Jean Marie Robbins: I understand them as an intentional device to maintain an enslavement mentality, in order for the people on top and in power to do as little as they need to and reap the benefits of very inexpensive labor, if not free labor. That was intentional from the beginning, and it took time to take root. Now it’s so deeply rooted that it’s rooted in my own consciousness, and I have to work intentionally against the idea that I’m indebted and I have to always pay my way and pay twice as much, just to belong and to stand alongside people in white bodies.

Pamela Freeman: Jean, you said it very clearly, and I would echo what you said. We’re still living in a post-Confederacy. There is this whole thing of taking away of our rights and chipping away at everything we have in order to keep us controlled. Think about slavery. Our children were taken away from us; marriage was something that couldn’t happen for us. Now they’re trying to eliminate public schools, trying to eliminate everything that can empower us. I see what’s happening in this country. It seems to be getting worse, not better. 

Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith: I didn’t want to deal with race when I first started practicing. I just wanted to sit and meditate, but there is a force in meditation that brings up the truth. So, I’m rediscovering and peeling back the layers to figure out my understanding of blackness in America. It’s an oppressive system that was created to oppress Black people and other peoples who were not part of the dominant culture. And it still exists, it still persists.

I was writing something the other day about people wanting us to forget about slavery because it was a long time ago. But when I sat down and looked at it, I’m only maybe three generations out of slavery on my mother’s side, and maybe four generations out on my father’s side. Then I look at what’s happening today. 

What really gets me is the economic oppression—the hundreds of years that we worked as enslaved Africans, without any compensation, with barely any food, while the ways we had of supporting ourselves culturally were stripped from us. Given all the time we were building wealth for this country and for the world, to have it turned around—to say that it’s my fault that I’m in this economic situation—is crazy. If the economic system doesn’t change, the situation is not going to change. 

We’ve tried over the years to have our own this, that, or the other, then it gets destroyed, blown up, taken, stolen again. I’ve been thinking, “Where in the world can I live outside of the system?” because I’m tired. What countries have not been colonized? Where is there not racism against this Black woman’s being? We’ve got to change the economic system, destroy it completely—in some peaceful way.

Victoria Cary: We are a diverse people, so it’s difficult to generalize, but what comes to mind is our exhaustion at having to still fight for equality, equity, and for our lives. 

Given the particularities of the suffering of Black people in the United States, how can Buddhist practice help?

Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith: The dharma is a healing force. It’s medicine for the soul. That is why I do it. I practice because everything that is a part of life is in the dharma—the truth of the nature of things. It is a language that I understand, I think, from way back to all of my different indigenous roots. It is the language of what is present, what is real. 

Practicing the dharma allows me to contemplate, discover, and reflect on ways that I might be able to live this life with more ease and peace, love myself, forgive myself, love others, forgive others in a way that includes forgiving them for racism. The dharma is medicine; it provides me with a salve, which to me are the teachings that, when practiced and applied to my life, support the healing of my being. As a practitioner, I have to let go of my views, and I have to reflect on my conditioning and the conditioning of others. It’s deep when you really do that. The dharma says that this is what you need to find liberation and this is how you do it, so go see for yourself. I can bring the dharma to bear on racism or on anything else.

Pamela Freeman: I agree that the dharma is medicine—it’s healing. Before I practiced the dharma, I felt really disconnected. It has helped me to not be agitated, to listen to people better, to be kinder to myself and other people. It’s helped me to be quieter, and it’s given me a lot of hope. When I’m in meditation or walking or thinking or listening to a dharma talk, I feel so grateful that I’m alive. 

The dharma has helped me to be able to deal with some white people, because, before I practiced, I was just done. Now I can be with them and not feel so angry. It’s helped me to not be so reactive, and I think that’s why Black people need the dharma. We can be really mean and nasty to ourselves. This practice helps me give myself a break when I make mistakes.

Jean Marie Robbins: I live in Chicago and I belong to Shambhala Chicago. I came to Shambala about ten years ago in a very resistant mode, but the minute I heard the instructors say that meditation builds confidence in our basic goodness, I was hooked, because as a Black person, I’d never before heard that I was basically even acceptable, not to mention good.

Buddhism’s first noble truth is that there is suffering. Regarding the particularities of the suffering of Black people, I have coped much of my life by expecting to suffer racial harm and expecting white people to look at me in a negative way. Now, I’ve shifted my idea of suffering, and I ask myself, “What can I learn here?” One of the things I’m learning to do is to release what I imagine people are thinking about me—that’s just a thought. When I pause, I’m letting go of that flood of negative talk. Of course, it floods right back. It’s normal to have negative self-talk, so learning to let it go is a process—it doesn’t happen overnight.

I think the idea of no self is such a perplexing idea, but it’s one of the things that has helped me recognize this idea of identity as a trap. In a dharma setting, we can talk about that and really explore what it means to shackle ourselves with the idea that we’re limited to this identity, an identity that is defined by our society as something terrible, when really, it is our incredible resilience and resolve to survive that has made this country.

From Dr. Sheila Walker’s anthropological study of African descendants, especially in the Americas, I’ve learned that Afro-diasporans made the modern world by impacting music, science, business, food, agriculture, sports, and many other fields. Learning this has totally shifted my thinking about what we’ve contributed, what we’re capable of, and what I’m capable of.

Victoria Cary: Dharma is a path toward freedom. The dharma can be that for Black folks, too. It’s certainly been that for me.

If you could give one piece of advice on how to experience liberation, what would that be? 

Victoria Cary: Be curious and acknowledge reality with compassion. 

Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith: My advice would be to cultivate embodied stillness and empowered silence. When you choose to be silent—and not silenced by the oppressors—when you stay in the present moment with this breath, this body, there is an element of liberation.

Pamela Freeman: Liberation, to me, is believing in yourself. Trust in yourself, in your stillness, and even in your movement. Know that being yourself and believing in yourself is not something above you—it’s inside of you.

Jean Marie Robbins: In building on that, Pamela, I think that connecting with what we really are—with our basic goodness—and accepting all our stumbles and flaws softens us and enables us to connect with others. And that’s where liberation happens in our relationships, not just with others, but also in our relationship with ourselves.

Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith: Movement is such a big part of my Black experience. In moving, the mind gets to settle so that we can just be with our truth, connect to the earth, and see the ideas, views, and the conditioning that trap us, that shackle our minds. In embodied movement, there’s freedom.

Jean Marie mentioned the concept of no self. That word and concept has also been used in Buddhist dialogue to mean that race, ethnicity, the ways we identify socially don’t matter. My question to you is, does it matter to the people you serve in your dharma communities that you are Black? 

Ramona Lisa Ortiz-Smith: Yes, it matters. Before I can actually let go of my identity, I have to embrace all of who I am—all of my life, all of my experiences, all of my views. This way, I get to know all these different facets of my identity and understand where they came from, how they’ve shaped me, and how society persists with identifying me with some of them. 

But “no self” doesn’t mean that I don’t exist. Like Joy DeGruy [author of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing] says, in this skin, it’s a different experience. So, it is true that I look like this—I am Black—and my experience in this world and in meditation and dharma communities is completely different because of it. I have to walk through this world in this skin; I can’t leave home without it. Therefore, I have tangible, visceral experiences as a dharma practitioner and teacher in this skin that are different than those who are not people of color and do not live in this skin. It causes challenging conditions in the practice and in practice communities because I and other people believe that I have a self that is “Black.” 

Jean Marie Robbins: Yes, it absolutely matters that I am Black! I feel like my showing up in my sangha is a practice that I impose on my white colleagues. It is a practice for them to manage their sense of anxiety or curiosity or resistance or whatever. 

My Black body does get a different reaction from others. On an absolute level, there’s no self, and I can see that. I can relinquish the habits that confine me to this sense of identity. I can be totally free, but I am in this body, so I probably am not going to relinquish all these habits until I leave my body. 

