Dharma

Engaged Buddhism: Honoring Thich Nhat Hanh’s Life and Teachings (1926-2022)

  Issue Contents Editor’s Introduction Ashley Wilson A Cloud Never Dies: Thich Nhat Hanh’s Community Reflects on the Zen Master’s Continuation in the World Stephen Pradarelli, Sister Chan Khong, Sister Chan Dieu Nghiem, Brother Phap Dung, Brother Phap Huu Thich Nhat Hanh’s Poetics of Care Jesse Curran In this short essay, I situate the immense value of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing to social justice ethics. Drawing on my own experience as a student, educator, yoga instructor, and meditation practitioner, I reflect upon how meaningful his language has been to my own growth as an academic and activist. Ultimately, I argue that Nhat Hanh’s literary style embodies a practice of virtuous support for the reader, what I refer to as his “poetics of care.” Keywords: ethics, poetics, virtue, care Walk with Me Jason Zevenbergen In the Symphony of the Storm: Four Phases of Engaged Buddhism in Thich Nhat Hanh’s Life Kaira Jewel Lingo Cultivating Fearlessness in the Midst of Suffering: A Conversation with Sister Dang Nghiem Here, Because You Are There: After Thich Nhat Hanh Dolores Walshe …

Contemplative Superpowers for Social Change

  Issue Contents Journal Editors’ Introduction shah noor hussein & Gabriel Dayley Contemplative Superpowers for Social Change James K. Rowe, Farah Godrej, & Shannon Mariotti Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: Reflections on an Africana Buddhist Hermeneutic Tracey E. Hucks Breaking our Brains and Hearts Open: Dr. Rima Vesely-Flad’s Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition Toni Pressley-Sanon In Response: A Black Buddhist Hermeneutic within the Field of Buddhist Studies Rima Vesely-Flad Embodying Transformation in Carceral Spaces: On Farah Godrej’s Freedom Inside Anita Chari Violence, Liberation, and Freedom Inside Robin L. Turner In Response: (Re)Thinking Freedom through Refuge & Embodiment Farah Godrej Sokthan Yeng and the Superpower of Buddhist Feminism Leah Kalmanson Sokthan Yeng and the Resuscitation of Anger in Buddhist Feminism Jason M. Wirth In Response: The Magic of Feminist Sanghas Sokthan Yeng Artwork by Rae Minji Lee and Chetna Mehta

Between Amitabha and Tubman: Black Buddhist Thought

  Issue Contents Journal Editor’s Introduction: Towards the Impossible Possibility of Black Buddhist Liberation shah noor hussein, Managing Editor Guest Editor’s Introduction: Making Black Buddhist Writing on an Apocalyptic Earth Shanté Paradigm Smalls Roundtable: Black-led and BIPOC Sanghas Shanté Paradigm Smalls in conversation with Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Vimalasara Mason-John, Claudelle R. Glasgow, Sheryl Petty, Aishah Shahidah Simmons, and Laurie Amodeo Honoring Ancestors in Black Buddhist Practice: Rituals of Devotion and Resilience Rima Vesely-Flad This article examines how Black Buddhists have embraced ancestral practices as they elaborate dharma teachings in convert Buddhist communities. Such practices include storytelling, devotional bowing, drumming, dancing, and chanting, as well as honoring African-derived images and ancestors on Buddhist altars. This article emphasizes the importance of honoring ancestors and the land within different lineages, as well as practices for incorporating indigenous rituals into Buddhist practices. For indigenous-oriented Buddhist practitioners, the history of ancestors carries meaning for themselves, their family members, and their broader community. Furthermore, the courage, determination, and perseverance embodied by ancestors is mirrored in the resilience of …

Reciprocity: An Antidote to our Global Crises

This article appears in the issue “Healing Social and Ecological Rifts Part 2″ (Volume 8, Number 2). Click here to subscribe and download the entire issue.  Subscribe to The Arrow Journal to read the complete issue, plus unlimited access to the only journal dedicated to investigating the meeting of contemplative wisdom and the systemic challenges facing our world. Already subscribed? Read the issue: Healing Social and Ecological Rifts Part 2 | Vol. 8, No. 2 | Fall 2021

Dead Turtle Animist: Towards a Non-Natural Ecopolitical Spirituality

This article appears in the issue “Healing Social and Ecological Rifts Part 2″ (Volume 8, Number 2). Click here to subscribe and download the entire issue.  Subscribe to The Arrow Journal to read the complete issue, plus unlimited access to the only journal dedicated to investigating the meeting of contemplative wisdom and the systemic challenges facing our world. Already subscribed? Read the issue: Healing Social and Ecological Rifts Part 2 | Vol. 8, No. 2 | Fall 2021

