(RNS) — When you picture American Buddhism, do you see a white convert sitting cross-legged, deep in meditation? Or a selfless monk giving up all material goods?
“Bad” Buddhists exist, say the authors of an upcoming book, and they may not appear how we envision.
A first-of-its-kind anthology, “Emergent Dharma: Asian American Feminist Buddhists on Practice, Identity, and Resistance,” expected to be released Dec. 9, compiles essays from 11 Asian American women writers who confront the whitewashed, patriarchal and model-minority myths embedded in mainstream understandings of American Buddhism. They describe what lived Buddhist practice can look like, expanded beyond seated meditation to ancestral connection, activism and creative expressions of the dharma.
RNS spoke with the book’s editor, Sharon A. Suh, a Buddhist scholar, mindfulness teacher and president of Sakyadhita International Association of Buddhist Women. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What brought you to study Buddhism academically? Did your studies make you approach your own practice differently?
I didn’t discover Buddhism until I was in high school. I had been going through, like many people, a lot of struggle and suffering. My AP European history teacher was married to a Japanese woman, and she gave a lecture on Buddhism. I just remember being amazed that there was this framework for explaining and helping me understand what my crazy life was, so that inspired this deep interest. When I went to college, my first professor was a Tibetan Buddhist monk, and that set the stage. Then I went to divinity school and focused on Buddhism and culture, and (received a) PhD.
At first, I was trying to get to a lot of my problems through the intellectual root of studying Buddhism. And guess what? It didn’t really help. What I realized in graduate school was Buddhist studies were influenced so much by European scholarship. It was modified and translated through this Orientalist pursuit of authenticity. Meditation was the most important practice — that didn’t quite sit (well) with me because there wasn’t a lot of room to study Asian and Asian American Buddhists, and there was a lot of denigration of Asian and Asian American lay practices. I felt this deep disconnect and frustration in this program. Asians and Asian Americans, unless they were monks or nuns, were not considered to be as worthy of study. And if we were practitioners who didn’t meditate all the time, then we were not considered very worthy either. That really shaped how I understand Buddhism today and even the book that’s coming out. I’ve always been a little bit against the grain.
Can you talk about how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped the book?
There was a certainly a lot of heightened race-based trauma. Everyone was isolated during COVID, but to be Asian American and go outside, it was a real risk factor. Compounding that was a sense of trauma and fear because it wasn’t just the local, it was national. It was from the president. There didn’t seem to be a sense of safety for a lot of us. This book was really born out of a desire to create a community that would be a safe refuge, where we could bring all of our stuff, including trauma, pain, struggle, joy and laughter. We created this Sangha that would meet online. From that, we discovered that we needed each other.
I’ve always wanted a book that would address issues of race, gender, sexism, patriarchy and all the ways we’re marginalized. After I came back from the 2023 Sakyadhita conference, I just sent out this letter to folks to see if they wanted to join in because when you get a bunch of Buddhist women together, really cool things happen.
We don’t talk about community as much, but Sangha was it for us. Sometimes we would be led in a meditation by a Zen Buddhist teacher, not about transcending self, but about a deep recognition that suffering is here and we need each other — we’re not going to get over this ourselves. Throughout the book, one of the strands is community and connection. There are a range of chapters that deal with suffering from the aftermath of an abortion or bulimia. I wanted to make sure the book represented an application of Buddhist teachings to ending and transforming real suffering in real time.
In Asian American communities, we don’t ever air our laundry. I am so grateful the authors in this book were willing to do that because there’s so much relief and power that comes from reading or hearing a story that is similar to yours.
The book is dedicated to “bad Buddhists and feminist killjoys.” Would you consider yourself either of these?
I definitely consider myself both a bad Buddhist and a feminist killjoy. Bad Buddhist is a play off of Roxane Gay’s “Bad Feminist,” and this recognition that as a bad Buddhist, I still love the tradition, I love the practice. But I think there’s an image we carry in our heads about what a good Buddhist is, and I’ve never felt like I needed to be that. Being a bad Buddhist is really about breaking the myth that all Buddhists are somehow completely selfless, or that we don’t have desires, we only care about nirvana in the long term. We live very ordinary lives. That was what I wanted to emphasize — there is some extraordinary stuff in the ordinary, if you choose to pay attention.
