A Buddhist Grief Observed

Excerpt from A Buddhist Grief Observed
By Guy Newland

Aren't Buddhists supposed to have transcended grief? What were we expecting? Was the Buddha not clear enough? We just need to "let go." 

When I was a young instructor at Mary Washington College, a student paper shocked me by arguing that Vietnamese Buddhists do not mourn their dead family members because they know that they are going on to future lives. Giving this writer skillful guidance was my first big teaching challenge. 

Most of us would not think this way, but we may fall into subtler missteps. Having met some Dharma and engaged it, many come to feel that they have taken death and impermanence into account. 

We might have. But probably not. Like everyone else, Buddhists seldom die as they expect. We die in some other way, too soon or too late, in ways we never imagined. We die in fear, and sadness, and in disappointment. Death is what happens when we are making other plans. And if our lives are committed to service, we will die while we still have critical work to do. 

When Dainin Katagiri Roshi was dying of cancer, he told his frightened students, "I see you are watching me closely; you want to see how a Zen master dies. I'll show you." He kicked violently and screamed, "I don't want to die!" Then he looked at them: "I don't know how I will die . . . Remember, there is no right way." None of us know how we will face death. 

Let's not fool ourselves. Meditation on death and impermanence does not magically make us invulnerable or transhuman. Losing those we love hurts. When his daughter died of smallpox, Kobayashi Issa wrote: 

  The world of dew
  Is indeed a world of dew.
  And yet, and yet... 

Issa comments on his poem: 

  I knew that it was no use to cry, that water once flown past the bridge does not return and scattered blossoms are gone beyond recall. Yet try as I would, I could not, simply could not cut the binding cord of human love. 

The Buddha teaches that all that arises is ephemeral, vanishing like a drop of dew in the morning sun. And this is true. Issa cannot evade the full force of this fact; as a Buddhist, he has long known this well - or thought he had. Now this little girl's death hurts him bone-deep, cuts him to the core. To be utterly heart-wrecked and, at the same time, strangely grateful for some lost grace - this is what it will always mean to be a human who loves another mortal. 

So we may have unrealistic expectations about how well our practice has prepared us to die or to lose someone whom we love more than our own lives. We may feel worse than we had expected to feel. You are practicing, your spouse dies - and suddenly it seems as though someone clubbed you in the head. Your grief may be complicated by useless disappointment in yourself-or in the Dharma itself. 

One woman came to me in a difficult grief after losing a parent. She made a commitment to intensive religious practice with the belief that she had taken the prospect of losing her parent into account. When grief hit her hard, she was doubly tormented. Because she felt so bad about her parent's death, she felt like a failure as a Buddhist. 

Soko Morinaga tells a similar story. His friend Miss Okamoto was a dedicated Zen practitioner for decades, but as death approached she was terrified - and also profoundly ashamed of her terror. 

I did not find my wife's death at all surprising. I had a vague idea that she would outlive me, but I also knew that she expected to die first. I wasn't startled that she died. And yet: I was shocked; it was a physical shock. 

Shock does not have to involve surprise. It took me months to understand. It is like someone informing you that he is going to punch you in the head - and then punching you in the head. You're not surprised, but you do have a concussion. 

Shock and pain are not a personal failure. It is cruel to judge ourselves so harshly; it is unhelpful to blame ourselves for being human. 

Knowing the first noble truth does not exempt us from it. 

Excerpt from A Buddhist Grief Observed
By Guy Newland
wisdompubs.org/grief-observed

What Good is Zen

 

What good is Zen if it won’t help my dying friend?

What good is Zen if it can’t stop an oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico?

What good is Zen is I’m shot down in Afghanistan?

What good is Zen if I’m broke and living on orange peels?

What good is Zen in the windows of an abandoned house?

What good is Zen is all it means is a pebble on the beach?

What good is Zen if you imagine you’ve done nothing wrong?

 

Excerpt from Zen Master Poems by Dick Allen
wisdompubs.org/zen-master-poems

Not No, Non- a Buddhist meditation

What Is The Meaning of Nonself?

Everything that comes into being depends on everything else. Nothing arises by itself.

