A Buddhist and one of
America’s preeminent African-American writers applies the suffering of
the First Noble Truth to the suffering of blacks in white America, and
traces the history of Dharma among black artists.Charles Johnson
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The black experience in America, like the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha, begins with suffering.
It begins in the violence of seventeenth-century slave forts
sprinkled along the west coast of Africa, where debtors, thieves, war
prisoners, and those who would not convert to Islam were separated from
their families, branded, and sold to Europeans who packed them into
pestilential ships that cargoed 20 million human beings (a conservative
estimate) to the New World. Only 20 percent of those slaves survived the
harrowing voyage at sea (and only 20 percent of the sailors, too), and
if they were among the lucky few to set foot on American soil new
horrors and heartbreak awaited them.
As has been documented time and again, the life of a slave—our
not-so-distant ancestors—was one of thinghood. It is, one might say, a
frighteningly fertile ground for the growth of a deep appreciation for
the First and Second Noble Truths as well as a living illustration of
the meaning of impermanence. Former languages, religions, and cultures
were erased, replaced by a Peculiar Institution in which the person of
African descent was property systematically—legally, physically, and
culturally—denied all sense of self-worth. A slave owns nothing, least
of all himself. He desires and dreams at the risk of his life, which is
best described as relative to (white) others, a reaction to their deeds,
judgments, and definitions of the world. And these definitions, applied
to blacks, were not kind. In the nation’s pulpits, Christian clergy in
the South justified slavery by picturing blacks as the descendents of
Ham or Cain; in his
Notes on the State of Virginia, Thomas
Jefferson dismissed slaves as childlike, stupid, and incapable of
self-governance. For 244 years (from 1619 to 1863) America was a slave
state with a guilty conscience: two and a half centuries tragically
scarred by slave revolts, heroic black (and Abolitionist) resistance to
oppression, and, more than anything else, physical, spiritual, and
psychological
suffering so staggeringly thorough it silences the
mind when we study the classic slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano or
Frederick Douglass, or see the brutal legacies of chattel bondage in a
PBS series like
Africans in America. All that was over, of course, by the end of the Civil War, but the Emancipation Proclamation did not bring liberation.
Legal freedom brought segregation instead, America’s version of
apartheid, for another hundred years. But “separate” was clearly not
“equal.” The
experienced law of black life was
disenfranchisement, anger, racial dualism, second-class citizenship,
and, as the great scholar W.E.B. DuBois put it in
his classic
The Souls of Black Folks (1903), “double-consciousness.” Can anyone doubt that if there is an essence—an
eidos—to black American life, it has for three centuries been
craving,
and a quest for identity and liberty which, pushed to its social
extremes, propelled this pursuit beyond the relative, conceptual
realities of race and culture to a deeper investigation of the meaning
of freedom?
If the teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha are about
anything, they
are about a profound understanding of identity and the broadest
possible meaning of liberty—teachings that sooner or later had to appeal
to a people for whom suffering and loss were their daily bread. In the
century after the Emancipation Proclamation each generation of black
Americans saw their lives disrupted by race riots, lynchings, and the
destruction of entire towns and communities such as the Greenwood
district of black homes, businesses, and churches in Tulsa, Oklahoma on
May 31, 1921. These Jim Crow years witnessed the birth of the blues and a
white backlash that fed poisonous caricatures of black people into
popular culture and the national consciousness—films like
Birth of a Nation,
the writings of the Plantation School, and endless stereotypes that
distorted black identity in newspapers and magazines—images that made
the central question of the black self, “Who am I? American? African? Or
something other? Can reality be found in any of these words?”
During these centuries of institutionalized denial, black Americans
found in Christianity a spiritual rock and refuge. Although first
imposed on some slaves by their owners as a way of making them obedient,
Christianity in black hands became a means for revolt against bondage.
Then, in the twentieth century, the black church provided consolation in
a country divided by the color-line. It became a common spiritual,
social, economic, and political experience and was the place where black
people could reinterpret Christianity and transform it into an
instrument for worldly change. It became a racially tempered
institution, one that raised funds to help the poor and to send black
children off to college.
