Being a ‘Bad’ Buddhist

Sharon Suh: I think the book in many ways is a reflection of this yearning that many of us have had to find a place in a space where we could be our authentic selves. And so I think one of the things that’s happening right now is that there are more Asian American Buddhist communities that are developing that address that particular issue. So most of the temples that some of us that have grown up in are not the temples that really speak to the needs that we have. You know, many of them are still in that immigrant model, and many of us have been born here. We want something that resonates with our experience.

James Shaheen: Hello, and welcome to Tricycle Talks. I’m James Shaheen, and you just heard Sharon Suh. Sharon is a professor of theology and religious studies at Seattle University, and she is currently the president of Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women. Her new book, Emergent Dharma, brings together the voices of eleven Asian American feminist Buddhists and presents a dynamic vision of Buddhist practice and identity. In my conversation with Sharon, we talk about why she describes herself as a bad Buddhist, the dangers of equating Buddhism primarily with meditation, what it means for the book to be a sangha in written form, and what she’s learned from bell hooks about love as an action to end domination. So here’s my conversation with Sharon Suh.

James Shaheen: OK, so I’m here with Sharon Suh. Hi Sharon. It’s great to be with you.

Sharon Suh: Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

James Shaheen: So Sharon, we’re here to talk about your new book, Emergent Dharma: Asian American Feminist Buddhists on Practice, Identity, and Resistance. So to start, can you tell us a bit about the anthology and what inspired you to put it together?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, so this book has been a few years in the making in terms of an idea that I had several years ago where I wanted to have more of a presence of Asian American Buddhist women, both exploring their or our voices and views both in academic circles but also in looking at more community-based temples and communities, because communities, in many ways, it seemed like we were sort of stuck in the middle between predominantly white meditation centers where we didn’t really feel like we fit in, as well as in really ethnic-specific Asian American temples where sometimes we don’t actually speak the language, and so it seemed like we were always looking for some community and couldn’t find one. And so I was always like, “Hey, you should start this community,” and then my friends would be like, “You should start this community.” So I decided to do it in written form.

James Shaheen: Right, the book seems inextricably connected to a few different organizations you’re a part of: the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative; Sakyadhita, the international association of Buddhist women; and looser, more informal networks of friendship within and outside academia. So can you talk a bit about how these communities have shaped the development of this book? Because they’re coming from a lot of different places. I mean, it’s a very diverse group within an Asian American women feminist larger group.

Sharon Suh: Yeah, thanks for asking the question. So the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative, we call it APARRI because it’s easier to say. This is an organization that was founded really in the mid to late nineties, and it was an organization that was really supported and started by Jane Iwamura, who’s an author in the book. We were graduate students at the time, back in the day, and we were really interested in looking at Asian American Buddhist communities and Asian American religions, but the larger academy of Buddhist studies and American religion actually didn’t consider us to be really legitimate sources of study because either, you know, Asian Buddhists or Asian American Buddhists were too popular, you know, they only do devotion, they don’t do serious meditation practice, or the question would be like, “Well, why do you want to study race in the context of religion?” So back in the day, it seemed that there were only some forms of religion and religious communities that were considered important or valuable. And so in, I think it was ’96 or ’98, there was a first gathering of both scholars and graduate students of Asian and Asian American descent focusing on Asian American religions. And that was actually the most important thing for me because I suddenly found myself in a community of other people that recognized a lot of the similar issues that I wanted to look at in terms of Buddhism, race, gender, identity, and so that was really foundational. And we actually still meet every year, and so many of us graduate students have now become, you know, older senior faculty, and so it’s this great sort of mentoring organization. So that’s been really pivotal for the book because many of the original members are featured in the book. And we also keep adding new members into APARRI. You know, one of the things I like to do is to make sure that we’re highlighting the younger academics and graduate students because they’ve got their pulse on what’s happening now, which is pretty exciting.

And so Sakyadhita, the international association of Buddhist women, is an organization that I’m currently the president of. And so we meet every two years, mostly in Asia, and that organization was so pivotal to this book because it’s amazing what happens when you go to Asia and you gather, you know, anywhere between 1,500 to 2,800 Buddhist women from around the world, predominantly in Asia, recognizing this incredible group of Buddhist women flourishing, doing so many different things are things that you don’t ordinarily see in the US. And so it sort of flips the script in terms of what we’ve considered to be authentic Buddhism in the West. When you go to Asia, it’s a completely different view. And so that really shaped how I came about putting this anthology together.

James Shaheen: Can you say a little bit more about Sakyadhita and how this came about, because you were or are the president of Sakyadhita, isn’t that right?

