Movement

Western Socially Engaged Buddhism: At What Cost?

kloncke15 Comments

sigh.

When I discovered the website for the Zen Peace Center’s Symposium for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism, coming up this summer, I got all excited.  Spiritual and social liberation!  Sharing strategies!  All about it.

Then I saw the price tag.

$600 for tuition, breakfast, and lunch.  Dinner and lodging not included.  (Not to mention the cost for me to travel to Massachusetts.)

Six hundred dollars?  Probably closer to a thousand, all told?  Now where’s the social engagement in that?

Of course, this is not a dilemma unique to the Zen Peacemakers.  As nathan and I have been discussing lately, it’s a huge challenge to make a sangha’s economy reflect its philosophies.  And when I called the ZPs to inquire about a sliding scale or some other option, it was clear that they were at least considering the contradiction between the symposium’s mission and its prohibitive costs.  Within a couple of months, they had designed and posted a volunteer application, which would cover the cost of tuition — though still leaving the problem of travel and lodging.  My new friend Ari, ZP assistant to Bernie Glassman, says they’re also pursuing possibilities for free places to stay: either camping on the property or staying with local sangha members.  If you’re interested in attending, hit up the volunteer app!  (Unless, of course, you can afford to pay — in which case you’d be helping make things more affordable for the rest of us.)

It’s important to keep in mind, I think, that the point of keeping entry costs low isn’t only a matter of accessibility.  Of course, we want to make teachings and community-building events available to poor and working-class folks.  But for a group explicitly interested in social justice or “social engagement,” there is also the problem of reproducing oppressive, class-based structures.  Inclusion is not enough: we need transformation.

For example: what does it mean when social justice -oriented sanghas establish endowment funds, which invest donors’ contributions into the financial market, strengthening the capitalist structures that exploit and crush workers?

We don’t need to rely on this model.  Check out this definition of a “dana economy” from the rad-sounding Eco-Dharma Center:

All our events are offered in the spirit of dana, a Sanskrit/pali term meaning giving and gift. The ethical practice of generosity expresses the transcendence of separate selfhood and constitutes a basic ethos at the heart of creative community. The economic forms of consumerism and capitalism highly condition our relationships in the world – encouraging us to experience ourselves as discrete subjective entities, producers or consumers, insulated from responsive engagement with others. Rather than emulate this, it is our intention to support economic relationships which contribute towards a culture of sharing.

We do not intend to enter into relationship with you as the providers of a service for a consumer. We intend to enter into a wholehearted human relationship with you, as co-producers and collaborators in the transformation of ourselves and our world. To support this intention we ask for contributions to make this work possible, rather than offering our work as a service to be bought. The basic principle of the Dana Economy is, “give what you can, take what you need”.

The suggested donations in our programme reflect the very basic income required to make the events viable. We do not have any independent means of financing the events and we do need that those attending offer financial support to make the events financially viable. If you can offer more, please do. If the incoming donations for an event are insufficient we will be unable to give them freely. So, please look at the suggested contributions and enter into the spirit of this approach by giving what you can. We are also willing to discuss donations in the form of skill sharing and offers of work to support the project.

(from http://www.ecodharma.com, on "radical ecology")

I know we need to be realistic, and as Ari reminded me, most sanghas do not dedicate themselves exclusively to offering retreats, a la Goenkaji’s Vipassana centers, so that’s not a viable model for everyone.  And I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to guilt-trip anybody.  Rather, I’m eager to talk more, and more openly, about the real costs of maintaining sanghas, and how we can reproduce and sustain radical dana economies: economies of insight and generosity. I’d love to hear y’all’s thoughts.

In addition to volunteering in order to earn my way at the Symposium, I’m hoping to host a workshop on using the Internet as a tool of dharma.  So wish me luck!  Seems like it’s a popular subject these days, and I’m psyched to hear how others are theorizing it.

Meanwhile, here’s a bit of info on the ZP’s newsletter — for which they often solicit contributions.  I checked out the issue on prison meditation this month, and there were a number of really solid articles.  (Also made me that much more eager to see Dhamma Brothers: a documentary on the introduction of a Goenka-style 10-day silent Vipassana course into an Alabama prison.)

