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3 The Emergence of Black Dharma and Oxherding Tale
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3 The Emergence of Black Dharma and Oxherding Tale “If it’s about liberation, black people will come.” Wayne Shorter (black Nichiren Buddhist, composer, and sax player) In the mid-1990s Rosa Parks was asked to choose the single photograph that best epitomized her life for inclusion in a book titled Talking Pictures. The editors of the volume solicited photos from people they considered to be “the most interesting people of our era,” and they urged contributors to choose the single photo that “mattered most” to them (Heiferman and Kismaric 10). Surprisingly, Parks—whose December 1, 1955, protest against racial segregation on city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, is widely considered to be a defining moment in the civil rights movement—chose a picture not of her activities in Montgomery but of her 1993 meeting with Daisaku Ikeda, the president of Soka Gakkai, an international Buddhist organization (see figure 3).1 It is clear from her explanation of why she chose the photo of her meeting with Ikeda that Parks understood their encounter to be a most important event: “This photograph is about the future, and I can’t think of a more important moment in my life. It shows an unprecedented private meeting I had in 1993 with Daisaku Ikeda, and it reminds us how people of very varied opinions and unique personalities from two different cultures have an opportunity to work together on a mission of world peace. . . . Our meeting can serve as a model for anyone. So the photograph of our first meeting is very important because it is history in the making” (198). Bringing together two groups not commonly identified with each other, blacks and Buddhists, the picture of Parks and Ikeda reflects in iconic fashion the international exchange of ideas about human rights that is one result of globalization. Offered both as an example of “history in the 105 making” and as “about the future,” the photo is positioned by Parks to point toward a future direction in human rights advocacy that she understands to resonate with her past work for civil rights reform. The photograph also hints at another form of history in the making: the emergence of what Turning Wheel: The Journal of Engaged Buddhism calls “Black Dharma”—or the increasing number of black Americans who have been drawn to Buddhist practice in the post–civil rights era. Like the disciplinary history of blacks who entered philosophy programs in the 1960s and 1970s, the history of black Buddhists in the United States has not yet been written. Nevertheless, the emergence of Black Dharma provides an important cultural and critical context for understanding Charles Johnson’s fiction and constitutes a significant cultural development in its own right.2 While several critics have analyzed the importance of Buddhist ideas in Johnson’s fiction and as his chosen personal religious and ethical practice, this study derives its critical apparatus from a consideration of the emergence of black Buddhism as a cultural phenomenon—from its early roots in the nineteenth century to the growing interest in black Buddhism as reflected in Buddhist publications, the increasing number of Web-based list serves or “cybersanghas ” available to Buddhists of color, and to the number of recent books 106 c h a p t e r t h r e e 3. Rosa Parks and President Daisaku Ikeda of the Soka Gakki International Buddhist Organization, 1993. Photo by Seikyo Shimbun. Courtesy Soka Gakki International. [18.232.185.167] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 14:44 GMT) published by black Buddhists, including those by bell hooks, Jan Willis, and Charles Johnson. Although Johnson has been interested in Eastern thought since he was fourteen, when he discovered one of his mother’s yoga books and experimented with meditation for the first time, he has become more outspoken about his Buddhism since the 1990s, contributing a number of essays to leading Buddhist journals, speaking freely about his Buddhist practice in interviews , and publishing in 2003 Turning the Wheel, a collection that includes seven essays on Buddhism. While Buddhism is not the only Eastern religion or philosophy important to Johnson, and while critics often comment on the complex fusion of multiple Eastern influences in his fiction, Buddhism is undoubtedly the most important in his life and in his art. Johnson’s increasingly public stance on Buddhism is partly due to his deepening personal commitment to Buddhist practice—a commitment that led him on November 14, 2007, to take formal Buddhist vows—and partly a response...