**3. "Original Face"**

Belonging, in the Buddhism that the historical Buddha established, was revolutionary. To become part of the community, or sangha, merely required a request and an agreemen<sup>t</sup> to abide by the rules established for the well-being and harmony of the group. Caste based on class and color disappeared. Seniority was determined by how long one had belonged to the monastic community. A community of nuns was established as well (albeit later and with more rules and less status), which was perhaps even more extraordinary, in that there was, at the time, no place for women apart from in families, dependent on fathers, husbands, and sons. This radically revised construction of belonging functioned as a rejection of identities and obligations based on family lineage and caste, and the creation of a new one, with the capacity of awakening as a birthright. Besides leaving family, shaving the head, wearing similar sa ffron robes and receiving a new name, formal belonging was predicated on taking refuge in the three jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. This meant taking refuge in the willingness to let go of an identity based on ego in order to realize one's own Buddha nature, being willing to follow the path that leads to this realization, and being willing to support and be supported by a community with the same aspirations.

At its core, Buddhism is a radical deconstruction of identity, beyond all personae, social locations, and limits of conceptual thought. This is not meant to serve as a theoretical or philosophical exercise, but rather as a very pragmatic strategy aimed at the elimination of su ffering by addressing its root cause: believing in, grasping at, and trying to secure a selfhood that does not fundamentally exist. The Buddha taught that there were three truths about existence: (1) that since everything comes into and goes out of existence due to the causes and conditions which create them, there is no permanence (*anicca*), and (2) thus no separate, intrinsic and essential self-nature (*annata*), and (3) that not understanding this gives rise to all kinds of su ffering (*dukkha*). That which we call the self, in a conventional sense, is merely the coming together of five aggregates: form, feeling, perception, impulses, and consciousness, and the sense of self we construct from them is very literally a form of mistaken identity. As one American Buddhist nun describes her spiritual practice:

I had been studying and practicing the Buddha's teaching and thus had spent years trying to deconstruct my identity, to see it as something merely labeled, not as something fixed, not something I truly was. So many of our problems—personal, national, and international—come from clinging to these erroneous, solid identities. Thus in Buddhism, we are not trying to find out who we are but who we aren't. We work to free ourselves from all our erroneous and concrete conceptions about who we are. (Chodron 1999)

The teaching of no-self (*anatman*) does not imply a nihilistic lack or void, as early Western interpretations of Buddhism suggested. Neither does it support a strictly materialist view, as implied by our secularized and scientific culture. Rather, it points to an understanding that the "emptiness" (as expressed through Mahayana thought) of intrinsic selfhood is another way of understanding the fact that all of existence is not only interconnected, but completely intercausal and interdependent, or as McMahan describes: "the world as a vast, interconnected web of interrelated beings—that is, whose identity is not a priori independent of the systems of which they are part of but is inseparable from those systems" (p. 150). The classical illustration of this is the image of Indra's Net in the Flower Ornament (Avatamsaka) Sutra, composed in the late third or fourth century CE and foundational to the Hua-Yen School of Chinese Buddhism. The sutra describes an infinite and celestial net which extends across all space, time, and dimensions. At every intersection of the net lies a multifaceted jewel which reflects—and is simultaneously reflected by, *ad infinitum*—all other jewels, and the entirety of the net itself. More familiar to contemporary Buddhists in the U.S. and the West is the explanation o ffered by Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh (2012):

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. We can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are. "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb "to be", we have a new verb, "inter-be".

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. This is not di fficult to see, because when we look at a sheet of paper, the sheet of paper is part of our perception. Your mind is in here and mine is also, so we can say that everything is in here in this sheet of paper. You cannot point out one thing that is not here—time, space, the earth, the rain, the minerals in the soil, the sunshine, the cloud, the river, the heat. Everything coexists with this sheet of paper. That is why I think the word inter-be should be in the dictionary. To be is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is. Sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger's father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.

