Why We Need a Spiritual Revolution

When we align with our Buddha-nature, we can appreciate our life, just as it is. Our Buddha-nature, or true nature, is amazing beyond description. The word “Buddha-nature” is a pointer to the nondual realization that we are not separate from the universe.

When we lose touch with our Buddha-nature, we are driven by craving in ways that cause ourselves and others endless suffering. To realize our true nature is one way to weaken a cycle of consumerism and exploitation that causes terrible harm and that will otherwise likely be our demise.

There's a difference between needing to have our basic needs met, which our society can and should do for all, and craving -- which is driven by a persistent sense of inadequacy and longing. I just finished reading David Loy's Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis. He reminds us that a cause of this persistent craving is our underlying awareness that we are ever-changing, mortal beings. We long for stability and security, and what we find is impermanence. 

Change and loss is to be expected, but we are surprised every time we face a problem and imagine that we should be able to attain a kind of homeostasis that includes no problems or losses. We fix our leaky roof and think, finally, the house is all set, and the next month, a pipe bursts. We want to feel healthy, but suddenly we get sick. We want our family and friends to be permanent fixtures in our lives, but then we get in an argument, or even more painfully, a loved one dies. Life is actually "problem" after "problem" and loss after loss. The end of our problems is death, which sometimes feels like the biggest problem of all.

One way we deal with this instability is that we try to turn our sense of self into an impenetrable fortress that will not have to suffer change. We may hope to attain some kind of greatness that will define us forever, like the nearly-immortal Achilles in the Iliad. As a young man, I threw myself into training in rowing. Along the way my teams won multiple national and international championships. Interestingly, even at the time, these victories felt hollow because some part of me knew that I am not those victories. I momentarily felt like a winner, but then I lost a race and felt like a loser. 

What I actually loved was the rowing itself, but I never expected it to be a permanent state. Winner, loser... these are senses of self that arise and disappear, just like each moment in our lives. There is no permanent self to be attained, only one sense of self after another, ever evolving based on causes and conditions. Deep down we know this, yet we keep competing with one another for the ultimate victory, chasing after shadows. 

This vacillating sense of self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction leads us to try to create a permanent sense of satisfaction in other ways. One of the most damaging is our desire to accrue wealth. We imagine that if we can stockpile enough resources, we can purchase the fairy tale ending, "they lived happily ever after." For this "American dream," we commit grave harms. Human beings have enslaved one another, displaced indigenous peoples, colonized nations, and stolen and pillaged land for its "resources." We exploit one another and the earth to attain our personal goals. 

Within the United States today, those who are poor (often people of color) continue to suffer environmental injustices as they are forced to live in toxic environments, such as near coal plants that provide energy that is largely consumed by the privileged. This inequity is unfair, and it is incumbent upon those of us with privilege to rectify it. 

But the human appetite for consumption appears insatiable. Every two years, human beings chop down enough trees to cover all of Spain, and an area totaling 22.5 million football fields is desertified every year due to unsustainable, but changeable, agricultural practices. We are connected by an umbilical cord to Mother Earth who sustains our lives, and if we destroy her, we destroy ourselves.

The scientific consensus is that we are reaching critical tipping points in the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. The arctic permafrost is beginning to melt, releasing methane into the atmosphere, which traps more heat and causes even greater temperature increases than CO2. If this happens on a grand scale (which is likely to happen within the next hundred years if we don't change course), the average global temperature could rise 6 degrees Celsius in as short a period as 15 years. The result would be devastating, including mass desertification, plagues, biodiversity collapse, and the end of human civilization. It could mean the end of all life on this little blue planet. We truly are in this together.

Unfortunately, we seem to be too driven by our craving for permanent states of satisfaction to pause long enough to really take in what we are doing to our planet and to one another. We keep feeding the hungry beast of consumerism in hopes of overcoming our "problems."

But the real problem is the hope to escape our problems through consumption. No matter how much wealth we accrue, this deep sense of inadequacy persists because all of us will still get sick, grow old, die, and lose everyone we love. So we spin the wheel of suffering faster and faster, trying to get ahead. We are actually just digging our own graves, and in the meantime, we forget to appreciate our lives. 

Insanity is sometimes defined as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Might it be time for us to try something different? 