An Ecodharma Prayer of Earth

This essay appears in the issue “Healing Social and Ecological Rifts Part 1″ (Volume 8, Number 1). Click here to subscribe and download the entire issue.  From the realm of boundless emptiness, The spacious horizon of sky, sun and moon, We call upon primordial perfection, The unborn womb of suchness called Buddha, Please grant us the unconditional openness To rest in timeless wisdom with all life, decay, and death, To see the patient perfection without beginning or end. From the realm of compassionate sadness, The vulnerable living skin of leaf, shell, and feather, We call upon immeasurable compassion, The inconceivable, endless vow of all Bodhisattvas, Please grant us the brave heart of awakening, To grieve for all that we are losing, To lovingly protect all that calls to be protected. From the realm of interdependent relationship, The elements, greenery, crawling, swimming, soaring ones, We call upon the interwoven web of causality, The selfless insight called Dharma, Please grant us the humility beyond human-centricity, To mindfully stay with the suffering of this very place, To take one …

Artwork by Rae Minji Lee, with photography by Carolina Marinati (CC0)

Spirituality and Survival: Imaginative Freedoms for Abolition Futures

In this collection on “Spirituality and Survival: Imaginative Freedoms for Abolition Futures,” authors engage key questions of Black survival in this moment: How are Black communities activating our ancestral knowledge to cultivate a future we are willing to fight for and worlds in which we want to survive? We invited authors to consider the following questions in their writing: How are you showing up right now to take care of yourself and to care for others? How are you showing up in mindful solidarity with the movements confronting police violence and demanding abolition? What contemplative insights, spiritual wisdoms, or dharmic teachings are you finding most relevant for society or for you, personally, in this time? How have Black histories of protest, riots, and revolutions related to spirituality? How have our ancestors, both familial lineages and intellectual inspirations, responded to past turmoils with insight and vision across the diaspora? How can the changes we need, including the abolition of prisons and police, be spiritually guided, mindfully motivated, and creatively conjured now and tomorrow? How can these …

We Need More Fugitives

radical Black feminist thoughtfeelings (& propaganda) “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?… Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.” —Minnie Ransom And so begins Toni Cade Bambara’s 1980 novel, The Salt Eaters: Its protagonist Velma Henry, resistantly coming undone in the hands of Minnie Ransom, a trusted healer intimately acquainted with the voices of her ancestral guides. This novel is unsettling for many reasons. Structurally, the many voices and perspectives Bambara uses to tell the story disregard narrative conventions. Deeper still, Velma Henry, a black woman activist hospitalized and seeking healing after a sucide attempt,  stands as a haunting embodiment of the ways embattled resistance can literally tear apart the bodymind. I’ve written out parts of that opening line and posted it on my walls and doors in nearly every place I’ve lived over the past five years. Currently it sparkles in golden glitter ink on a white piece of paper next to my bed. …

Con*cep*tion

Prologue We all strive for understanding and meaning. Yet too often, we arrive at understanding by a consensus of the few. Our definitions, numbered and lettered, give us form from which we build beliefs and systems.  One of the skillful means I appreciate about Chogyäm Trungpa, an influential Tibetan Buddhist monk who brought Buddhism to the West, was his ability to play with words to reveal the potential of any word to hold wisdom. Each piece below engages in a narrative that invites you to reconsider the normative definition of a word or phrase and what is true in your experience.  Each may give you an opportunity to create and experience and witness one. Although all pieces below reflect some aspect of Black birth and mothering, they simultaneously engage with how we relate to our world. Con*cep*tion We are all capable of conceiving. Some make worlds, others systems, still others ideology. All of this contributes to our (personal) Now and This Now (cultural) of the last 400+ years, which has deteriorated our humanity. Yet, co-arising …

Land-Based Ethics and Settler Solidarity in a Time of Corona and Revolution

Settler colonialism has been defined as a structure, not an event, meaning that settler societies like the U.S., Canada, and Australia endure over time through racist laws and ideologies that naturalize the dispossession of Indigenous populations.1 One of the most effective strategies that settler states rely on to eliminate Indigenous peoples and their power is the idea that their knowledges are primitive and superstitious, examples of failed epistemology.2 This view is rooted in an Enlightenment-born materialism that asserts that legitimate knowledge can only be produced through narrow empirical methods, relegating the negotiations of immaterial life to the social margins.3 As the colonial project progresses, legitimate knowledge production is simultaneously tethered to race and power (reserved to the white and landed), resulting in what we have come to know as modernity.4 Settler colonialism seeks to eliminate Indigenous populations in order to monopolize resources for the sake of capital. It operates through laws and racist ideologies, but also through conceptualizations of the natural world as white men’s for the human taking. Settler colonialism operates from its own …

