A Gift of Dharma for 5.27.11
Today’s quote is from Mushim (Patricia) Ikeda-Nash, a Buddhist teacher, writer, diversity consultant, and community activist who serves as a core teacher at the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California. Among other things, she is the coeditor of Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in Our Buddhist Communities (which you can download in-full by clicking on the title), and one of the activists whose work is documented in the Pluralism Project at Harvard University’s film Acting on Faith: Women’s New Religious Activism in America. This is it:
Most of the people I see who are drawn to Buddhism are like me in that they want skills, they want to apply those skills, and they want to see incremental positive results. Furthermore, they don’t want to be expected to put up with other forms of oppression or perceived oppression while they’re gaining these skills. If someone in authority says “Jump!” they want to be empowered to say, in a reasonable manner, “Please explain to us why” instead of answering, “How high?” The potential Buddhists I now see are largely wary of abusive authority and occulted governmental processes. Shared power, decision-making by some form of consensus, and transparency of government will mark and are marking both the present and the future of Buddhism.