Historically, no other institution’s influence compares with that of
the black church, and I believe it will continue to be the dominant
spiritual orientation of black Americans. It provides a compelling and
time-tested moral vision, a metaphysically dualistic one that partitions
the world into good and evil, heaven and hell, posits an immortal soul
that no worldly suffering can harm, and through the agapic love of a
merciful Father promises in the afterlife rewards denied in this one.
Christianity, in part, made black Americans a genuinely Western people,
on the whole identical in their strivings and sense of how the world
works with Northern Europeans in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
But as early as 1923, Du Bois reflected deeply on the nature of black desires and a Western
weltanschaaung in a speech entitled, “Criteria of Negro Art.” It was published in
The Crisis,
the official publication of the National Association for The
Advancement of Colored People, which Du Bois himself edited, and in this
document he raises fundamental spiritual questions—what Buddhists might
call Dharma doors—for a people whose dreams were long deferred.
What do we want? What is the thing we are after? As it
was phrased last night it had a certain truth: We want to be Americans,
full-fledged Americans, with all the rights of other American citizens.
But is that all? Do we want simply to be Americans? Once in a while
through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of
what American really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that
white Americans can not. And seeing our country thus, are we satisfied
with its present goals and ideals?
If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans, if your
color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously
forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and
powerful;—what is it that you would want? What would you immediately
seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor-cars and outrace Cook
County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore?
Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree?
Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners and
buy the longest press notices?
Even as you visualize such ideals you know
in your heart that these are not the things you really want. You realize
this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we
have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste
for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if
it were really a beautiful world; if we had the true spirit; if we had
the Seeing Eye, the Cunning Hand, the Feeling Heart; if we had, to be
sure, not perfect happiness, but plenty of good hard work, the
inevitable suffering that always comes with life; sacrifice and waiting,
all that—but, nevertheless, lived in a world where men know, where men
create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is
that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all
America.
Others echoed Dr. Du Bois’s question, “What do we want?” As early as
the 1920s, some black Americans were quietly investigating Far Eastern
philosophies like Hinduism and the Theravada and Mahayana traditions of
Buddhism after experiencing Du Bois’s “flashes of clairvoyance.”
Preeminent among these spiritual seekers was Jean Toomer, who regarded
himself as “a psychological adventurer: one who, having had the stock
experiences of mankind, sets out at right angles to all previous
experience to discover new states of being.” His classic work,
Cane
(1923), kicked off the Harlem Renaissance, the first outpouring of
black American creativity after World War I.
It is fitting, in a way,
that
Cane inaugurated the Renaissance, which scholar Alain Locke
described as the dawn of “The New Negro,” for Toomer’s book is a
hypnotic, language-rich montage of poetry and fiction that delivers a
portrait of Southern black life as so mythic and shot through with
elemental mysteries that it clearly belongs in the tradition of American
Transcendentalism stretching back to Emerson and Thoreau. Furthermore,
the year after its publication, Toomer began the first of many summers
in Europe studying, then teaching the philosophy of George I. Gurdjieff,
which remains an original restatement of esoteric wisdom influenced by
Tibetan and Sufi teachings. For Toomer, the task was to transcend false
concepts of dualism, ontologically restore to our sense of life its
original wholeness, and emphasize the enduring mystery of being.
During his years as a teacher for the Gurdjieff Institute, Toomer
declared, “I am of no particular race. I am of the human race, a man at
large in the human world, preparing a new race”—a new man, whom he
describes in his sweeping, Whitmanesque poem “Blue Meridian” (1937), a
song of this country’s possibilities, which also offers us a bridge
between the black experience and the profound reflections on selfhood
long a part of Vedic literature. In that remarkable poem, Toomer
prophecies that the new man of tomorrow’s America will be a “blue man.”
