Awakening Together

As an African American lesbian elder and educator of the dharma, I am often challenged by students and teachers who feel that raising social and political issues within the dharma hall is inappropriate if not distracting from practice. I often will hear: I’m here to work on my mind, to be free from suffering. But we must ask: To what end when suffering in the world is urgent, threatening, and horrendous for so many of us? To acknowledge social injustice and systems of power is not to take sides or to invite a debate, to organize, or to solve systemic problems. It is more the naming of harm that is all around us and an invitation to wisely support practitioners in working with the stimulation and distress it creates within us and especially our response to it.

The Buddha taught the end of suffering and the embrace of peace. Surely there is room in our practice for acknowledgment and exploration of how we meet the complexities of our time both on and off the cushion with wise care. Relevant to this topic, the Buddhist psychologist John Welwood coined the term “spiritual bypassing” in the early ’80s:

I coin the term [spiritual bypass] to describe a process I saw happening in the Buddhist community and also in myself… We often use the goal of awakening to rationalize what I call premature transcendence—trying to rise above the raw and messy side of our humanness … before we have fully faced it and made peace with it… I see this as an occupational hazard of the spiritual path. It leads to a conceptual one-sided spirituality: Ultimate truth is favored over Relative truth; emptiness over form; transcendence over embodiment; detachment over feeling.

As a spiritual leader, I generally will approach teaching in two ways: (1) offering my understanding of what the Buddha taught using my lived experience and practice as an example, and (2) talking about my life and how the dharma supports my understanding of belonging to both the challenges and beauty experienced near and far.

There is no limit to suffering throughout the world, nor is there a limit to our collective goodwill.

I feel responsible for speaking up when my heart is pinched by social injustice and political oppression; to not collude in silence or neutralize the suffering that rains upon masses of people by downplaying the heat of the obvious. My talks often and naturally include an invitation to investigate the worldly winds of social corruption and innocence, wisdom and irrationality, distance and intimacy, and receptivity and force—to examine our part in its harm and healing. In Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living, Dr. Kamilah Majied quotes renowned Buddhist educator, poet, and philosopher Daisaku Ikeda:

The joy of life is to be found not by evading life’s sufferings but by grappling with them to the finish. Escapism cannot produce true happiness. Happiness based on delusion does not last. Enlightenment comes from seeing the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be.

It is not uncommon for me in a dharma talk to specifically name the social and power challenges impacting ethical and global well-being—for example, the systemic oppression and suffering in Gaza and Sudan, not to mention the pressing threat of civil uprising within the United States— and invite practitioners to examine their relationship and kinship to what leads to harm and what leads to its release. From this base of exploration and understanding flows a natural, responsible, and compassionate response to social suffering—or at least, this is my prayer.

Many Buddhist communities have called for more social understanding and engagement, most notably the work of Venerable Thich Nhat Hanh and Plum Village, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, as well as the Social Justice Coalition, an international coalition of dharma teachers, leaders, and sangha members, calling for a dharma response to the crisis in Gaza. Many Black Buddhist teachers would be hard-pressed not to speak of social issues when teaching, as illustrated in many best-selling publications, including Black & Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom, edited by Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles and Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation by Rima Vesely-Flad.

There is no limit to suffering throughout the world, nor is there a limit to our collective goodwill. We will all see and serve differently, with, it is hoped, a moral compass of seeing ourselves in those we judge and taking action with an intent to not cause harm.

Wherever you see fit to serve, your wise and embodied offerings are needed. I believe that if we can stay close to the pain of social suffering—if we were, for example, to embrace that every death was our child—perhaps we could be more curious than critical, more collectively courageous, and less afraid to connect to social distress and thus to a full-bodied and interdependent fact of our lives.

If I didn’t belong to you, I wouldn’t be here
If you didn’t belong to me, you wouldn’t have come
Your liberation is tied to my liberation
My liberation is tied to your liberation
And your heart and my heart are very old friends
May all beings be free from suffering

♦

Originally published on Ruth King’s blog on July 1, 2024. Reprinted with permission.