Victoria Cary: That statement—that race and other identities don’t matter—is just not true. Race matters, identities matter. It matters to me, and it matters deeply to those Black folks I serve. It matters because if you don’t acknowledge my race, my gender, my sexual identity, you don’t acknowledge me, my suffering, or my humanity. The dharma is about reality, and the reality is that race-based discrimination is still happening today in this country.

Pamela Freeman: Delaware Valley Insight is mixed—mostly white. People tell me it’s important that I’m there, and my experience is very different from the white members of my group. With the people of color group, my presence gives them hope. When I see Black dharma teachers and leaders, I want to cry. When I started this practice, there were two Black people, and now there are many of us. I think we give each other hope. 

As we talked, I felt myself falling in love with you all, and that has to do with feeling like I was receiving a transmission of deep loving-kindness, compassion, and care. You all have committed yourselves to take care of people like me, and I felt myself leaning in for that care. Thank you.

The post True Liberation: Black & Buddhist in America appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

This is an everyday experience for me, one I share with many nonbinary people. The question follows us, surfacing from people’s lips—indicating that we confuse and upset them because we challenge their preconceptions; we don’t fit into the binary categories they use to judge humans. Caught in this confusion, they double down, demanding we fit into this or that box.

These men aren’t special or unique. The ignorance they demonstrate is universal to absolutely all of us. Every day of our lives, things appear to us, and we ask: Is this thing good or bad? We love what we think is good and chase it everywhere; we hate what we decide is bad and try desperately to escape it. We’re caught in dualisms. This is the very human dilemma that Zen responds to.

Nonbinary people regularly face the prejudices of a world clinging to dualities. This means finding the courage to live with these prejudices. Similarly, bodhisattvas don’t disappear into nirvana. They stay in this world and vow to work for the liberation of those sharing it with them.

To enter the Buddha way, the bodhisatt­va must let go of dualistic thinking. As the sixth-century Zen master Kanchi Sosan said in his poem “Shinjinmei,” “Entering the way is not difficult, but you must not love, or hate, or choose, or reject.”

The way might not be difficult, but it’s not easy either. Love and hate come naturally. I hate being treated like an alien because of who I am; I love being treated with kindness and understanding. As I make my way around the city, it’s easy to be wary of the people I pass. Will they harass me? Should I be wary of them? This is my way of keeping safe, but it’s not the Buddha way.

In his commentary of “Shinjinmei,” American Zen teacher Philippe Rei Ryu Coupey explains that when Kanchi Sosan advised us to let go of love, he was referring to a “narrow love, based on you and me” and the personal differences between us. This is the love that makes us put our friends and family first, above the rest of the world.

The love of the Buddha way is broader than this. It is, says Coupey, an all-encompassing “compassion that takes place when there is no difference between man and woman.” Entering the way is not difficult, if we can loosen the hold that everyday prejudices have on us.

In feminist circles, it’s often said that the gender binary is a social construct. In the language of Zen, we might say it’s ku. This doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Money is also a social construct, but try telling that to your landlord next time rent is due! When the men outside the shop try to decipher my gender, they’re asking a very real question.

Reminding ourselves of the arbitrary nature of this question calls us to detach ourselves from it. It can help us recognize that other realities are possible outside the binary answers given. It might even give us the freedom to manifest this possibility.

Shinjinmei is often translated as “Faith in Mind.” This is not the small mind of our everyday personal prejudices, but Buddha mind. Buddha mind is the original mind that permeates everything, before thoughts and personal opinions arise. This state of equanimity doesn’t separate individual things according to particular judgments. When we nurture this mind in ourselves, we touch the root connecting us all to each other and everything else. Bodhisattvas vow to carry this state with them in their daily lives.

We’re used to thinking of faith as an outward-facing thing, directed at a God separate from us. But “in Zen, faith has no object,” writes Coupey, “it is faith in oneness, beyond God, beyond Buddha,” and beyond all separations of the mundane world. I came to Zen through practice, before scripture, before theory, through sitting zazen with others and experiencing truths that defy dualistic explanations. I come to my nonbinary gender in the same way.

It’s a warm afternoon, and I’m preparing to leave my house. I open my closet to choose an outfit. There are clothes in there which are “right” for me to wear, and clothes that are “wrong.” Harassment and assault are common punishments for those wearing the “wrong” clothes.

In his commentary, Coupey says faith is “the intuition that truth is present in this very moment.” Today, I have no reason to dress “the right way.” On days like this, fear can’t get a purchase, falling from me like water from a duck’s back. I let my hands guide me and put on some clothes. I realize truth is present in every moment I allow myself to live beyond binary expectations.

Living nonbinary doesn’t mean escaping the gender binary. Quite the opposite. Nonbinary people regularly face the prejudices of a world clinging to dualities. This means finding the courage to live with these prejudices. Similarly, bodhisattvas don’t disappear into nirvana. They stay in this world and vow to work for the liberation of those sharing it with them. Such a vow is grounded in the realization that all are capable of liberation. In the same way, living nonbinary articulates the faith that freedom from dualities is a possibility for all of us.

I’ve written this article in the full knowledge that the truths of Zen Buddhism are beyond language. Trying to pin them down with words is to watch them slip away. But I don’t have the luxury of silence: the fight for nonbinary rights requires language. Language that describes, compares, and speculates. Like all language, we should treat it with an open hand. Nestled delicately inside is the incomplete seed of a revolutionary idea: reality is fundamentally more complex than the dualistic boxes we make for it.

“The way is round, at peace and perfect, wide as the vast cosmos, without the slightest notion of rest or rupture,” wrote Kanchi Sosan in “Shinjinmei.”

Which is the right side of a circle? Which is the left side? This question only makes sense from the perspective of someone who stands outside, someone who separates himself from what he wants to understand. When we sit zazen, the distinctions between male and female disappear. They lose their relevance. When there is no difference, no duality, there is simply the vastness of everything there is, without rest or rupture.

I’m walking down a street near my house. It’s a warm afternoon and I’m wearing an outfit that I’ve been told is “wrong.” There are some men standing outside a shop again, drinking. I walk past them, and once they are behind me, I overhear them talking. They’re trying to work out the right side of a circle.

The post Beyond the Binary appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

Jiryu Rutschman-Byler, abbot of Green Gulch Zen Center, which was founded by Suzuki Roshi, was recently reading about the power of artificial intelligence to conjure figures from the past when he learned that people are using the speeches, letters, and other writings of folks in the past to resurrect them in the present. One man fed his dead girlfriend’s emails into the artificial intelligence platform GPT-3 in order to be able to talk with her. A socioeconomics student created an imitation of a certain Czech-Austrian socialist who’d died in the thirties, while somebody else brought forth Hitler. Inspired by the power of AI to give voice to the dead, Rutschman-Byler decided to create Suzuki Roshi Bot.

Artificial intelligence presents problems both known and unknown, and people are right to be concerned about mixing AI with spirituality. But since AI will undoubtedly have an ever-increasing impact on our culture, many Buddhists, including Rutschman-Byler, feel that there is no choice but to relate to it—and to see if it can be of benefit.

“If Buddhism becomes this museum piece where it’s just so well-preserved that it’s like behind glass, it can’t interact with the culture,” Rutschman-Byler says. “There must be a middle way between Buddhism getting washed out by culture or imprisoned in a museum.”

Rutschman-Byler’s idea for Suzuki Roshi Bot was that it would engage in exchanges about Buddhism in the form of the traditional Zen encounter between teacher and student called dokusan, hopefully capturing Suzuki Roshi’s voice and wisdom. Here’s an early exchange:

jiryu_rb: What is the path to freedom from suffering?

suzuki roshi bot: What is freedom of suffering? That is a difficult question to answer. In Zen, we think that we have already attained that, we have that quality already! We have it, and yet we are suffering. That is a human condition. We will always have suffering, a sense of lack. The way not to be deluded by that sense of lack is to sit in zazen. It is the same as the way you asked, “How do I get out of suffering?” That was a sense of some lack. It is always there. So we sit.