If an interconnected/nondual understanding of identity is the warp on which belonging is woven, lineage, which articulates spiritual and social connection, is its weft. On the most basic level, as Tibetan teacher Reginald Ray (2005) explains, organizational lineages of teachers and schools and monasteries, which confer authenticity and legitimacy, have functioned to link practitioners in the present to particular traditions or communities, while transmission lineage follows the symbolic and spiritual ancestries of students and teachers back to the historical Buddha. However, of the greatest importance is what is known in some traditions as the primordial lineage: one's own inherent and intrinsically enlightened *buddhanature*—the same capacity for enlightenment as that of the Buddha himself. These forms of belonging, themselves connected both horizontally and vertically in space and time, reinforce the figuration of selfhood as a net of interconnection rather than a discrete entity. Moreover, the experiential realization of the "emptiness" of the phenomenal self directly informs social engagemen<sup>t</sup> and ways of being in the world in the form of profound compassion. Mahayana Buddhism exemplifies this in the figure of the bodhisattva who, hearing the cries of the world, vows to forego the bliss of nirvana to work to liberate and save all sentient beings from su ffering. From an ordinary dualistic perspective, this work is unending. However, at the same time, and in the same nondual way that "form is emptiness" and "emptiness is form" in the "Heart Sutra," that the absolute completely coinheres with the particular, that each jewel in Indra's Net reflects and includes all others, there are no beings to save and no beings that are unsaved. The well-being and the liberation of one implicates the well-being and liberation of all.

While the notion of ourselves as interconnected with others and the rest of life is certainly not foreign to the West, and has been quite integral to discourses within theology, biology, and ecology, the Buddhist approach aims for a much deeper understanding beyond the conceptual and discursive. American Buddhist poet, Jane Hirschfield (1998), points to the possibility of this through an empathic leap into our own experience, not limited by culture or ideology:

'Show me your face before your parents were born, 'says the Buddhist koan [ ... ]. For Neruda, that face becomes a poetry of all things: a long praise-song to salt in the mines and in the ocean, to a wrist watch ticking the night's darkness like a tiny saw cutting time, to the dead body of a fish in the market. In the light of the poet's abundance of heart and imagination, we remember the threshold is a place at once empty and full. It is on the margins, where one thing meets another [ ... ]. (p. 213)

### **4. Belonging to the World**/**Acting for All Beings: Towards a Non-Nationalism**

How might this Buddhist understanding of self contribute to a conversation on religion and nationalism in the U.S.? The ways in which we construct a sense of selfhood for the individual is the basis for all constructions of identity and belonging in collective contexts, which in turn creates the causes and conditions of social well-being or unrest. As psychologist and Vipassana teacher, Tara Brach (2001), notes, the emphasis on individualism and self-reliance in the West, and particularly in the U.S., is extreme to the point of being almost pathological:

Never in the history of the world has the belief in a separate self been so exaggerated and prevalent as it is now in the twenty-first century in the West. In contrast to Asian and other traditional societies, our distinctive mode of identification is as individuals, without stable pre-existing contexts of belonging to families, communities, tribes or religious groups. Our desperate efforts to enhance and protect this fragile self have caused an unprecedented degree of severed belonging at all levels in our society. In our attempts to dominate the natural world, we have separated ourselves from the Earth. In our efforts to prove and defend ourselves, we have separated ourselves from each other. Managing life from our mental control towers, we have separated ourselves from our bodies and hearts.

