Tathagata Buddha songs, which this paper studies, has been specifically enabling for Dalit women as it gives them not only a sense of religiosity but it also opens them to the possibility of rationalizing their beliefs and practices. The paper will bring up an ethnographic account of some of these Dalit women singers and look into some of their composition and songs that have a specific invocation to Gautam Buddha and of political icons like Babasaheb Ambedkar, whom they revere.

Taking as its focus twentieth- and twenty-first-century semiautobiographical writings by black American Buddhists, this article explores how black American Buddhists engage with Buddhist teachings to understand themselves as racialized subjects on local, national, and transnational levels.

They portray the Buddha as a social reformer enlightened to the operation of racial, gender, and sexual inequalities. This portrayal of the Buddha allows black Buddhists to articulate a counter-narrative to hegemonic Western authority while paradoxically constructing their own romantic vision of Asia as the “Other” to the West.

… integration rather than segregation is the typical outcome. However, the tendency toward adaptation and integration can be impeded when economic frictions in the form of income inequality and housing cost are present.

The origin story of the Licchavis, retold in two commentaries on Nikāya texts, has received some scant attention in the modern scholastic record, yet has usually been either cast aside as so much myth or has been recast in thematic or structural studies that align it with other tales of incest, foundling narratives, or origin stories of gaṇa-saṅghas. This article argues against those interpretations and offers a thorough rereading of the story as not only encoding a class hierarchy but also, in so doing, critiquing the Brahmanical class structure and the concept of svabhāva by birth.

I know there are different worlds…

An analysis of this airy, Anishinaabemowin song about the space between us.

For an interview with this poet, listen to the bonus episode.

Sōtō Zen temples in Japan kept necrologies in which the ancestors of outcaste members of their congregations were clearly identified, sometimes by derogatory titles such as “beast” or “less than human.” Indeed, Sōtō priests routinely allowed access to these memorial registers by private investigators, who perform background checks to insure that prospective marriage partners or company executives do not come from outcaste families.

After pledging to stop discriminating against “outcasts” in the late ’70s, the Sōtō Zen school in Japan is still grappling with the challenges of modernity.

… revolutionaries suffer subjective vertigo when they meet the state’s disciplinary violence with the revolutionary violence of the subaltern; but they are spared objective vertigo. This is because the most disorienting aspects of their lives are induced

… the scholarly act of embracing members of the Black Liberation Army as beings worthy of empathic critique

Even the most bizarre propaganda claims [about Tibet] are accepted by Hans [without] any apparent qualms about them. But on the part of Tibetans, the messages are completely counter-productive. The more the propaganda is imposed on them, the more resolute they become in their rejection of that propaganda.

We ask Gotama, the Eye that has arisen in the world:
Is one a brahmin by birth, or by action?
Explain to us what we do not understand –
how to know a brahmin.

What makes someone respectable?

Brahmin, I don’t say that coming from an eminent family makes you a better or worse person. I don’t say that being very beautiful makes you a better or worse person. I don’t say that being very wealthy makes you a better or worse person.

The Buddha strongly rejects the caste system and the “prosperity gospel” interpretation of Karma.

Since July 20, 1985, a new higher ordination (upasampadā) movement has emerged at the Dambulla Buddhist temple in Sri Lanka. The architect of this movement, a Sinhala Buddhist monk named Inamaluwe Sumangala, challenges the contemporary Buddhist monastic practice of ordaining monks on the basis of their castes

On the face of it, the movement seems to involve a debate about the irrelevance of caste to higher ordination between Sumangala and the monks of the Asgiriya temple, one of several chapters of the Siyam Nikāya that ordains only high-caste Buddhist males. However, the challenge constituted by the new ordination can be seen as part of a broader attempt on Sumangala’s part to redefine monastic identity

One of the most obvious fallacies of modern Theravāda Buddhism is the depiction of the Buddha with a full head of hair.

Every other rights struggle that we have seen—disability rights, gay rights, women’s rights—all come from the efforts of the black civil rights struggles. […] It is black people who have been the perfectors of democracy.

The history of The United States, retold beautifully and powerfully in three emotional hours.

Perhaps this is how racism feels no matter the context–randomly the rules everyone else gets to play by no longer apply to you, and to call this out by calling out “I swear to God!” is to be called insane, crass, crazy. Bad sportsmanship.

An astonishingly good book of poetry describing the contemporary African American experience and how “race” emerges in relation.