A few days ago, while visiting a local library in a relatively small town on the eastern coast of the United States, the person who took me there asked if I wished to borrow a book. I looked around. While I couldn’t find much that immediately connected with me, one book seemed of particular interest: Black & Buddhist.
An African American interpretation of Buddhism, it is a collection of articles by scholars and Buddhist activists who, writing from their personal experiences of racial exclusion, explore “trauma, belonging, healing, and transformation,” even as they “wrestle with their suffering.”
Subtitled Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom, the book prompted a thought even as I carried it in my hand: if Dalits in India have been embracing Buddhism in large numbers, why wouldn’t Black Americans do the same, given that they, too, have experienced a qualitatively similar form of discrimination?
Even before I began reading the book, which was published in 2020, I sought to find out what percentage of Americans are Buddhists and, of these, how many are Black. This is what I found: Buddhists represent approximately 1.0% to 1.3% of the U.S. population, or about 3.5 to 4.4 million people. A majority are of Asian descent—roughly 60% to 67%—while about a quarter to one-third are White.
As for Black Americans, they make up roughly 3% of all Buddhists in the United States. And within the broader Black American population, less than 0.5% identify as Buddhist. Yet, from my personal interactions in the United States, I have found that Buddhist cultural presence, visibility, and affinity appear to be growing rapidly.
Someone I know intimately is by no stretch of the imagination a Buddhist. Yet he is among the millions living in America who identify as Christian, Jewish, Hindu, or “spiritual but not religious,” while regularly practising Buddhist meditation or adopting aspects of Buddhist philosophy. Not without reason, according to one source, the absolute number of Buddhist practitioners in the United States grew by more than 20% between 2010 and 2020.
Yet, as far as Black Americans are concerned, they haven’t gone the Dalit way.
Buddhists in India may make up a minuscule 0.7% to 0.8% of the country’s population, or about 8.4 million people, but a vast majority of them are Dalits—around 85% to 90%.
In all likelihood, many of them followed their icon, Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who publicly converted to Buddhism at the fag end of his life—in October 1956, just two months before his death in December 1956—after concluding that the caste hierarchy and the practice of “untouchability” were inextricably embedded in orthodox Hindu scriptures.
Returning to Black & Buddhist, I couldn’t find any direct reference to Ambedkar or Dalits in its chapters. This could be because the anthology’s primary focus is specifically on the African American and Black diaspora experience in the United States, examining intergenerational trauma, white supremacy, capitalism, and the distinctive resilience of Black Buddhist practitioners in America.
However, in the book’s introduction, the two editors, Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles, explicitly name “caste designations” alongside racism, sexism, white supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism as inherent, exploitative features of the capitalist system that Buddhism must actively confront.
There is, of course, a critique of Mahatma Gandhi by one of the contributors, Sebene Selassie, similar to what some Indian Dalit intellectuals, as well as the well-known litterateur Arundhati Roy, have been saying.
Selassie writes: “When (Gandhi) was living in South Africa as a young lawyer, his stance on anti-Black racism was well-defined and expressed: he believed Indians and whites to be part of an Aryan brotherhood and inherently superior to Black people, which was not an uncommon stance of Indians living there at the time.”
I didn’t expect Selassie to go on to examine whether Gandhi changed his views thereafter.
But let me turn to the book now.
Each of the eight contributors—Cheryl A. Giles, Lama Rod Owens, Sebene Selassie, Lama Dawa Tarchin Phillips, Pamela Ayo Yetunde, Gyozan Royce Andrew Johnson, Kamilah Majied, and Ruth King—gives graphic details of the suffering and trauma they have experienced, which led them to adopt the Buddhist way of life as a way out.
They go on to conceptualize Buddhism by identifying the paths they believe have helped them overcome their suffering: Right View, Right Mindfulness, Right Intention, Right Livelihood, Right Concentration, Right Action, Right Speech, and Right Effort.
Given this framework, what appeared particularly interesting to me was the way the book looks at capitalism.
While pointing out that in the capitalist society in which they live there is “creativity and freedom,” the book also underscores—and let me quote here—that the system leads to “exploitation, poverty, classism, caste designations, racism, sexism (and other ‘isms’ related to sex and gender), ageism, white supremacy, human supremacy, imperialism, and colonialism.”
Further, capitalism “allows for shortened lifespans for poor people due to chronic stress, hunger, thirst, and treatable but untreated diseases.”
This is quite close to the Marxian analysis—something the powers-that-be in the United States would perhaps detest from the bottom of their hearts.
A closer look, however, suggested that it is nowhere near the typical Communist way of thinking—the proletariat versus the capitalists.