The consequences of this can easily be found in social/political polarization, increasing political and economic inequities, rising religious and ethnic separatism, nationalist rhetoric and policies, and environmental and climate crises. In a similar vein, David Loy (2009) underlines the fact that the suffering engendered by the belief in a separate self is fundamentally no different from the suffering caused by identification with imagined communities:

In fact, many of our social problems can be traced back to this deluded sense of collective self, this "wego", or group ego. It can be defined as one's own race, class, gender, nation (the primary secular god of the modern world), religion, or some combination thereof. In each case, a collective identity is created by discriminating one's own group from another. As in the personal ego, the "inside" is opposed to the other "outside", and this makes conflict inevitable, not just because of competition with other groups, but because the socially constructed nature of group identity means that one's own group can never feel secure enough. For example, our GNP is not big enough, our nation is not powerful ("secure") enough, we are not technologically developed enough. And if these are instances of group-lack or group-dukkha, our GNP can never be big enough, our military can never be powerful enough, and we can never have enough technology. This means that trying to solve our economic, political, and ecological problems with more of the same is a deluded response. [ ... ] If the parallel between individual ego and collective wego holds, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the grea<sup>t</sup> social, economic, and ecological crises of our day are, first and foremost, spiritual challenges, which therefore call for a response that is (at least in part) also spiritual.

In his 2019 article in *Tricycle*, Bhikkhu Bodhi, an American Theravada Buddhist monk and scholar, emphasizes the importance of moving away from practices that are the result of collective self-making, such as profit-seeking, environmental plundering, and national projections of power, toward a greater vision of inclusivity and care which reflects Buddhist perspectives of identity and belonging:

To achieve real peace, we need a global commitment to protecting people everywhere from harm and misery. This commitment must be rooted in a universal perspective that enables us to see all people as brothers and sisters, worthy of care and respect regardless of their ethnic, national, and religious identity. As Americans we can't go on thinking that American lives are more important than the lives of people elsewhere—in Iraq and Afghanistan, in South America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. We can't think that only the lives of middle-class people count, but not the lives of black youths in Chicago, herdsmen in Ethiopia, rice farmers in the Philippines, or factory workers in Bangladesh. Rather, we must regard all people as endowed with intrinsic value, which we must affirm by establishing greater economic, social, and political justice. (Bodhi 2019)

What Buddhist narratives on self can offer to a larger conversation about national identity and purpose in the U.S. is threefold. First, as Saul Tobias (2018) points out: "The similarity between the core principles of nationalist ideology and the qualities of the doctrinally based self are not coincidental," and that "nationalism provides a secular version of the guarantee of a unitary and immortal soul that both the grea<sup>t</sup> Western monotheisms and Hinduism provides" (p. 636). Buddhism, on the other hand, provides an important critical framework that challenges these foundational principles:

With its distinctive account of the self, the *skhandas* and the a fflictions, Buddhist thought provides insight into the basic psychological mechanisms that explain the consistency of certain features of nationalisms across various historical and political contexts, as well as the appeal and pervasiveness of nationalism and the intensity of feeling it evokes, even to the point of violence. To use a traditionally Buddhist distinction between *causes* and *conditions*, one might say that modern nationalism has required the coming together of numerous historical conditions, including modern technology and communications, the emergence of mass societies and the displacement of religion in the West. But from a psychological point of view, the enduring causes of modern nationalism lie in what Buddhism understands to be the very engine of our conditioned existence, namely the relentless process of *aha ´nkãra* or self-making. (Tobias 2018, pp. 640–41)

This approach has the added benefit of clarifying an apparent paradox within the usual paradigms of nationalism used in contemporary scholarship in the West:

Viewing the nation through the lens of Buddhist psychology therefore helps to resolve one of the principle di fficulties with the dominant modernist account of nationalism in Western political theory: how to reconcile an insistence on the 'imagined' or 'ideological', in other words, purely conventional nature of the nation, with the intensity of feeling and commitment that this imputed phenomenon evokes. (Tobias 2018, p. 637)