He selects this color, I believe, to invoke the image of Krishna in
Hindu pictorial art, where that deity’s skin, blue and borderless as the
sky itself, suggests the infinity and nonduality of being.
Toomer’s “new (blue) man” is, therefore, emblematic of a being who
has shed likes and dislikes, “prejudices and preferences.” A
cross-cultural being. A breaker of racial and gender polarities (“Free
the sexes, I am neither male nor female or in-between; I am of sex, with
male differentiations”). So that, when he writes, “It is a new
America/To be spiritualized by each new American,” he urges us to avoid
all forms of bondage and enslavement that arise from a racially
fractured society, vulgar materialism, and naive naturalism.
Let go!
Let it go that we may live.
A pin, a watch-fob, a card of identification,
A name, pain and emptiness,
A will to perpetuate what has been, blind
To distinctions between the useful and the
useless,
And, of course, an ego
Let go!
That which you have held has got hold of you
And would sink you as it goes down.
In 1931, Toomer self-published a remarkable collection of aphorisms entitled
Essentials.
Therein, he observed that “I is a word, but the worm is real,” letting
us know that the self was in part a product of language, which can
conceal as much as it reveals about the world (“In this multiple
simultaneous world words only dole out one thing at a time”). He
understood, as the earliest Buddhists did, that “The assumption of
existence rests upon an uninterrupted series of pictures” and, more
importantly, that “Whatever is, is sacred.” He knew that all things were
interdependent and transitory. He was no stranger to the renunciation
of an illusory, empirical ego (“Unless a man dies consciously he will
die.”)
Indeed, Toomer even glimpsed, decades before Fritjof Capra, how
nuclear physics in the 1920s was revealing “matter” to be a construct
beneath which whirled an invisible subatomic world of protons,
electrons, and hadrons in constant movement, transformation, and
mutation (“While the world produced by science is growing more
immaterial, science itself is growing more immaterial”). Although his
work after
Cane was rejected by publishers, and he slipped into
literary obscurity until the 1960s, Toomer was a spiritual trailblazer
whose creative “journey to the east” inspired post-1960s authors, myself
among them, to probe the “multiple simultaneous world” he first charted
and took to heart such aphorisms as “The realization of nothingness is
the first act of being” and “We do not possess imagination enough to
sense what we are missing.”
If Toomer felt alone in his time (“It is as if I have seen,” he said,
“the end of things others pursue blindly”), he might have been
comforted by the fact that some black American soldiers returning from
service overseas came home with exposure to the Dharma—exposure that
only increased as black soldiers returned home with Korean and Japanese
Buddhist wives. In his superb novel
Kingsblood Royal (1947),
Sinclair Lewis writes the story of a white man who discovers he has a
black ancestor; he seeks to better understand people of color, and
realizes the great diversity of black Americans in his town—among them,
writes Lewis, are Buddhists.
By the mid-1950s, as the Beats looked toward Zen, so did a few black
musicians and poets; and of course by then the Civil Rights Movement was
underway, led magnificently by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who took
Mahatma Gandhi as his inspiration. After a pilgrimage to India in 1958,
where he visited ashrams and sought to learn more about nonviolence not
simply as a political strategy but as a way of life, King came back to
America determined to set aside one day a week for meditation and
fasting. In the 1960s, he nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize the
outstanding Vietnamese Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. King was, at
bottom, a Baptist minister, yes, but one whose vision of the social
gospel at its best complements the expansive, Mahayana bodhisattva ideal
of laboring for the liberation of all sentient beings (“Strangely
enough,” he said, “I can never be what I ought to be until you are what
you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I
ought to be”). His dream of the “beloved community” is a sangha by
another name, for King believed that, “It really boils down to this:
that all of life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable
network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”
The
fourteen-year public ministry of Dr. King is emblematic of the
philosophical changes that affected black Americans in the 1960s.
