Our movements for justice and liberation are facing profound challenges in the face of rising authoritarianism, polarization, and violence. We are in need of politicized spiritual leaders and spiritual political leaders who can not only help us bear witness to suffering, but who can also provide transformative vision to help us realize our collective potential for liberation.

While movement chaplaincy has been practiced arguably for generations—though it may not always have been named as such—no theorization of what Buddhism, per se, might offer our current movements for justice and liberation (beyond common, yet important, skills of accompaniment, presence, and bearing witness) have been, to our knowledge, thoroughly explored, taught, or practiced.

We see an opportunity to theorize new ways of approaching the challenges our movements face from a nondual Buddhist frame, and to put the dharma in dialogue with many other movements with long spiritual and political traditions of liberatory work. We are calling this type of Buddhist movement chaplaincy “Movement Dharma.”

This contributions in this issue are offered in response to this call. We see this as an ongoing conversation and look forward to engaging with our readers!

ISSUE CONTENTS

Volume 13 | Issue 1 | Fall 2026

Chief Editor’s Introduction
Brooke D. Lavelle

Co-Editor’s Introduction
Mishka Erdenesanaa

Guest Editor’s Introduction
Monika L. Son

Becoming the Refuge: On Socially Engaged Buddhism
Mishka Erdenesanaa

This essay unpacks the term “Socially Engaged Buddhism,” asking what the distinction implies. Drawing on Buddhist ontology and the Shantideva Prayer as well as the histories and contemporary scholarship of socially engaged Buddhism, it questions the seemingly pervasive split between inner and outer practice—as well as the persistent gap between aspiration and lived practice. Rather than treating socially engaged Buddhism as a discrete modern movement, I ask that we consider more expansive, complicated Buddhist histories: encounters with political power, social hierarchy, suffering, and collective responsibility. It reframes taking refuge as an embodied obligation—to become, however imperfectly, a refuge for others.

Navayāna Buddhist Ministry: Dr. Ambedkar’s Dhamma and the Making of a Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy for Social Democracy and Liberation
Santosh I. Raut

This paper reads Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s 1956 conversion to Buddhism as a founding, if underrecognized, contribution to Buddhist Movement Chaplaincy. Ambedkar diagnosed India’s caste order as a dualistic, relational injury requiring not only political remedy but a transformation of self, culture, and mind – a diagnosis that resonates with the nondual analysis this special issue invites. The essay first unpacks the fundamental pillars of Ambedkar’s applied theology, or Dhammology, and situates it within the broader field of socially engaged Buddhism. It then places Ambedkar in extended dialogue with W. E. B. Du Bois and Howard Thurman, and examines Ambedkar’s own synthesis of Navayāna ministry and chaplaincy – a Buddhist leadership answerable to both deep democracy and caste trauma – before turning to what a contemporary Buddhist movement chaplaincy might learn from all three. Du Bois supplies a sociological and psychological vocabulary for the wound caste and race share; Thurman supplies a lived template – built literally, in mortar and congregation, for what a politicized, contemplative spiritual leadership addressed to that wound can look like. Ambedkar’s Navayāna Buddhism, understood in this comparative and multifaith frame, offers contemporary Buddhist movement chaplains a historical precedent for politicized, nondual spiritual leadership at the scale of a whole society.

Interview | Rangzen: The Movement for a Free Tibet and a Call for a Decolonial Movement Dharma
Tenzin (Tendor) Dorjee

Editor’s note: This interview with Tenzin (Tendor) Dorjee, Director of Research and Advocacy at Tibet Action Institute, and former director of Students for a Free Tibet, took place over thali and momos in Jackson Heights, Queens. I was eager to speak with a leader of Rangzen—the Tibetan Freedom movement—about Buddhist movements for liberation and the perceived support for this movement among contemporary Buddhist practitioners in North America. In the spirit of this special issue on Movement Dharma, which aims to (re)awaken political consciousness and engagement among Buddhist practitioners, it felt necessary not only to center indigenous decolonial movements, but also to honor the lineage and culture of Tibetan Buddhism, from and through which so many of us practice and have received teachings. 

Spiritual Activism and Movement Dharma: a feminist coalition
Rebecca Esho Greenslade

This essay considers the relationship between Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of “spiritual activism” and the principles and practices of the bodhisattva path undertaken by Buddhist movement chaplains. This comparative analysis is a form of coalition building; an act of dialogue and bridging of spiritual epistemologies and practices that, to date, have had minimal engagement with each other. I suggest that Anzaldúa’s cosmology can augment how Buddhist movement chaplaincy might engage with social justice concerns through locating our bodhisattva vows and practice within radical feminist politics of spirit perspectives. Reciprocally, placing an ethical Buddhist framework – in this case, the Zen Peacemakers “Three Tenets” – in dialogue with Anzaldúa can offer further spiritual technologies through which to actualize Anzaldúa’s feminist epistemological and ethical vision in service of a movement dharma for current times.

