Upaya Sangha of Tucson
Dharma Talk, September 21, 2024
Sensei Al Genkai Kaszniak, Ph.D.
The Radical Hope of Beloved Community in a Time of Cultural and Environmental Chaos
In 1956, influenced by Harvard philosophy professor, Josiah Royce, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote:
“But the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of a beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this kind of understanding and goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles.”
Upon learning of Dr. King’s murder, his good friend, the late Vietnamese Zen monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh wrote:
“When I heard the news, I was devastated. I could not eat. I could not sleep. I made a deep vow to continue building what he called the Beloved Community, not only for myself but for him also.”
In: Andrus, M. (2021). Brothers in the Beloved Community. Berkeley: Parallax Press.
Thay, as he was known to friends, expanded on King’s work toward creating beloved community, through his own lived experience of non-duality, deeply seeing the interdependence, interbeing as he called it, of all life and of all the universe. He brought this perspective of interbeing to his peace and reconciliation work, and to his efforts toward restoration of the natural environment and addressing climate disruption. This perspective is so important for understanding how chaotic social and environmental disruptions develop, as well as for seeing possibilities of potentially helpful action.
Thay was very aware of the power of beloved community, as are other committed contemporary activists. In a recent interview concerning climate disruption, with writer, historian, and activist, Rebecca Solnit, published in the Spring, 2024 issue of Tricycle magazine, Rebecca said:
“There’s so much we can do, not through giving things up but by actively laying hands on our own power and possibility—and by connecting with other people. When we see ourselves as members of communities, that’s where our strength lies to build a movement. The notion of the isolated individual makes us both sad and weak—sad because it feeds loneliness and a sense that we don’t need to care about anything else and nothing cares about us; weak because our power lies in our connections. Our power is not autonomous because we were never autonomous. Giving up this notion of the individual doesn’t mean that we don’t get to have our own dreams and wild imagination and course through life; instead, it means that we do this in relationship to other people and with respect for all the other beings that we impact and are impacted by.”
A few months ago, James Shaheen, the current editor of Tricycle magazine, The Buddhist Review, spoke with our sangha about the role of Buddhist Journalism in a time of polarization. During his talk, James raised difficult questions about what, if any, role Buddhist sanghas should play in political activism. As the U.S. presidential political campaigns intensify approaching Election Day in November, and particularly in the context of the extraordinary nature of this election, including the vitriol and the multiple civil and criminal indictments and convictions of one of the candidates, polarized partisan rancor has been amplified. Our Upaya Sangha of Tucson practices within a tradition of socially engaged Zen Buddhism, that Thich Nhat Hanh was so important in developing, and that Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe has done so much in nurturing. Particularly during each of the last two U.S. presidential election cycles, we talked in our sangha about what social engagement means for us, individually and collectively. Some of us, me included, have also participated in the two-year Socially Engaged Buddhist Training Program, and the related ongoing monthly Gathering Dharma online meetings of Upaya Zen Center, with which our sangha is affiliated. Recalling James Shaheen’s visit to our sangha, and considering perspectives gained from the works of scholars I’ve recently been reading, has stimulated reflections on cultural and environmental chaos, and the radical hope of beloved community, expressed in socially engaged practice, that I would like to share today.
I think that it’s fair to say that we are living in an era, within European and Anglo-American contemporary culture, where it seems that there are constant efforts to understand many challenges, cultural conflicts, disasters, and heartbreaking horrors as having isolated, individually contained causes. Culture wars and hateful polarization, here in the United States and elsewhere, are blamed on extremist political leaders who fan flames of division. Enormous and disastrous fires, in the Americas and elsewhere, are blamed on lightning strikes, careless campers, faulty power lines, or errors in Forest Service controlled burns. Horrific mass shootings in so-called developed countries are attributed to deranged individuals operating alone, with vague and usually mistaken reference to mental illness. An aggressive and murderous invasion of one sovereign nation in Europe by another is described as reflecting a particular leader’s lust for power, blood, and soil.