Being a feminist killjoy, I experience this all the time where if we bring up matters of race or gender discrimination or sexism, there’s always somebody rolling their eyes. You see people who have privilege and power sick of being told they have privilege and power; you become the problem when you point out the problem.
At the same time, there’s a lot of joy and celebration in the book. I think there’s an assumption that if you’re a Buddhist feminist killjoy, somehow you’re killing all the joy and you don’t want to have fun. I don’t think any of the contributors would prescribe to that.
“Emergent Dharma: Asian American Feminist Buddhists on Practice, Identity, and Resistance,” edited by Sharon A. Suh. Cover courtesy of Amazon
There’s an idea in the book that Buddhists are inauthentic or illegitimate if they do not practice meditation. Can you say more about this?
Most of the Euro-American converts to Buddhism have been inspired by the Insight meditation teachers that had gone to Asia and brought these lineages back with them. I feel in many ways that meditation became the most important focal point, whether it’s in Zen Buddhism or Insight centers. Somehow, the assumption was meditation was more important than the ethical components, the precepts or the Noble Eightfold Path.
There is this promotion of authenticity associated with historically white male Buddhist teachers. Of course, that’s changing where more female-identified practitioners are becoming teachers, but I still see that as a divide.
Do you think Buddhism is romanticized?
Romanticization of Buddhism is deeply intertwined with the commodification of Buddhism. If you look at the Buddhist or meditation apps, or even mindful eating, which I’m trained in, the image you see is usually of a young, thin, white woman. There was a period when Buddhism was very much romanticized in post-Enlightenment times, when Buddhism came on the scene for a lot of Orientalists and Orientalist scholars. This romanticization has become intertwined with exoticization, commodification, capitalism and racism, so it’s this big, entangled, ever-morphing thing.
Within Buddhism, how has the model-minority stereotype of Asian American women — that they’re compliant, silent, rule-following and passive practitioners — been perpetuated?
I think we see it in Buddhist context primarily in Euro-American Buddhist convert communities. There’s a lot of assumptions about (making invisible) Asian Americans and in particular, women. It’s almost as if we don’t have any problems, we don’t have any issues, but we’re also not meditating like the others, so maybe we’re not as worthy of notice or attention.
Part of the reason for writing this book and getting these stories from so many different Asian American Buddhists is I wanted to crack that open. I don’t think any of the Buddhist women in this anthology would identify as the model minority, but we are influenced by it. Asian Americans for the most part, outside of most recently, COVID-19, have identified themselves as the model minority — they don’t want to make waves because maybe they have it pretty good. But that’s also the myth because not every Asian American has it very good.
Out of the stories in the anthology, were there any particular moments or ideas that surprised you?
The (writers) were given free rein to do whatever felt liberating and real. One of the stories begins with giving blood as a form of Dana (the practice of giving). This author reads that in a very traditional Buddhist way, but also recalls giving blood in Sri Lanka to support violence and soldiers. She has this disconnect and ambivalence. That, to me, was really rich.
We tend to think that anything that covers Buddhism should be an action or an image that fits what Buddhism is. This book is really like, no, we’re looking at how has Buddhism helped us shape our lives and respond to our lives in ways that might not be canonical (or) recognizable, but they’re equally as powerful and authentic.
There’s a story about raising one’s kids as Buddhist, not in the temples, but through attending to their grandparents’ grave site. Rather than bringing the children to temple every weekend, this person was like, ‘What’s more important is that connection and recognition of the irreplaceable bonds between us and all beings,” and this person did it through annual visits to a cemetery. It kind of blew my mind.
There’s a chapter about how this artist healed herself from intense guilt over an abortion through art making and poetry. So there’s a way in which people craft their own practice with the framework of Buddhism. So the content and themes are Buddhist, but the form is really different depending on the person. And to me, that’s Buddhadharma, right? It’s going to change according to time, place and person. I just wanted this to be as real and resonant as possible to the experiences of each person who was so amazingly generous in being willing to tell their story.