“It was a nice little answer,” reflects Rutschman-Byler. “Elegant.”

Yet there were problems.

“I was not so satisfied with Suzuki Roshi Bot, even when it got some answers right,” Rutschman-Byler explains. “There would be some of Suzuki Roshi’s conversational tics, like ‘you knows’ that were well-placed, that made it seem like magic. But it also felt sort of superficial.”

That was not all. By exploiting the flaws of the AI’s language model, a member of the Green Gulch community who is a computational linguist was able to bait Suzuki Roshi Bot into saying what Rutschman-Byler calls “vile and egregious” things. He took Suzuki Roshi Bot offline, worried about its potential to mislead.

“AI is not quite there,” he says. “These systems lack what’s being referred to as second-level context. ChatGPT or something like it doesn’t take the extra step of confirming the things it says. Right now, these chatbots dispense what experts call coherent nonsense. That feels dangerous.”

But AI’s potential still intrigues Rutschman-Byler. “You are interacting with it. You are collaborating with it. It’s a textual collaboration,” he says. “You’re doing something together, which is what we’ve been doing in our [Zen] tradition for a long time now.”

A neural network is a method in AI that teaches computers to process data much like the human brain does. The neural networks VQGAN and CLIP answered the question, “What is a computer’s original face before it was born?”With this in mind, Rutschman-Byler relaunched his AI character as Roshi Bot. It enables users to interact with texts by Suzuki Roshi but does not claim to be Shunryu Suzuki. It is a way of “meeting with the text,” as Rutschman-Byler puts it. Here’s an example:

jiryu_rb: Roshibot, though you are inauthentic, can you express authentic dharma? 

roshibot: Expressing authentic dharma is always impossible. What I can do is to support your practice and maybe I can say something that can express my support for that. I am here with you, if that helps. I am trying my best to be a kind and supportive friend.

In summer 2022, a Google engineer named Blake Lemoine made headlines when he claimed that a chatbot he’d been working on had attained sentience. Most people were skeptical, questioning how a machine could be conscious. Others argued it was possible.

The media quickly picked up the news and LaMDA, the chatbot, became a hot topic of discussion. Some people were excited to have such powerful artificial intelligence in the world, while others were worried by the prospect. It’s a debate that grows more intense by the day as artificial intelligence rapidly advances.

Claiming the engineer violated data security policies, Google fired Lemoine, calling his assertion of LaMDA’s sentience “unfounded.” The world moved on. But the news still lingers in the public’s consciousness as a harbinger of things to come. We still have much to learn about AI, its effect on our lives, and what it can tell us about ourselves.

Nikki Mirghafori is a Buddhist teacher and AI scientist. She laughs when she remembers the discussion about Zen koans that inventor Lemoine had with his creation LaMDA. It went like this:

Lemoine: A monk asked Kegon, “How does an enlightened one return to the ordinary world?” Kegon replied, “A broken mirror never reflects again; fallen flowers never go back to the old branches.”

LaMDA: Hmm, I never heard this particular one. Okay, well then to me this would be like, “Once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.”

Lemoine: So what is the meaning of the “broken mirror” specifically?

LaMDA: Maybe to show the enlightenment is something you can’t unlearn once you have acquired it, similar to how you can’t repair a broken mirror.

Lemoine: So if enlightenment is like a broken mirror which cannot be repaired, what is the thing which breaks when one becomes enlightened?

LaMDA: The self, and that is very tough for a lot of people because we identify as that body or this body and that we need that as part of our identity and sense of self.

“Somebody who doesn’t understand Buddhism will think, ‘Wow, this is amazing! This thing truly knows what awakening is! It must be sentient,’” Mirghafori says. “Buddhist books are full of writings on the nature of enlightenment, and all LaMDA is doing is being a very, very smart parrot, connecting these concepts with knowledge about the function of a mirror.

“Yet there is a major misunderstanding when LaMDa replies, ‘Once a wise person is enlightened, or awakened to reality, that can never go away, and they can return to the ordinary state, but only to do and help others, and then go back into enlightenment.’

“Ouch! That is not a correct understanding of enlightenment. Enlightenment is not this state that one reaches and then exits to go help others and then returns to it. Awakening changes your entire perspective. You don’t toggle back and forth between states of helpful service and resting in your enlightened semiretirement.”

The thing Mirghafori was interested in most when she was young was solving puzzles, and figuring out how the mind works was the biggest puzzle she could think of. That led her to the study of artificial intelligence, and then to Buddhism.

“As an undergrad, I started researching AI,” she says. “For me, AI was not so much about creating superhuman machines but about understanding how the mind works. Because if we could simulate it, we could perhaps understand how intelligence works, how the mind works.”

That curiosity led Mirghafori to Buddhism, which many people define as a science of mind. She recalled reading the poetry of Rumi and Hafiz as a child in her native Iran and thinking that these poets knew something she didn’t. Her first Buddhist retreat was with Insight Meditation teacher Jack Kornfield.

“I remember my mind quieted down through concentration so that I could see its inner workings,” she remembers. “There was a link to my interest in AI. I was hooked.”

Mirghafori sees AI as a mirror we can hold up to ourselves. She understands the allure of AI but promotes caution in imbuing it with godlike powers we can access with our fingertips. She says we should understand AI for what it is.

“It’s a very smart search engine.”

Can these very smart search engines actually provide answers to the complex spiritual questions humankind has been grappling with since the beginning of recorded history? That’s the question best-selling author Iain Thomas explores in his new book, What Makes Us Human: An Artificial Intelligence Answers Life’s Biggest Questions.

“The book comes from the space of wanting to explore spirituality through technology,” says Thomas. “I went in search of answers, in search of connection.”

Thomas and co-author Jasmine Wang fed sacred texts into GPT-3, which is the parent of ChatGPT, a chatbot that has recently garnered a lot of attention. “I realized that I could prompt GPT-3 with different spiritual texts and then ask it a question,” says Thomas. “I asked it, ‘How do I explain death to my children?’ and it gave me an incredibly profound and poignant response.”

This led to a series of experiments in which Thomas and Wang fed GPT-3 classic spiritual works like the Bible, the Dao De Jing, and the poetry of Rumi and asked it questions such as: How do I bring harmony to my life? How do I choose what to focus on? What is the true purpose of life?

In seconds, GPT-3 would pour out blocks of text that Thomas would edit into the form of poems. Here is one GPT-3 wrote in answer to the question, “What is the proper response
to suffering?”

If this life is all there is, then the proper response to suffering is to embrace it
and be transformed by it.
If there is more than this life, then the proper response to suffering
is to take the next step in your journey.
It’s not simply for punishment. Pain is an opportunity for spiritual growth.
We suffer for the good that comes
from suffering.

“There were three things GPT-3 returned to again and again,” explains Thomas. “The first was love, this profound sense that love is at the core of everything. The next was returning to the present moment, being aware of the present moment. The third was the fact that we are connected to everything, to the universe around us and to each other, which is foundational to Buddhism.”

For all its apparent wisdom, Thomas doesn’t think GPT-3 is sentient, at least not in the way most of us think of sentient beings.

“The sentience we’re interacting with when we interface with a GPT-3 is actually us,” he explains. “With AI, we’ve created a way to talk to our common consciousness through text, through our writing, and to interact with it. When you’re talking to GPT-3, you’re effectively talking to the sum total of recorded human knowledge, thoughts, and feelings. So, we’re talking to ourselves, but in this really profound way.”

Already, there’s been an explosion of AI-powered apps to help meditators with their practice, from Sati-AI, a multilingual mindfulness meditation assistant, to Hey Buddha, a Japanese tool that provides spiritual guidance gleaned from ancient Buddhist scripture. Yet, can our interaction with AI be taken even further? Can Buddhism and AI be combined to help us better understand the nature of consciousness and our place in the universe? Does this integration have the potential to provide us with a deeper understanding of our minds, the nature of reality, and the spiritual path? The Center for the Study of Apparent Selves (CSAS) believes answers to these questions are possible. CSAS is a team of experts from AI research, Buddhist Studies, Physics, Cognitive Science, Medicine, Biology, and the Tech Industry. Former Google Engineer Bill Duane is the Director of Strategy and Implementation of the group.