Take care, y’all!

— — — — —

Zen Master Bernie Glassman and the Zen Peacemakers invite you to enjoy

BEARING WITNESS:

A Newsletter for Western Socially Engaged Buddhism

The Zen Peacemakers founder, Bernie Glassman has created the a clearinghouse on Socially Engaged Buddhism in the West. We are pleased to invite you to receive our FREE monthly online publication.

You will learn about:

·      Who?: Profiles, links and articles on the individuals and groups practicing service and working for social justice as Buddhist practice

·      What?: Emerging service projects and social actions, including opportunities to train and get involved

·      Why?: The history, ethical bases and philosophies that inspire the global movement of Buddhist communities towards social engagement

Previous issues include Bernie’s meeting with His Holiness the Dalai Lama as well as surveys of Buddhist chaplaincy programs and work in prisons.  You are invited to e-mail submissions for our March issue featuring Dharma-based mental health programs to editor@zenpeacemakers.com.  For your free subscription, please go to: http://www.zenpeacemakers.org/subscribe

We are also building two related directories:

Groups and Activists

&

Learning Resources

It’s easier than ever to access information and to get involved!

Spiritual Realism

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Having used the literary concept of “magical realism” on a few occasions to describe my experience at Goddard, I’ve lately begun exploring an idea of “spiritual realism.”  It’s a phrase that speaks to many of my experiences in the last two years, and to my spiritual philosophy in general.  I’m interested in the spirituality of everyday life, in the most mundane places — ugly, resplendent, boring, and everything in between.  I’m especially drawn to spiritual practices that address the suffering inherent in social oppression.  That’s why I practice Vipassana meditation at donation-based centers; that’s why I sit with a sangha led by and for people of color and queer folks (also on a donation basis); that’s why I live and work with the Faithful Fools, a street ministry in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.

Spiritual realism is the antidote, the flip-side, to the “spiritual materialism” against which Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche warns us.

I’ve got a lot of thoughts on it, but for now I want to share one of its proximate inspirations, left as a gift on my Facebook wall.  Too good not to pass along: especially, I think, for those of us working for justice in some way.  The goals can seem so urgent that it’s easy to overlook the larger realities — the importance of process.  Thanks for the reminder, bk!

The “8” Of Section 8

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It’s been a bit of a rough week, folks. Tuesday I woke up at 6:30am — it was Sharon’s big day. She had made it to the top of the Section 8 housing list, and for the first time in her forty-odd years of life, she was going to have a place of her own.  So we hoped.

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program subsidizes rent for families and individuals. As far as I can tell, it’s like a semi-privatized version of public housing, much like the whole school-voucher privatization schemes. The government pays landlords to house the otherwise-homeless, rather than building public units with state funding.

But what really blew my mind about Section 8 was the wait list. According to the Housing Authority, approval for an applicant takes between six months and eight years.

Eight years.

EIGHT YEARS.

Sharon, Melissa and I spent four hours Tuesday morning jumping through all the necessary hoops, until we could progress no further for the day. The next step, since Sharon does not have a spotless criminal record from the last 10 years (not too unusual for the chronically homeless and near-homeless, trying to survive), is collecting letters from interested parties testifying to her upstanding character.

Shelter: a privilege reserved for the righteous?

Time for bed. Night, y’all.

Black Bodhisattvas

kloncke8 Comments

Well, friends, it’s been a tremendously emotional 24 hours for me.  This art school business really makes you take a look at some hard stuff.  Reaches in and digs it right out of you.  And last night and today, particularly, I’ve been encountering the legacy of Black American slavery again and again and again.  Blues.  Lynching.  Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl — Written By Herself (1861).

There are so many ways to understand this multifaceted history, and new facts and visions keep emerging all the time.  Besides which, as one faculty member, Gale Jackson, reminded us tonight, we continue to live the history through trope in so many respects, acknowledged and unacknowledged.

So for tonight, for my part, all I want to do is honor the Black bodhisattvas of that legacy.  A bodhisattva, in certain Buddhist traditions, is one who has reached the cusp of enlightenment, but delays their own liberation in order to remain in the human realm and guide other people on the path.  Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and even Billie Holiday, to me, exemplify this courage and selflessness, putting themselves at risk for the sake of others.