Sharon Suh: Yes. So Sakyadhita started in 1987, and it originally was formed as a way of promoting and supporting and pushing for the full ordination of Buddhist women, primarily in parts of Southeast Asia in Theravada lineages. And so it has been this incredible organization. Honestly, I never thought that I would or should be president of this group, but I’m really grateful for it. I think many of my Asian American female friends will kind of laugh at this too, because they share this sense of sort of authenticity anxiety, like, what am I doing as a non-monastic Asian American bad lay Buddhist practitioner running this organization? And I still kind of struggle with that, but it’s still the organization itself is doing just so many incredible things for women in terms of elevating women’s issues of mental health and education, physical health, and it really highlights all really these amazing things that Buddhist women are doing all around Asia that we wouldn’t ordinarily know or see.

James Shaheen: Right. You mentioned monastics, and I know that Sakyadhita has done a lot to try to advance the ordination of women on a par with men, and in Sri Lanka not long ago there was a government decision to be the ones who would be in charge of recognition of bhikkhunis. What sort of effect do you think that would have?

Sharon Suh: You know, over the summer we met in Malaysia for a conference, and this was a big question because a lot of the women who had ordained as bhikkhuni were not listed as such on their passports. So that in and of itself was a really important sign that women didn’t have that level of parity with bhikkhus. But it was interesting because in the beginning of the conference there was one nun that was discussing this very thing, and by the end of the conference there was a shift in that ruling so that nuns could actually indicate that they were bhikkhunis on their passports. And we don’t normally think about passports as being so important in terms of identity, but in this particular case it was quite huge.

James Shaheen: Yeah, that’s big. OK, so back to your book for a moment. You say that the book in itself is a sangha in written form. So can you tell us what you mean by that?

Sharon Suh: Yeah. You know, I think it was sort of a play on my prior book, Silver Screen Buddha, where I talk about film as sutra, and just a way of creating and recreating a sense of community. And it’s not always something that has to be in person. So this sangha in written form that I highlight in Emergent Dharma is something that emerged, right? It emerged out of the context of the pandemic, and there were many of us who were longing to get together and be together at this time when Asian Americans were really being victimized, even more so than they were prior. And so we wanted to get together and find a way to support each other. So we created an online, I would call it a kind of lackadaisical sangha where we would get together once or twice a month, and we would be led in chanting by one person and then in meditation by another, and then we would just talk about whatever was on our minds.

That became, in many ways, the building block for Emergent Dharma, and creating a sangha in written form to me meant that we could write in a way that was publicly accessible, because I’m not really interested in writing things that most people can’t understand. And so I wanted to create this book as a way to resonate with others who might experience similar things. I mean, the book is very much focused on Asian American feminist Buddhists, but at the same time, we’re addressing a lot of issues that transcend those sort of limiting categories. So it’s like, yes, we’re important enough to write about as a topic, and there are things in here that might resonate with others. So creating a sangha in written form, it’s kind of like take a look, see if it resonates, and if it does, let’s continue this conversation.

James Shaheen: You know, you make a really nice etymological point about the word anthology, which literally means gathering flowers. So can you talk about this aspect of gathering?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, the sense of gathering in anthology, you know, I love the play on words, and I started thinking about the Avatamsaka Sutra and the Flower Ornament Sutra and garlands and, you know, how do we create this sangha, this community of Asian American feminist Buddhists? Well, the way to do it is by gathering in and inviting in voices and seeing what emerges.

And so I never had a sense that I wanted my authors to write about X, Y, or Z. And I think this was the hardest thing for a lot of the authors who I invited in, because some of them are academic practitioners or scholar-practitioners, and so they wanted to know, well, what should we write about? So I said, well, write the thing that you’ve always wanted to write.

And there was some anxiety, because they had to let go of some of that academic voice. And so I got some really beautiful first drafts that might be great for a journal on Buddhism, but that’s not what I wanted. You know, I wanted that first person experience of what does it mean to be an Asian American feminist Buddhist in your experience? And so from those varying voices, this book kind of emerged. And so that’s the part that I’m most excited about because it is much more creative. And so gathering those different voices in this anthology means like, hey, we’ve got eleven different voices coming together to create this particular version of what the dharma looks like for this community.