Interview: Was the Buddha a Movement Chaplain?
Pamela Ayo Yetunde

Guest Editor’s Note: I was excited to sit down with Pamela Ayo Yetunde JD, MA Th.D, who through her work as a chaplain and educator of chaplains has been an inspiration in my own journey. Her ability to speak directly to the tensions that arise as we attempt to situate identity, culture, and practice as Buddhist practitioners (Black & Buddhist) alongside the invitation to create compassionate communities in a polarized world (Casting Indra’s Net), has been deeply motivating in my formation as a movement chaplain. In this interview, Ayo argues that Buddhist practitioners are called not only to witness suffering but also to engage actively in addressing its causes. We reflect on why the practice of leaving what is familiar is important for “awakening’’ both politically and through the Dharma. We explore the concept of “exile” to describe the suffering experienced by people displaced by many political systems in this moment, and how movement chaplains must remain open-hearted to those experiencing oppression while also recognizing their own vulnerability within systems of exclusion. Dr. Yetunde also stresses that the work of change is never the work of one person alone but that all change emerges from countless causes and conditions and contributions of generations before us. We end the interview with Ayo’s invitation to Buddhism – to grapple more directly with questions of justice, power and collective action.

Nobody’s Movement: Anattā and the Practice of Coalition
Chris Hoff

Movements for justice and liberation are repeatedly fractured by foregrounded subjectivity, the demand that identity sit at the center of collective life. Drawing on Bernice Johnson Reagon’s account of coalition, Judith Butler’s call to background identity claims for the sake of common struggle, and clinical experience in narrative therapy, this essay argues that the Buddhist teaching of anattā (Pali: ‘no-self’) offers movement chaplaincy a coalitional practice. Read through the two truths doctrine, anattā neither erases identity nor demands its renunciation; it loosens the grip that turns coalitions into purity-policing communities. The essay proposes concrete practices, from the anonymity architecture of 12-step culture to rotating leadership and contemplative training. Through these practices, chaplains can transmit a discipline of holding the self lightly so that common struggle can hold us.

Buchanan & Buddha: Ontologies of Justice and the Carceral State
Robbie Madfis

This article explores the modern ontologies and paradigms that have both fueled and justified this latter expansion of carcerality in the United States. It further considers the possibility that what is at stake in these ontological frames is not merely the degree to which they accurately reflect the underlying reality they purport to describe, but their impact on actively shaping the possible realities, behaviors, and responses of the societies and people subject to their frame. The final section explores an alternative paradigm rooted in Buddhist thought and historical practice as well as examples from indigenous cultures and literature as case studies in the possibilities that become manifest with a shift in underlying frames.

Hart Island
Sean Fentress

This essay explores Hart Island’s rich history, its current manifestation, and the spiritual/ethical/philosophical implications of the phenomenon. Weaving vignettes from my visit on a public tour, as well as my Buddhist teacher’s connection to Hart Island as its former staff chaplain, the essay offers an opportunity to interact with New York City’s “potter’s field” from afar. It also raises open-ended contemplations on what such a place might mean to us as citizens and, more broadly, as sentient beings in general.

Author Interview: Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China
Jessica X. Zu

Just Awakening: Yogācāra Social Philosophy in Modern China, by Jessica X. Zu, is a work of “liberation Buddhology” that explores how early 20th-century Chinese intellectuals drew upon Yogācāra philosophy to build an irresistible, revolutionary activist movement to bring forth a nonviolent, just society. The book, which just won the prestigious Toshihide Numata Book Award in Buddhism, offers a compellingly clear account of what Zu terms “socio-soteriology”, a new revolutionary project of social philosophy and praxis.

Cadences of Freedom: Path and Politics Towards a Buddhist Movement Theology
Adam Lobel

At a time of climate mutation, resurgent authoritarianism, and renewed debate over political strategy, the question of what practices can bring forth genuine freedom has become increasingly urgent. This essay brings Buddhist paths of liberation into experimental proximity with political theories of transformation, approaching both as practical “tempos” or “cadences” of causality, temporality, subject formation, effort, and change. Gradual cultivation, the transformation of latent habits, empty paths, sudden awakening, prefiguration, rupture, and effortlessness each disclose different cadences through which transformation becomes imaginable and actionable. I am not looking to Buddhism for a political program, or to political theory for a way of applying Buddhist ethics. I want to place these two archives of transformation close enough together that each can unsettle and illuminate the other, moving in both directions. The essay proposes that organizers, movement leaders, movement chaplains, and Buddhist practitioners may become more nimble by learning to recognize and move among multiple cadences of transformation without treating any single cadence as the only tempo of change itself.

Issue art by Maria Reneé Johnson