's a kind of form of condition and it's a marker of gender, right? It's like the baby's being marked as female. So... Do you recognize social conditioning? I think I'm with you enough to proceed with your explanation of whiteness, at least. Right. So you do understand gender conditioning, right? You've got a basic understanding that we're generally... I mean, this is San Francisco, so you don't have to play in music, right? Right. So if you can get things that you do... have a sense of gender conditioning. And if you just expand the idea of how, what are the other ways we're conditioned as social being?

[46:33]

Like what are the other ways that we're conditioned as social beings? And whiteness is a way that we're social, socialized being. So it's a way in which we exist in the world where we take, where we have certain, where there's certain values that are taken for granted about the world. It's a way of seeing the world and understanding one's position in it. So it's not an essential identity. It's something that you can... That's why there's a group called Unpacking Whiteness. It's something that can be... You can be white and not act out of the conditioning of whiteness. You recognize that whiteness is a social condition. So let me try, you've been a little confused, so let me try another approach. So historically, whiteness was a legal and political category. It was something that groups of people in America were either allowed entry to or not allowed entry to.

[47:41]

It was a category of where power resided, where kind of full amount of people resided. So we can understand whiteness as a form of social conditioning that white people, you know, walk through the world with. But you can also understand it as a political category that you can trace over history, like this legal moment in which whiteness has an identity. So critical whiteness looks at what are the building blocks of that identity? What are the social and cultural conditions that made whiteness possible? Like, why were Italians not considered white? Why were Irish ones not considered white? Why did they become white subjects? And then you can contextualize that thing with the power and death happening at the time. It's a legal category and a social category rather than a physical category. But white-skinned people tend to be completely white.

[48:46]

So how would I know if I have whiteness? I think if you don't recognize it, it's probably safe to say that you are conditioned in whiteness. I think that would be... So how would somebody else know that I have whiteness, not me? Or would I be accused to tell them I have whiteness? I think unless you've done, I mean, honestly, unless you've done kind of white awareness work, I think it's safe to assume that we're all of the white-skinned people in the room. unless it's doing some kind of training into what it means to be white as a social, as a legal category, as an emotional category, because it's really embedded into our very being. I think we can all assume that we are all marked by white conditioning. I appreciate your effort. I still don't know what whiteness is, but I can tell you're crying with me, and I appreciate that.

[49:48]

Yeah. Does anyone want to help out? Well, I mean, I don't want to get really existential with you, but it's true. Yeah, I agree. I'm just curious. What does it feel like? when you hear the word whiteness? Are you having an emotional, like, I'm not white? I mean, how do you understand yourself as a white person? Well, mostly I was trying to understand your talk. And so sometimes when I don't understand something, I just look at the words and I try and ask myself, do I understand what each word means? Because if I don't, I just concentrate on that. So it seemed like you're talking about whiteness flourishing and whiteness being somehow... intermingled with American Buddhism, or at least with Zen, and with other Buddhism, I guess. So it was hard for me, when I didn't understand what that word meant, to know what you were saying.

[50:53]

Well, are you white? Do you identify as white? I don't really know what the identify bit means. Are you asking what I put on an insurance form? I mean... That's what, yeah, I mean, that would be one way to identify as a marker. But do you recognize that you're not African-American, for example? Do I recognize that I'm not? Yeah. Yeah, right. Do you think that when you walk through the world that you are treated differently because you're white and not African-American? I mean, I don't really think in those terms. Like, I mean... I mean, I think I'm treated the way I'm treated for reasons I'll never understand. So I don't really think about it that way. I mean, are you asking if you did some surgery on me, make me African-American, would I be treated differently? I think, well, from what I'm hearing, you experience the world in a very individualist way, that you're not sure what gender conditioning is.

[51:59]

You're not sure if you're treated differently because you're a white man rather than a black man. That suggested to me that your experience of reality is very individualist, that you don't really recognize structural analyses like gender or race or class. You don't really recognize them as systems that condition you and condition other people and how they respond to you. Would that be a kind of fair analysis of what you said? This language is pretty new to me. So, I mean, I noticed that... people are treated differently for all kinds of reasons. Those are reasons. Yeah, well, for example, I mean, I'm sure you know about gender discrimination and racial discrimination. One mark of whiteness is that white people do tend to see themselves as very individual. So individualism is often a mark of whiteness. So it's an inability to think on a kind of collective level.