Another milestone is the remarkable success of Soka Gakkai in attracting
black Americans for three decades. Its members include entertainers
with the high visibility of Herbie Hancock and Tina Turner. Although I
do not belong to this Nichiren Buddhist group which, according to writer
Jane Hurst, represents 50,000 to 150,000 Americans (with 25-30 percent
of these being black and Hispanic), my sister-in-law in Chicago and her
friends are practitioners who have chanted Nam-myoho-renge-kyo since the early 1970s.
In a recent conversation with my
sister-in-law and one of her associates, I was informed that Soka
Gakkai’s initial attraction for them came about because they discovered
that through chanting they could transform their lives, in fact, that
they alone were the architects of their own suffering and happiness. For
my sister-in-law, raised Baptist and impoverished in a housing project
on Chicago’s South Side, the black church with its white Jesus had
always been an unsatisfying experience, one from which she felt
emotionally distant since childhood; for her friend, a woman raised as a
Catholic, Soka Gakkai provided—through its explanation of karma and
reincarnation and its foundation in The Lotus Sutra—a reason for
the individual suffering she saw in the world, convincing her this was
not due to the will of God but instead was based causally on each
person’s actions in this life and previous ones. Global peace is their
goal. Chanting is their tool for self-transformation, empowerment, and
experiencing the at-oneness with being they both had sought all their
lives. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, they said, invested them with
boundless energy, individual peace, and, as my sister-in-law’s friend
put it, “a natural high like I never had before.”
Many white Buddhists new to the Zen and
Tibetan traditions dismiss Soka Gakkai for what they consider its
skewed, Christian-oriented, materialistic version of Buddhism. For me,
Soka Gakkai is but one branch on the Bodhi tree. Yet its success in
recruiting black Americans indicates that people of color find in
Buddhism the depths of their long-denied humanity; centuries-old methods
of meditation—very empirical—for clearing the mind of socially
manufactured illusions (as well as personally created ones); an ancient
phenomenology of suff
ering, desire, and the self; and a path (the Eightfold Path) for a moral and civilized way of life.
The emphasis in Buddhist teachings on
letting go of the fabricated, false sense of self positions issues of
Race as foremost among samsaric illusions, along with all the
essentialist conceptions of difference that have caused so much human
suffering and mischief since the eighteenth century. It frees one from
dualistic models of epistemology that partition experience into
separate, boxlike compartments of Mind and Body, Self and Other, Matter
and Spirit—these divisions, one sees, are ontologically the correlates
of racial divisions found in South African apartheid and American
segregation and are just as pernicious.
More than anything else, the Dharma teaches
mindfulness, the practice of being here and now in each present moment,
without bringing yesterday’s racial agonies into today or projecting
oneself—one’s hopes and longings—into a tomorrow that never comes. You
watch the prismatic play of desires and emotions (for example: joy,
fear, pride, and so-called “black rage”) as they arise in awareness, but
without attachment or clinging to name and form, and then you let them
go. One is especially free, on this path, from the belief in an enduring
“personal identity,” an “I” endlessly called upon to prove its worth
and deny its inferiority in a world that so often mirrors back only
negative images of the black self. Yet one need not cling to “positive”
images either, for these too are essentially empty of meaning as well.
Indeed, you recognize emptiness (shunyata) as the ultimate nature of reality. In my own fiction I have worked to dramatize that insight in novels such as Oxherding Tale (1982), a slave narrative that serves as the vehicle for exploring Eastern philosophy; Middle Passage, a sea adventure tale about the slave trade (and a rather Buddhist African tribe called the Allmuseri); and Dreamer
(1998), a fictional account of the last two years of Martin Luther
King’s life that highlights his globally ecumenical spirituality.
Buddhist insights continue to multiply among contemporary black authors. In Right Here, Right Now,
a recent novel by Trey Ellis, which won a 1999 American Book Award, we
are offered the story of a black man who creates a new world religion
that borrows heavily from Buddhism and underscores the central theme of
impermanence and change. And Octavia Butler, a MacArthur fellow and much
celebrated science-fiction writer, features in Parable of the Sower
(1993) a narrator in 2024 who broods on the fact that “Everyone knows
that change in inevitable. From the second law of thermodynamics to
Darwinian evolution, from Buddhism’s insistence that nothing is
permanent and all suffering results from our delusions of permanence to
the third chapter of Ecclesiastes ('To everything there is a season . .