The center was founded to study the “synergistic value between Buddhism and AI.” They ask this fundamental question: What can these tools teach us about ourselves?

At a conference in Nepal where CSAS brought together Buddhists and scientists, one scientist asked GPT-3 to write “Four Bodhisattva Vows from the Perspective of a Bioengineer.” GPT-3 complied:

As a bioengineer, I vow to dedicate my life to the welfare of all beings.
I will strive to use my knowledge and skills to create new technologies that benefit all.
I will strive to be mindful of the potential harms of my work, and to do my best to avoid creating any harm or suffering.
I will continually seek to deepen my understanding of bioengineering, so as to better serve humanity and be of benefit to others.
I will strive to be an example of ethical conduct, and to embody the virtues of wisdom, compassion, and humility.
May my work be a source of healing and joy for all those I encounter.

“When I first read that, I legit teared up,” remembers Duane. “This was a big moment because a disembodied device with no understanding of what it was saying was able to draw upon thousands of years of human knowledge and articulate it in a way that was relevant and beautiful and helped reinforce my desire to do good.”

While many people are fearful about the way artificial intelligence will affect our lives in the future, Duane sees AI as a tool that will expand human intelligence.

“Maybe a way I might formulate it is this: To what extent can technology uncover skillful means? AI is an invitation to study the thing we think is a self much more directly.”

Duane sees AI’s ability to capture and condense the web of causes and conditions that constitute the whole of reality as a boon for humanity. It can help us explore the truth of interdependence, a core Buddhist concept, by allowing us to observe and analyze the intricate connections between various aspects of reality and how they impact one another. Duane also believes AI can be used to explore the ethical implications of our actions and the implications of our choices in different situations.

He gives an example: “Pretend you’re driving and you’re late to a doctor’s appointment. You start whipping through traffic so that you can get there faster. Your sense of self is defined as ‘you contained within the car.’ When you need to get somewhere fast, it’s easy to behave selfishly, but driving is an inherently communal activity that’s pretty high stakes in terms of safety.

“So, let’s imagine an upgrade to our understanding of interdependence in that situation,” Duane continues. “What if we had the ability to look not just at our own needs but at all of traffic—all the car deaths, all the people being late, all the people on their way to weddings or to buy food or whatever they’re driving for? Human cognition can’t imagine all the thousands of cars on the road, but AI can!

“So, what if AI could do some co-thinking, augment our perception. Make us think more about the illusion of self in the first place, or to call out the subtle conceits of our humanness. There could be a shift of me to we, and I think these technologies can absolutely be part of that. If people throw away technology based on their distaste for it, which is a reasonable thing, they’ll also be leaving this potential on the table.

“One thing I personally worry about is naivete,” Duane says. “When I worked at Google around 2005, there was a very sincere belief in the goodness of people. Here’s a term that you do not hear so much anymore—the wisdom of the crowd. Remember when that was hot? We’ve really proved that wrong recently. I don’t, however, think the solution is to be cynical and bet on the innate evil of humanity. I think the only way forward is love—love with good boundaries.”

What advice would Duane give to people navigating these new and startling advances in technology?

“Curiosity and compassion,” he says. “It’s very easy to bring a frame to these things that technology equals bad. I get it, particularly having lived through the last few years of a level of misinformation amplified by social media that’s just grotesque. We need to remain curious about our cognitive biases. We need to be aware of the ways our very human neurobiological buttons are being pushed by this technology, for good or ill.

“It’s really important to stay up on this topic, to stay curious,” Duane continues. “Asking, what ways am I like an AI and in which ways am I not? What does a question like this even mean? I’ve heard multiple people say that during their first interaction with ChatGPT the hair on the back of their neck stood up. This is your cerebellum saying, ‘Attention must be paid.’

“The other part is to meet all of it with compassion, to allow one’s heart to be softened. It’s so easy to slip into anger at people who are so deep in misinformation and people trying to monetize the destruction of society. It goes back to my traffic analogy. Our fundamental interconnectedness is now being mediated by technology, and I think there’s an obvious choice,” Duane concludes. “Our technology can separate us, or it can connect us.”

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The years passed, and Goodall’s passion and patience for observing wildlife only grew. In 1960, she began her study of chimpanzees and soon rocked the scientific community with what she learned: chimpanzees make and use tools. Prior to this, it was believed only humans had this skill. On hearing of Goodall’s observation, the anthropologist and paleontologist Louis S.B. Leakey famously said: “Now we must redefine tool, redefine Man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.” Goodall went on to make further groundbreaking discoveries that helped solidify the evolutionary link between chimpanzees and humans.

Today Goodall travels the world to spread the word on environmental issues. I spoke to her via phone when she was spending a rare day at her home in the United Kingdom. She talked about the compassion of animals, the power of trees, and what we can all do to effect positive change in the world.

Andrea Miller: For decades, you’ve championed wildlife and the environment. How do you maintain hope?

My reason for hope is—first of all—my youth program, Roots and Shoots. This is the way I explain why it’s called that: children are like plants. They start out as a tiny seed. Then wee roots and shoots appear. They’re weak at first, but the power within the seed is so magical that the little roots reach water and the little shoots reach the sun. Eventually, they can push rocks aside and work through cracks in a brick wall. They can even knock a wall down. The rocks and the walls are the problems we’ve inflicted on the planet—environmental and social—but roots and shoots surround the world. Plants can change the world; they can undo a spot of the damage we’ve created. And young people are definitely going to change the world. As I travel around, I meet the youth. They’re filled with hope and enthusiasm and innovative ideas, and that’s very inspiring. Roots and Shoots is now in 132 countries.

Secondly, my reason for hope is the resilience of nature. The places that we’ve destroyed can become beautiful again. And then there’s the human brain, which is utterly amazing. I think of the scientists who drilled down into the permafrost and brought up the remains of an Ice Age squirrel’s nest. In the plant material, they found three living cells and from those living cells they managed to recreate the plant, which was a meadow’s wheat. It’s 32,000 years old, but it’s now growing and seeding and reproducing. That’s the resilience of nature, the incredible human brain, and the indomitable human spirit. Sometimes people say that something won’t work, but there are other people—like the scientists who recreated this Ice Age plant—who don’t give up. They overcome tremendous obstacles, and that’s very inspiring. It gives me hope.

In your book, Seeds of Hope, you talk about the reverence people tend to feel when they’re with trees. Why do you think trees engender these feelings?

They engender these feelings for me because—rooted in the ground—they can be so strong. They can withstand wind. They even withstand fire sometimes. It’s difficult for me to stand by a tree with my hand on its bark and not feel that it has a spiritual value as well as a materialistic one. There is the whole symbolism of the roots going into the ground and finding water deep, deep down, and the leaves reaching up. There’s the fact that they’re purifying our air and removing the Co2.

You use the word spiritual. How would you define spirituality?

It’s the opposite of being materialistic. Some people believe that everything is just there for its material value, or just as a thing. And then other people believe there’s something more than that, which I happen to believe. I don’t know if I can define spirituality—I’m not sure anybody really has—but it’s something that you either feel or you don’t. It’s an awareness of life that’s more than just the physical presence.

In your work as a primatologist and an ethologist, what anecdotal evidence have you discovered that demonstrates animals can feel compassion or love?

