Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation by Angel Kyodo Williams and Lama Rod Owens (review)

This book invites its readers fully into the mess of it, the mess of love, liberation, justice, freedom, racism, homophobia, capitalism, all of it. So reading this book is not easy; it's full of paradoxes and demands, as well as invitations. It's full of compassion, understanding, raw personal stories. While Radical Dharma is not written for academics, I would recommend it to anyone, especially anyone who thinks they know what Buddhism is, because the views here on what Buddhism is and what it can be are important and fresh, and, yes, "long overdue" (p. xv). Radical Dharma is written largely, but not only, for Buddhists, sometimes and maybe largely for white Buddhists, and for Buddhists of color. It challenges introspective Buddhists (especially white Buddhists who are privileged by their whiteness) to understand that personal liberation requires social liberation; it challenges activists to understand that social liberation requires personal liberation. "Love and Justice are not two. Without inner change, there can be no outer change. Without collective change, no change matters" (p. 209).

Radical Dharma is written by three people, and their voices are kept mostly distinct throughout the book in a number of ways. For example, some chapters are written by one person, so a section on "Homeleaving—What We Left Behind" has three chapters, each chapter written by one of the authors who is named at its beginning. The voices are in conversation, too; some sections are composed of parts of the public conversations in Atlanta, Boston, and Berkeley that are at the root of this book. When the authorial voices are in conversation in these dialogues, the speaking author is named. These public conversations include also unnamed people who participated in those conversations (the gender of the speaker is noted only: "female speaker" or "male speaker"), asking questions and offering their own reflections. Further, the book self-consciously invites the reader into these conversations, calling itself a "talking book … designed to begin the conversations we need to build new communities" (p. xxxi). This format and style can be off-putting; it can seem incomplete and unpolished, yet that feeling in the reader of it being unfinished is also clearly one of the strengths of the book—because if you stick with it, you can become another member of this conversation and you recognize the importance of being in it.

For this white Buddhist, the most important aspect of the book is its straight talk about racism and the effect of that racism on Buddha Dharma in the United States, and the demands it makes on its reader to respond. As I read this book for the first time, I made a note: holding this book is holding fire. It was exciting to read passages such as this one: "Our methodologies are forged within the default mindset of colonization, capitalism-as-religion, corporation-as-demigod, domination over people and planet, winner take all, rape and plunder as spoils of victory, human and natural resources taken as objects of subjugation to the land-owning, resource-controlling, very, very privileged few" (p. xvi). It was inspirational to see clearly once again: as a white person I cannot get a clear view on the teachings of the Buddha, on liberation, without facing and addressing my racism and the advantages I enjoy as a white person in a culture that privileges whites. The reality of racism in white American culture is slippery; this country has not faced up to its history and altered its education system by teaching real history and ending segregated education. White American culture has not offered reparation for the horrors it has visited upon Blacks. As a result, the path to understanding is spiraling. One realizes aspects of racism, and one can return to these realizations again and again at deepening levels. Particularly helpful in this spiraling path of understanding about Buddhism and racism are the...