In Buddhism, we often talk about “no self.”  This is a difficult idea to grasp in English.  What we mean is that the self as we usually image it doesn’t really exist.  Just as the daffodil is made up of the nutrients it draws from the soil, the energy of sunlight, the water that helps it grow, and the bees that pollinate, so, too, we are made up of the air we breathe, the food we eat, the water we drink, the ancestors who have come before us and made our lives possible.

But does this mean that because the daffodil is comprised of nondaffodil materials it isn’t a daffodil?  Of course not!  And likewise for each of us.

In Chinese the word for “no self” is wuwo, but wu does not mean “no” in Chinese.  It negates rather than defines.  It is indefinite.  It is not fixed or concrete.  Wu connotes fluidity, movement, even hope.

The realization of no self is not at all nihilistic.  It simply means that the self is something different from what we habitually assume it to be.

In Chan, emptiness is not nothingness.  And nothingness is not nothing.  We might say “nonthingness” instead.  No self might be better expressed as nonself.  Not no, non-.

What is the meaning of nonself?  Infinity.  The downward sweep of Songnian’s hand came out of the place from which each breath comes and goes.  Where each moment is born and vanishes.  A place of nongrasping where there is complete freedom and everything comes together naturally.  A lovely Chinese phrase, xing yun liu shui, expresses this.  It means clouds flowing across the sky, a stream running downhill in spring without hindrance or obstruction, fully functioning, free but still connected, as clouds are connected to the sky and rivers to the earth.

When we realize that, we don’t feel terror or despair.  On the contrary: to realize that, to live it, gives rise to a feeling of potential and possibility.  We are no longer bound to the stifling attachment to who we think we are.

Everything changes, including each one of us.  We get stuck because we limit ourselves.  We do not really open up and become intimate with the world around us.

Not no, non-

 

Excerpt from Chan Heart, Chan Mind – A Meditation on Serenity and Growth by Master Guojun
wisdompubs.org/chan-heart

Exporting Reconstruction: Ulysses S. Grant and a New Empire of Liberty - REVIEW

by Ryan P. Semmes

Exporting Reconstruction examines Ulysses S. Grant's Reconstruction-era policy, both foreign and domestic, as an integrated whole. Grant's vision for America's international role in the aftermath of the Civil War was best articulated in his 1869 memorandum, considering whether the United States should annex the Dominican Republic. Grant envisioned a combined domestic and foreign policy of Reconstruction, one predicated on spreading the values of liberty, equality, and the rights of citizenship to not only the Dominican Republic but also other Caribbean nations as well as to Native Americans and Chinese immigrants living in the United States but seen as aliens within the nation.

Author Ryan P. Semmes interprets the Grant-era policy of Reconstruction as an all-encompassing agenda that imagined the United States as the arbiter of civil rights for the Western Hemisphere. Exporting Reconstruction shows readers that, unlike presidents before and after his administration, Grant hoped to increase not only the United States' imperial reach but also extend freedom and liberty to people beyond the borders of North America.

Ryan P. Semmes is professor and director of research at the Ulysses S. Grant Presidential Library, housed at Mississippi State University.

University of South Carolina Press
ISBN-13 ‎ 978-1643365176

Black Revolutionaries: A History of the Black Panther Party - REVIEW

by Joe Street

Black Revolutionaries is an accessible yet rigorously argued history of the Black Panther Party (BPP), one of the emblematic organizations of the 1960s. Joe Street highlights the complexity of the BPP’s history through three key themes: the BPP’s intellectual history, its political and social activism, and the persecution its members endured. Together, these themes confirm the BPP’s importance in understanding Black America’s response to white oppression in the 1960s and 1970s.

Based on a wealth of archival material, Black Revolutionaries reveals the enduring importance of leftist political philosophy to 1960s and 1970s radicalism, and how the BPP helps us to understand more deeply the role of public space and public protest in the 1960s.Street shows how the BPP were key to the transformation of political activism in the post-civil rights era. As the BPP faced the psychological and organizational impacts of FBI surveillance, police repression, and imprisonment, Street examines how these negative forces helped to shape and destroy the BPP.