Yet, perspectives from several long-established spiritual traditions, indigenous cultures, and the more recently developing enactive scientific perspective on cognition and consciousness, each argue that such individual-centered views are inadequate and distorting. These perspectives reject reductive individualism and emphasize the interactive social dimension of all life. Rather than focusing upon linear models of causation, these perspectives propose alternative dialectical frameworks, expressing an appreciation of continuously changing processes, of circularly interactive dynamic systems, characterized by complex structured coupling. The fundamental processes of life, and of all the world, from the enactive scientific perspective, are viewed as interactively sense- or meaning-making, and as “restless,” precarious, and therefore, necessarily impermanent, never static. Living organisms are viewed as both shaped by interactions with the world, and interdependently giving rise to the world, what the late Chilean neuroscientist and Buddhist practitioner, Francisco Varela was fond of describing as, “laying down a path in the walking,” a complex interdependently causal circularity between life, mind, environment, community, and world. From this perspective, any conceptual separation of self and world is deeply and mistakenly delusive, although in dissolving illusory separation, discernable differences are not erased.
This view, provided by the enactive scientific framework, has implicit and explicit relationships to Buddhist perspectives, particularly regarding impermanence, not-self, and interdependent co-arising, the English translation of that Sanskrit term, pratityasamutpada. Contemporary Soto Zen priest and teacher, Ben Connelly, describing what has been called the three-natures model of Vasubandhu’s Yogacara philosophy, rooted in Mahayana Buddhist teachings, writes that this model emphasizes …
“… letting go of delusion, letting go of the way of seeing that creates alienation: the delusion that our happiness or suffering are dependent on the slings and arrows of an external world from which we are separate. The three-natures teachings help us to realize the totality of our connection and intimacy with everything.” (p. 8)
(In Ben Connelly (2016). Inside Vasubandhu’s Yogacara: A Practitioner’s Guide. Somerville, MA: Wisdom Publications)
There are also implicit and explicit relationships of both Buddhist and enactive scientific perspectives with those of indigenous First Peoples of the Americas. Kyle Whyte is the George Willis Pack Professor of Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. His research addresses environmental justice, focusing on moral and political issues concerning climate policy and indigenous peoples, the ethics of cooperative relationships between indigenous peoples and science organizations, and problems of indigenous justice in public and academic discussions of food sovereignty, environmental justice, and the Anthropocene. He is also an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
In a chapter entitled Against Crisis Epistemology, published within the 2021 Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies, Professor Whyte wrote of an alternative “epistemology of coordination,” emphasizing moral social bonds at the center of an emergent knowing of the world, with various so-called “crises” of our era as actually manifestations of longstanding, ongoing disruptions of social relationships, particularly, though not exclusively, consequent to colonialism.
(Whyte K. 2021. Against Crisis Epistemology. In Handbook of Critical Indigenous Studies. Edited by B. Hokowhitu, A. Moreton-Robinson, L. Tuhiwai-Smith, C. Andersen, and S. Larkin, Chapter 4. Routledge.)
Whyte writes:
“A crisis epistemology, in the context of settler colonialism, might look something like this. A crisis is believed to be happening, whether real, genuine, or perceived. The crisis may be articulated as related to many problems, including health, economic well-being, environmental sustainability, cultural integrity, and religious salvation. But what makes some state of affairs of the world crisis oriented is the automatic assumption of imminence. By imminence, I mean the sense that something horribly harmful or inequitable is impending or pressing on the present conditions people understand themselves to be living in. There is a complexity or originality to the imminent events that suggests the need to immediately become solutions-oriented in a way believed to differ from how solutions were designed and enacted previously.”