James Shaheen: Yeah, well, one of those voices, Jane Iwamura, we’ve adapted her essay and it’s going to appear in the spring issue, so we’re very happy. It was Sarah, our producer, who worked on that. But we’re happy to reprint that. So the book draws its title from the work of writer and activist adrienne maree brown, who wrote Emergent Strategy. So can you tell us about the title? What does Emergent Dharma mean to you?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, you know, emergent dharma means to me that this is a teaching and a community and one that’s continually evolving to meet the needs of, in this case, readers. And so it’s emerging in the sense that I feel like many of the issues that we’re tackling are ones that are far more nuanced than they were before, and so we want a way of interpreting the Buddhist dharma that meets the needs of practitioners today. And so the emergent part is simply that it’s evolving over time and that the sense of authority and what defines Buddhism is something that I think is much more powerful in this text because it’s one that has emerged from the various voices that were included. And so I never went in thinking that there is a phenomenon as Asian American feminist Buddhism. I didn’t come into this thinking that that was a thing, and I still don’t think it’s a thing. I think it’s just an evolving group of voices that are addressing issues that are relevant to our lives today.

James Shaheen: Well, the interesting thing about it is in a sense it is a thing. On the other hand, the voices are still very diverse. They’re not at all like each other, or they’re sympathetic to each other, but they’re working something out. And that’s the feeling I got looking through the book. You also center a question that brown poses, which is, and I’m quoting here, “How do we turn our collective full-bodied intelligence toward collaboration if that is the way we will survive?” So how do you think about this question?

Sharon Suh: I love this question because it really helps me think about Buddhist practice as community and community-based, community-centered, and the idea that any kind of liberation we’re experiencing, whether it’s in the very immediate present, is something that’s collectively experienced and we flourish in that sense of community.

You know, there’s so much of Buddhist practice that tends to be, at least as I’ve understood in the West, for me, has been a much more individualized experience. And I see this in the mindfulness world as well, and I’m somebody who very much is in favor of healing and utilizing mindfulness practices to heal trauma, things like that. But there’s a tendency to think of it as a more individualized experience.

So thinking about the collective liberation means also sharing and bringing to light the kinds of experiences that we’ve had, whether it’s been racism or sexism or both, classism, et cetera, in a way that can both incorporate and highlight all the experiences of the various authors, but also provide this as an opportunity for others to engage. So the sense of collective liberation is here’s a group of eleven authors, here’s what they’ve been grappling with, how they’ve been applying the Buddhist dharma in ways that might not seem legible to others. Nonetheless, they’ve been very powerful sources of healing. And so to present this in a book is also a collective, as in the readers might find something in here that resonates with their experience, and therefore it kind of grows. So that was my understanding of it.

James Shaheen: You know, it’s interesting. The founders of Tricycle were a group of people before me who were from the meditation-centric schools. That’s how they understood Buddhism. There was a bit of a learning curve before Pure Land and Nichiren became regular parts of our lineup, because in the beginning they existed to some extent, but they were marginalized, and one thread in this anthology is moving beyond equating Buddhism primarily with mindfulness or meditation and instead examining it as a living tradition with a wide array of practices and ways of being. So can you say more about the dangers of equating Buddhism with meditation, or at least the misconceptions that can arise?

Sharon Suh: Yes. One of the ways I think about this is that there’s this kind of authenticity gap when looking at Asian American Buddhist practices, because many of them are not about meditation. So you’ll see in the book, and you’re highlighting Jane’s essay, “Grave Remembrance,” so visiting the grave site of her parents as a form and a way of practicing Buddhism, or engaging in art making in the case of Naomi Kasumi’s chapter, and these are ways of applying and expressing the buddhadharma that have very little relationship to what we conceive of as the most important form of Buddhist practice in the West, which is meditation.

None of the women that I interviewed in this book, outside of one, really spends a lot of time thinking about and practicing meditation as the most important Buddhist practice. And so with, for example, Jodo Shinshu traditions, one of the things that I’ve always resonated with and found to be really powerful was the idea that everyday living is the practice of Buddhism. So that expressions of gratitude, for example, as a central Buddhist practice that’s not about sitting in meditation, but it’s about recognizing one’s interdependence and all other causes and conditions seen and unseen. So it’s in many ways the book is framed as an alternative model, but an alternative that’s not new. It’s more what do we pay attention to. In the world of Buddhism, it has been primarily meditation. But what happens when we turn the focus onto what’s already happening? It enriches our understanding of what Buddhism is.

I see this with my students all the time because they’re so worried that they’re not good meditators, and I’m like, neither am I, and yet I’m teaching Buddhism. So it just means that there’s different ways to practice. We’ve been stuck in this model that meditation and mindfulness are the most important ones. They haven’t always allowed us to figure out ways to be in our bodies in ways that are liberatory. You know, meditation has often been a practice where we have to work our way through the suffering body that’s sitting here in meditation for hours on end, and that has its benefits, but it doesn’t really allow us to engage with our bodies in a different way that is not forcing your body to sit in a particular position but rather looking at the ways that our bodies have suffered, you know, whether through racism or sexism, patriarchy, all of those things. Well, how does the Buddhist tradition and practice help us come to terms with that suffering without negating the body?