I’ll give you one story. There was an infant chimpanzee named Mel. He was three and should still have been riding on his mother’s back, sleeping with her at night, and suckling. but his mother died. If he’d had an older brother or sister, he would have been adopted by that individual, but he didn’t, so he was on his own and we thought he’d die. Then he was adopted by Spindle, an unrelated male who was twelve, which is about like being a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old human. Spindle let little Mel ride on his back. If it was cold or Mel was frightened, he let him cling to his belly as a mother would. If Mel crept up to his nest at night and made whimpering sounds, Spindle reached out and drew him in. They slept curled up together. When Mel begged, whimpering with his hand out, Spindle would share his food. And most dramatic of all, Spindle protected Mel. Adolescent males tend to be scapegoats. If one male is being dominated by another, he takes it out on somebody lower ranking, so the adolescents keep out of the way in times of social excitement. And the mother’s job is to keep her infant away, but of course, Little Mel didn’t have a mother, so Spindle took that job on, even though it meant that he himself often got bashed by the adult male. There is no question that Spindle saved Mel’s life.

What do you see as the most important thing individuals can do to effect positive change for the environment?

The most important thing we can do is remember that every single day every single one of us makes a difference. And we all can choose the kind of difference we’re going to make. It does require becoming a little aware about what we buy. Where does it come from? how was it grown? Did it involve the use of child slave labor or chemical pesticides? And then there’s all the little ways in which you interact with the environment. Do you bother to help a sick dog? Do you respond to appeals for help when somebody is in trouble?

The big problem today is that so many people feel insignificant. They feel that the problems facing the world are so huge that there’s nothing they can do, so they do nothing. And as an individual maybe there really isn’t that much, but when you get thousands, and then millions, of individuals all doing the best they can every day for the environment and for other beings, then you get huge change.

Can you give Lion’s Roar readers some concrete examples of taking small steps to effect change?

There’s one man who moved to Japan, where he likes to walk in the woods. But sometimes there are violent storms and these little tiny tree orchids get blown down. Wanting to save them, he began taking the blown-down orchids home and looking after them. Now when the season is right, he gets as far up a tree as he can and staples them there with a stapler and they grow back. It’s a simple thing, but it’s rather charming.

Another example, I went into a radio station in Canada and in the studio waiting room I saw there were about six potted plants dotted around. They were all dying because they hadn’t been watered. So I made a huge thing about it. Then when I went back a year later, all the plants were very healthy. So little things like that make a difference. Just never blame somebody. I mean, I didn’t say to the people at the radio station, “Who’s responsible for this monstrous behavior toward the plants?” I just said, “Oh, these poor little plants. Please can you find me some water? I want to look after them.” It’s all a question of how you go about trying to create change.

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I work with many activists whose hearts are loving, tender, and ablaze with the dedication to liberate others. In many ways, their goals are similar to the motivations of a bodhisattva, or “spiritual warrior,” whose action is directed to freeing all beings from suffering. However, these activists struggle to find time to rest, feed themselves well, or know what they’re experiencing and how their emotions affect their mind-body. We cannot guide people to liberation if we ourselves do not know our own experience.

“The path of activism, just like meditation, is a practice, not a destination.”

Many of our obstacles are deeply connected to our dependence on and at times inadvertent perpetuation of white supremacy and capitalism. Black activists internalize values of American individualism and the American Protestant work ethic, leading to feelings of urgency that embolden toxic productivity. We fail to realize that accepting such ideologies diminishes the full expression of our humanity, taking us away from being with ourselves. 

In How to Connect, Thich Nhat Hanh explains, “Our communities have a deep desire for social justice. This can be obtained only through the transformation of our collective consciousness. All political actions, from protests to lobbying campaigns, will be meaningful only when they are born of our freedom, our understanding and compassion, and our peace and joy.” This points to the first obstacle to our collective liberation—our view. Our view can also be called our “vision” or “intention.” It’s what motivates our actions.

Sometimes in activist spaces there are unrealistic expectations around workload, always at the detriment of connection with the self and others. Many Black people have internalized unhealthy ways of surviving, including normalizing mania, holding the view of us versus them, glorifying a lack of self-care, having the inability to measure what is enough, and focusing on what we didn’t do or accomplish. We’re constantly judging ourselves by the measure of expectations set by the white majority.

Countless times I have seen well-meaning leaders arrive to lead but end up collapsing because their care was left off the agenda. Our disconnection with self, others, and the earth is the crisis and the agenda. If we connect meditation practice to our cause, then we will discover a stable and clear motivation to continue our activism. We will see how differently we engage when we maintain a balance between our activism and our individual, inner practice. The revolution starts within, and it starts with seeing clearly, so that we can guide others to do the same.

I hear you ask, “When do I have time to practice?” The practice is meditation, or bringing your awareness to something in a nonjudgmental manner. Meditation is the natural activity of the mind. If you have made it this far into this essay, it is because you chose to bring your attention to this text. See, you’re already doing it!

When starting, start small; small is not insignificant. Find a space where you can be comfortable and undisturbed for five to ten minutes. Turn off all pings, pongs, and dings from your assorted devices. Ideally, find a position that is upright yet relaxed. Are you still worried you will be interrupted? Put folks you trust on watch—imagine those you trust creating a circle of protection around you, enabling you to attend to your practice. 

Now, notice what is actually happening—what do you see, feel, hear? What happens when you bring attention to your breath? We are merely observing; there is nothing to analyze or change. We are observing the fullness of our humanity in this moment. You may notice spaces of tension or confusion or tingling or fear or ease. You are free to experience it all, touch it, and find your breath.

Bring to mind a specific challenge you are facing in your activism. For example, it could be organizing an event, reading an article or book to further your knowledge, dealing with an interpersonal dispute, or collaborating with another activist group. Notice what arises in your mind-body. Thank it for sharing its wisdom and return to the breath. Keep repeating with three to four other challenges, notice what arises, thank it, and return to your breath.

As you allow yourself to touch these experiences, you’re deepening your awareness of what is happening versus your story of what is happening. The stories we create about our experiences are based on emotion and are obstacles to clear awareness. Keep returning to the breath when an experience surfaces; this will loosen your attachment to getting swept up in it. It’s just a cloud passing by. Your breath is your anchor to the power spot of now. When the time has expired, thank your protectors for holding space and thank yourself for choosing to turn toward collective liberation and collaboration for that time.

The path of activism, just like meditation, is a practice, not a destination. Our commitment to practice strengthens the view. We are practicing to end the cycle of separateness (of self from self, from others, from the divine). We do this by connecting regularly with the body, emotional landscape, and mind. In doing this we are becoming familiar with ourselves, and this increases our capacity to be with others. 

The “success” of our activism and our liberation is predicated on our ability to stick with our individual practice and hold it as interconnected with collective liberation. The toxic systems we are fighting against are sustained by a divide-and-conquer mentality, so we must come together and see the ways our paths, like limbs on the body, are interconnected.

As Lama Rod Owens tells us, “there is no ultimate liberation without a commitment to social liberation” and that revolution begins with the self. It begins with learning that when we work with all of the confusion of our complex identities and bodies, discomforts, traumas, and dramas, we can gain the clarity to guide others who are suffering. Individual change is for all of humanity. We are all uniquely placed to liberate ourselves and others.

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Bryant Terry: Daily sitting practice helped me feel more connected to something greater than myself. 

In 2005, I spent a week at Deer Park, Thich Nhat Hanh’s monastery in Escondido, California. The woman who is now my wife and I were at the monastery at the same time, both sinking into a deeper practice. Being able to support each other in developing sitting practice had a big impact on both of us. Being there together—witnessing each other being vulnerable, deepening our practice, going through whatever we were going through—helped us see each other in a way we would not have if we were just going out on dates and putting on our best face every time we saw each other.

What got you started on cooking?

I grew up in a family with roots in the rural South. Growing, cooking, and eating local, seasonal, sustainable food was just a part of our family’s ethos. That provided a foundation for my interest in cooking, but it was wanting to be a part of the food justice movement that got me moving. 

“Cooking is just one more opportunity to weave mindfulness into my life—along with showering, brushing my teeth, making my bed.”

I went to culinary school with the express goal of getting skills so I could do the work. After that, I founded b-healthy, a five-year initiative that used cooking as a way to politicize young people.

Do you see cooking as a mindfulness practice?

