sponsored by: The Willis Wood Fund Annual Lecture, Amherst College

Sponsor: Smith College Taitetsu Unno Memorial Lecture

Buddhism, Race, and American Belonging: An Asian American View

Where do we find home? How do we become free together? How do we find a place of refuge and belonging in a world often intent on exclusion? These have been enduring questions for American Buddhists of Asian ancestry since the 1850s when the first Buddhist temples were built in the U.S. by immigrants and their descendants. Today, people of Asian heritage make up more than two-thirds of American Buddhists. Yet the histories and perspectives of Asian American Buddhists remain marginalized in many sanghas. What can we learn from Buddhist Asian American insights about navigating the complexities of identity and building an American Sangha that values multiplicity over singularity, hybridity over purity, and inclusivity over exclusivity? How does centering Asian American voices expand our understandings of race, identity, and belonging in American Buddhism? What can Buddhists of all backgrounds learn from Asian American Buddhists when it comes to building multiracial coalitions and inclusive communities? 

In dialogue with each other and with participants, Duncan Ryūkan Williams and Chenxing Han will draw from their respective books, American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War (Harvard University Press, 2019) and Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic Books, 2021). These groundbreaking works form the basis for a timely conversation on buried histories, trailblazing contributions, race and identity, belonging and refuge. We hope you’ll join us.

As we work to become a more inclusive, equitable, and diverse community, we invite feedback/suggestions you may have regarding ways that we can make participation in the program more accessible and welcoming; please email us at contact@buddhistinquiry.org.

This is a free online course. Register below.

The Karma of a Nation: Racial Reparations from an Asian American Buddhist Perspective

The forced removal and incarceration of over 125,000 persons of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them Buddhists, in U.S. concentration camps during WWII began with the arrest of Buddhist priests even before the smoke had cleared at Pearl Harbor. The prewar surveillance of Buddhist temples and the making of registries that targeted Buddhist priests, unlike Christian ministers, as threats to national security was based on a long-standing presumption that America is essentially a White Christian nation. The first federal immigration law that targeted a particular group for exclusion from the United States was the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, legislation that deemed the predominantly Buddhist Chinese immigrants as the “heathen Chinee,” a group religiously and racially unassimilable. Despise this long history of religion-racial animus, Buddhists who found themselves behind barbed wire in camps surrounded by guards drew on their Buddhist teaching, practice, and community to not only survive the wartime incarceration, but advocate for a vision of America that is multi-ethnic and religiously free. In this presentation, Duncan Ryuken Williams will talk about how the teachings of these Asian American Buddhist ancestors offer a way to heal and repair America’s racial and religious fractures that endure to the present. An interned Buddhist priest and a postwar advocate of racial reparations, Rev. Kyoshiro Tokunaga, often spoke about the “Karma of a Nation” in reference to America’s racial legacy while Ta-Nehisi Coates has argued that reparations is more than a recompense of past injustices, but a national reckoning “that would lead to spiritual renewal.” Williams proposes a Buddhist approach to the work of repair and building a nation that values multiplicity over singularity, hybridity over purity, and inclusivity over exclusivity.

Due to the novel coronavirus (COVID-19), I have cancelled all upcoming public events for March through May. I will be in contact with you if and when there is a foreseeable change to this timeline.

Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies Japan Forum Lecture Series. “American Sutra: Buddhism and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII” lecture with introduction by Helen Hardacre, Harvard Reischauer Institute Professor of Japanese Religions and Society and discussants Diana L. Eck (Harvard Professor of Comparative Religions and Indian Studies) and Stephen Prothero (C. Allyn and Elizabeth V. Russell Professor of Religion in America, Boston University). Reception and book sales/signing will follow.

This will take place at Belfer Case Study Room S020, Japan Friends of Harvard Concourse, CGIS South Building.

Presented by the Harvard Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies; co-sponsored by the New England Japanese American Citizens League, Harvard Buddhist Studies Forum, Harvard Divinity School Center for the Study of World Religions, Harvard Pluralism Project, and the Harvard Program on U.S.-Japan Relations.

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“American Sutra: Buddhism and the WWII Japanese American Internment” by Duncan Williams followed by a book signing – presented by the Council on East Asian Studies; co-sponsored by Asian American Cultural Center, Department of Religious Studies, Yale Law School Legal History Forum

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