Take Out the Personal Sting

The morning after I finished reading the anthology Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us About Race, Resilience, Transformation & Freedom, my husband told me that the night before, he dreamed of witnessing a white man kill two African American kids outside a department store. “It felt traumatic, and I still have a headache,” he added.

“Oh, wow…I wonder if this is your way to comprehend the deep pain of the black community, since you’ve never witnessed something like this in real life,”  I responded from the cognitive side of my brain.

“Maybe,” he uttered.

I asked him if he’d like some energy healing and he agreed. I did Mind Clearing and slowly and thoroughly cleared out the congested energy in his energy field.  Then we did a metta meditation to send loving-kindness to the two boys and then to my husband. By late morning, his headache subsided, but I started to feel a little headache, which I rarely do.

I realized that I did not intentionally separate my energy field from his at the end of the healing. I made up this simple act in my mind and thought to myself, “It’s time to shift.”

Over the past year, I took a deep dive into social justice issues, starting from racism to neocolonialism and to hypercapitalism. I first began paying attention to these issues to improve my cultural competence as a spiritual care provider, in order to become more aware of how social oppression affected patients’ experience when they received spiritual care and of the ways my social location influenced how I provided care. This learning soon led to reflections on my own experiences as an Asian female immigrant from the communist China. I came to see that Eurocentricity permeated the air I breathed back in China and white supremacy was the water I swam in in the United States. Racism exacerbated the stress and suffering in my life, compounded by patriarchy of a much longer history. It was fascinating how those social forces perpetuated existential pain.

Initially, I was reluctant to engage in such exploration, considering it out of alignment with the Buddhist teaching on non-self. After all, “Asian,” “woman,” or “communist” were all conventions in the Buddhist sense and did not have an essence of their own. It turned out that my reluctance probably had more to do with a knowing that this was a Pandora’s box than with following a Buddhist strategy.

Apart from making sense of my past from those lenses, I also witnessed firsthand at the hospital the nationwide consequences of some privileged individuals’ preference for comfort and freedom in not taking coronavirus precautions seriously. And I definitely had my share of experiencing unconscious bias, microaggression and belittlement.

So I was curious what I would learn when I finally began reading Black and Buddhist. I was immediately hooked by the first two chapters of the moving accounts of healing trauma. Where was racism? Well, it was woven in the fabric of the authors’ lives. It needed no highlight. Its impact was by no means downplayed, but it was placed in the larger context of a person’s being. This means that when that person sought healing that was effective, their racialized trauma was held in spaciousness. They were not defined by their oppression, contrary to what oppression often sought to do.

Ruth King elaborated on this quite nicely in the final chapter of the book:

“I was beginning to realize that my mind—my relationship to distress—was not only a righteous and persistent oppressor but also my understanding of the nature of mind was my ticket to freedom.

“Are you taking this situation personally—to be a personal experience instead of a human experience? Have people before you felt this way? Where else in the world are people feeling similarly gripped?

“I am not focused on your story but on the direct experience story is having on this moment. I am more invested in your freedom than your comfort zone or safety, and I won’t be complicit in your suffering. I’m listening intently to your rhythm of unfolding, how you are freeing yourself through the practice, and how you are contributing to improvisational jazz—a sound larger than self-interest or indulgence.”

This reminded me of a Dhamma talk by Thanissaro Bhikkhu that I really liked several years ago. It’s called “The Particulars of Your Suffering.”

“The Buddha offered his teachings as aids both in overcoming bewilderment and in finding protection, i.e., protection from the suffering. One of the first things he has you do is try to take the personal sting out of your suffering…It’s good to recognize that everybody is suffering in the same way. There are differences in the particulars, but deep down inside everybody has that same sense of being burdened, being overcome: pushed in ways they’d rather not be pushed, weighed down in ways they’d rather not be weighed down.”

“A human birth provides the stark contrasts and inequalities which cry out, not for justice, but for the compassion and self-reflection aimed at finding the fundamental cause of these problems within us, rather than merely attempting to alleviate their symptoms on a social level.”

The reason why crying out for justice is not suggested is because justice is practiced differently by each person and will not be genuine when it is imposed. Paññāvaddho Bhikkhu said:

“He realized that every group is a collection of individuals, each of whom has a conscience that disciplines personal behavior. He addressed his teaching to that conscience because he knew that social justice is practiced differently by each person based upon their intentions, kamma, strengths, weaknesses, wishes and fears.”

“Social harmony can only manifest when enough people freely choose the path of harmlessness and compassion over the one of confrontation and self-interest. When a philosophy of social justice is imposed upon a population, which complies merely out of social pressure or the fear of punishment, people’s compliance is insincere, and therefore not grounded in real virtue.”

"I can sense the turning of my thinking as I read these words. I did not realize how deeply I adopted the notion of justice, or was it an adaptation? Recalling Chinese folk tales, I could see how fairness was a central value in most Chinese people’s minds, and there were many stories where the bad guy was punished and the good guy received what he deserved. How can people trust in a society if there is no fairness, or justice? The simple answer is empathy, a quality valued in every religion and secular psychology, as Thanissaro Bhikkhu wrote in a recent Tricycle article,“Karma Is Individual”:

“The ultimate purpose of this reflection is to spark a desire to get out of the karmic network altogether. The interim reaction, though, should be empathy: We’ve all been in this together for far too long. It’s time that we helped one another, rather than taking advantage of people when they’re down.”

But empathy cannot be willed. It can only come from a sense of freedom, knowing that you have something to spare. Investigating and separating out the raw materials in the mind that cause suffering will open the possibility to liberation. Those raw materials are, in Thanissaro Bhikkhu’s words, “the intimate details that all forms of suffering have in common”.