Interdependent During a Pandemic

Last summer, my partner and I worked on a research project about wildlife trafficking in southern Africa. While trafficking in elephant ivory and rhino horn tends to dominate the headlines, we also examined smaller species such as the pangolin—which is both the most trafficked mammal on earth and one possible source of the novel coronavirus. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, one lesson from our research stands out as particularly crucial: Wildlife trafficking is not a problem of protecting a single species in a single place. Rather, it is a global problem, composed of unaddressed poverty in rural communities, middlemen profiting from illegal trade, and indulgent demand for exotic food and art. It is a problem from roots to leaves, which unfurl thousands of miles away. The same is true of the virus now ravaging human society. It knows no boundary. It reaches my aging parents in a small mountain town, my anxious students scattered across the United States, and my friends in rural Botswana with limited access to healthcare. In a recent letter …

‘May I Also Be the Source of Life’: Embodied Resistance, Existence, and Liberation in Bodymind as It Is

This essay also appears in the issue “The Necessity of Including Embodiment and Lineage in Racial Justice Work” (Volume 6, Number 1). Click here to subscribe and download the entire issue.  And until they pass away from pain May I also be the source of life For all the realms of varied beings That reach unto the ends of space. – Shantideva1 In Mahāyāna Buddhism, I have been taught that body and mind are not two separate entities. They are one: bodymind. There are seeming limitations of the specific and located human bodymind I call “myself,” this named entity that comes into being at a certain point; lives a certain span of years, days, and minutes; then goes through the death process of dissolution of form and cessation of bodymind activities. To be embodied in the ordinary, day-to-day sense means that I am subject to sickness, to aging, and to death, which are all forms of anicca/anitya, impermanence. True enough. How is it, then, in accordance with the Bodhisattva vows I took in 1983, that …

Issue cover

The Necessity of Including Embodiment and Lineage in Racial Justice Work

  Issue Contents Chief Editor’s Introduction (available to subscribers in the complete issue) by Gabe Dayley Guest Editor’s Introduction (available to subscribers in the complete issue) by Kelsey Blackwell Black Boys by Vernon Keeve III Race and the Body: Why Somatic Practices Are Essential for Racial Justice by Kelsey Blackwell Body Knowing as a Vehicle for Change by Arawana Hayashi Borders by Jessica Stern ‘May I Also Be the Source of Life’: Embodied Resistance, Existence, and Liberation in Bodymind as It Is by Mushim Patricia Ikeda How to Love a Mestiza Woman by Laura Soto Examining Whiteness with Meditation by Kalen Tenderness Tierney On Lineage and Whiteness by Alexandria Barnes I’ll Meet You There by Jahan Khalighi Reflections on Embodiment, Culture, and Social Justice Work in Selected Buddhist Traditions by Arisika Razak The Movement Within the Movement text and poetry by Nicole Klaymoon photography by David Wilson mask art by Tigre Bailando Cover design and illustrations by Alicia Brown Comments The Arrow welcomes comments in response to issues we publish. Please submit comments for review to editor[at]arrow-journal.org. Comments may expand on an …

Going to the Root: How White Caucuses Contribute to Racial Justice

Caucusing is a form of upāya—skillful means. To caucus is skillful because it reduces harm. For Buddhists, practicing harm reduction is a relative bodhicitta practice. In my experience of 24 years of facilitating racial justice work, I have found that it is not helpful to put together in the same room folks who have had racism aimed at them all their lives and folks who haven’t had to think about it very much, if at all. The latter group, white people, need a place to start thinking and feeling about it, a space for using prajña (insight) to discover how white conditioning, through no choice of their own, has been embedded in their ego. There is no white person in North America who does not have white conditioning.1 —Robert Horton, Co-FounderThe UNtraining: Healing Personal & Social Oppressions The current political landscape of the United States has made it impossible for us to avoid our racial karma. In recent years, the news has been littered with it: police violence and murder of Black and brown people …

