"Something Has To Change": Blacks In American Buddhism by Lawrence Pintak
http://vmdd.tech.mylinuxisp.com/buddhism/links.html
"Something Has To Change": Blacks In American Buddhism by Lawrence
Pintak
Jan Willis was feeling euphoric. Sitting in the basement of a
church in London's impoverished East End last summer, she
looked around and realized that of the 40-odd people in the
room, 31 were black.
"Black Buddhists!" she exclaims at the memory. "In 25 years
in Buddhism, I had never been in such a sangha. I felt so
high. It was great!"
For Willis and the handful of African-American Buddhist
teachers now beginning to speak out, Buddhism in America has
been a homogeneous world inhabited largely by upper-middle-
class whites.
"There are a lot of black Buddhists who are in the closet.
They just don't feel comfortable being part of the great
white sangha," says Insight Meditation teacher Ralph Steele.
"One of the most common phrases I hear from young black
Buddhists when they do step out into the white Buddhist
sangha is that they feel uncomfortable."
Through the eyes of African-American teachers like Shu Shin
priest Joseph Jarman, white Buddhist America is largely blind
to the existence of a black sangha. That was driven home to
him at last year's Buddhism in America conference. "People
there had never known there were African-American Buddhist
priests and educators in this country; they just never
appear," he recalls. "That was like opening another door."
For Willis, Steele and Jarman, their journeys as Buddhists
have been part of a larger journey of emerging from the
shadows of racial prejudice. They continue to deal with it,
subtly and not so subtly, both in the greater society and
within the American Buddhist world.
The world that Jan Willis experienced as a barefoot little
girl playing in the dusty alleys of an Alabama mining camp in
the mid-1950's was carefully divided into black and white.
The border lay just a few blocks from where she lived, where
the white cottages began. Forbidden territory. Stronghold of
the Ku Klux Klan.
The Klan's shadow lay heavy over the hamlet where Willis was
born and raised, a tangible presence even to a little girl.
She saw firsthand the beatings and other punishments meted
out to blacks who stepped out of line-those who committed
transgressions like accidentally stepping on white-owned
property while walking to school or the grocery store, with
its "white" and "colored" water fountains. If she had any
doubts about her place in the world, they were consumed in
the flames of the cross the Klan ignited on her front lawn
one terrifying night, as Willis, her sister and her mother
cowered in their home waiting to die.
The bomb they expected that night never came, but the Klan's
constant threats and intimidation took their toll. "This
unimaginable psychic terror crippled my self-esteem and the
self-esteem of many black people," Willis would write years
later in her book, Dreaming Me: An African-American Woman's
Spiritual Journey. "I am witness to its scars."
In her search for healing, she would march with Martin Luther
King Jr. in Birmingham, take part in the armed takeover of
the Cornell student union building by militant blacks, and
ultimately find her way to the hut of a gentle Tibetan monk
in the hills outside Kathmandu. From a Buddhist perspective,
it would be said that a combination of karma and auspicious
coincidence brought Willis to the doorstep of Lama Yeshe
Thubten, the teacher who would become her root guru. However,
for most African-Americans, she believes, lack of money keeps
the door to the dharma firmly shut.
"There are far too few people of color in Buddhist centers
and retreats, in part because of the nature of where the
retreats are and the fact that they cost money," says Willis,
now one of the nation's leading Buddhist academics. "It's
about class. Working class people can't take a month off to
go on retreat.
"Buddhism is a commodity like everything else in the States,"
the Wesleyan University professor of religion adds. "Trungpa
Rinpoche talked about 'spiritual materialism.' You can choose
among hundreds of different traditions and lineages in the
spiritual supermarket, and then you pay.
"That's part of why Soka Gakkai has had success," she says of
the Japanese Pure Land organization, which counts many blacks
among its members. "They're in the cities, they've tried so
hard to bend over backwards to assimilate with American
holidays and they have a simple ritual." The same, Willis
continues, is true of the Friends of the Western Buddhist
Order, the group she met with in Britain. But in the American
sanghas of the more traditional Buddhist lineages, blacks are
largely absent.
Ralph Steele has also begun to tackle prejudice and exclusion
within the sangha.