To all those who reach the brink of freedom, turn right around and plunge back in to help the next person.

Thank you.

Lovely Inconvenience

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If you’ll bear with me, I’d like to experiment a little bit.  Rather than write out the whole story that accompanies these photos (which is my habit), I’d like to try to let the images tell it on their own.

The barest background: this morning, I approached a bush (echinacea, I’m told?) because I found it beautiful and wanted to photograph it.  (As quickly as possible.  Mind you, it’s FREEZING here, and I have no gloves.)  Next thing I know, I look down and . . .

California Dying (And Awakening)

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This week in The Nation:

"Homeless in Fresno: Guillermo Torrez ended up on the streets after he lost his construction job and his family's home was foreclosed." Photo credit Matt Black

The lethal and typically capitalist governance of California is manifesting, statewide, in a virtual strangulation of the poor.

VMH [in Los Angeles] has provided counseling and medication to impoverished children and adults since 1957. But in August, shortly after the new facility opened, the clinic lost most of its funding for adult services when the state and county yanked their dollars, triggering huge matching-fund losses from the federal government. Eighty percent of the counseling staff, including nearly all of the site’s adult counselors, were laid off. Kids still receive some counseling, but the walls of the rooms in which they are seen by staff are bare–the clinic ran out of funds before it could decorate them–and the doors have paper signs taped to them instead of brass plaques.Nowadays, VMH’s adult clients are treated exclusively with medication. And the indigent mentally ill–whose treatment had been paid for by LA County, which in turn received money from the state–are turned away at the door. Many of them end up sleeping on park benches near the clinic. “These are the chronically mentally ill,” says psychologist Janie Strasner glumly, “who will end up being the raving lunatics on the street.”

What makes this all the more troubling is that Glendale isn’t an outstandingly poor neighborhood, Los Angeles isn’t a poor city and California certainly isn’t a poor state. And yet something is seriously wrong with the organism that is California. The state’s savage budget cuts–$26 billion in 2009, an expected shortfall over the next year that could reach $20 billion–now serve as anti-stimulus to the federal stimulus package. Its basic educational, public safety and social service infrastructure is crumbling. As a self-sustaining political system, as a set of relationships between local and state governments, as a revenue-raising and revenue-spending mechanism, California is deeply damaged. And the impact of that damage is hitting an awful lot of people awfully hard.

And we’re seeing the same brutal impact in the Tenderloin of San Francisco.  From the Faithful Fools’s 2009 Annual Report:

As concern was high over the precarious economic reality and the ever-rampant budget cuts and elimination of vital services, we recognized the importance of being a small, grassroots, heart-driven organization. We had the ability to remain constant in people’s lives when their city or state funded supportive services disappeared. We helped bridge food needs, financial resources and the direct labor necessary to find out what was still available for people and then walked the maze to link them up. We saw the direct face of balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and disabled people as they were notified three different times in the year of a reduction in their monthly checks. The cuts were an average of $70 per person. One fellow who serves on the Tom Waddell Community Advisory Board with us said, “that’s a week’s worth of food for me!”

It’s a deadly time.  But sometimes the threat of death is just what is needed to spark an awakening.  Which, in California’s case, hopefully means a rapidly evolving consciousness of our shared situations, and renewed energy for collective, compassionate struggle.

The Need Of The Moment: Insight and Solidarity

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There’s a famous haiku by Matsuo Basho that I’ve seen quoted a few times recently.

The old pond.
A frog jumps in:
Plop!

The point of the poem, as Joseph Goldstein explains in The Experience Of Insight, is to illustrate the quality of mind called “bare attention,” which he describes as “the basis and foundation of spiritual discovery”:

Bare attention means observing things as they are, without choosing, without comparing, without evaluating, without laying our projections and expectations on to what is happening; cultivating instead a choiceless and non-interfering awareness . . . No dramatic description of the sunset and the peaceful evening sky over the pond and how beautiful it was.  Just a crystal clear perception of what it was that happened . . . Bare attention: learning to see and observe, with simplicity and directness.  Nothing extraneous.  It is a powerfully penetrating quality of mind.