One might describe the Buddhist approach as a "middle way" between these two positions, a non-nationalist stance that recognizes the real-world e ffects on a conventional level while at the same time denying any essentialized status to fictitious collective selfhoods. Secondly, the presence of Buddhist perspectives in American culture contributes to the possibility of a re-examination and a dialogue regarding the nature of individualism, self-reliance, and exceptionalism, as well as how they manifest and create specific e ffects in collective and systemic contexts. Individual, familial, group, tribal, or national agency do not exist in any absolute or neutral way, but as a function of privilege and access to resources, which, in any healthy pluralistic and democratic society or in the interest of global politics, should be a matter of shared concern. Thirdly, a Buddhist perspective which holds that all fixed identity positions, both individual and collective, are fundamentally mistaken assumptions, has the potential to significantly lessen ideological, emotional, and tribal attachments to them. In turn, this lessens the possibility of division and conflict and opens a space for a reconstructed sense of belonging based on interconnectedness in its widest sense, both human and planetary.

How have the "new" Americanized forms of Buddhism in the U.S. contributed to a more "non-nationalist" vision of collective identity and belonging? In an article describing her (then forthcoming) book, *American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity* (2019), Anne Glieg (2018) highlights what she calls "three emerging turns, or sensibilities, within meditation-based convert Buddhism: critical, contextual, and collective." She notes that:

First-generation practitioners tended to be very celebratory of "American Buddhism," enthusing that they were creating new, more modern, and "essential" forms of Buddhism that were nonhierarchical, gender-egalitarian, and free of the cultural and religious "baggage" of their Asian predecessors. While the modernization and secularization of Buddhism certainly continues, there is now much more discussion about the problems and pitfalls of these processes, with some exposing the Western ethnocentrism that has operated behind the "essential" versus "cultural" distinction.

She describes the contextual turn as the increased awareness of how forms of Buddhism evolve and are expressed according to surrounding cultural contexts and social locations and conditionings, including around issues of power, globalization, economics, privilege, and marginalization. The collective turn challenges individualism in favor of embracing inclusivity and a sense of "collective awakening" to systemic forms of su ffering due to sexism, racism, and economic and environmental

exploitation. Importantly, Glieg finds, "With the 'three turns,' previously excluded, neglected, or entirely new conversations—around critical race theory, postcolonial thought, and cultural studies—are shaping the dialogue of Buddhist modernism." It is precisely this syncretic approach that is a hallmark of Buddhism in America. Christopher S. Queen (2000), a foremost scholar of engaged Buddhism, writes that: "the direction of contemporary Buddhism, like that of other ancient faith traditions, has been deeply influenced both by the magnitude of social su ffering in the world today, and by the globalization of cultural values and perspectives we associated with the Western cultural tradition, especially the notions of human rights, economic justice, political due process, and social progress" (p. 23). It is no longer enough, in many Buddhist contexts in the U.S., to be satisfied with a practice or a community that limits itself to "time on the meditation cushion" without addressing how the development of wisdom and compassion can, and should, manifest not only in one's daily life, but also in communal and systemic ways for the well-being of those outside one's direct circle:

As we begin to wake up and realize that we are not separate from each other, nor from this wondrous earth, we realize that the ways we live together and relate to the earth need to be reconstructed too. That means not only social engagemen<sup>t</sup> as individuals helping other individuals, but finding ways to address the problematic economic and political structures that are deeply implicated in the eco-crisis and the social justice issues that confront us today. Ultimately the paths of personal transformation and social transformation are not really separate from each other. Engagement in the world is how our original awakening blossoms, and how contemplative practices such as meditation ground our activism, transforming it into a spiritual path. (Loy 2019, p. 5)