"Diversity," he says, "is a magic word here in America, but
no one has been tackling diversity on a cultural basis in
Buddhism." The New Mexico-based teacher wrote a letter last
year to 25 leading American Buddhists calling for a greater
emphasis on inclusion. "Our sangha will end up being like the
Christian Church-there will be a white Buddhist sangha, a
black Buddhist sangha, an Hispanic Buddhist sangha-if we
don't begin to do something about bringing Buddhism into the
whole of an American sangha."
Spirituality runs in Ralph Steele's blood. The grandson of a
minister, Steele's family has run a church for the past 150
years. A devout Christian upbringing is one of the things
that Steele shares with Willis and Jarman-and the vast
majority of African-Americans.
He also shares with them the experience of living as an
outsider. Steele grew up on Pawleys Island, a then-isolated
speck of land off the South Carolina coast populated by freed
slaves from Sierra Leone. Steele grew up speaking Gullah, a
Creole language formed from Elizabethan English and African
dialects. He was 12 years old before he spoke English.
"It has always been a practicing Christian community," he
said. "What that means is that when some Christians elsewhere
started saying they were 'born again,' that never happened
there because no one ever left Christ."
An Army brat, Steele's first exposure to the dharma came
during his high school years in Japan, when he began to study
martial arts. He remembers the day his instructor leaped up
and kicked the rim of a basketball hoop. "That's when my life
began to change," he says. "Right then I knew that life was
different from how you see things."
Like so many Vietnam veterans, Steele was nearly destroyed by
the war. Along with physical and psychic scars, Steele
brought home an addiction to heroin and a five-pack-a-day
cigarette habit. He credits devotion to his martial arts
teacher and to the discipline of martial arts practice with
getting him through.
"It wasn't the martial arts itself," he says. "It was the
teacher, the trust in the teacher." Back in the States,
Steele enrolled at the University of California at Santa Cruz
and signed up for a course on Buddhism-taught by a young
black professor named Jan Willis. "I was pretty tough on
him," Willis reports without elaboration.
Among the things he learned from her were techniques of
meditation from the Tibetan tradition. "That helped, because
I was simultaneously going down to Palo Alto VA hospital to
deal with flashbacks," he says. "Meditation allowed me to
begin to get some balance."
His Christian connection still strong, Steele would go on
frequent meditation retreats at a Catholic hermitage in Big
Sur, and, for a time, even considered joining the order. But
his link with Buddhism was cemented when Willis went on
sabbatical and Lama Thubten Yeshe came to teach in her place
at UC-Santa Cruz. Not long after, the 16th Karmapa, head of
the Kagyu lineage of Tibetan Buddhism, came to town: "I went
on a one-week retreat to prepare to meet him. When I went up
to get his blessing, we had this exchange: I gave him a
rosary and he gave me refuge."
Now a psychotherapist, Steele runs the Life Transition
Institute in Santa Fe, a center built around the body-mind
meditation practices pioneered by Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn. But
Steele had several stops en route to New Mexico. He practiced
briefly in Seattle, using Buddhist psychotherapy techniques,
but he began to receive death threats and left for Portland,
Oregon, where he spent many months with the renowned Tibetan
teacher Kalu Rinpoche. In those days, the idea of teaching
Buddhism never crossed Steele's mind. But then, nine years
ago at a Metta retreat with Joseph Goldstein, co-founder of
the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), Steele looked around
and realized that he and one Vietnamese practitioner were the
only non-whites in the crowd. Steele recalls that he said,
"Joseph, something has to change," to which Goldstein
replied, "Yes, but for now just do the practice." Steele did.
But eventually, during a retreat in Santa Fe, he told Jack
Kornfield, another IMS co-founder, that he was ready to
teach. "I saw myself starting to become a closet
practitioner, and I didn't want to do that," he says now. And
how does his Christian family back on Pawleys Island take his
new role? "They all accept what I do. People walk their
practice there. They have a deep understanding of what
practice is."
Not everyone involved in mainstream Buddhism is sitting with
hands folded in their laps when it comes to diversifying the
sangha. Spirit Rock in Woodacre, California, for example, is
opening a new center in the heart of Oakland. Ralph Steele
sees such steps as positive, but not enough. "More people are
speaking it than actually doing anything," he says sadly.