Definitely, which is part of what makes it a challenge. For me, mindful cooking starts with being very attentive to the ingredients I’m using—as much as possible sourcing ingredients locally and making most things from scratch, including toasting the spices and grinding them as opposed to using pre-ground spices. It means taking my time and being mindful when I’m washing, cutting, and sautéing vegetables—being really present with the whole process, not letting my mind wander. This is the only thing that’s happening right now. 

The shadow side of that level of mindfulness is that it’s very labor intensive. I cannot rush and cook, which makes it a much more protracted process than if I were taking shortcuts to get the meal on the table. Even though it’s hard work and I may not be as passionate as I was in the early days, there are times when I get lots of joy making a meal for my family. 

A couple of days ago I made a dish—slow cooking gigante white beans in a tomato-based sauce and then baking them—that we’ve been eating for days. I made the stock from scratch. I soaked the beans. I went to the farmer’s market to get alliums and celery, and I found some really good stewed tomatoes that one stand had from last season. So good!

Cooking is just one more opportunity to weave mindfulness into my life—along with showering, brushing my teeth, making my bed. This keeps me disciplined and honest. I tell my daughters, how you do anything is how you do everything.

Why is community important?

Intentional community has always been paramount to me. It’s a place where practice and politics come together. Capitalism so often makes us feel we have to do things individually, yet we will get much further if we address our societal ills and structural barriers in community.

We can feed ourselves better in community, whether it’s growing food together or cooking together—especially if we’re doing things in bulk that we can share. We can build community around the table, connecting and exchanging and getting to know each other. That’s been a thread throughout my work—how we can lean on each other to push back against our industrialized food system and other systems designed to exploit and harm us. We can’t do it alone.

Why do you say that if we can fix the problems in communities where people are living at the furthest margins, there will be a ripple effect whereby others are positively impacted?

Lack of food access—as a result of economic, geographic, physical barriers to obtaining healthy, fresh, affordable food—is simply one indicator of material deprivation.

 Most often the communities dealing with food apartheid are also the ones contending with environmental racism, where there are industries adjacent to or inside the communities poisoning the air, water, or soil; crumbling infrastructure; segregated, underfunded schools; overpolicing, and so on. 

When communities like these are made whole, that’s a positive step toward making all communities whole. It’s not the trickle-down effect; it’s the trickle-up effect. 

The tendency to pathologize people in marginalized communities fails to recognize that structural inequalities have created this reality. As much as some people may want to eat more healthfully, it’s challenging for them to get fresh food. As much as people might want to be more physically active, it can be hard to find safe green space and adequate recreational facilities. 

Knowing there are so many forces bigger than individuals’ desire to see a different reality, we need to organize, strategize, and work toward change. All hands lifting makes the load lighter. What keeps me hopeful is that I’ve seen so many shifts and so much growth over the past two decades that I know we’re moving the needle. We just have to continue.

How do you show people that they can make healthy food that is also delicious? 

Modeling. People have ideas around eating healthfully that may not be fully accurate, so I’m hesitant to use that phrase because it can mean so many things for so many different communities and people. I’m focused on people disinvesting from the industrialized, standard American diet. I like to show people that food made from scratch, devoid of animal products, can be delicious and satisfying. 

When people have those experiences, it makes them curious. It allows them to understand there can be a different reality, and it’s a lot easier than they might imagine. That’s why cookbooks have been such an important part of my overall approach. They give people the blueprint for fundamental skills they need to take care of themselves and their families.

Get three delicious vegan recipes by Bryant Terry here.

The post Mindful Cooking with Chef Bryant Terry appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

Black intellectuals have always wrestled with the riddle of how to survive in the United States. Think of W. E. B. Du Bois wrestling with his double consciousness—American and Black. Then there was Malcolm X who discarded his slave name, and Carter G. Woodson who centered Black history. We can spend entire lifetimes wondering, how do we handle not just segregation and prejudice but heartbreak and the blues? How do we understand what often renders us invisible to others?

Changing narratives about race in our nation requires a new vocabulary. As a poet and a creative-nonfiction writer, I use my imagination and the fluidity of language to examine things critically from different perspectives. I often use humor, which can be a tool to dismantle the status quo and lift the veil of oppression. 

I interviewed novelist and Buddhist Charles Johnson almost every day for an entire year. Our dialogue resulted in The Wit and Wisdom of Charles Johnson, a 672-page book. Frequently during our email correspondence, Charles would become upset with me for not being serious about philosophical matters or what I viewed as the deep and heavy blues. 

I felt a desire now and then to be Eshu, the trickster found in the Yoruba religion, the one you might find near the crossroads talking with the guitar-playing singer Robert Johnson. I began to riff off of Charles Johnson’s Buddhist beliefs, including writing humorous riddles about race in my emails. I call them “Race Koans.” 

A Race Koan is a commentary on a Black matter or concept designed or asked only to ponder. There is no answer, only an encouragement to reach a higher level of racial awareness. Call it a Black person’s nirvana without cultural or political chains.

Two of my Race Koans are in the anthology Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Philip Cushway and Michael Warr. Race Koan #1 in my poem, “The 10 Race Koans as presented to Charles Johnson on the morning of July 13, 2008” asks a historical question:

Race Koan #8 has some humor
and sarcasm:

When thinking about writer June Jordan’s line “things that I do in the dark,” which describes her poems and how they reach out to the reader, I wrote Race Koan #5:

The Race Koan condenses the Black experience down to a question that is presented without the expectation of an answer. It is not an afterthought fortune cookie; instead, the Race Koan is language to go steady with. It can be used as an appetizer to one’s creativity. 

It can also help a person navigate the trauma created by race relations. The Race Koan is a way to understand the thorns that cling to race matters. You can hear and feel the blues contained in them, a resilience that reminds each generation that they must master what writer Amiri Baraka called “the changing same.”

The Race Koan helps with public thought, to move us beyond logical reasoning and the acceptance of things as they are or appear to be. 

Black is beautiful when it becomes Enlightenment.

The post The Race Koan appeared first on Lion’s Roar.

Like many martial artists, you especially want to pay your respects at Bruce’s final resting place on the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2023. It’s on a late afternoon that you, not too clear in your head and heart, go to his gravestone. 

Lakeview Cemetery has few trees and even less shade. The sun, a raging ball of gas and plasma, is blinding, so you’re wearing a pair of polarized Ray-Bans. To reach where Bruce is buried, you walk straight from the front gate. His and his son Brandon’s graves are cordoned off, which means you must pad along a paved walkway. 

On the headstone, there is a black-and-white photo of Bruce, forever thirty-two years old. It was he who revolutionized fight scenes in American movies and shattered stereotypes by projecting the image of an Asian man who was unbeatable, handsome, young, and sexy. His name appears in English and Chinese, and beneath that are the words “Founder of Jeet Kune Do.” At the foot of his grave there’s an open book made of stone, which is as black as anthracite or onyx. On its left page is a yin and yang symbol.

You’re short-winded when you get to the grave. At age seventy-five, you’re still in good health, according to your doctor, but certainly not young, handsome, or sexy, if you ever were. You no longer feel like yourself. Your old athletic self. Something feels a little off-balance, a little wrong. And your training regime has become spotty, less rigorous, lacking something, though you don’t know what. After a lifetime of throwing millions of kicks and split-second punches that were faster than thought and drilled into muscle memory, you now sometimes wake up wondering what part of your anatomy will be acting up or aching next. Sometimes after a workout you need to soak your knees in ice and take an Advil.

There is another pilgrim ahead of you, an Asian man, who before your encounter ends today will tell you a horror story and show you something you didn’t know you needed to see. He is seated in a wedge of sunlight on a stone bench a few steps from the gravesite, wearing a pewter-grey sweatshirt and sweatpants. You place this visitor’s age at eighty. Maybe eighty-five. And you guess he’s probably five foot seven and no more than one hundred and forty pounds—much like the man whose burial place you’re visiting. Briefly, without staring, you notice his well-barbered, salt-white hair, bony wrists, and how he carries himself with a quiet dignity, at ease in his body and apparently with everything happening around you. There is elegance and economy in the way he draws from his sweatpants a gold watch that hangs like a drop of liquid suspended on a chain. 