But even though insight is a practice in choicelessness, it still helps us to make better choices as needs arise.  Kind of like training on a treadmill, going nowhere, in order to run longer distances outdoors.

The power of insight developed through meditation helps us to take action that is informed and intelligent, yet not overthought.  It strengthens the basic clarity of perception that gives rise to truly creative processes.  So when the need of the moment reveals itself, we see it for what it is, rather than immediately forcing it into our own familiar frameworks, categories, and concepts.

Not a bad faculty for allies in political struggle.

Insight, or bare attention, proves useful in many respects when we’re dealing with reality.  (Different from memory, fantasy, imagination, theory, projection, etc.)  One of its handy effects is paring down superfluous names, theorizations, and concepts for actually existing phenomena.

A recent post over on Advance The Struggle illustrates this well.  (Read the whole thing — it’s worth it, I promise.)

Continue reading →

Don’t Resist: Resist!

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I’ll be the first to admit it, folks: non-resistance, one of the core elements of Buddhist or dhammic praxis, seems like a sham. On its face, non-resistance sounds like one or a combination of (a) weakness: a sort of rationalized fear of fighting back; (b) delusion: playing Mary Sunshine and pretending that there’s nothing to resist; or (c) apathy: leaving it to fate or karma or whatever to sort everything out.

With a slightly more nuanced view of non-resistance, we realize that it doesn’t so much refer to external conflict or confrontation, but has more to do with our internal states, as a tool for reducing suffering.  A British professor, a guest speaker I heard at the Cambridge Insight Meditation Center back in September, cited as an example the moment you open a delicious-looking box of chocolates, only to find that they’ve all been eaten up — except the coconut ones, which you hate.  The more we resist reality (by fantasizing about the missing chocolates; resenting the scoundrels who devoured them), the greater our suffering will become.

Ok, understandable, but something still feels off.  It was at that moment, when he pulled out the bonbon anecdote, that the thought occurred to me: This white guy has no idea of the weight of the words he’s using.

Resistance.  Struggle.

These words carry a lot of meaning for a lot of people.  How could he use them so blithely, so unawares?

Now, it wasn’t just a matter of the professor: his explanation, language and vocabulary were also tied to the audience he was addressing: largely wealthy, white, overeducated, and middle-aged. But there was also a larger context: the neighborhood in which this dharma talk was taking place.  Area 4, poor and gentrifying, a long under-resourced and heavily policed area, with lots of homeless and near-homeless people of color.

When talking about non-resistance, how often do we hear examples of irritation like sitting in traffic?  Not getting a bonus or promotion at your firm?  Undergoing chemotherapy?

In my experience, A Lot.

And how often do we hear examples of police profiling and brutality?  Eviction?  Domestic abuse?  Racist education?  Colonization?  War?

It’s a shame that so many dharma talks by convert Americans in the U.S., from what I’ve seen and read, are couched in terms of a white ruling-class (and often straight, male, cisgendered, non-disabled) experience.  Some may include the “social justice question” as an afterthought, or as a response in a Q & A, but rarely do dharmic explanations center around the people who must resist routinized oppression in order to survive.  Talks ignore these realities.  And that ignorance, willful or not, can raise a lot of skepticism about the dharma. Earlier in 2009, brownfemipower approached this same question from a different angle: the notion of submission, and whether it can ever be relevant to people who don’t really have a choice.

Fortunately, though, the way I see it, when we get to the deep meaning of non-resistance, we understand that it is totally compatible with political and social struggle.  Lately I’ve run across a few explications that speak to confronting violence or abuse.

Some psychologists, among them Tara Brach and Marsha Linehan, talk about radical acceptance—radical meaning “root”—to emphasize our deep, innate capacity to embrace both negative and positive emotions. Acceptance in this context does not mean tolerating or condoning abusive behavior. Rather, acceptance often means fully acknowledging just how much pain we may be feeling at a given moment, which inevitably leads to greater empowerment and creative change.