Most significantly, Black Revolutionaries demonstrates that an understanding of African American grassroots politics and protest, racial injustice, and police brutality in the post-civil rights era is only comprehensible through engagement with the BPP’s history.

University of Georgia Press
ISBN-13: 978-0820366944

Symphony of Secrets: A novel - REVIEW

by Brendan Slocumb

A gripping page-turner from the celebrated author of book club favorite The Violin Conspiracy: Music professor Bern Hendricks discovers a shocking secret about the most famous American composer of all time—his music may have been stolen from a Black Jazz Age prodigy named Josephine Reed. Determined to uncover the truth that a powerful organization wants to keep hidden, Bern will stop at nothing to right history's wrongs and give Josephine the recognition she deserves.

Bern Hendricks has just received the call of a lifetime. As one of the world’s preeminent experts on the famed twentieth-century composer Frederick Delaney, Bern knows everything there is to know about the man behind the music. When Mallory Roberts, a board member of the distinguished Delaney Foundation and direct descendant of the man himself, asks for Bern’s help authenticating a newly discovered piece, which may be his famous lost opera, RED, he jumps at the chance. With the help of his tech-savvy acquaintance Eboni, Bern soon discovers that the truth is far more complicated than history would have them believe.

In 1920s Manhattan, Josephine Reed is living on the streets and frequenting jazz clubs when she meets the struggling musician Fred Delaney. But where young Delaney struggles, Josephine soars. She’s a natural prodigy who hears beautiful music in the sounds of the world around her. With Josephine as his silent partner, Delaney’s career takes off—but who is the real genius here?

In the present day, Bern and Eboni begin to uncover more clues that indicate Delaney may have had help in composing his most successful work. Armed with more questions than answers and caught in the crosshairs of a powerful organization who will stop at nothing to keep their secret hidden, Bern and Eboni will move heaven and earth in their dogged quest to right history’s wrongs.

Brendan Nicholaus Slocumb was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and holds a degree in music education (with concentrations in violin and viola) from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. For more than twenty years he has been a public and private school music educator and has performed with orchestras throughout Northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC.

Vintag
ISBN-13 ‎ 978-0593315453

Divisions: A New History of Racism and Resistance in America's World War II Military - REVIEW

by Thomas A. Guglielmo

Divisions offers a decidedly different view. Prizewinning historian Thomas A. Guglielmo draws together more than a decade of extensive research to tell sweeping yet personal stories of race and the military; of high command and ordinary GIs; and of African Americans, white Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans. Guglielmo argues that the military built not one color line, but a complex tangle of them. Taken together, they represented a sprawling structure of white supremacy. Freedom struggles arose in response, democratizing portions of the wartime military and setting the stage for postwar desegregation and the subsequent civil rights movements. But the costs of the military's color lines were devastating. They impeded America's war effort; undermined the nation's rhetoric of the Four Freedoms; further naturalized the concept of race; deepened many whites' investments in white supremacy; and further fractured the American people.

Offering a dramatic narrative of America's World War II military and of the postwar world it helped to fashion, Guglielmo fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the war and of mid-twentieth-century America.

Thomas A. Guglielmo is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of American Studies at George Washington University. He is the author of White on Arrival: Italians, Race, Color, and Power in Chicago, 1890-1940 (OUP, 2003), which won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians.

Oxford University Press
ISBN-13 978-0195342659

Karla's Choice: A John le Carré Novel - REVIEW

by Nick Harkaway 

An extraordinary new novel set in the world of John le Carré's most iconic spy, George Smiley, written by acclaimed novelist Nick Harkaway. It is spring in 1963 and George Smiley has left the Circus. With the wreckage of the West’s spy war against the Soviets strewn across Europe, he has eyes only for a more peaceful life. And indeed, with his marriage more secure than ever, there is a rumor that George Smiley might almost be happy. But Control has other plans. A Russian agent has defected in the most unusual of circumstances, and the man he was sent to kill in London is nowhere to be found. Smiley reluctantly agrees to one last simple task: interview Szusanna, a Hungarian émigré and employee of the missing man, and sniff out a lead. But in his absence, the shadows of Moscow have lengthened. Smiley soon finds himself entangled in a perilous mystery that will define the battles to come and set him on a collision course with the greatest enemy he will ever make. Set in the missing decade between two iconic instalments in John le Carré's George Smiley saga, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Karla’s Choice marks a momentous return to the world of spy fiction's greatest writer.

