Feeling African, Being Buddha: An Exploration of Multiculturalism within Sangha

Zenju Earthlyn Manuel

"If you don’t understand the path as it meets your eyes, how can you know the way as you walk?" 
from Sandokai by 18th C. Zen Master Sekito Kisen

Before I accepted that sitting meditation was a valid response to hatred and ignorance in the world, I thought it necessary to fix things, to analyze the situation, to carry the burden of making things better for those who suffer the most.  I was thinking of black people at the time.  I became angry at the universe, angry at God, as if either one were a person out there somewhere doing bad things to us.  When I discovered that the anger that resided in my heart was the same as the hatred by which the Earth wept, the depth of suffering in the world became clear.  I had closed my heart to people who were different than me, especially those who had white skin and straight hair.  I was clear that the rage within would need tending to (with loving care) in my practice of Dharma.

Any person who aspires towards love and peace makes great efforts at openness of the heart.  Yet openness of the heart can be especially difficult if there is a sense that others’ hearts are closed to you.  As a young dark child I experienced that difficulty and still today as I practice in Buddhist communities there is a tension of feeling African and being Buddha.

In the Sandokai, Sekito Kisen poetically speaks to the difficult question of how the oneness of things and the multiplicity of things coexist.   In America’s multicultural society, walking the path of compassion and wisdom is to live with the merging of harmony with difference within the sangha.  Therefore, sangha members, especially in the USA, seek guidance in understanding places of discrimination based on non-acceptance of others.  With such an understanding each member’s practice can be steeped in the peace and calm that comes from realizing that form is within emptiness and within emptiness there is form.  Ultimately, there can be an end to hatred.

My paper will consider multiculturalism in non-Asian, non-homogenous, Buddhist sanghas in America.  I will use the Sandokai by Zen Master Sekito Kisen and the Jewel Mirror Samadhi by Ch’an Master Dongshan Liangjie.  The inquiry is "How do we practice Buddha’s teachings as one and in our difference"?