Matthew Hepburn's Articles on Lion's Roar

Young Buddhists are adopting a broad, inclusive vision of Buddhist teachings and practice. In this Buddhadharma Forum, Gesshin Greenwood, Matthew Hepburn, Chenxing Han, and Lama Bryn Dawson take a look at where Buddhism is, and where it’s headed. Moderated by Ray Buckner. I’m a millennial Buddhist, and growing up queer and transgender, I bore witness to a lot of suffering. I was called a cross-dresser and stared at with anger for wearing a suit. I was laughed at in center field while playing softball in high school. I knew early on how much our bodies carry, and that we wound easily and heal slowly—if at all. The world that I and other millennial Buddhists have inherited is not an easy one. The recession of 2008, the inundation of student loan debt, and the current economic and health crisis resulting from the coronavirus all capture the struggles and uncertainty millennials endure. We have witnessed communities suffering from climate change and must confront the fact that we may not have a safe and livable planet much longer. These are some of the collective generational traumas we live with—and that weigh on our hearts and minds. In this Forum, I talk with four millennial Buddhists who are deeply aware of the problems the world faces and conscious of the suffering involved (and to come). They talk about Buddhism in the same breath as taking care of the world, and they also—though they had just met—take care with one another in the course of our conversation. In these truly difficult times, times in which we are all inside, it is so hard to feel heard, and held. Alone in my apartment, I listened to these millennial Buddhists try to envision what a more peaceful, intentional, and enlightened Buddhism might look like. And suddenly, I was no longer alone. We had each other. The Forum takes a close look not only at how Buddhism can serve the world but also at how it can repair itself and expand to include a diversity of people and perspectives, as well as practices and wisdom from other traditions. We explore issues such as sexual violence, race in American Buddhism, and questions of community. We discuss our love for Buddhism, and grounded in that love, we discuss how we hope Buddhism might change, and where it might go. We share our vision for a Buddhism grounded in hope, creativity, and liberation for all beings. Millennial Buddhists are concerned about making our world more inclusive and safe for all, and they’re asking: what does it look like to hear and honor another person’s experience? How do we see ourselves in the suffering of another? How can I make my sangha more inclusive and equitable, so that we might all find refuge on this path? How might this path engage all bodies? When it forgets a body, how might the path meet this moment and body with compassion, intention, responsibility, and understanding? I believe millennial Buddhism is about discovering these answers, together. It’s about achieving liberation, and the seeds of home, safety, and belonging, together. It’s about addressing oppression and the suffering of our world, together. It’s about forging a new, intentional, and hopeful path, together. —Ray Buckner Ray Buckner: The frame for this conversation is simply that we’re millennials, although our generation is still pretty invisible in the Buddhist world. I’m curious: is “millennial” an important part of how you understand yourself? Do you think it informs how you understand Buddhist practice? Gesshin Greenwood: We are a generation that's been shaped by economic and environmental forces beyond our control. We were handed a broken system. My practice was inseparable from things like the economic recession. The stock market crashed when I graduated from college, and that was one of the main reasons I had time to spend my twenties in a monastery, because there were no jobs. So you can't separate those forces from practice. That may be a difference from older generations—I think older generations might have felt more driven to make some sort of rarefied, pure Buddhist space that is separate from political and economic forces. But we can't separate from something like the climate crisis. The world is going to be changing so much, and the suffering will be changing as well. So I wonder if maybe we're better suited or more enthusiastic about seeing how these economic and environmental problems are showing up, and quicker to see Buddhism as a way to address them, not as something separate. Ray Buckner: The night after the Pulse shooting in Florida in 2016, I went to a dharma center in California, and that night the teacher basically tried to convince the mostly older white people why, right after the shooting, they should care about the LGBTQ folks. I don't think it’s a solid difference between millennials and older Buddhists, but in that moment it occurred to me that of course we would be talking about the Pulse shooting the night after it happened. Of course in a dharma center, after queer folks of color had been killed, we