Viking
ISBN-13 978-0593833490

Elizabeth Catlett: A Black Revolutionary Artist and All That It Implies – REVIEW

by Dalila Scruggs

Accomplished printmaker and sculptor, avowed feminist, and lifelong activist Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012) built a remarkable career around intersecting passions for formal rigor and social justice. This book, accompanying a major traveling retrospective, offers a revelatory look at the artist and her nearly century-long life, highlighting overlooked works alongside iconic masterpieces.

Catlett’s activism and artistic expression were deeply connected, and she protested the injustices of her time throughout her life. Her work in printmaking and sculpture draws on organic abstraction, the modernism of the United States and Mexico, and African art to center the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Catlett attended Howard University, studied with the painter Grant Wood, joined the Harlem artistic community, and worked with a leftist graphics workshop in Mexico, where she lived in exile after the US accused her of communism and barred her re-entry into her home country.

The book’s essays address a range of topics, including Catlett’s early development as an artist-activist, the impact of political exile on her work, her pedagogical legacy, her achievement as a social realist printmaker, her work with the arts community of Chicago’s South Side, and the diverse influences that shaped her practice.

"A deft sculptor and printmaker, devout feminist, and lifelong social justice advocate, Catlett was uniquely committed to both her creative process and political convictions. Growing up during the Great Depression, she witnessed class inequality, racial violence, and U.S. imperialism firsthand, all while pursuing an artistic education grounded in the tenets of modernism. Catlett would protest injustices for nearly a century, via both soaring artworks and on-the-ground activism. Born in Washington, DC, Catlett settled permanently in Mexico in 1946 and for the rest of her life she worked to amplify the experiences of Black and Mexican women. Inspired by sources ranging from African sculpture to works by Barbara Hepworth and Kathe Kollwitz, Catlett never lost sight of the Black liberation struggle in the United States. Characterized by bold lines and voluptuous forms, her powerful work continues to speak directly to all those united in the fight against poverty, racism, and imperialism."

Dalila Scruggs is the Augusta Savage Curator of African American Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. She has held curatorial and education positions at the Williams College Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

University of Chicago Press
ISBN-13 978-0226836577

Higher Flight: Refocusing Black/Africana Studies for the 21st Century - REVIEW

by James B. Stewart

In the open access book Higher Flight, pre-eminent scholar and activist James B. Stewart offers a much-needed critical assessment of the current state of Black/Africana studies in order to chart a path forward. In three equally groundbreaking sections, Stewart clarifies and refines the distinctive approaches that currently define the field; shows how creative production in particular can serve as a unique means of cultural analysis and political mobilization; and suggests how to restore the balance between intellectual inquiry and direct action in order to improve the actual lived experiences of people of African descent. Each section incorporates various forms of expression, including Stewart’s essays, speeches, and poems, and the book as a whole covers a vast range of figures, issues, and phenomena, from W.E.B, Du Bois to James Baldwin, from conscious hip-hop to the Black Lives Matter movement, from Hurricane Katrina to Covid-19, and very much in between. Written with an accessible authoritativeness few Black/Africana scholar-activists can match, Stewart offers a must-read not only for researchers, but also for graduate students and advanced undergraduate students interested in Black/Africana studies, diaspora studies, ethnic studies, Black womanist/feminist studies, and American studies, as well as in African American history, culture, politics, economics, literature, and philosophy.

James B. Stewart is Professor Emeritus of African and African American Studies at Penn State University, USA. He previously served as Vice Provost for Educational Equity and Director of the Black studies Program at Penn State, as President of the National Council for Black Studies, as President of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, and as Editor of The Review of Black Political Economy. He has published numerous articles and books, including the field-defining Introduction to Black Studies: Transdisciplinary Approaches and Implications (1992) and Flight in Search of Vision (2004).

Zed Books
ISBN-13 978-1350380295