Where efforts are being made, the transition is not always
easy. Steele recalls a diversity training day at Spirit Rock
when discussion turned to the idea of proactively seeking out
Buddhists of color. "They got the message that their sangha
wouldn't be the same and they got scared," he remembers. "The
reaction was: 'I don't know if I could handle that kind of
shift.' They had to sit with that and assimilate it."
So where are the black Buddhists, if not in the sanghas of
the mainstream schools? Robina Courtin, an Australian nun who
heads a dharma prison project, has a ready answer: "They are
all in prison."
Joseph Jarman, whose own son is behind bars, reluctantly
agrees. "The vast majority of them are." The reason, he says,
is that only in prison do many African-Americans encounter
the dharma. "In our culture, many people commit crimes
because of psychological perspectives of the Devil or some
negative energy overtaking them," says Jarman, who runs a
martial arts dojo and leads a multicultural sangha in
Brooklyn. "Buddhism doesn't have those perspectives, but
instead offers tools for dealing with non-positive energy."
Jarman has firsthand knowledge of those tools. In the late
1950's, he served in a secret U.S. Army Special Forces unit
in Southeast Asia. The experience was so traumatic that for a
year after his return he was literally mute. "I was in a
negative space-a super-negative space-filled with depression
and completely alienated from society," he recalls. "I was
going to a library daily and not speaking, and one day, the
librarian, this old man, gave me this book and said it was
the teachings of the Buddha."
Shortly after, as he began to recover at a Milwaukee
hospital, Jarman met the Japanese priest who would become his
teacher: "I said, 'Hello,' and he said, 'I give you ten
thousand years and then I will kill you,' and I said, 'O.K.'"
A month after that enigmatic encounter, Jarman, a fifth-
degree black belt Aikido master, was invited to a karate
demonstration at a nearby Buddhist temple. "And who is there,
but this guy. After that, I began to go there once a week."
The teachings, Jarman says, helped him to transform his image
of himself and move beyond the anger and suffering to which
he had clung since Southeast Asia. He would go on to become a
successful jazz musician, retiring in 1993 from the renowned
Art Ensemble of Chicago.
In spite of the marginalization of blacks in the American
sangha, Willis believes that Buddhism can offer the kinds of
transformation that she-and Steele and Jarman-have
experienced to other African-Americans. "Buddhism offers a
method for helping us improve our self-esteem, because the
legacy of slavery and racism is so heavy," says Willis, who
describes her autobiography as a narrative about self-esteem.
"It's something people don't want to talk about but that all
of us feel the weight of."
Willis came to the dharma at the height of the civil rights
movement in the sixties, eventually choosing a fellowship to
study Buddhism in Asia over an invitation to join the Black
Panthers. Soon after she met Lama Yeshe, who offered the
angry young activist an entirely new perspective on herself.
"That's what Lama Yeshe took 15 years doing, transforming me.
It took that long," she says with a laugh, then continues,
imitating her teacher's broken English: "'You O.K. You mind
pure. You quick intellect.' All the time, he'd tell people,
'Be strong like this woman.' I think we can all use that."
In particular, the black students who come to her angry,
confused and uncomfortable in their own skins could benefit
from this message of basic purity, she says. "I want them to
know there are some methods out there for helping with self-
confidence and self-esteem," says Willis. "I truly believe
that Buddhism-especially tantric Buddhism, because
visualization is so central to the method-is something that
can help us re-envision ourselves, help us put down this
heavy weight we carry around with us."
Willis calls herself a "Baptist Buddhist." Growing up in the
revival meeting tents of the Old South, she watched in awe as
friends and relatives were swept up in spiritual frenzy.
"Quite simply," she wrote in Dreaming Me, "nothing scared me
more than black women engaged, as good feeling Christians, in
the activity known as 'shouting.'" But it was in just such a
setting that the diminutive 14 year old "found Jesus" and was
baptized in a water tank out behind the church. On that day,
Willis first felt herself engulfed in spiritual love as
friends and family reached out to welcome her into the bosom
of the church.
