Opening the Door - Turning the Wheel Interview

Opening the Door - Turning the Wheel Interview

http://www.newdharma.com/article.php/turningwheel

Reverend Angel Kyodo-Ji Williams is an activist, artist, and spiritual teacher influenced by Bernie Glassman and the Zen Buddhist tradition. She began formally studying Buddhism in 1992, and is now both a spiritual teacher and an ordained interfaith minister. In 2000, she founded UrbanPEACE, an organization that develops awareness practices of individuals and organizations. She is the author of Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace (Compass Books, 2002). In 2004 she opened the New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace in Emeryville, California. John W. Ellis IV talked to Angel about the New Dharma Center’s mission to forge new paths in Western Buddhism.

John W. Ellis IV: You always answer the phone by saying, “Center”, which sounds like a request or command. When I hear it, I sit up a little bit straighter and I feel like I should center internally.

Angel Kyodo-Ji Williams: What’s held at this edifice is a center that can help you to find your own location. I hope it gives a sense of perspective, and helps you to come back to the breath, to breathe. I love multiple layers of meanings.
We talked about changing the name, but I realized that we will always be known as “the center.” In a country that has lost its sense of community, we need a hub for interaction, integration, learning, love, marriage ceremonies. We have lost a lot by trying to figure everything out on our own, so we want to use our center to share what we have. We want to be a center that anchors things—a center of community, formal spiritual practice, and eating.

John: What is your mission at the New Dharma Center?


Angel: To fine-tune the ways in which the Dharma is presented. Dharma is just Dharma. It is what it is. It’s truth. Truth has that paradoxical quality of being completely capital-T truth and unassailable. It’s revolving and moving and dynamic for each person.
We often mistake the ways we present the Dharma for being the Dharma itself. “A finger pointing at the moon,” is a Zen saying. The point is that the finger is not the moon itself. So we start talking about things in these colloquial terms and we say, “Dharma in America…” What we are really talking about is how Dharma is presented by certain people, institutions, or organizations. That’s not Dharma—it’s important to make this distinction. If we don’t, then somebody gets to own the presentation of the Dharma and decide how it’s done or not done. So our mission is very much about figuring out how we want to present the Dharma, or what kind of finger we want to be—not what kind of moon. Buddhism in the West has largely looked like middle- to upper-middle-class white people. Essentially, everybody else is in the margin, so we want to create access. We have to make Dharma more accessible to people who have been marginalized by the mainstream presentation of it in the United States.

John: How do you create access to the Dharma for a wider range of people?

Angel: We are on the border of Berkeley, Emeryville, and Oakland, and so our center has this sort of very cool feeling of being on the margin in many ways. But there are lots of people who can’t get here—or people who are not even going to know that they want to get here, which is often the case.
We have what we call a traveling circus. I go out to talk to folks about Dharma and how it applies to their lives. I recently spoke with a group of transgendered people. We have someone who practices here who we pick up because she has a physical disability. That is something that is really important to us, and she is a vibrant part of the community. We recently acquired a white male in his early 50s who sits with us. He is in the minority in many ways, because there are mostly women of color here. I think that his world has been overwhelmingly heterosexual, and there are lots of gender preferences and sexual orientations here, too.
All of us who have had that feeling that we don’t quite fit in the middle of things are really good candidates for the Dharma because we’ve experienced some of the incongruence of life.

John: In this country, dharma practitioners are mostly white. If the Dharma is attractive to people in the margins, why aren’t there more people of color practicing?

Angel: I think that many of the white Americans who participate in the Dharma see themselves as marginalized. Margins are all from the eye of the beholder. And the significant white Buddhist teachers in the United States are all a little off, too. They’re not superstars.
I also think that Dharma has come up against a very peculiar animal, which is the United States. The U.S. has an unbelievable ability to continually appropriate things, consume them, and then turn everything American. I think that’s what we are seeing now.

John: Is America like the Borg on Star Trek? “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”

Angel: America does that to everything it gets its hands on. I’m still trying to find the difference between American-ness and marketing. I think they are one and the same. I think we are at a juncture where the presentation of the Dharma is beginning to mirror America and all its messiness and limitations. At the same time, people of color are beginning to see the value of the Dharma from their own perspective. Even though the presentation is starting to look like the American mainstream, something still appeals to people of color. We can taste the Dharma beyond the appearance of it, and what we taste is the truth of the teachings.

John: So what you are saying is that the destination is the same for everyone, but not everyone wants to take the same route? We can all look up and see the same mountain, but some people may want to take a different path than the one that is already trodden?

Angel: White America has carved out a path that is useful for them, from the perspective of the side of the mountain where they live and what their needs are. They want a path that has long retreats. They focus on the teachings that assuage some of their fears about who they are in the world and that help them cultivate more kindness toward themselves.
But let’s say you eat nuts and I want to eat fruit. I’m looking for the mountain path that will get me fruit. Some people are tired of walking a path where they can only eat nuts, but I think we need to get beyond being mad at the people who cleared the path and planted only nuts. They eat nuts and their need is just as clear and as valid for them.

John: So there is anger in some communities about how Buddhism has unfolded in this country? Are you saying that these people should let go of those feelings and create their own paths?