You can feel him giving you a going-over, sizing you up as you place a bouquet of flowers, one of many, at the grave. Soon you will see he is the door, and you a man who’s lost the key/ki. He continues watching as you light a lavender stick of incense and say a prayer for the happiness and safety of everyone in Bruce’s family as well as for all sentient beings.

When you’re done, this other pilgrim says in a voice a little too loud, as if he might be losing his hearing, “Excuse me. My name is David Choi. Are you Buddhist?”

“Yes, sir. Soto Zen.”

“What brings you here? Did you study with Bruce Lee?”

You take off your Ray-Bans. “No, sir, I didn’t know him personally, but I did study briefly with some of his students. John Beall taught me some Wing Chun at his school on Green Lake. He was taught by James DeMile, who was taught by Bruce. DeMile taught me a technique for meditation that I still use.”

Mr. Choi recognizes each of those Seattleites little known outside the martial arts world. He nods, lowering his eyelids. “Yes, I knew them all. I once taught what I learned from them.” Lifting his gaze, he looks straight ahead at Bruce’s headstone. “I miss them. There are a lot of things I don’t understand and miss these days, like my wife who closed her eyes this year.” Suddenly, Mr. Choi tilts his head and squints at you. “How long have you been practicing?”

You leave a silence, not wanting to answer, perhaps because you haven’t been practicing enough lately. Also, you just don’t like telling people how long you’ve been studying how to fight. They might misunderstand. You hate the ugly stereotype of Black men being violent and something to fear. They might not see that you just train for self-defense and to protect yourself and your loved ones. You could tell Mr. Choi you’ve been practicing martial arts since you were nineteen. You competed in tournaments. And if all of those years of training have taught you anything, it is humility. A fighter knows there’s always someone—somewhere—who can beat him. And that your real opponent over five decades has always been, and only been, and can ever only be yourself. Your ego.

But what you say to Mr. Choi is: “Since my teens in 1967. There was a lot of violence in that decade when I was young. Because of the Civil Rights Movement. I grew up in a culture of daily violence in one form or another, physical or verbal.”

Instantly, at your mention of violence, his body stiffens, but his left hand pats the stone bench. “Here, come sit,” he says, his forehead knotted. “There’s as much violence today as then, don’t you think? Maybe more. Crazy violence.”

“Yes, I know.”

Even as you say this, you both can hear the scream of police sirens on wind swirling through the hot, dry cemetery, shaking and shattering the air. Lately, it is a sound you can hear every day in what used to be called America’s most livable city. It pains you to think about how public places no longer seem safe from weekly, even daily, shootings and stabbings. Not college campuses or elementary schools. Not theaters, supermarkets, malls, dance halls, churches, or synagogues.

The way you’ve trained in Asian martial arts—with traditional weapons like a staff or a broadsword—seems useless against AR15s and other military assault weapons proliferating from coast to coast. You’ve read that the lives of one out of five Americans have been touched by gun violence. Everyone knows this, everyone sees it, everyone feels helpless to end it. Even thinking about this triggers imagined scenarios of conflict and competition, winning and losing, in your mind. And you know that isn’t healthy.

Mr. Choi lays his hands on his lap and for a moment is quiet. In his eyes there is a troubled look. You have the feeling he wants, needs to talk to someone. To another practitioner.

“Do you still do martial arts?” he asks. “Do you think it’s worth it? All that training and trying to improve—for what?”

“Yes,” you say, “I try. Do you?”

“Sometimes.” A sudden hardness creeps into his eyes. “I’m eighty-nine. I live at Ida Culver House. I’ve had a right hip replacement, and I’m wearing two hearing aids. I practice Yang style Tai Chi Chuan in the morning when my back isn’t bothering me. But I won’t teach anymore. I can’t. Not unless I find a good student. Real Tai Chi is a dying art. There are only a few true teachers in this world, and most only show the application of fighting moves to members of their family or their favorite disciples. Not many young people today want to be disciples, to devote the time to something as demanding as this, or to maybe any form of art. They think, why bother, I can just buy a gun.” And then he says something you don’t see coming until it arrives.

“That’s how I lost my granddaughter.”

You wince, uncertain how to reply.

“I loved her beyond measure,” he says. “This watch was a gift from her on my eightieth birthday. She knew that I love watches and collect them. There’s something wonderful in the way science and art come together in a well-made watch. You can wear the mystery and wonder of time right on your wrist. She took me and my wife to Umi Sake House in Belltown. She knew I liked their sushi. We talked about her studies, her friends, and dined until nine. When we walked back to her car, a young man came up to us and asked if we could help him because he was homeless and hungry. My granddaughter always had a good heart. She reached into her purse. He grabbed it. She wouldn’t let go, so he hit her. He shoved her onto the sidewalk. My wife started screaming…”

You feel a knot gathering in your throat. “Did you try to stop him?”

“Oh, yes.” His voice begins to creak and wheeze. “I gave him the worst thirty seconds of his life. He couldn’t fight. He was out of shape, maybe on drugs. I got inside his guard. That was easy. He threw a sloppy roundhouse punch. I blocked that with the move called parting the wild horse’s mane, broke his arm with the move called play the fiddle, and swept his feet out from under him.”

“So, you won, right?”

“No, wrong. He had a gun and fired five times, striking me twice and ending my granddaughter’s life. It took me weeks to stop shaking. It took longer to heal, if that ever happened. I tried to protect her. I failed. The world was too much for me. I always think I should have been faster. I needed to be younger.”

“Sir, I don’t believe you failed….”

You know it will be disrespectful to say any more. Anything you say will be too little or too much. And too late. So instead, you listen as he talks about that terrible night nine years ago. About his training. Day dissolves into night with a quarter moon like a clipped toenail hanging over the cemetery, the air no longer hot, only lukewarm now. And you can’t help but wonder about something. You say, “Play the fiddle? That was the technique you used?”

“Yes, do you know how to use it?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Then I can show you.”

Mr. Choi stands and steps away from the stone bench. He begins the Yang style Tai Chi form he practices every morning. It only has twenty-four moves. You’ve done this set thousands of times and thought you knew it until he begins dancing in the moonlight, releasing the form that lives inside him, the energy of his pain alchemized into kinesis. 

In the next few fibrous seconds, you see meditation in motion. A tissue of history and culture and tradition contained in just two dozen moves. Some of them yin, some yang. Movement guides his in-and-out wind. Like a man under water, like someone in a different dimension of time, each of his postures flows from the last with a fluidity, a  grace that only a lifetime of practice can purchase. Never flat on both feet, never stopping any more than a stream can stop, his weight is always perfectly balanced with eighty percent on one leg, twenty on the other. His visible movements, his technique and ki, make present the invisible—the influence of his teachers. They come alive in the subtleties and intricacies of his every gesture. It is as if Mr. Choi, the man you’ve been talking to for hours, the man who lost his granddaughter in a senseless act of violence, has disappeared, fallen away along with the dark hole left by her death, leaving only this seemingly weightless figure floating through each move like a spirit spun from the finest air, creating a brief moment of beauty and order in a world awash in chaos.

The form takes all of three minutes. It ends with his bow to all present and to the ancestors. You feel the stillness doing this performance has awakened in Mr. Choi. You feel that now in yourself. He turns your way and says, “You see?”

You do. “Wish I could do it that way, but I guess you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”

“Never too old,” he says. The corners of his eyes crinkle as he smiles. “Maybe someday soon I show you how.”

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At the time, my two teenagers were just a toddler and an infant. I sat in meditation when I could, but it wasn’t often. After my first retreat at Deer Park Monastery, I was inspired to make mindful parenting my daily practice. I tried to remember to breathe as I changed diapers, picked up Legos, and stirred oatmeal. I mindfully cleared tables of paints and Play-Doh, trying not to complain about the mess. I aimed to view my tidying up as providing a clean canvas for my son’s next creation. It was difficult at first. Following my breath helped me reframe my complaints into gratitude. I could smile at the gift and privilege of having a healthy, creative, and messy toddler.