[53:01]

as a collective subject. So you know, you could see the difference in how Manuel was explaining collective dukkah and her experience of the collective as an African-American woman. So that's really helpful. So you're saying one aspect of whiteness is? Individual, is to experience the world in a very individual way. So an inability to think collectively. Yeah. So for example, like, you know, often of my undergrad, you know, the time, hard to think structurally because they think everything that I, you know, made of myself is through my individual efforts. You know, they experience life as a kind of meritocracy, you know, it's an individual process. So they, and they assume that when other people fail, people of colour, it's because they, it's an individual failing. But through the class, through, you know, the study of history and, you know, looking at, you know, different ways the legal system works or ownership of land or education resources, they start to see that it's, you know, the context, even though they've been really super hardworking and everything, taking that away from them, that they've had, you know, certain advantages just by the very virtue of being white.

[54:18]

So that, when you start, if you started to see that, oh, you know what, I went to a school where there was... you know, books in the library and the teachers weren't doing GoFundMe every, you know, at the start of the school year to get, you know, equipment, crayon, books and stuff. You know, I had a really good education that was like 20 people in my class and not 40 people in my class. Then that's a kind of a crack open when they start thinking about their experience, still as an individual, because we all have a sense of individuality, but in a larger context, structural context. So that would be a kind of a move, in a way, a possibility out of an individualism that marks Whitener. So it's just, I mean, I just encourage you to think about structures that have shaped you. So thank you. You're welcome. That was a hard question. I've never had a question like that in an academic session. Yeah.

[55:20]

Thank you so much for coming here. So I'm a longtime resident and a priest here at Zen Center. And I grew up and I was raised in China. And so my life here has been very wonderful as well as great learning. And so the talk that you gave, I think I, because of my conditioning, I don't relate to the label of whiteness as much as individualism versus collective. Right. So that's where I find challenges in living in this environment. So my question is... Do you have any suggestion how to, yeah, how to meet this challenge?

[56:33]

Well, I think it would be, I mean, I think, do you know Manuel? Do you know Zanju? I mean, I think that, you know, the Buddhists of Kulari have lived in the Zen center, know the climate of the Zen center. much better than me. So I'm hesitant. If I'm understanding your question, I'm not sure. I'm hesitant to offer any specific suggestions for the climate of the Zen Center. Maybe you can kind of... Well, I mean, I do find friends. I have many friends here, and I relate to people very well, one-on-one. Yeah. However, collectively, it doesn't feel there is a cohesiveness. So that's because maybe the culture is individual. In the center? Well, in the bigger sense, too.

[57:37]

American culture and culture here. So one-on-one is mostly wonderful. However, the sense of community, the cohesiveness is... missing. It's relative. I think for many people here, they think this is a great community, maybe. And for me, who grew up in... If you have seen The Farewell... Yes. So it's always kind of a point of... not only tension, point of learning. And so, yeah, I find that people who come from other collective culture, I don't know what language to use, tend to hang out together more and do things together more naturally, whereas other residents like being on their own more.

[58:50]

And so I accept that. At the same time, I wonder how do we bring some bridge or some understanding to this diversity of culture? Well, I guess I can share that my interviews with Buddhists of Colour, that has definitely been a common theme. They found their dharma spaces to be... you know, individualistic. They've longed for, they've missed the sense of community and they've longed for a sense of community. And they've either left to find their own communities or they've, you know, tried to work within Sanders. They're at the Sanders and make change. But I think it's definitely a problem. And I think it is a problem because of whiteness and individualism. The States is extremely individualist culture, as you know. I think it's really good for the white members of the Sangha to hear this, that there is a sense of some, it's good, but there's still, it's not quite coming together in a cohesive sense for you.

[60:02]

Practices at the East Bay Meditation Center, I mean, Moshim is the fount of this knowledge. Intentional community building, exercises, not just leaving you know, community to happen on its own because I think that it doesn't necessarily happen on its own in spiritual groups. Spiritual groups do tend to draw introverted and kind of weird people. I've found... I mean, I've spent a lot of time in spiritual communities as a practitioner. Their interpersonal skills are not great, you know? So, in our... I mean, it's about embodied sangha and... They started things like movie nights for the sangha and, like, outings, but, like, doing stuff together that you would hang out with your friends. You know, you go and see a movie or, you know, go and see an art show or something like that, which, you know, probably loads of people are really contracted right now.