James Shaheen: Well, one of the interesting things that occurs to me as you’re talking is that these traditions side by side in this country have tended to influence each other, and it seems to me it’s a little bit later that Pure Land, the more exposure it got, also began to shape a larger American Buddhism, and one of the interesting things to me is how sometimes, like I’m a meditation-centric Buddhist, right? And sometimes the idea of agency in Pure Land Buddhism has been very helpful to me when I’m overexerting myself trying to do something, and as I told my teacher once, sometimes I just say Namu Amida Butsu and I relax, you know? So it’s interesting how all of the traditions start to shape each other in the same place, and I think that has been invaluable to me. I just wanted to point that out because people think of, say, the Mahayana or they think of the Tibetan tradition or the Zen tradition influencing Theravada and the other way around. Now we can really think also in terms of, I think, extraordinarily, Pure Land’s understanding of agency, which is something that is kind of liberating at times when you reach a point in your practice where you’re thinking, “I’m a fool,” you know, and that I found very interesting. That’s all.

Sharon Suh: Yeah. I would say, you know, I find the same resonance with the Jodo Shinshu tradition and thinking about other power meaning other than self. So a lot of times people think about other power and they automatically assume that it’s a godlike figure that you’re giving up all of your desire, et cetera, too. But one of the ways that I’ve learned about it is it’s other power as in other than self power. And that resonated with me.

James Shaheen: Yeah, absolutely. That’s how I felt. I thought if somebody says, “Well, what is other power?” I just say, “I don’t know, but it’s not me,” you know? And that’s very helpful.

Sharon Suh: It’s like an incredible way of thinking about all the different Buddhist traditions and lineages and practices as working on us in really different ways.

James Shaheen: Playing with this notion of authenticity, which you mentioned earlier, you note that you describe yourself as a bad Buddhist, and you’ve hinted at that, taking a cue from Roxane Gay, who calls herself a bad feminist. So what do you mean when you say you’re a bad Buddhist? It’s a very Pure Land approach, I think.

Sharon Suh: Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I guess it depends on what circles you’re running in, right? So if I were to say this in, you’re right, a Shin Buddhist temple, everyone would be like, “So are we.”

James Shaheen: Yeah, exactly

Sharon Suh: And it’s the recognition like, ah, this dang ego that we have. But being a bad Buddhist, you know, it was a very intentional way of saying that one can be Buddhist but not have to sacrifice oneself on the altar of some sort of Buddhist piety or piousness or even meditation, and this is one of Roxane’s main arguments when she said that she was a bad feminist, like yes, completely committed to feminist ideals, but not the image of the traditional feminist. And I think that that’s really played an important part throughout this entire book where some of the authors began to identify themselves in such a way as well, like being a bad Buddhist auntie. And so it’s a way of saying, yeah, we consider ourselves Buddhist and are a little tired of that authenticity anxiety, where we’re measuring ourselves up to a yardstick that wasn’t made for us.

So rather than thinking of ourselves as inauthentic Buddhist, because we don’t meditate, there is a play on being the bad Buddhist, right? Like, yeah, we’re bad in that we don’t practice meditation as much as people think we should, but there’s a richness and a different framing of what it means to be Buddhist and an authentic Buddhist. So being a bad Buddhist is kind of being a good Buddhist.

James Shaheen: Yeah, there’s a little humility there. I’m not a perfect Buddhist. It’s like how people want to be a perfect meditator. It doesn’t happen. Another guiding figure for the anthology is the feminist killjoy, a term popularized by feminist theorist Sara Ahmed. So what is a feminist killjoy and how has this figure been a North Star for you?

Sharon Suh: Oh boy. Yeah. So the feminist killjoy is the feminist who is willing to kill the joy, if you will, of white supremacy and patriarchy and is the person that will often invoke eye-rolling, sighs of indignation and resignation, like, “Oh, here she goes again,” and I have been in those academic circles where I’m giving a talk on Buddhism and feminism and race, and things have changed. Things have really changed. But I remember giving a paper at the American Academy of Religion, maybe 2017 or 2018, and there were many white male scholars in the room, and they just weren’t having it. It must have been 2017 because that’s when Ahmed’s book came out, but I was talking about the Buddhist killjoy, and I could see in the audience the very same things that I was writing about: Why are we here? You know, people sitting back in their chairs, looking at each other, rolling their eyes because we were leveling a critique of this academic institution, and those in power didn’t want to hear it because we were killing the joy. You know, they’ve worked in this area for so long and they got to define the parameters of what was considered real scholarship and real Buddhism versus what was not. And so I was coming in and saying, “Hey, you know, there’s some problems here.” And that was maybe 2017.