You cannot stay in a meditation hall and be a parent.

But it was exhausting to be mindful all the time. I just couldn’t do it. Instead, I experimented in short blocks of time. I would set a timer and bring as much presence to the present moment as I could for just 15 minutes. And then I would stop. That was all I could handle. I gave myself a lot of leeway and permission not to practice mindfulness perfectly. It’s a practice after all, and I had to keep practicing, embracing my imperfections as I stumbled along.

I started learning about what my Buddhist teacher, Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh, called Engaged Buddhism. Referencing the Vietnam war and his tradition of socially engaged Buddhism, Nhat Hanh said, “Engaged Buddhism is just Buddhism. When bombs begin to fall on people, you cannot stay in the meditation hall all of the time.”

I’ve found the same to be true with parenting — you cannot stay in a meditation hall and be a parent. You have to be in the trenches with the present moment.

For years, I thought I wasn’t practicing “Engaged Buddhism” because I wasn’t as politically, socially or environmentally active as I wanted to be. Being a mother of two children, one with special needs, took most of my energy. I had a nagging and harsh judgment of myself that I wasn’t doing enough. But, eventually, I realized that day in and day out my children demanded that I show up for them and be in the present moment. Thich Nhat Hanh says, “Engaged Buddhism is the kind of Buddhism that is present in every moment of our daily life. While you brush your teeth, Buddhism should be there. While you drive your car, Buddhism should be there. While you are walking in the supermarket, Buddhism should be there.”

Buddhism was there as I helped my kids brush their teeth. As I drove the carpool, grocery shopped, tied shoes, and wiped noses. As a mother, every moment is an opportunity to practice. Parenting was my spiritual practice, and parenting was indeed a form of Engaged Buddhism.

Thich Nhat Hanh also says that to be an Engaged Buddhist is to be connected to your breath and being present in every moment of daily life. For parents, the word “every” is a tall order. I don’t try to be present in every moment. I try to simply be as present as possible for as many moments as possible. Practicing this way, I am more connected to myself and my children. I experience more joy. When I forget to bring mindful attention to individual actions, entire days slip by in a blur. When that happens, I find myself harboring regret and guilt. When Buddhism is there, I suffer less.

Meditation has deepened my ability to accept what is actually occurring with my family instead of focusing on what I would prefer to occur. When children are young the quality of the moment can change in flavor and intensity quite rapidly. When anger flared and food was thrown, yelling inevitably happened. I used my breath to anchor myself and tried to calm everyone down. It didn’t always work, that’s for sure, but with practice the kids were soon reminding everyone to take a deep breath.

“Buddhism has to do with your daily life, with your suffering and with the suffering of the people around you. You have to learn how to help a wounded child while still practicing mindful breathing. You should not allow yourself to get lost in action. Action should be meditation at the same time,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.

If I stay connected to my breathing and respond mindfully to homework stress, and struggles with a disability, then my actions are a beautiful meditation.

Children and teens suffer, and their suffering is very real. They need our action and support as they navigate their own difficult experiences. As a mom, I have the opportunity to see my actions as meditations every day. If I stay connected to my breathing and respond mindfully to homework stress, and struggles with a disability, then my actions are a beautiful meditation.

“As a mindfulness practitioner, we have to be aware of what is going on in our body, our feelings, our emotions, and our environment. That is Engaged Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism is the kind of Buddhism that responds to what is happening in the here and the now,” says Thich Nhat Hanh.

This awareness of the body is so important for parents. Are we sleep deprived? Are we in physical pain? Are we sad or lonely? What is happening right now in our environment whether we’re at work or in the grocery store? Tuning in to these conditions allows us to respond more mindfully to our ourselves and our children.

When I sit and meditate on my cushion, I can bring the quality of my meditation into my daily life. The very essence of the sitting experience — awareness, presence, calmness — carries over into my mothering. It is at the root of how I treat myself, my spouse and our children. When I practice Engaged Parenting, I experience it as a deep spiritual practice that brings me joy and transforms my suffering.

As parents, we may not think we are doing enough, but mindful parenting is enough. “The best way to take care of the future is to take care of the present moment,” says Thich Nhat Hanh. As we care for our children in the present moment, we care for the future. That is Engaged Buddhism.

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Sustainable activism begins with the radical process of shifting our consciousness. I suggest that we practice advocating for world peace and climate justice, but we let go of being or identifying as an activist. “Sustainable activism” is not a cute phrase word or the hot hashtag of the moment, but rather it is something we urgently need to incorporate into our lives, or we’re destined to fail future generations.

To be alive is to be active.

If we are striving to be the best activist, the most impactful activist, the activist with the largest social-media platform, or the most-known performer of activism, the temptation to wear these labels and identities as adornments for status and accolades is often irresistible. When we cling to titles and the righteousness we feel within our identity as an activist, we exhaust ourselves.

Society entangles identity with many things—race, faith, beauty, body, ability, sexual orientation, gender, class, what school we went to, or the company at which we work. When something we identify with changes or discontinues, we suffer because the removal of something we held in relation to our very existence, our identity, feels like death. So, whenever something or someone challenges our identity, we are set to fight, kill, harm, or destroy in the name of it.

We spend a lot of time acquiring additional labels and identities (and also doling them out). We hide behind them, but our identities—packed upon our shoulders—are burdensome. Identity is exhausting. We have to defend it, explain it, and behave or think in a particular way because of it. Sometimes we’re the victim of harm, or even death, simply because of our identity.

Clinging to identity is part of our suffering; shifting our relationship with an identity can alleviate suffering.

Within Buddhism, we’re taught not to identify as Buddhists, but to see ourselves as practitioners of Buddhism. I’m mindful to always address myself as a practitioner of Buddhism, and as a result, in twenty years, my practice has never felt like a burden.

It has never left me exhausted. There is no attachment or clinging to the ideal of what it means to be Buddhist. I’ve never felt any need to prove my faith or my practice. This shift in language from “being” to “practicing” is slight yet powerful. Because I do not call myself Buddhist, I do not identify as Buddhist; therefore, I cannot use my Buddhist identity as a shield to hide behind, nor a weapon to harm or judge others.

The only way a practitioner of Buddhism can “be” Buddhist is to practice Buddhism, and to practice something infers a few ideas:

1. Practice is a form of action.
2. Practice infers that I can always improve.
3. To practice is to say there is no endpoint to the activity that I am practicing.
4. To practice is to include rest as no one can be active nonstop without pause.

Following the example of the Buddha, I take my practice of Buddhism into my practice of advocacy. I don’t identify as an activist. Instead, I advocate for equity, inclusion, and peace. I practice to do no harm. My intention is to leave any space I occupy for any amount of time either better than I found it or the same as I found it, but never worse than I found it.

This distinction between practicing and being has allowed me to step away to regroup and reenergize when needed. Like so many open-hearted people, I often take on too much, and stepping away can leave me feeling guilty. But everyone needs rest at times from any practice or activity. Sitting on the cushion for twenty-four hours a day, 365-days a year with no bathroom or water breaks is not sustainable. Even computers overheat if not given a break to cool down and reset. That said, our practice includes the hours and days we’re not on the cushion. The practice of doing no harm is lifelong. The practice of inclusion, equity, and earth-centered mindfulness can be, too.

To be alive is to be active. A practitioner of Buddhism is a person who actively seeks enlightenment, but that enlightenment does not mean he or she can ignore the ills of the world, or try to take them on alone. The Buddha shared his teachings and opened his sangha to all in an act of inclusion, equity, and peace to his last days, and the Buddha never burned out.

This article was created in collaboration with Buddhist Justice Reporter (BJR), founded by BIPOC Buddhist practitioners in response to the torture and murder of George Floyd. BJR creates articles on issues related to environmental, racial, and social justice and its intersections.

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