Angel: Yes, they need to create their own paths, but they may need to eat nuts while they are planting fruit trees. I’m also saying this debate does not honor the people who cut the path.
Someone told me about a mainly white practice center in the San Francisco Bay Areathat they thought needed to change. I asked why. The person said, “Because the Dharma is for everyone.” I agreed and said, “But that center is for them, right? The Dharma is for everyone, including them.”
We get tripped up on this. White money built that center, but people of color come along and say, “They should make it a place for us!” No one really talks about this. Why should they make a place for someone else? Why? Make your own! We’re no longer at the place where we can’t build our own centers.
This doesn’t mean it has to be exclusive, but there is something problematic about this discussion. We don’t go knock on the door of a Thai Buddhist center and say, “You need to make a place for us because the Dharma is for everyone.” We only go to white centers doing that. What is that about? What is playing out underneath the surface for us as people of color?

John: Maybe people feel that way because of the history of race in this country—particularly as it relates to whites and blacks. In many areas, access is still being denied—jobs, education, finance, media. So why shouldn’t someone walk in the door of the local Dharma center and say, “Hey, how come this isn’t set up for me? Are you denying me access again?”

Angel: If you went to a Greek Orthodox Church you wouldn’t ask that! You would just say, “They made this Greek-like.” Right? It’s not something held in the public trust the way the media is, the way the schools are. I’m not letting white America off the hook in terms of how racism is played out in these places. I’m more interested in how we reclaim our own power as people of color and people who feel marginalized. How do we start from a place of reclaiming our own sense of empowerment in this landscape?
People of color didn’t have the money to fly off to India and spend months at the feet of the guru, so that makes it different. And white folks have the money to bring these teachers over here now. They have had a certain access, but we didn’t have that opportunity. So we have to find different ways, different paths. Some of that may mean that we will eat nuts for a while until we forge a new path and plant fruit along the way.
So I’m saying that to walk into a place and demand to be given nuts or fruit from the beginning is a position that disempowers us. It doesn’t honor the other, and it tries to jam everything into American race discourse, and it just does not fit so easily there.
I had a conversation with someone about what it means to have teachers of color. A person can’t just go read a bunch of books on the Dharma and become a Dharma teacher. Such a person may become a teacher of Buddhism, but I think that’s different. She may become someone how knows Buddhism really well—someone who has a proclivity to study texts at great length, someone who can quote the classics—and she may be living a life of the highest integrity. But I don’t know that that makes a true Dharma teacher, a person who has an unnamable quality that has nothing at all to do with knowledge. In fact, we do have Dharma teachers of color, and we don’t necessarily call them that, because they might come out for some other tradition, and they might know nothing about Buddhism or Buddhist texts.

John: What do you mean?

Angel: Some people have a beeline on the truth and are able to articulate that truth so that we are constantly awakening to our nature as human beings. Those people are really Dharma teachers.
In the technical sense, Buddhism has some particularized criteria that make it distinct from other teachings: teachings around emptiness, teachings around suffering, and the truth of no-self. But there are only three or four different basic teachings. Buddhism is wide open. So even within the traditional realm of Buddhism, a lot can be taught as Dharma.
In Zen they ask, “Is transmission happening?” Transmission is so palpable, and yet completely elusive, and it exists for relatively few teachers.
We need, among people of color, teachers who hold that standard. We need people who inspire us to dig deep into the possibility of really waking up. Other people teach us things that make us feel better or that make sense of things and help us function better. There are a lot of courses that do that. But this misses the mark of the Dharma’s highest offering, which is freedom and liberation from the delusions that we have about ourselves. We need teachers of color who actually emanate this quality. We need teachers who take us beyond our common way of seeing things. There are people who can just talk about it, and then there are people who embody it.

John: If teachers can transmit the spiritual essence of a lesson beyond the words they speak, why do we need a teacher of color to do that?

Angel: It’s a two-way street, and some people have their fingers in their ears. It isn’t just about the qualities of the teacher, it’s also the willingness of the people to receive the transmission, and that can be hindered by race dynamics. You can be transmitting the light of the sun, but if I’ve got my receiver off because I’m thinking, “This white man’s not gonna be able to teach me anything,” it’s just not going to work. Our delusions are that powerful.
We want to believe that there is someone whose teachings will be able to transcend all of our stuff, and that’s just naïve. Plenty of people tried to kill the Buddha. Let’s just imagine for one moment that the Buddha was the most powerful person ever to walk the face of the Earth. Shouldn’t his teachings have been able to penetrate enough so that people wouldn’t want to kill him? He even had to make a code and elucidate rules for the monks because his experience was not their experience, his awakening was not their awakening.

John: That scenario seems to apply to many historical figures who represent liberation and light. Why does humanity have a love-hate relationship with spiritual leaders?

Angel: We all have the ability to see clearly, but it has everything to do with choice. Our evolutionary thrust is to aspire toward our own liberation. Usually life tosses us on our tail, and then we say, “Whoa, I can hear something a little bit different now.” We might even hear the Dharma from a white man and get shaken up. The Buddha is always around, but we’re stuck waiting for someone who looks a certain way to come along.
Some people say we are still waiting for the savior, but I’m saying, “Fool, if the savior was standing right in front of you, you would probably say something like, ‘This cat needs to cut his hair!’”

The New Dharma Meditation Center for Urban Peace (www.newdharma.com) is located at 1056 60th Street in Emeryville, California. Phone: 510/547.3733

John W. Ellis IV is a freelance writer, martial arts instructor, and member of the East Bay Church of Religious Science. He lives in Oakland with his wife and five-year-old son.
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