[61:05]

Like, oh, my God, I'm not going to the Castro with you or whatever. But I think that... It does seem strangely in America that community, especially in white dominant spaces, does not occur spontaneously of its own. And I would say that's a mark of whiteness. Because, for example, a lot of Buddhists of color, African-American Buddhists, especially that I worked with, did compare the Buddhist experience with their experiences of the church, you know, and how, like, church was, you know, such a, you know, like a connective plate. Well, many of them have had other issues often related to queerness. But there was just a sense of, like, a friendliness, like a basic friendliness, where I feel like you could easily go to so many Dharma centers and, like, no one even smiles at you. They're, like, just avert their eyes, you know.

[62:06]

So I think, you know, I think... intentional community building is what I learned from, you know, the people I've interviewed and worked with. So we seem great. I wish I was here. I hung out with you. You can have breakfast tomorrow. Yeah, I love that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. Thank you, everybody, for being able to laugh. Yeah, yeah. Oh, sorry. Hi. Thank you for that. That was such a great crash course in Buddhist modernism. I'm thinking about, like, modernism has always been challenging for me, and I'm struggling with, like, why you're periodizing it that way. And I'm thinking about, like, how when Buddhism came to Japan, it... was used for so long as a way to codify social structures there in the caste system, and it was used by some priests to make discrimination worse.

[63:11]

And that was before modernism. So I'm wondering if, from your lecture, I'm getting the sense that there's whiteness, and there's Buddhism, and there's modernism, and they're all propping up with a terrible stool. Is that what you're saying? Because, yeah. Well, there's a lot of conversations happening in the paper. There's, you know, there's several layers. So as you know, Buddhist modernism, when I, in talking about Buddhist modernism, I'm entering the conversation in Buddhist studies, you know, where are we now? So I'm basically, you know, picking up the consensus of the modernization. you know, period, and we're starting to see cracks in it. So there's that historical, theoretical conversation that I'm joining. And then whiteness is its own separate field that's coming. It's quite new to Buddhist studies, as you may also know.

[64:13]

I know you've got a bit of an academic history. So I'm thinking kind of parallel of how other scholars looked at whiteness with other religious communities. You know, so I'm kind of coming at that from, you know, I'm looking historically with this modernism, and then I'm coming kind of parallel with kind of whiteness. And then Buddhism, you know, is in both modernist and post-modernist, post-colonial forms is, you know, always these selective Buddhist kind of maneuvers. So there's, you know, there's a few things going on there. So I can see it's a little, the clunkiness of it. What was the exact question? Like do... I think my impulse is to say that there is something endemic to Buddhism that makes it... Socially oppressive. Yeah. Yeah. But even as I said that, then I'm like, there actually is no Buddhism. There's just people. Right. Well, I'm glad you brought that up because it's a complicated question because the question is often asked with an agenda.

[65:24]

So the agenda is often... You're not asking it like this, I know, I recognise that, but it's often asked with the agenda of shutting down any forms of socially, you know, progressive or engaged forms of Buddhism. You know, that Buddhism, that's not Buddhism, right? So when I'm answering that question, I'm always kind of on alert of, you know, that... that agenda. But I also think that because of the anxiety around that agenda, and I do actually see this in practitioners who are doing progressive Buddhism, that there can be a tendency to discard, ignore, you know, conservative and nationalistic and, you know, harmful, socially kind of harmful forms of Buddhism. And I think that's a big mistake. It also would be a terrible mistake as a scholar because it would be ahistorical. So I'd say it's really important to recognize that Buddhism has formed multiple relationships with different forms of political power.

[66:46]

that also, I'd say, included very, you know, forms of politics that would be, you know, really the opposite of progressive, you know. So I think it's something that progressive Buddhists need to really look clearly and confront that Buddhism has been, you know, a politically regressive, nationalistic force in history. But there's always been moments of resistance as well, you know. So I would just say, you know, blinter the canon and just realize the Buddhism and politics of Buddhism. I mean, even like in this present moment, there's so many different relationships happening between Buddhism and politics. I mean, you know, really awful things happening in Southeast Asia around Buddhist nationalism and quite hopeful things happening around like climate justice here. And I think that there's certain scriptures, certain texts that, you know, Even the same text can be interpreted to support counter moves, you know.

[67:52]

So I would say then that really puts the question back onto who's doing the interpretation and what bodies are going through scriptures and what bodies are those scriptures coming through, you know. So I think that just thinking, I'm always now just thinking about different Buddhist bodies. But yeah, you know. So I was hearing a tension between the modernist view of trying to get back to a purer version of Buddhism, but also that that's a corruption that's being overlaid by a political view in the first place. So you can't go back to a purer version, but looking for a purer version itself is also not good? Like, what do we do? I feel like these questions are so existential. Like, I feel like I need to be like the Buddha to answer them. I'm like, give us a simple academic question here so everyone is being so tall.