Why People of Color Need Spaces Without White People

I’m breathing deeply as I write this. What I’m writing about is charged. I feel this energy in my body. It’s a heat in my throat and a rumbling in my belly. It’s an intensity that’s frustrated that these words must even be written. It propels me through my fears of backlash and worry about not getting it exactly right. What I say may anger you. You may disagree. You may feel more confused, and this, I would say, is good. It means the work can begin. Breathing. People of color need their own spaces. Black people need their own spaces. We need places in which we can gather and be free from the mainstream stereotypes and marginalization that permeate every other societal space we occupy. We need spaces where we can be our authentic selves without white people’s judgment and insecurity muzzling that expression. We need spaces where we can simply be—where we can get off the treadmill of making white people comfortable and finally realize just how tired we are. Valuing and protecting …

Social and Ecological Ethics

This comment also appears in the issue “Dharma, Degrowth, and Climate Change” (Volume 5, Number 1). Click here to subscribe and download the entire issue.  At the root of the climate crisis is the disjuncture between the exponential development of the capitalist economy and the lack of an equivalent development in ethics and morality. Human and environmental sustainability requires social action based on a transformation of consciousness, from a dualistic to an ecological worldview that recognizes humanity as part of nature and the inherent equality of all human beings. To avoid further environmental and social collapse and conflict, it is important to recognize the history and realities of social hierarchy, domination, and oppression. Instead of speaking of a collective “we” in the context of climate action, it is necessary to explore the differential responsibilities and burdens borne by different communities for the climate and related crises. The North–South conflict over climate mitigation speaks to this reality. It is the privileged groups, especially those at the top of the global social hierarchy, that need to shift …

Dharma, Degrowth, and Climate Change

  Issue Contents FEATURE Contemplating the More-than-Human Commons by Zack Walsh In Response Social and Ecological Ethics by Asoka Bandarage Drala of the Landscape: Rights of the River by Rachel DeMotts Beyond Theory: Relating to Dominant Systems and Manifesting Social Alternatives in Dharma Communities by David Kahane FICTION The Tale of Stormtamer by Austin R. Pick In Response A Buddhist Depiction of Ecological Dystopia by Holly Gayley Cover design and illustrations by Alicia Brown Comments The Arrow welcomes comments in response to issues we publish. Please submit comments for review to editor[at]arrow-journal.org. Comments may expand on an idea, raise questions, or make a critique. They should be no more than 500 words. Regardless of the stance toward the article that a comment takes, comments should be substantive and respectful, engaging the merits of the argument.

Expanding Awareness: How Patterns of Interaction Support White Supremacy

Lately, I’ve been feeling a deep sensitivity as I move about my world—a vulnerability, a brewing sadness, that comes, I believe, from the rawness of beginning to peel back the layers and peer into the depths of my own internalized oppression. I see how often I let myself become small, allow someone else a final thought to keep the peace, and ignore the use of words like “ghetto” (when a place is not) and “afro” (when a hairstyle is not) to protect a white friend from feeling uncomfortable if corrected. Often these subtle aggressions happen closest to home, when engaging with my friends and other seemingly aware white individuals. To be clear, these people are not racists. They’re activists supporting marginalized populations, creatives dedicated to raising social consciousness, and general do-gooders making not enough money to do meaningful things. No doubt upon reading this, they will stand by my side and say, “write on!” (pun intended). Yet the fact that even individuals conscious of the oppression of marginalized populations inadvertently reinforce their own privilege indicates …

Image of people singing around a campfire

Rising to the Challenge: Race and Inclusivity in the Sangha

Last summer I traveled from my home in Berkeley, California to Pátzcuaro, Mexico for a weeklong “young” sangha meditation retreat. I say “young” because in our group of roughly 20, though we varied in age from early 20s to 40s, chronological years didn’t matter. We were artists, activists, educators, and scholars united by a curiosity to explore how creativity and contemplative practice might inform the larger social and environmental ills of our time. As a 33-year-old dancing, writing, Buddhist, I felt right at home. In addition to the Mexican participants, the young-at-heart arrived from across the United States and Europe. By day, we meditated, studied the Dharma, and engaged in experiential activities. By night, we enjoyed campfires, conversation, and maybe a few sips of tequila. As the days turned into what felt like years, we became close. Romances blossomed, disintegrated, and blossomed again. Our nighttime campfires morphed into uninhibited sharing free-for-alls with impromptu poetry, mystic storytelling, and group sing-alongs. We were connected to each other and the lush, blooming forest that held us—one beautiful, breathing …