Review: Black & Buddhist
On what a Christian seeker can glean from Black Buddhists & diversifying the sangha
Black & Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom
Edited by Pamela Ayo Yetunde and Cheryl A. Giles
I am a Christian who was raised Catholic and for many years claimed the nebulous title of seeker because it was more open-ended and felt less complex than trying to explain the connections I’m inspired by in the ecumenical relationship of the Abrahamic religions. I am also deeply enamored of different aspects of various traditions and Buddhism is one that is very close to my heart.
Whenever I think of Buddhism and world religion, I think about one of my favorite high school teachers, the late Jack Betterly. He was a historian beloved for his kindness, character and deep insights on a list-serv called World History Connected. I knew him as a lanky, twinkly-eyed soul with a turquoise leather necklace and matching ring. He spoke quietly and with purpose. He encouraged me and his other students to keep an open, skeptical mind about what history included and excluded. In a class about world religions, I was fascinated to learn about the life of the Buddha, the way of accepting one’s suffering as a part of life, this notion of letting go of the world in order to see it open up.
Mr. Betterly passed in 2008, and I still tear up thinking about our world’s great loss. But the gift of faith is a timeless one, no matter the tradition. And just a few years before he passed, I found my way to the cushion. In San Francisco at the time, I found a meditation group led by someone who had studied at the San Francisco Zen Center. I believe it was via Craigslist. What a different world we were in then!
So more or less for the past 15 years, I have had a daily meditation practice. I have attended a single silent meditation retreat over the years, which was one of the most profound, surprising and healing experiences of my life. This is more or less my experience with Buddhism as a Black woman. As in other arenas, there are not that many of us in sangha. But maybe that is changing.
I ordered this book after participating in one Zoom session with Lama Rod Owens, who is an author whose voice is resonating with me most these days because of his combination of vulnerability and candor about his life and path. In this collection of eight essays, it is his that I found myself enamored of the most, given the time when I read it, which was on the anniversary of my mother’s death and the day of the U.S. Capitol insurrection. Because of the latter, I had forgotten to even remember the former. In “The Dharma of Trauma,” he writes:
I will start by admitting that the only thing I have ever wanted is to be free.
What a liberating mirror to see someone articulate that so simply. I was hooked.
Later, this passage struck me so profoundly I wrote it down:
We are not our mistakes. We are not the violence that we manifest, and we are not our despair. We are not our sadness. We are joy. When we take part in that remembering and that stepping into that joy, what we’re actually doing is practicing liberation.
The context of the essays is about claiming freedom and resilience and the joy of practice, of being present with the world as it is, in the midst of all of our suffering. That’s maybe why I felt so soothed by its pages. I appreciated the wisdom and truth-telling of the Black women in the book too, and I think it’s a worthy collection to explore if you’re interested in a more diverse perspective on Buddhism in America at this moment.