Encourage Others by Overcoming Your Own Suffering

One of my favorite suttas from the Buddhist scriptures is the Majjhima Nikaya 128. It tells a story of quarrels and resentment to which the Buddha responds: “He abused me, he beat me, he robbed me, he insulted me. Those who harbor such thoughts, in them hatred will never be appeased. He abused me, he beat me, he robbed me, he insulted me. In those who do not harbor such thoughts, hatred will cease. Hatred is never overcome by hatred but by nonhatred. This is a universal law.” This is where we have to start. What will we do with this truth? How will we respond to it?

Our obstacles are very great. It is going to take a worthy opponent with a radical approach to overcome them. So long we have had the strategy. It was offered more than twenty-five hundred  years ago. Five hundred years later, that same message was echoed by another sage. It’s about time we really tried it. We know what hasn’t worked. Why not try it now? Pacifists are not passive. Their actions are subtle but have transformative powers that have saved countless numbers of living beings.

The Buddha never tried to change society by protesting, picketing, staging sit-ins, and so forth. So when I’m talking to practitioners, I don’t either. Instead, I say, “You change.” I am always pointing them back to their own thoughts, speech, and actions—regardless of what others do.

I marvel at how scared, anxiety-ridden, and plagued by feelings of insufficiency and guilt the long-term practitioners who attend my retreats and talks are. So I offer them what I have—the dharma—and the courage and compassion to live it. The mindfulness movement has certainly gone wide. But now it is time to go deep. That’s the best way to show gratitude to the pioneering teachers and carry their work forward.

As a people, Black Americans continue to struggle to overcome obstacles, threats, and lack. We have had to develop a sense of our own worth to survive a Western “caste” system. We are well acquainted with suffering and the stamina it takes to surmount and overcome adversity. So I think two of the most important inspirations the Black community can offer to a growing Buddhist movement in the West are courage and compassion.

I remember when I was first asked to speak at different sanghas. I was invited to speak to the POC groups. I’d say, “I’m not a Black dharma teacher, I’m a dharma teacher. Call me back when you want me to speak to your whole group.” And they did! 

Of course, I caught a lot of flack from younger Black Buddhist leaders because I wasn’t a proponent of affinity groups from the start. I just think we all need to stay together and work at overcoming our discomfort with one another. That’s not so easy to accomplish when we separate. Many centers that started this now permanently have a bunch of separate groups they call one sangha! I don’t really call this progress. I think the dharma calls us to a higher resolution and unity.

But that requires a strong and clear dharmic message around the cultivation of virtue, compassion for others, and practices of respecting others. Or how else will we survive as a species? It also takes a commitment to holding our views without being attached to them and a kind of respect for oneself that can be maintained in the face of rejection.

To me, all this is what fierce compassion is. When we have the capacity to see the underlying ignorance, tendencies, and fears that cause people to act as they do, and we really care, we can hold a space with them, and if necessary, for them. But if we are riddled with doubts about our worth, angry, resentful, and unaccomplished, we will not be of much use in proving the dharmic message of transformation as possible.

I remember speaking to a group of ninety-nine People of Color—one of the very few POC talks I had given. There was one white person who showed up for the talk, and they wanted me to ask him to leave. I was told they didn’t feel comfortable—didn’t feel safe—with that one person there. I was dumbfounded! I asked them who put such a notion in their heads that one white person (they didn’t even know) was that threatening? I did not ask him to leave. I gave an excellent talk that night on dharma that transcended racial disparity. They benefited, and so did he. Anything I can say to one person, I can say to any person. It is not words as much as the spirit of harmlessness they ride upon.

When we walk into a room, we should come in loving and accepting ourselves. Don’t you know our worth is not dependent on others loving us? Come with the love offering and the notion that wrapped up in that gift is the courage and compassion to deliver it in person.

The truth is, everybody is not going to love you or accept you. You have to have enough love and acceptance for yourself. And when you keep building on just that, acceptance overflows and spills onto those who deserve it and those who don’t. In other words, you can look on all people with the same equanimity, helping or instructing some when you can, accepting others when you can’t.

When you don’t have self-acceptance, resentment flourishes that leads to hatred and all manner of unrighteous conduct. Being a woman in this Black skin for seventy years has taught me that! This is not about just race but about all kinds of differences and biases. There is temptation to aversion everywhere! But this is precisely what the dharma addresses and ensures victory over if we have the patience and courage to learn it, practice it, and perfect it.

You have to have enough love and acceptance for yourself. And when you keep building on just that, acceptance overflows and spills onto those who deserve it and those who don’t.

What I know is true, is that we impart what is in us. So there is this constant exchange of energies in the world. What is my contribution to it all? That’s the question I ask myself again and again.

If we look at our country, we have to admit that things are much better on the surface as the centuries have passed. But the perspectives that defined the emerging nation have not changed much from the 1600s. Some laws and rules have made things better, but scratch just beneath the surface and all the poisons and defilements are still there.

I see it in India and Thailand, too, as I work with inequities of outlawed “untouchability” and sanctioned patriarchy. I see it here in our society in regards to race, social injustice, income and opportunity disparity, immigration, and too many other issues. I also see it even within the small American bhikkhuni sangha of which I am a part, gatekeepers including and excluding sisters based upon narrow and debatable interpretations of “correct” procedures. Yes, when virtue is lost, we need to create laws. But we should also recognize their insufficiency to change hearts. After all, laws are for the lawless.

So what can change us from the inside? I believe that’s the work of the sages—those who have cried out from their own bowels, “Give me a clean heart and renew an upright spirit within me. . . then will I teach transgressors the way”—and have then done the work. A certificate does not a sage make! So we should be careful about overinflation of capability and eagerness to establish a “brand.”

One cannot hold this station if they are not both ready and able to surrender all—fame, status, wealth—for the excellency of upholding the truth. It takes a superior vision beyond the ordinary worldly view, courage, and compassion. It also takes surrendering an attachment to the pains one has become acquainted with. That’s the difficult part. We cannot play the victim. That will always presume a power over us. But when we can honestly surrender our indignation and offense, we begin to open a possibility for true change in lineage, where people of all “colors” become sons and daughters of the buddhas.

I believe in people’s ability to change. I believe we all possess the buddhanature. We just need help discovering it. But, first, in our own minds we must move beyond the dichotomy of separation. While useful in speech for discussion, it becomes limiting for action and transformation.

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From Afrikan Wisdom, edited by Valerie Mason-John, published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2021 by Valerie Mason-John. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.