"These hands were wondrous things. They were like the Holy
opening its arms to me. This love, in a flash, dissolved all
my fears. These hands took me completely beyond myself. They
reached out with equanimity toward all," she writes in the
book. "For the first time, I felt that I belonged to a family
as big as humankind itself; and yet even bigger than that,
taking in all creatures who breathed and cried and struggled
and sang."
Years later, meditating on a Himalayan mountain, she would
again touch that equanimity and recognize the common roots of
love and compassion that link the Christianity into which she
was born and the Buddhism she had embraced. Still, it was
with some trepidation that she returned to Alabama with her
new-found beliefs, only to find her conviction that Buddhist
meditation had much to offer African-Americans confirmed by
none other than the pastor of the church where her father
served as deacon.
"We Baptists could use some of these methods," she recalls
him declaring. "It's one thing to say, 'Love thy neighbor.'
It's a whole 'nother thing to do it." That, she says, holds
true even for Buddhists: "I can't even love myself! So we're
talking about transforming prejudices about others and about
ourselves." Willis and colleague Marlise Bosch, a women's
counselor in the Netherlands, are currently at work on a
booklet containing a series of visualizations and exercises
designed to help American Buddhists confront-and go beyond-
their innate prejudices.
"The fear is there, and for any human being in this country
to say they don't have any issues with regard to another
culture is absurd," says Ralph Steele, who looks forward to
teaching the exercises. "But when you sit in a room and face
off with other human beings, stuff is going to come up." The
foundation of Willis' booklet was laid at a series of
workshops she held at the Vajrapani Institute, in which
participants used drawings, visualizations and movement
exercises to begin to recognize how they viewed those around
them. "We started with awareness of our own prejudices,
writing lists of what we thought the first time we saw
someone in a wheelchair, a child with Down's Syndrome, an old
person driving," Willis recalls. "Not one minute had gone by
before the words discomfort, frustration, mistrust, anger and
hatred came up."
In her early days in India, several lamas told Willis that
she had been Tibetan in a past life. The patch of white in
her hair, she was told, was a mark Tibet's dharma king,
Trisong Detsen, conferred on those who had helped construct
the great monastery at Samten. If that were true, she
wondered, why was she reborn in the body of an African-
American woman? Willis now thinks she has the answer.
"Can you think of two more oppressed groups: to be a black
woman in the Jim Crow South?" she asks with a laugh. "I
figured I was supposed to do something with this life, I had
no idea it was going to be this: developing meditations on
transforming prejudice. But that upbringing made sure I was
familiar with it."
Earlier this year, Joseph Jarman sat in meditation beneath
the Bodhi Tree, the site of the Buddha's enlightenment. It
had been more than 40 years since he had first been exposed
to the basic ideas of Buddhism. Now he was deep in a
spiritual experience that he would forever treasure.
"I felt like I was floating," he recalls. "Even though I have
meditated for 30 years, I never had that feeling. The energy
was just like a barrel of water being poured down on you.
It's the most positive energy I have ever felt." But there
was something else about his visit to Bodhgaya that deeply
struck the 63-year-old Chicago native: it was the energy of
equality.
"People from all over the world come there and the most
amazing thing was that every level of the human condition was
right there without criticism and without conflict," he says.
In earlier travels abroad, the acceptance that Jarman
experienced highlighted the pervasive nature of prejudice
among Buddhists in his native land. He had braced himself to
encounter the same prejudice when he traveled to Japan in
1990 to be ordained at the main temple of his lineage in
Kyoto. "I was on edge in the beginning, looking to see if
they were going to say, 'This black guy is here, we better
not eat with him.' But they all accepted me as one of them."
Still, neither Jarman nor the other black teachers I spoke to
have any illusions that Buddhists elsewhere are free of
prejudice. They know it's something Buddhism has struggled
with since its earliest days. "The Buddha did address that,
but he addressed it on the level of class differences,"
observes Steele, who encountered prejudice among Buddhists in
Thailand and Burma during his year of study there. "Here, it
is culture-the whites forgetting the issue of privilege-and
that delusion causes things to go spinning off into unhealthy
thinking such as racism. It's one culture interfering with
another and that brings up lots of fear."