[68:58]

I feel like I'm really making me work for two nights accommodation. Well, I mean, Religion is a lived dynamic process. It's always becoming, isn't it? Like, society is always changing. The interpretive frameworks for religion are always changing. I mean, just be a Buddhist best self. Or no self. There's no, I don't, the going back is, I mean, it's a style. It's self is a movement constituted in a particular context. or go back, but recognize that it is a movement, you know, that's in a specific context. As a scholar, I'd say transparency is, you know, really important. That's what I would like to see of more practitioners, recognition of the specific configuration rather than claims to some kind of essential or transcendent view of Buddhism.

[70:08]

There's no evidence to support that, so. Easy question, please. I don't think mine is a question. It's just an observation. Oh, thanks. A fascinating thing that just happened this time of interview. Interventional question is the inability to stay with something that is very uncomfortable. Right there, the conversation needs to be diverted to Buddhism, not whiteness. It's very, it's telling. That's all I wanted to say. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for bringing back to that, Miriam. And I had two things. One was if anybody wants to continue the conversation about whiteness, I am

[71:12]

really interested in talking with you about it and hearing your questions and seeing how I can understand it better and how I can help support anybody in the Sangha in understanding whiteness better. That's the first thing. And the second thing is you've shared a few different ways that Buddhism is misused in Sanghas, modern Sanghas, particularly around using the absolute to dismiss the individual, like dismissing identity, dismissing the relative. And I'm wondering if you can share a few, I'm thinking of this from the lens of the fact that there are a lot of teachers in this room and probably a lot of people who will become teachers. And I'm wondering what are some ways that the two groups can be talked about in a way that is really supportive to all people in the room, and that doesn't dismiss experiences of gender and race and class?

[72:19]

Well, first of all, I definitely recommend that everyone buys Manuel's book, The Way of Candidates, because my, when I, that was actually Manuel, you know, who elaborated those different ways. It's really the Buddhist of color, also like Shins who are doing this work on the ground. So, It's not an academic argument. I'm contextualizing their work in a historical, contextual framework using Buddhist modernism. But it's their experience in sanghas, you know, that I'm really recording, you know, academically. But I think, you know, it's kind of interesting because when I was on the way here, I was rereading Grace Shriason, is it? Shriason? I would say her name wrong. It's a book that she wrote on then women. And she was also saying, it was, I think it was from about 10 years old, the book or something. But she was making the same point at how conversations on gender were being shut down all the time, how she'd experienced conversations on gender being shut down all the time.

[73:24]

Like, why are you going on about being a woman? We're all one, you know, with everything. And it was nearly exactly the same as, you know, as what you read in Manuel's book. She brings an intersectional lens, connect rates and gender. So it also reminded me of John Wellwood. He talks about the spiritual bypass. So John Wellwood was a Tibetan Buddhist teacher and a psychotherapist who recently died. And he coined this phrase called the spiritual bypass. And he coined it to explain the ways in which... practitioners use spiritual practice meditation to avoid dealing with psychological issues and interpersonal issues. And so in a way, all the work on gender and race and class is just an extension of that. It's how meditation, the experience of meditation and philosophies associated with oneness and interdependence are used to erase these really uncomfortable conversations around, you know,

[74:30]

race, gender, and sexuality. So there is, like, so many different frameworks. Like, if whiteness doesn't work for you, throw out the window and come at it through. You know, not you... you know, other people in the room, just come at it from a different angle. Like what is like not being included in practice? And then you'll start to see that there are these, the identity categories will fall into them. So I think that, you know, as a way to avoid that is to educate yourself, listen to the experiences of people in your sangha, in your community, you should be friends when they say, when I try and talk about race, I'm, you know, I'm shut down. listen to them and don't shut them down. So you can learn from, you know, the people in the sangha and, you know, all the literature that's kind of coming out, I would say. I mean, there is a movement happening. I mean, I've noticed differences in coming to this center. You know, there's, you know, the queerdom, I know it's been going for about 10 years, but there's undoing whiteness.

[75:35]

There's a, everyone's welcome. Like, there is, things are happening. You know, so be a part of that. Who's running the whiteness group here? Oh, Toby, I really need you to help me out. Yeah. But I'm an academic. I'm not a diversity and inclusion. You know, I'm not a facilitator of this work. I'm an academic. So probably a bit clunky in my response. Did I more or less respond? Yeah. Thank you, mate. Thank you. For more information, visit sfcc.org and click Giving. May we fully enjoy the Dharma.

[76:30]

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