Letting in All the Ancestors

Mount Riga, New York. Fall 2020. My teacher, fellow monks, and I stand behind our mats ready for morning service. The beginning of our devotional dance. Except for me, everyone is  in flowing black robes. I, the newest monk, am wearing a black sweatsuit. We bow and chant as we do every day. Outside, facing the meditation hall, are the Taconic Mountains, a silent witness to our harmonized voices and full prostrations. 

The chant leader announces the next chant: Eihei Koso Hotsuganmon. It’s a chant originally written as a personal prayer by the founder of Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji. In the prayer, Dogen expresses his gratitude for the ancestors’ continuous guidance in our practice for the benefit of all beings. I suddenly find myself sobbing through a chant I’ve heard countless times before: “Buddhas and ancestors of old were as we, we in the future shall be Buddhas and ancestors.” During my two-year temple residency, I will have many such moments. I enjoy residential temple life: tasty, home-cooked vegetarian meals; group study; working with others in the kitchen and the garden; and a daily schedule rooted in shared intention. Communal life is not without challenges, but it feels like home.

On my last day as a resident, I offer incense at the ancestral altar. The altar holds a wooden statue of the feminine embodiment of compassion, Kwan Yin, as well as a framed portrait of Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center. I enter the meditation hall for my monk-leaving ceremony. Following custom, my teacher asks me what I will take with me to the marketplace (the world outside of the monastery). Incapable of a single answer, I list a few things: the sentient beings I sat with in this temple; the various beings within its mountains and forests; the sound of rushing stream water thawing in the spring; the sound of gravel under feet by the entrance gate. I will miss all these things—and certainly the mountains, which live deep in my body.

Brooklyn, New York. Fall 2022. I return to Brooklyn and resume lay life, but it’s not easy. I can’t simply pick up where I left off. Without my temple family and the daily schedule, I feel lost. Old karmic habits return with a vengeance—workaholism, news bingeing, disordered eating—and, with them, a bad case of self-loathing. Surely, after two years in the mountains I’d transcended such shameful human failings. Instead of sharing my struggles with those dear to me, I feel embarrassed that I’m checking work emails at 3 a.m. and forgetting to drink water, go outside, and see family and friends. Winter is tough. I am still not drinking enough water, nor am I exercising or resting well. Some of these old habits never really disappeared, I finally admit to myself, but had merely been tempered by a supportive temple schedule and tight community of monks.

Aside from honoring the Zen rituals of sitting meditation, or bowing and chanting, I feel encouraged to pay attention to what’s happening with me, within and without, and to respect the lives of those spiritual and blood ancestors who came before me and those descendants who will follow.

After suffering enough, I confess to the sangha that I am not doing well. One of my teachers suggests joining the sangha for daily online morning sits. I do, and it helps me feel connected again. Yet I can’t quit feeling as if I’m starting from zero and, as such, kind of a failure. It’s the old impostor syndrome with an extra dollop of harsh self-judgment. I’m not able to see the situation clearly. Back in the marketplace, I feel I must make it on my own. Marketplace rules: the striver taking care of business! Anything less is shameful. 

Brooklyn via Jamaica, West Indies. Spring 2024. Today my mother calls. My dad’s baby brother, Uncle Nigel, died suddenly this morning. He was found dead at his home in Kingston, Jamaica. A burst appendix. This is only a month after the death of my mom’s baby sister, Aunt Terry, who died of pneumonia while undergoing cancer treatment. For a long time, I’d been haunted by these two relatives. How strange that they are now gone from my life so soon after each other. Like me, they had both moved to the United States from Jamaica as young adults—my uncle for an athletic scholarship at Michigan State and my aunt to continue her professional studies in law and real estate. Living on their own for the first time, in late sixties America, they met a young first-world country that was just starting to learn that Black can indeed be beautiful. My uncle returned to Jamaica in his senior year of college, never completing his final remaining semester. He retreated into what appeared to me as a life of unfulfilled promise. My aunt worked several menial jobs, saving enough to start her own business, and then helped pull her family out of poverty through her remittances to her family in Jamaica, providing assistance with school and housing. 

My aunt’s love for family, stories, and laughter remain with me, as does my uncle’s love for his people, music, and friendship. Extraordinarily generous, they sacrificed their own health and well-being for their family and friends, and they bore a great deal of personal pain quietly. I see similarities between my life and theirs in our shared sensitivity, intuition, and caring nature. My relatives’ struggles with boundaries, self-care, self-forgiveness, and respectability are also very familiar. They dearly loved a world that didn’t always love them back.

I sometimes feel overly responsible for things beyond my control and neglect caring for my body. I’m working on asking for and receiving help. Right now, I am trying to understand how the personal impact of poverty, racism, misogyny, patriarchy, and the legacy of colonialism are not my individual burdens to bear. These are communal legacies, shared histories, and I alone cannot fix them. I am trying to understand how the challenges I face as a sensitive, Black immigrant woman are not “failures” or a mark of personal shame but encounters within a violent system. 

I sometimes think back to my time at the monastery where the Zen rituals and chants moved me deeply. In the Eihei Koso Hotsuganmon, Dogen Zenji acknowledges the role of the ancestral fires of karma as a possible “cause and condition of obstacles in practicing the way.” Dogen encourages me to live a life of continuous practice—that is, to heed how I act in the world and to do so with complete honesty and compassion. Being honest with myself is as important as being honest with others. The chant stresses that we cannot do any of this work entirely by ourselves and recommends requesting help from all buddhas and ancestors (“May they share with us their compassion”). Aside from honoring the Zen rituals of sitting meditation, or bowing and chanting, I feel encouraged to pay attention to what’s happening with me, within and without, and to respect the lives of those spiritual and blood ancestors who came before me and those descendants who will follow.

Dogen encourages me to live a life of continuous practice—that is, to heed how I act in the world and to do so with complete honesty and compassion.

If I live in a world crafted from our collective misperceptions and delusions, then with our collective wholesome intentions we can make a world that exists in the truth of what is—or, as author Ruth King would have it, a world where we belong to each other. I’m learning that the self-doubt and fear won’t go away. They are part of the many beings that live in this body, some of them quite old, and all they are asking for is my loving attention. Not judgment. Today, I invite all my relations, including my doubts and fears, into the circle dance that is my life. When I let you in, dear ancestors, nothing is left out. I know it was you who set my heart on the Buddha way. I feel your presence, pleasure, vulnerability, and pain. I feel all that you are and have been. I feel your love and tenderness for me, and I’m whole.