What we need if we hope to survive as a species is nothing less than a spiritual revolution. We have this remarkable human capacity to recognize the inherent beauty of our lives, instability and all. In Buddhism, we call this inherent beauty our Buddha-nature. 

Ultimately, our Buddha-nature is nothing other than ourselves as we are in this very moment -- the very thing we so often think is inadequate. For me, it is the sensation of my legs resting on the cushion, laptop perched on my lap, breath entering and exiting my lungs, crickets singing in the trees, and cars whooshing along the street. But it is not the concept of these things as separate beings. It is the actual presence of all of these "activities" that make up "my" boundless nature. 

Really this boundlessness is not mine. Buddha-nature belongs to the universe, and we are ephemeral manifestations. 

Our Buddha-nature also includes our "problems," such as a broken heart when someone we love dies. If, rather than trying to avoid such sorrow, I hold it compassionately, like an ocean holding a wave, grief simply arises and falls, revealing its own beauty. 

It turns out there was nothing to fear. "Impermanence" is just this ever-evolving moment. There is something reliable after all. 

Our boundless Buddha-nature is nothing other than things as they are, moment after moment, and when we turn toward this, appreciation and gratitude arise as we feel the intimacy of all beings residing in our hearts. 

We can realize our Buddha-nature by meditating. This realization is transformative. We find in this realization that we are not actually separate from the world. Like grief, separate senses of self may arise like waves in the ocean, but we are also the entire ocean. We are made of the earth and sky, and we will return to them when we die. During our lives, the earth lives in our bodies, the sky in our lungs. We are deeply interwoven with all of creation. In this realization, we find the very joy, connectedness, love, and gratitude we previously sought through egoistic and materialistic pursuits. 

There is nothing we need to do to attain our Buddha-nature. It is already manifesting. But we may need to practice meditation with a group and teacher to realize it. Our true nature reveals itself to us when we are quiet, sit still, and pay attention. Bit by bit, we learn to appreciate this in activity as well. Then we no longer crave to possess more and more of the world; it offers itself to us each and every moment.

As we realize just how intimately interconnected we are with all beings, here we find the love that inspires us to care for all of creation. The air in the sky inhabits my lungs. May it be pure! The rain falling from the sky fills my glass. May it be clean! And I am part of this world, always contributing to its evolution. May I be of benefit! In this way, realization of our Buddha-nature inspires us to care for all beings.

Zen and Dismantling Racial Constellations of Harm

In her book, Mindful of Race: Transforming Racism from the Inside Out, Ruth King writes: 

It would be wholesome for all of humanity if white people, as a collective, were to see themselves as racial individuals and to recognize whiteness as a racial constellation with roots, history, power, and privilege that negatively impact other races, and then to organize themselves to dismantle racial constellations of harm.

I love Ruth King's book. In Boundless Way Zen, we are reading it in our recently formed Racial Justice Group. We also discuss race openly in Morning Star Zen Sangha. 

Not everyone is entirely comfortable with this direction. One sangha member suggested that raising questions about race in a Zen sangha is unwise. I understand his concern. This is not an easy topic. I do worry sometimes that we may unintentionally harm one another in this fraught territory, particularly as a mixed-race, mixed-ethnicity group. There is risk involved. 

But Zen offers us unique precepts, insights, and practices that can help us wake up with compassion to the construct of race and racial constellations of harm. 

Why Race?

Racism is a particularly salient form of oppression in American society resulting in imprisonment, poverty, disenfranchisement, inadequate healthcare, environmental injustice, limited educational opportunities, internment, hate crimes, and more. There are other intersectional forms of oppression that deserve our attention; antiracist activism excludes none. But our American “caste” is rooted in a relentless series of targeted policies that have disenfranchised and oppressed people of color while economically propping up white people. 

White families in Boston have a median net worth of $247,500 while Black families have just $8. To say the discrepancy is Black people’s fault is a racist idea. This inequity is the result of hundreds of years of racist policies, including slavery, Jim Crow, segregation, redlining, and disproportionately criminalizing Black and Brown people. These policies and many more have led to stark inequities that persist for people of color. 