Inspired by the nonviolence of Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, the Thiền Buddhist teacher Thích Nhất Hạnh coined the term, "engaged Buddhism," to describe the e fforts he and the Buddhist community made in response to the su ffering that surrounded them during the Vietnam War. Since then, it has developed into a movement within American Buddhism and has taken multiple forms and directions. Practices of socially engaged Buddhism in the U.S. have included environmental and antinuclear activism, the promotion of sustainable food production and permaculture, criminal justice reform and prison ministries, hospice projects for AIDS patients, and most recently the ecodharma movement which applies Buddhist teachings and resources to climate activism. Engaged Buddhism has also included the founding of organizations such as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and Zen Peacemakers, holding conferences on decolonizing the dharma, applying Buddhist approaches to gender and racial discrimination, and incisive self-examinations of power and privilege within Buddhist communities themselves. Ultimately, what the contemporary globalized (post)modern forms of American Buddhism o ffer to conversations regarding national identity and belonging is an a ffirmation of American values of inclusivity and mutuality while at the same time calling into question the limitations of a collective ego and self-congratulatory stories of infallibility, chosen-ness, and exceptionalism that can, and have, been used to obscure or e fface some of the very real failings whose legacies still pose formidable challenges as the U.S. moves into the next decade of the 21st century.

### **5. Whose Dharma?**

Sitting on a cushion on a chilly morning, in a temple near the Daniel Boone National Forest, the question of what it means to exist in the current contexts of political polarization and rising nationalism, gun violence and mass shootings, extreme economic inequities, and mass extinction and climate crisis, as an American, is not a philosophical question. I understand that the sense of self that I use to navigate the world does not mean that I am separate or that my existence isn't bound up with the rest of the world. My community is not imagined. It is not an ideological a ffinity or an emotional sense of belonging, but a direct and tangible sense of connection. My community is this rock, that tree, these birds, those clouds, the people and the deer I pass on the highway, the world that I hear about on the radio, everyone in the gas station and grocery store, and everyone in my home. The word,

*dharma*, in a Buddhist context, means the teachings of liberation from greed, hatred, and ignorance and the realization of profound interconnectedness. However, in its original context within Hinduism, it also means "path" or "duty." As a participant in the "American project" of democracy in a nation forged with the rhetoric and intention of freedom—but built to a large degree on slave and immigrant labor on lands taken from Native populations that were killed or forced to move, that granted women the vote only 100 years ago and passed the Civil Rights Act just 25 years ago, that is experiencing crises in healthcare, education and immigration, and that is not facing the devastating challenges of ecological crisis and climate change—my understanding of interconnection means that it is not only my responsibility to look at the history and the present directly and see what is, but also to empathize and "be with" in order to e ffectively do the work that needs to be done for the "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" for us all. From a Buddhist perspective, there is no divine being dictating the course of American history from the blueprint of a providential plan from above. However, there is the direct and active agency of individuals and communities paying attention to the present moment, their place in it, and with each other. An understanding of a de-essentialized or non-nationalist "nationalism" is not a play on words, mystic mumbo-jumbo, or a philosophical sleight-of-hand. It is a sense of connection and shared purpose, not in an abstract notion congealed into a collective identity, but in the mutuality of our well-being and the well-being of the natural world that supports us and from which we are not separate. This inclusive and pluralistic approach fully accords with the tenets and values of Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions—particularly around questions of human equality, social justice and care of the earth, as well as the foundational aspirations of the U.S. As Teigan Dan Leighton (2019) a ffirms in "American Buddhist Values and the Practice of Enlightened Patriotism" in the the journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship:

The Buddhist ideal of universal awakening is supported by the American democratic principles of liberty and justice for all, equal justice under the law, and the unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And these American ideals are enhanced, in turn, by the Buddhist ideal: May all beings be happy. There can be no true peace and justice, or happiness, which is not somehow shared with all people.

It also serves as a call to return to the "*E pluribus unum*" vision of our founders—but in the fullest way possible. In her entry in *It occurs to me that I am America: New Stories and Art*, Alice Walker (2018, p. 356), a longtime student of Buddhism (who refuses to identify with the label of Buddhist), writes: "Together we move forward. [...] We are here now. In this scary, and to some quite new and never-imagined place. What do we do with our fear? Do we turn on others, or towards others? Do we share our awakening, or only our despair? The choice is ours."

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