would take up their suffering, explicitly. That, to me, feels generational. Lama Bryn Dawson: I began my path in the dharma with older generations, and my community, up until a few years ago, was predominantly middle-class and middle-aged, or older. That made me appreciate when I was introduced to people who are younger or who had spent their twenties not in a monastic setting. We’re thinking of the parts of our lives we have yet to live—can we have a family, for example? I wonder if people nearing the end of their life more readily accept the irreversibility of catastrophic effects. I seem to notice younger generations keep in mind that things will continue. I think there's a real inspiration in younger generations. Because we perceive ours and our children’s lives as just beginning, we are mobilized to enact the vision of this world and human communities continuing. We see ourselves carrying this responsibility—not as a choice but as an inevitability. Chenxing Han: I know I’m technically a millennial, but I feel a kind of productive ambivalence with the label. To what extent is it just a narrative? Do Europeans of our age, for example, think of themselves as millennials? I haven't heard the term used very much in Asia, though I do think younger Buddhists in Asia are also questioning the Buddhism of older generations. So what does it mean if we look at these generational categories more transnationally? I do think these categories may be relevant outside the US because we're in such a globalized and connected world, as COVID-19 is teaching us in a stark way. We were handed a broken system. So maybe we’re more enthusiastic about seeing how these economic and environmental problems are showing up, and quicker to see Buddhism as a way to address them, not as something separate. —Gesshin Greenwood. Ray Buckner: Yes, and there’s so much to be anxious about today: climate change, COVID-19, detention of immigrants, and the US election. And now there’s a new global economic uncertainty, even more profound than what many had been experiencing already. More and more, it seems that Buddhism is in conversation with other perspectives: Buddhism and critical race theory, for example, or Buddhism and feminism. What, besides Buddhism, is informing your thinking about the world? Are those things in sync with Buddhism, or is there a tension between them? Gesshin Greenwood: Since I was a teenager I've been informed by intersectional feminism. That's always been there. And it's definitely in conflict with Buddhism in some ways, especially in how it relates to hierarchy and power. I'm really interested in equalizing power imbalance. But I've talked to a lot of older Buddhist teachers who say power imbalance is kind of inevitable. At least in a therapeutic dyad, there's always going to be power imbalance, and you can't entirely get rid of that, but you can work to acknowledge it, to make it visible, so that it has less of a harmful impact. I would like to see Buddhism take up the tools and principles of radical feminism more seriously—it definitely needs it. If this were a PR meeting for Buddhism, I'd be like, "We definitely need some feminism now—we're not looking good." Ray Buckner: Could you say a little more about intersectional feminism? What do you think it offers to the Buddhist world? Gesshin Greenwood: I know I'm not going to give a correct definition, but intersectional feminism recognizes the various ways in which power and identity can come together in a particular situation or person, and how race and gender and class are informing power differences. But underlying that is an explicit turn toward power in and of itself. Whereas I think second-wave feminism was kind of focused on how white women could get more high paying jobs, now I think feminism is looking at equality in general, and the different ways power is working to create inequality. Chenxing Han: I think Buddhism has always been in conversation, and perhaps tension, with many different systems of thought or “non-Buddhist” ideas. It gets to what Buddhism means—is it really a thing distinct from all of these other things? For much of the past four years I’ve been primarily based in Asia, specifically Southeast Asia, and that’s given me a little bit of distance from the experiences of being Asian American in America, and what all of that means. It's not that the issues go away, but the context shifts. Race and racism register differently in Thailand; maybe there, we’d talk about ethnicism or colorism. Issues of gender and sexuality issues register differently too. It's also been interesting to be based in Asia and to witness the rise of polarization in the US, this attachment to being right. What really draws me to Buddhism isn't necessarily the answers it has, but the kinds of questions it asks. Asking questions, finding different answers to these questions, and then trying to sit with that difference, trying to understand...

Forum: How Millennials Are Reframing the Buddhist Path

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