One of the solutions offered is “Right Action.”
The book wonders: “A question Black Buddhists ponder is ‘What is Right Action when confronted by a violent racist?’ Our actions are not just about our own self-preservation but”—and here I paused—“also about the well-being of those around us, including violent perpetrators.”
It says that Black actions, from a Buddhist perspective, should lead to “domino effects and we vow not to become oppressors even while being oppressed.” Insisting that “hatred does not transform hatred” and “only love does that,” it underscores the importance of responding without reproducing the very violence one is confronting.
Quite Gandhian, I thought.
Further: “Right Action, at its core, is love. Love in Right Action applies to everything we do, including our hobbies, vocations, work, and activism. Right Action is necessary in the economic system we live in.”
And how does one observe “Right Livelihood” in a capitalist setup?
Not by rebelling against the system, but by ensuring that one does not make “money in a way that harms others.” In fact, one must live as “spiritually integrated, nonexploitative, generous, and constructive human beings” by beginning with “examining if and how greed operates in our lives.”
The book warns: “Capitalism can breed greed if we have the wrong view that possessing a multitude of things, or having much more money than we need, brings real security and real joy.”
Here, it cites “studies in the US” to argue that “being rich does not make one happy and does not promote mental, emotional, or psychological security.”
Regretting that Black people have “been the objects of capitalism and exploited as property,” the book says that, through the generations, they “have created a collective psychological defense against the vulnerability of being seen as financially insecure.”
The result is that “some of us have come to value things that don’t bring lasting joy.”
Often, “a large home, a luxury car, precious gems and metals, and expensive designer clothing, and paying for these things through doing work that exploits, maims, causes addictions, or kills others” are considered “symbols of success,” feeding the delusion “that being wealthy or appearing to be wealthy protects Black people from exploitation.”
The book believes: “Right Livelihood promotes safety, truth, nonharming, and constructive enterprises. Right Livelihood is not the pursuit of greed and has no interest in impressing others with material excess.”
It adds: “It is not a way to demonstrate economic viability or invulnerability. It can be used as a springboard to create economic alternatives within the system in which we find ourselves. Right Livelihood is certainly a fitting description for Right and Noble anti-racism activism…”
And how does one achieve Right Action and Right Livelihood?
The answer the authors offer is through Right Concentration.
“Supported” by experienced meditation teachers and students, one can undertake “meditation retreats” for this purpose. But here, they warn, one must be selective. One should check whether the retreat centre would be in a position to support participants during what could be an emotionally and mentally vulnerable period.
The book underlines: “Long meditation retreats evoke mental and emotional vulnerability because returning to one’s object of meditation over and over again can trigger trauma.”
But this “should not be taken to mean that meditation is not right… The real questions are these: What type of meditation retreat is appropriate? How long? How often? To what end?”
Why would an African American anti-racism activist want to experience Right Concentration?
By committing to “cultivating peace of mind and peace of body as we struggle for liberation”; by helping each other so that “our collective souls and collective selves may be nourished for generations of communities to come.”
Right Concentration, the book believes, would help one know one’s “traumatized history, without the constructs of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion and without preferences and desires, fears and terrors, anger and rage—imagine how much freedom there may be.”
“We would come out of that experience knowing ourselves as part of the Universal Renaissance in Black Self-Knowledge…”
All this would have to be done, says the book, at a time when, in the United States, one often hears African Americans being told: “Go back to Africa where you belong!”
It says: “Black belonging has always been contested in the United States and we are now being asked to support the exclusion of Brown people at our borders, Black people from African countries, and the Muslim world which is largely populated by people of color.”
This, the book argues, ought to be overcome through “benefactor practice,” which “weaves together the threads of ancestral myth, memory, and connection with others, all of which may be modes of healing intergenerational trauma that lives in our bodies.”
It says: “Integrating these threads is a lifelong process that can be supported by bringing our benefactors into our meditation practice. We know trauma lives in the body. We carry it every day. Trauma cannot be buried, ignored, pushed aside, or denied. As long as we breathe, trauma reminds us it is with us and rises to the surface. Transforming trauma means being willing to address it in our lives.”
“In other words,” the book argues, “being Black-identified does not mean that I am also anger-identified. To be Black has come with significant woundedness and trauma from having to survive a white supremacist culture as well as having to hold the transhistorical trauma of (the) ancestors who also survived the same trauma and passed it on unknowingly” to the next generation.
Yet, through meditation practice, one can experience “Blackness” as something “based upon resiliency, community, deep joy in the face of violence, and a profound gratitude” for Black culture, “which continues to transform marginalization into celebration.”
Courtesy: CounterView