– Christopher K. Germer from “Getting Along” (Tricycle, Spring 2006)

Non-resistance means looking at the totality of a given situation: not denying any aspect or focusing too narrowly on one area.  And not getting lost in our own imagination, our own reactions, or our own desires to appear strong, calm, courageous, or unperturbed.  In a conversation with Pema Chödrön, Alice Walker makes a similar point about the importance of acknowledging and accepting pain when somebody tells us to “go to the back of the bus”:

The cause of someone’s aggression is their own suffering.  So we can connect with our own aggression and provocation, feel that, and exude good wishes for ourselves and others.

Let’s be clear: exuding good wishes for ourselves and others doesn’t rule out strong action.  Even physical, militant action.  In his essay “Loving the Enemy” (2002), Jeffrey Hopkins writes,

If your own best friend [suddenly, without warning],* came at you with a knife to kill you, what would you do? You would seek to disarm your friend, but then you would not proceed to beat the person, would you? You would disarm the attacker in whatever way you could—you might even have to hit the person in order to disarm him, but once you have managed to disarm him, you would not go on to hurt him. Why? Because he is close to you.

If you felt that everyone in the whole universe was in the same relationship to you as your very best friend, and if you saw anyone who attacked you as your best friend [acting harmfully],* you would not respond with hatred. You would respond with behavior that was appropriate, but you would not be seeking to retaliate and harm the person out of hatred. He would be too dear to you.

We’re not talking docility here.  What makes non-resistance so great and useful is that it’s not a prescription for action or non-action, but rather an aid to clear-sightedness that we can apply to any given situation.  It says: look at the reality in front of you.  Much as we might want to deny that our friend is brandishing a knife, he is, and that needs addressing.  Much as we might want to concoct some story of betrayal — that our friend has now become our enemy — in truth he’s only our enemy if we make him so.  Otherwise, he’s only changed from what he was before.

As my teacher Goenkaji says, Accept each moment as it is — not as you would like it to be, but as it is.

And when the moment comes to resist, you’ll resist.

——–

Have a good weekend, friends.  I know I will.  :)  More on that next week.

——–
*The original language in this piece talks about the best friend “going mad” as the explanation for the harmful behavior. As folks at Feministe pointed out while I was guest-blogging there, casually linking violence and mental illness presents a lot of problems, including exacerbating stigmas against people living with mental illness. I think Hopkins’ story is still helpful in the sense that it points to the power of a pre-existing, positive, loving relationship that allows us to choose mercy over revenge, refusing to totalize a person even based on their violent actions. At the same time, it’s also a very simplified example, evading the possibility of calculated betrayal, or an inherently predatory “best-friend” relationship. If you have time, I really recommend checking out the Feministe thread, and probing the example a bit further.

SF Annual Homeless Dead Memorial

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Reverend Hope at the Memorial Service For All Our Homeless Dead.

Last night, for the nineteenth time in as many years, San Franciscans assembled in front of City Hall for the Interfaith Memorial Service For All Our Homeless Dead, organized by Reverend Glenda Hope with SF Network Ministries, along with the Coalition On Homelessness.  Half a dozen laypeople and religious leaders — a rabbi; a Zen Buddhist nun; a housing activist; a Franciscan sister (my boss and roommate, Carmen); and more — presented poems and eulogies, mourning the dead and calling for justice for the living.  Alternating with the speeches, one person from a given neighborhood would read aloud a list of names: the recorded deaths of homeless people in that area, in 2009.  I think there were between 50 and 60, maybe more.  A singing bowl rang after each name spoken, including, hauntingly, a few nameless: John Doe Number 64 (ding), John Doe Number 67 (ding), John Doe Number 95 (ding) . . .

Evidently, over the years it’s become increasingly difficult or complicated to access information on homeless mortality.  In addition, the deaths of people living in single-resident occupancy housing (or SRO’s — basically hotel rooms) are not recorded.  So the actual death toll among the very poor or destitute is far greater than our reading reflected.

A man sang in a beautiful soprano; the lists of names were ceremonially burned.  All told, about 80 people gathered in the cold near-rain.  And though the memorial itself was lovely, the most moving part for me was knowing that this frail reverend, emceeing in a barely audible voice, has faithfully assembled people here on every winter solstice since 1980.  Almost twenty years of bearing witness this way, in this same place.