The assumption of unprecedentedness, imminence, and the need for immediate solutions-focused action that this implies, often result in morally unregulated, unwise, oppressive, and sometimes even violent actions in the name of addressing the imminent crisis. Such actions litter the history of imperialist interactions between colonial settlers and indigenous First Peoples. An epistemology of coordination, as described by Professor Whyte, is based on quite different assumptions. Whyte writes of:
“… an Anishinaabe story that discusses one of the origins of humans. Humans and animals live interdependently. “Without the animals the world would not have been; without the animals the world would not be intelligible” (Johnston, 1990: 49). Animals provided nourishment, ‘shelter’, ‘joy’ and voluntary ‘labor’ on behalf of humans. Humans and animals could communicate directly with one another. Yet humans subjected animals to abuse, taking for granted the services that animals had previously performed ‘without complaint’.”
Whyte goes on to point out that in this story:
“… humans couldn’t possibly survive and flourish without animals. Yet animals were being abused. There is an ecological crisis. Yet what generates the crisis in the story is when one group—humans—abused the relationships of interdependence. Humans took domineering actions against animals that failed to demonstrate care, reciprocity, or respect for consent. If the interdependence of species can be related to environmental protection, then repairing relationships of justice and equality are inseparable from actions needed to achieve biodiversity conservation and climate change mitigation. … crisis is interpreted through a deeper history, and traced to the moral bonds of relationships among the diverse beings and entities dwelling together in shared environments. Something like a crisis cannot be understood without appealing to the history of moral bonds between the beings and entities affected by a real or perceived crisis.”
It seems to me that many of the “real or perceived” crises of our time and place, including the climate crisis, the crisis of cultural and political polarization, the crisis of mass shootings and killings in schools, and so many others, when examined within an epistemology of coordination, can be, in Whyte’s words:
“… interpreted through a deeper history, and traced to the moral bonds of relationships among the diverse beings and entities dwelling together in shared environments.”
How often do each of our current crises reflect, in Whyte’s words, a failure “… to demonstrate care, reciprocity, or respect for consent?” What would an epistemology of coordination, and the related perspectives from a Buddhist view of impermanence and interdependent co-arising, as well as that from a complex dynamic systems view of enactive science, imply for how we address what we label as current crises? I would argue that repairing the torn moral bonds of relationships among diverse beings and entities coinhabiting the earth, will depend greatly upon nourishing beloved community. This cannot, in my humble opinion, be limited to the spiritual communities of sangha, temple, church, mosque, or synagogue. I view beloved community as much more of what might be visualized as an enormous Venn diagram of overlapping circles of hundreds, if not thousands of beloved communities … faith communities, neighborhood organization communities, get-out-the-vote communities, school communities, artistic communities, community gardens, supportive families, and so very many more.
The number and variety of such beloved communities is among the reasons why I so value our lay or householder Zen sangha. Now, I am, of course, grateful that Zen training and retreat monasteries exist, providing opportunities for residential intensive and protracted learning and practice. Yet, such monastic institutions, valuable though they obviously are, also run a risk of insularity and exclusively. I’m more interested in how our lay sangha, our beloved Zen community, might support the cultivation of attentional stability, emotion regulation, restraint, patience, wisdom, and compassion, that we can then bring to activity in the many other beloved communities in which we each participate, where those vital moral bonds of relationship can be established, repaired, and nourished, more through what we do, what we enact in coordination with each other, than what we say.
When we sincerely and mindfully bring the entirety of our being into activity within any beloved community, active and radical hope can arise. Active because the hope is given birth by what we do together. Radical because this active hope is not dependent upon estimation of a high probability of rapid success in the outcome of our actions, but rather because, as Rebecca Solnit stated, …
… “When we see ourselves as members of communities, that’s where our strength lies to build a movement.”
Beloved communities are characterized by relationships that resemble moral kinship bonds of care, reciprocity, and respect for consent that form the basis of patient and sustainable power, the joyful, radical hope of any successful revitalizing movement.
I’ll close today’s talk, as I often do, with a few relevant words from Japanese Soto Zen founder Eihei Dogen, …
… these in the Tenzo Kyokun, or Instructions to the Head Cook, fascicle of his Shobogenzo:
“If there is sincerity in your cooking and associated activities, whatever you do will be an act of nourishing the sacred body. This is also the way of ease and joy for the great assembly.”