Fast forward to 2019. There was another panel that I organized on Asian American Buddhist practice, and many of the same people were in that room, but I will tell you, the energy was completely different. There was no more eye-rolling. And there were a few of the authors that are in this book were on that panel as well. And I had invited Mushim Ikeda as a speaker, who’s not an academic, and so she began actually with a Buddhist teaching, which is unheard of in these circles. And what ended up happening at the end of this panel is that we received a standing ovation, which is, if you know the American Academy of Religion, that does not happen. And so, I don’t know if it was, you know, it was probably partially because people were very excited about what was being said, but also I think there were a good number of those same people in the room in 2017 that recognized they couldn’t do that anymore.

James Shaheen: You mentioned that you got a standing ovation, and this is something I was talking to our producer about earlier, and I was wondering what you thought in terms of how much progress has there been? Obviously, probably not as much as you’d like to see, but are there any encouraging signs that there is progress?

Sharon Suh: Oh yeah, absolutely. It’s never an either-or game here, right? So I find a lot of hopefulness in things that are happening in the more general public, and I’m only going to limit this to Buddhists and Asian American Buddhists. And so if you think back to the gathering during the pandemic and after the murders of the spa workers in Atlanta and after George Floyd’s murder, there was this very large gathering of Buddhists called May We Gather, and I’m sure that you’ve covered it through Tricycle.

James Shaheen: Yeah, Duncan Williams was very involved.

Sharon Suh: Yeah, Duncan was involved in that. Funie Hsu, who is one of my authors, Chenxing Han, who’s one of my authors. So these are longstanding Asian American Buddhists who organized this incredible event and then had another follow-up event and then another, and this made me incredibly hopeful because not only was it something that was benefiting Asian American Buddhists and honoring and memorializing those who’ve been murdered, but also it was getting the kind of traction that we need to be more visible.

You know, Funie’s point was, I think she wrote an article called “We’ve Been Here All Along,” and I think seeing this event, where you had multiple Asian American Buddhists, monastics, lay Buddhists, men and women, multiple generations, I think that was an incredible moment in time, and I don’t think it was a one-off. I think it was a really powerful image that came into our American consciousness, that wow, here are Buddhists that have been here all along, and here’s how they are responding to a profound tragedy and trauma. And I think it was eye-opening.

James Shaheen: Right. Well, I think the violence against Asian Americans during the pandemic reminded people that it hasn’t gone away, that that underlying sentiment is there and can be awakened, and that fear and that violence that resulted. You know, just back to the killjoy for a moment, since I was so delighted by that whole concept. Part of it is that you say that when you expose a problem, you become the problem, hence the killjoy. So you are the problem because you’re bringing up the problem. Can you say something about that?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, it is much easier to associate the problem with the person who brings it up rather than looking for the solutions to the problem, which often in this case happen to be the very same people who are really invested in whatever power they have. And so by becoming the problem, you know, I see this in the workplace all the time. If you point out inequities, then you’re the bad person who is creating all these problems. Like, if I point out racism, it’s like, “Oh, there she goes again. And so it becomes identified with a person rather than with the institution, or rather than with the organization in which these power dynamics exist. So it’s much easier to roll your eyes and say, “Ah, it’s her again,” and so it’s a distancing of oneself from the impact that one’s power has.

James Shaheen: Right. I thought that was very well put, and I think it really comes through in the book. But one thing that really interested me and one theme of the collection is the question of what it means to be a scholar-practitioner, and you mentioned before the discomfort many of the scholars felt when they go, “Oh, I don’t know if I can come out and talk about myself,” because it’s very personal. So I’m thinking especially of Nalika Gajaweera.

Sharon Suh: Yeah, Nali’s book.