.'), change is part of life, of existence, of the common wisdom. But I
don’t believe we’re dealing with all that that means. We haven’t even
begun to deal with it.”
Canonical Zen documents like “The Ten
Oxherding Pictures” of twelfth-century artist Kakuan Shien also appear
in recent black poetry. In the preeminent journal of black letters, Callaloo
(Vol. 22, No. 1), the distinguished poet Lucille Clifton revisioned the
Ch’an teachings of the “The Ten Oxherding Pictures” in which the stages
of Zen understanding are depicted by a man who follows the footsteps of
an ox, which represents ego. He finally glimpses the ox, slowly tames
it, then trains it to do what he wants, not what ego wants. Only after
he has completely transformed himself does he happily ride his ox back
into the marketplace. Clifton writes these lines for the eighth picture,
in which both the ox and oxherder disappear; here, the emptiness
suggests the dissolution and arising of forms and the essence of
interdependence is represented by a circle:
"The Ox and The Man Both Gone Out of Sight"
man is not ox
I am not ox
no thing is ox
all things are ox.
Through meditation, Du Bois’s flashes of
clairvoyance are sharpened and the internalized racial conflict of
“double-consciousness” is transcended, enabling those of us who live in a
violent, competitive society steeped in materialism to grasp the truth
of impermanence (anitya) that first turned twenty-nine-year-old
prince Siddartha Gautama from the ephemeral sense pleasures of his
palace to the pursuit of liberation and enlightenment. After one had
abandoned experiencing the world through concepts and representations,
after he realizes the cessation of mental constructions, he perceives
the interdependence of all things, how—as Thich Nhat Hanh
says—”Everything is made of everything else, nothing can be by itself
alone” (anatman) in a universe of ceaseless change and
transformation. Then and only then is it possible to realize Dr. King’s
injunction that we “Love our enemies” in the struggle for justice
because once one approaches the “enemy” with love and compassion the
“enemy,” the Other, is seen to be oneself.
All things, we learn, are ourselves. Thus,
practice necessarily leads to empathy, the “Feeling Heart” Du Bois spoke
of, Toomer’s sense that all is sacred, and the experience of
connectedness to all sentient beings. No matter how humble the
activity—whether it be walking, sitting, eating, or washing the
dishes—one approaches it with mindfulness, acting, and listening
egolessly as if it might be the most important thing in the world, for
indeed all that is, has been, and will be is contained in the present
moment. In this nondiscursive, expansive spirit discrimination is
inconceivable. After the practitioner has charged his battery, so to
speak, in meditation, he eagerly works and creates to serve others—all
others—with humility, a boundless joy in giving, fearlessness, and
disinterest in all personal “rewards.” And though the number of black
Buddhists is small, they are growing in an increasingly multicultural
America with the promise of more black people turning the Wheel of
Dharma as a new millennium dawns. For through the Dharma, the black
American quest for “freedom” realizes its profoundest, truest, and most
revolutionary meaning.
Charles Johnson is recipient of the 1990 National Book Award for his novel, Middle Passage
(the first African-American male to win this prize since Ralph Ellison
in 1953). He has authored three other novels, a collection of short
stories, and numerous essays, screenplays, critical books, and reviews.
Johnson, a Ph.D. in Philosophy and published cartoonist, holds the
University of Washington’s first endowed chair for writing.
Image 1: W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was
one of America's most influential black intellectuals. Courtesy
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.Image
2: Jean Toomer's exposure to Gurdjieff led him to proclaim the coming
of a new, raceless "blue man." National Portrait Gallery.Image 3: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was inspired by Gandhi and Thich Nhat Hanh. Courtesy Robert Sengstacke.Image 4: Soka Gakkai Buddhists chanting sutras in New York City. Courtesy Kirk Condyles.