"We are all prejudiced," agrees Jan Willis. "We are all
forming these judgments. In Buddhist psychology we know about
this, so let's do what we do best at Buddhist centers: let's
do some of these meditations that are specifically geared
toward helping us recognize-become mindful of-prejudices and
transform them. I want us to feel comfortable in our own
skin. I think that's a starting place. Then we can see we're
all human beings, and then maybe we can stand in each other's
shoes," she says. The irony that practitioners who are
striving to see beyond dualism find themselves viewing their
own sangha in terms of black and white is not lost on the
trio.
"We gotta crawl before we can walk," says Ralph Steele. "The
dualism has to be looked at. You can't say, 'It's not there.'
It's like looking at the four noble truths. There's
dissatisfaction and the cause of it, how to stop it and the
skills of addressing it. The sangha in America is sitting
under the Bodhi Tree to be awakened on this issue, and it's
going to have to happen on all different levels."
There is also, the three teachers agree, the issue of what-
and how-to teach would-be American Buddhists, particularly
those from among the African-American and other minority
communities. Steele says he chose to concentrate on Theravada
Buddhism-even though he studied under many revered Tibetan
lamas-in part because of its simplicity. "It's like the Apple
computer," he says. "User friendly."
Willis argues that communicating the practice in a digestible
form is only part of making it accessible to African-
Americans and other people of color. "One part of
accessibility is making it comprehensible. One part is making
it affordable. One part is making the centers in places where
people can get to them. One is developing things that don't
require a month-long retreat. "There have to be
accommodations made. Otherwise it's going to remain a
homogeneous group of people with means and free time," Willis
warns. "And I think there is more to the message of Buddhism
than that."
Adds Steele: "I would love to sit in a retreat that is
actually diversified. Some people say it will happen. I
agree, but I want to push it a little quicker so it can
happen in this lifetime."
Lawrence Pintak is a freelance writer living in Princeton,
Massachusetts. This article was originally published in The
Shambhala Sun
n_cram...@pacbell.net
wrote:
> Source: http://www.blackelectorate.com/articles.asp?ID=1364
>
> "Something Has To Change": Blacks In American Buddhism by Lawrence
> Pintak
> Lawrence Pintak is a freelance writer living in Princeton,
> Massachusetts. This article was originally published in The
> Shambhala Sun
Wonderful, encouraging and uplifting article. Thanks for sharing it.
With Metta,
--
Nick. To send your support to Any of Our Troops in Harm's Way, go to:
http://anysoldier.com/
Thank a Veteran and Support Our Troops. You are not forgotten. Thanks ! ! !
David Raleigh Arnold
http://vmdd.tech.mylinuxisp.com/buddhism/links.html wrote:
> Source: http://www.blackelectorate.com/articles.asp?ID=1364
>
> "Something Has To Change": Blacks In American Buddhism by Lawrence Pintak
>
>
> Jan Willis was feeling euphoric. Sitting in the basement of a church in
> London's impoverished East End last summer, she looked around and realized
> that of the 40-odd people in the room, 31 were black.
>
> "Black Buddhists!" she exclaims at the memory. "In 25 years in Buddhism, I
> had never been in such a sangha. I felt so high. It was great!"
>
> For Willis and the handful of African-American Buddhist teachers now
> beginning to speak out, Buddhism in America has been a homogeneous world
> inhabited largely by upper-middle- class whites.
>
> "There are a lot of black Buddhists who are in the closet. They just don't
> feel comfortable being part of the great white sangha," says Insight
> Meditation teacher Ralph Steele. "One of the most common phrases I hear
> from young black Buddhists when they do step out into the white Buddhist
> sangha is that they feel uncomfortable."
I met an American Theravada monk who was black one time. He
drew a crowd because he was so unusual. He didn't seem to be
uncomfortable at all, and he certainly had no reason to be. daveA
--
The only technical exercises for all guitarists worth a lifetime
of practice: "Dynamic Guitar Technique". Nothing else is close.
Free download: http://www.openguitar.com/instruction.html
daveA David Raleigh Arnold dra..at..openguitar.com