James Shaheen: OK, Nali’s chapter in the anthology, “Critical Affinity,” where she suggests interrogating and expanding the use of the term scholar-practitioner. So how have you come to understand this term? Because I know for a long time, scholars weren’t even allowed to profess a religion. They weren’t even allowed to admit they were a Buddhist. It was a little bit different. Christian theologians got to do it, but Buddhists certainly didn’t. and still there was always a separation. So can you say something about this term scholar-practitioner?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, I mean, I wish we could just get away from the term altogether. I mean, I’ve been in this academic game for twenty-six years teaching, and the more I’m in it, the less I want to be in it in terms of the terminology itself. And so scholar-practitioner is a term that is far more radical than it should be, you know, the idea that scholars should be practitioners would somehow reduce our intelligence or our ability to be objective. And so in many ways it, it’s sort of that distinction between theology and religious studies that I sometimes come up against, where theologians are the believers, but religious studies scholars, well, they’re so far removed, how can they really understand, it’s so colonizing. But you know, for me, and I only talk about myself here, as a scholar practitioner, I think it’s a useful term for people who want to feel frankly liberated from the limitations of scholarly writing or their scholarly voice where you have to maintain a certain kind of authenticity and an authority, but that’s never been something that resonated with me. And I think this is the case with many of the academics that are featured in this book, we’re part of it, we’ve learned to play the game, we know the language, but it’s not really where we want to live, because that’s not the Buddhist practice. For us, that’s the scholarly discussion of the practice, which is really different from the lived experience.

James Shaheen: I think it’s fair to say that the book is also motivated by love, and specifically love as an action that can end domination. So can you tell us about what working on this anthology has taught you about love?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, that it’s not easy.

James Shaheen: It’s not even easy to ask, frankly.

Sharon Suh: Yeah, you know, I think the book is so much so inspired, and I’m so inspired by bell hooks. When I met her, it was 2006 and we were both on a panel on American Buddhism and feminism at a conference at Smith College. And being bell hooks, I was just in awe of the person and the image. And then one of the things that she said to me, well, first of all, she reached out to me, and this was such an important moment. It sounds a little minor, but it was quite large for me because here’s somebody who is renowned and I was just on the tenure track at that point, and she stopped me on the bus. I heard her voice, and she’s calling my name and I turn around and I’m like, oh my gosh, bell hooks is saying my name, and she’s like, “I just read your book.” So it was my first book, Being Buddhist in a Christian World, and she said, “You know, I just loved it, and here’s why.” And so we get on this stage and I start talking about myself as a bad Buddhist. So this is something that predates Roxane Gay, but I was like, you know, I don’t really consider myself a very good Buddhist because I have no time to meditate. I’ve got two little kids. I’m working nonstop. So I’m not really, what am I doing here? Ultimate authenticity anxiety. And she looks at me, and this was, to me, such a validation, which love for me is also about validation. She said, “You know, all you need is one or two minutes. Maybe your practice is being with the kids, going through all of this struggle. That’s the practice. So why are you struggling to fit something into your already busy life when your busy life is where the dharma is?”

And for me, that was a profound moment because it shifted and changed the way I understood my own practice, like I was good enough. And it sounds, you know, like kind of a silly thing to say like, “Oh, I’m good enough.” But it was really powerful because I had never felt like my practice was good enough because it didn’t measure up against these meditators I kept seeing in all these Buddhist meditation centers, and so that moment where she reframed that for me was really powerful. And so I think about the impact that somebody like bell hooks had on me. And I think, you know, I’m certainly no bell hooks, but maybe there’s a way that I can express a care and a validation for other practitioners and other people that I meet that is in that similar vein. And so when I talk about love and self-love and the importance of that for liberation, it’s really about, for me, validation, seeing, affirming, and recognizing because for many of us who are featured in the book, we have not experienced those things, and certainly some of our authors, including myself, we write about how in Asian American family dynamics, we don’t often talk about love. You know, there’s this kind of sense of duty and obligation, and so many of us are questioning, well, what if our families didn’t cultivate the kind of love that we needed? And so that’s what we’re getting at in this book.

James Shaheen: That’s very interesting. You know, I think I’m not confusing essays. I think in Jane Iwamura’s essay, she grows up in a family whose heritage is Jodo Shinshu, she leaves and goes to study and practice Christianity, and she returns as if she were returning home and embraces her Jodo Shinshu roots. And you talked about being a Buddhist in a Christian world, that’s a pretty good description of her own ambivalence or maybe even confusion, she doesn’t say, of leaving and then coming back. I wonder if you have anything to say about that, that being drawn away from this family tradition and then returning, because it’s really quite moving. She visits with her children the graves of her parents.