Ibram Kendi* argues that racist ideas are born when people blame the racial group, not the racist policies, for ongoing inequities. Such racist tropes are numberless in our culture, contributing to often unconscious senses of superiority and inferiority.

Once we blame the victims in this way, we become silent and complicit in ongoing oppression. Many of these implicit biases need to be brought to light through close attention, or they remain hidden to us.

What Zen Brings

Part of Zen practice is awakening to our own delusions, taking responsibility for them, and seeing through them. We chant, "delusions are endless; I vow to end them." In Zen, we are encouraged to turn the light around, shine it within, and actually examine the delusions that generate suffering. 

What is our motive for this work? Our great vow is to liberate all beings from suffering. Awakening is central to that path, but it does not mean ignoring injustice. In fact, it helps illuminate the delusions that lead to injustice. 

Part of what we realize in introspection is that our thoughts and conceptions are not reality itself. This may seem obvious, but in day-to-day life, we are often deceived. My conception of a person is not the animated presence before me. 

This is a helpful insight when becoming aware of our racial views. It is important to recognize that our inherited conceptions of races are socially conditioned and biased. Race is actually a biologically meaningless category. Kendi calls race "a mirage." From the "absolute" perspective of what Zen folks call emptiness, races do not have intrinsic or fixed essences at all. Nothing does. 

However, Kendi also appropriately argues that these mirages of race have enormous power in our hearts, minds, and society. We get "lost in the absolute" when we try to whitewash problems through claims of “oneness.” It’s a form of denial that is privileged, uncompassionate, and dishonest. 

So from the Zen perspective, though we recognize concepts as concepts, we also recognize the "relative truth" that these socially constructed designations have consequences.

White people in particular may wish to "spiritually bypass" examining how impressions of races live in our hearts, minds, and society due to our history of creating policies that oppress people of color and economically benefit white people. One example is the way white Zen practitioners might try to use a focus on "awakening" as an excuse not to turn toward injustices. This may be because we feel shame. White people often react negatively to being asked to think about  privilege and racist policies. We quickly move into defensiveness, dismissiveness and deflection perhaps because deep down we know we are complicit in policies that have resulted in inequitable outcomes, we have perhaps benefited economically, and we have not remedied those inequities.

But white people also suffer due to racism. We suffer disconnection and a loss of kinship. We suffer segregation. And we suffer a loss of capacity to love as we become cold, disengaged, or even hateful. We are not separate from this suffering world after all. Awakening heightens rather than erases our awareness of our interconnectedness. 

Zen practice teaches us that we can meet our personal and collective suffering, and we can talk about it skillfully by honoring the precepts of not speaking falsely and not elevating ourselves at the expense of others. In this way we take personal responsibility.

We also practice listening compassionately. When pain arises in ourselves and in others, we need not turn away. This is possible because through practice, we recognize that we are not only our suffering. We are also the earth and sky. This "wider container" gives us space to acknowledge suffering without getting swept away in reactivity. The vast sky gives the thundercloud infinite space. Put differently, we are like boundless oceans containing tumultuous waves. We don’t deny the waves; we give them space to arise, roar, and fall. In meditation, we discover a boundless compassion that allows us to take the suffering of the world into our hearts. When we see suffering and its causes clearly, we are moved to take action to help alleviate that suffering.

As one white sangha member put it, "I have never thought about what it means to be white. I wonder why not?" White people have our own work to do in realizing that we are indeed racial beings "with roots, history, power, and privilege that negatively impact other races" but that could be used to help create a more just society.

Every time we practice together in Morning Star Zen Sangha, we vow to atone for our endless greed, aversion and ignorance. We vow to liberate all beings from the suffering these three poisons cause. Dismantling racial constellations of harm is one important way we can enact this vow. 

*Ibram Kendi has written two great books, How to be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning. I also recommend Coates’s The Case for Reparations, The 1619 Project, and Ruth King’s book Mindful of Race. If you want to watch a powerful, informative documentary, check out 13th on Netflix. It describes our modern day slavery in the criminalization of Black and Brown people. I also highly recommend Jeff Chang's essay, The In-Betweens: On Asian Americanness. For more on residential segregation by design, check out this short video. Finally, for a quick look at how many of us have been miseducated, check out this John Oliver clip.