On SUBSTACK: May We Gather
My trip to the May 4th memorial for victims of anti-Asian violence, and reflections on the gravity of grief and the spiritual strength that can hold us up.
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Photo by Tauran Woo.
Back in May, I had the privilege of speaking at May We Gather, a memorial service for the victims of anti-Asian violence. It was held in Los Angeles at the Higashi Hongwanji, a Shin Buddhist temple that had been vandalized only a month before in a wave of anti-Asian attacks. The event was timed to fall on the 49th day following the mass shooting that targeted three businesses owned by Asian women in Atlanta and killed eight people, six of them Asian women.
The day that I landed in LA, I wrote a post about the event and what it was like to be there, especially as I was one of several dozen Buddhist clergy and monastics, and one of only six scheduled to speak. In that post, I wrote about my apprehension, anticipating walking the streets of Little Tokyo in my priest robes—the first time I'd be wearing them outside the grounds of my temple, and the first time I'd be wearing them without other Chozen-ji priests with me.
The strangeness of traveling after being grounded by COVID for so long was punctuated by the precious cargo of my priest robes towed behind me in my carry-on luggage. On the plane a day before the memorial and my talk, I could already feel the weight of the robes on me—and this, too, I wrote about while sitting in my hotel room waiting for the memorial to begin.
My priest robes are big, imposing, black and gold, with sashes and belts to tie, a fan and beads to carry. Underneath the robes themselves, a plain, white kimono is worn—the same kind in which they dress corpses in Japan before they make their last journey out of this world. What’s more, for such a formal occasion, it’s appropriate for me to wear the keisa, a golden sash that wraps over one shoulder and around the trunk, one part of it resting on the left forearm. It is terribly precarious. The keisa wants more than anything to slip down and fall to the ground. That it is only held in place by a few strategic folds on the forearm felt to me like a reminder of how tenuous our senses of normalcy, routine, and basic composure can feel these days.
While priests play many ceremonial, community and counseling roles, the underlying and deeper responsibility of a Chozen-ji priest specifically is to take away fear. It's a task I have endeavored to fulfill and a responsibility I have tried hard to live up to, though no one will be surprised to know that it's been a challenge and there have been countless times when I've felt like I've fallen short.
To meet the moment and bring my responsibility as a Chozen-ji priest to bear, I arrived in LA ready to talk about something that I knew felt fleeting and scarce at the time: spiritual strength. Then, as I stood onstage in front of the beautifully adorned butsudan at the Higashi Hongwanji, surrounded by a small sea of other Buddhist clergy and monastics and speaking about strength, my voice broke and tears unexpectedly fell from my eyes. It happened as I took a breath, right before I recited the names of the Asian women who had been killed in Atlanta. Before I held them up as paragons of spiritual strength and compassion approaching that embodied in the divine manifestations of the Buddha, Fudo-myo and Kannon.
Many of the comments I got after the memorial addressed the fact that I showed emotion. It was only then, event organizer Funie Hsu told me, that she finally cried that day. Other people, especially the monastics, shared that they resonated with the idea of spiritual strength. They know what it's like to have to reach into their depths to find perseverance, steadfastness, and ferocity in the face of delusion and pain; what it's like not to quit.
Perhaps people assume that to be a Buddhist priest or monk means that you're stoic, unaffected by sadness. Indeed, I had not planned to cry. But I hope that by showing my own grief in the moment, I demonstrated that it's as important to let our emotions flow as it is to let them go. To have spiritual strength is not to be impassive. It means standing strong in the face of great tragedy and sadness. Not by pushing feelings aside or rolling in the turbulence of those emotions, either, but by being full there with what's happening in this moment, then clearing the decks completely so we may be ready for whatever is next.
Below is a video of my talk at May We Gather. The text of my talk, which was recently included in special coverage in Lion’s Roar Magazine (where you’ll fine the text of all six talks given that day), is beneath.
In the original Sanskrit, the paramita of virya means vigor, effort, and diligence. For today’s purposes, let’s think of it as spiritual strength.…
We clearly need strength, in moments like these, to help us forge a path ahead through racism, patriarchy, and other oppressions and inequities. But we also need it to meet the suffering caused by injustice or just the vicissitudes of life with compassion. Nobody would dispute that what the world needs today is more compassion. But consider what compassion really means. The Latin roots of the word compassion are com and passion. Com means with. Passion—as in the Passion of the Christ—means to suffer. So, com-passion means to suffer with. To suffer with others, perhaps even in the hardest moments of their lives, requires tremendous spiritual strength.
After an exhausting year, many are probably wondering, where can we find such spiritual strength?… We need only look around, finding examples of spiritual strength in our families and ancestors who risked everything to build a brighter future. Examples like Tan Xiaojie, Feng Daoyou, Hyun Jung Grant, Park Soon Chung, Kim Suncha, and Yue Yong Ae. The strength they had to make America their home, working multiple jobs and navigating a new world for the sake of their families, was tremendous. Let us commit to matching their spiritual strength, their virya, today and every day to come as we remember and honor them.