Sharon Suh: Yeah, I think that ambivalence is a theme that comes up quite a bit in this book, and it’s important because there are a few voices, a few authors in the text that talk about this ambivalent relationship they’ve had to Buddhism, whether it’s because of the family relationships, or they’re almost so Buddhist that they don’t talk about being Buddhist. And so there’s this sense of affinity, but in Jane’s chapter, she writes about going to church and joining these youth groups. And I think part of that is the natural process of figuring out like, who am I, what is religion anyway? And Jane and I met when we were in divinity school, back in the day when we met, and so I think we were both grappling with these questions. And there is an ambivalence, especially if one is raised Buddhist, of questioning, right? And college is a great ultimate time to question everything and question your assumptions, which is a very Buddhist practice as well. And so we see this ambivalence of course in Chenxing Han’s chapter, we see it in Nali’s chapter, we see it in Mihiri’s chapter, this ambivalence where we’re raised as Buddhist, but wait, there’s all these things that Buddhists are doing that we don’t really support, and yet there’s something very powerful about the tradition. So that’s something that comes through in the book as well, this ambivalence about one’s own tradition.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I just want to make sure I understood something correctly earlier. You talk about, OK, the meditation-centric traditions are separate, and even the Asian sanghas where you don’t speak the language, that’s separate, and then you guys are somewhere in between finding your way, and the book seems to be in part a way of finding your way. Is that fair to say?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for seeing that. You know, I think the book in many ways is a reflection of this yearning that many of us have had to find a place in a space where we could be our authentic selves. Many of us are second, third, fourth generation Asian Americans whose primary language has been English. So there is that sense of ambivalence of going to a temple where you don’t really speak the language, but everybody looks like you, so you kind of want to fit in, but you don’t. And so I think one of the things that’s happening right now is that there are more Asian American Buddhist communities that are developing that address that particular issue. So most of the temples that some of us that have grown up in are not the temples that really speak to the needs that we have. You know, many of them are still in that immigrant model, and many of us have been born here. We want something that resonates with our experience.

James Shaheen: Yeah, it follows the typical pattern that by the third generation, the language is lost. So the Sansei are no longer speaking Japanese, for instance. It just seems to work that way in American immigrant families. The third generation, forget it. The language is gone, certainly in my case. So related to this ambivalence that we were talking about, you also explore the relationship between love and rage, and you note that in your own life, learning to practice self-love has almost meant listening to your anger. So can you tell us about this connection, love and rage?

Sharon Suh: Yes. I’ve always felt like the expression of anger in Asian American families is something that’s really fraught. You know, there’s the kind of typical stereotypical mom raging. If you watch K-drama, you see this, right? The mother’s always raging, but inside the home. So it’s never outside of the home. Any kind of political anger is something that’s repressed outside the home. It’s probably reproduced in the home, but in a different sort of way with different recipients of that rage. But it’s something that’s not really accepted. And the idea that as daughters, and all of us in the book, we’re daughters. We’ve experienced this kind of socialization that expressing rage is not OK. Expressing anger is not OK. You’re not a good daughter, not a good Asian daughter. So there’s a lot of suppression of anger and a lot of suppression of rage. But what I’ve come to understand is that rage is an indication that something is very wrong. So rather than trying to brush it under their table or meditate our way through it, you know, it’s to acknowledge that these are feelings and sensations that we’re having that are actually based in something that’s really happening. And in order to acknowledge it and see it, yeah, that’s kind of a new way of being in relationship to anger. And in the Buddhist world, we’re not really supposed to be consumed by anger, but recognizing it is incredibly powerful.

James Shaheen: You know, Ken Yamada once told me when he was reading people like Chenxing Han and Funie Hsu, he said, “It’s time.” You know, it’s really time because when he felt anger, it wasn’t permissible for him to express it. He’s another generation. So he was sort of behind this generation saying yes, and recognizing that. 

Sharon Suh: Yeah, and you know, we have a number of Asian American Buddhist feminist activists in this text, and I think that as an activist, you know, the acknowledgment of disempowerment coincides with the expression of anger. And anger can be really healthy when it acknowledges certain wrongs and tries to undo those harms. And so I used to shy away from expressing anger. And it’s not that easy for me even now.

James Shaheen: Well, the onus on women is additional. Again, she’s a problem. Right?

Sharon Suh: Right, what’s wrong with her? And, you know, if a man expresses anger, well, there’s a grand injustice out there, whereas if a woman expresses anger, she’s unhinged

James Shaheen: Right. And for a man it can be an expression of power, and women are penalized more for expressing anger.

Sharon Suh: Right, and you know, as someone who’s my age, mother of grown children, I still struggle with that, but I always come back to the reminder that if I’m angry, let’s take a look and see what I’m angry about. And that connects to self-love for me because it’s not denying the experiences that I’m having that are real. To ignore the anger and just to get over the anger like many of us have been taught, it’s harmful. It’s harmful for the self, and it’s harmful for any kind of relationship that we’re in because we’re suppressing something that needs to be expressed. You know, there are ways to express it that are more useful than others, more skillful than others. I think that that’s something that I would want to highlight, and hopefully that comes through in the book, but if it doesn’t, I want to make sure that I recognize that there’s different ways to express rage and anger.

James Shaheen: Yeah, I mean, Buddhism has very particular ways of responding to anger, but it never says to deny that it’s there. I think that’s part of what you’re saying. Is that fair?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, and as Asian Americans being raised in the US as the model minority, we don’t express anger. It’s not safe to express anger. So expressing anger in the grocery store, you know, when something is happening, it’s not a safe thing to do. And so both inside, internal to the family system, as well as in the larger context of American race and racialization, it’s never been safe or useful or healthy, if you will, to express anger because the consequences were so dire.

James Shaheen: Right. So before we close, I also wanted to ask about your previous book, Occupy This Body: A Buddhist Memoir, which explores these themes of love and anger in your own family life, particularly in relationship to food. So could you tell us a little bit about the book?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, so that was a memoir that I wrote that came out in 2019, and it really is a narrative of how Buddhism has helped me come to terms with living in this body. I grew up, my mother was an immigrant from Korea, first-generation, came to the US in 1960 and she was undiagnosed mentally ill, bulimic and anorexic. Within an Asian American family, we never talked about it. And she had a lot of rage. And that rage, I was the recipient of that rage. And so this book is really a narrative of my experiences growing up with a mentally ill mother and how I came to the Buddhist tradition first from an intellectual perspective, thinking that the four noble truths from an intellectual perspective would help me solve some of these problems, which it helped me frame, but didn’t really help me live in this body in a more healthy way. And so it was really just through different kinds of practices that I outline in the book. So that is a book that, you know, it’s a memoir, so it’s very private-public, public-private. And it’s complicated. I’m glad I wrote it, but every once in a while when somebody I meet hasn’t met me before, but they’ve read my book, I’m like, “Oh, what are you thinking now?”

James Shaheen: Especially for an academic, I mean, again, there’s that line, where there’s this public persona and then there’s this private life that typically isn’t expressed among academics, but there you are. So, Sharon, anything before we close?

Sharon Suh: Well, just to follow up on that memoir, I do think that a lot more academics are moving in that area. I kind of just ripped the bandaid off and I wrote about all of it, but I do think that people are starting to become more comfortable with this kind of self-narrative and sharing the difficulties because I don’t think I want to teach about Buddhism if people can’t see how it might be beneficial.

There’s ways that we can talk about suffering and the reduction of suffering and the four noble truths and the noble eightfold path. But if we don’t see how it works and we don’t provide an opportunity for people to hear and see and recognize that, and this goes back to one of the chapters in the book, in Syd Yang’s chapter, like, wow, Buddhism can actually be really beneficial for things I’m actually struggling with, like bulimia in Syd’s case. So again, what I think is really valuable about the book is that the authors, and me too, we’re sharing how there have been these really difficult experiences and this is how we’ve dealt with it within the context of Buddhism. It might not be meditation, but there’s a lot of other ways to heal.

James Shaheen: That’s interesting, I think of being an undergraduate and taking courses in philosophy and never getting to where this might actually have something to do with my life. So I think that’s what you’re talking about with regard to teaching Buddhism, like what does this actually have to do with my life? I mean, how does it make a difference in my life?

Sharon Suh: Yeah, and I’ve never been the academic or the scholar who wants to set herself apart as the authority on anything. It’s like, here’s my experience, here’s what’s helped, see if it lands.

James Shaheen: And I’m a bad Buddhist, right?

Sharon Suh: Yes.

James Shaheen: OK, Sharon Suh, it’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us. For our listeners, be sure to pick up a copy of Emergent Dharma, available now. Thank you, Sharon.

Sharon Suh: Thank you so much.

James Shaheen: ​​You’ve been listening to Tricycle Talks with Sharon Suh. Tricycle is a nonprofit educational organization dedicated to making Buddhist teachings and practices broadly available. We are pleased to offer our podcasts freely. If you would like to support the podcast, please consider subscribing to Tricycle or making a donation at tricycle.org/donate. We’d love to hear your thoughts about the podcast, so write us at feedback@tricycle.org to let us know what you think. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts. To keep up with the show, you can follow Tricycle Talks wherever you listen to podcasts. Tricycle Talks is produced by Sarah Fleming and the Podglomerate. I’m James Shaheen, editor-in-chief of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Thanks for listening!