RECORDED TALK (Video): https://youtu.be/3_WxHRQeGts

For some traditions of Buddhism, ancestral lineage offers a precious spiritual place for devotion, wisdom, and a deep sense of origin. As Buddhism continues to unfold in the United States within and beyond the Asian communities in which it came, all complex, painful, and cherished relationships to ancestry and ancestors unfold with it.

Historically, these same lineages have often been constructed for reasons of legitimacy, authority, power, and attracting resources. The legacy of white supremacist colonization has severed ancestries through violent occupation, relocation, reeducation, and enslavement. The logic of whiteness itself is one that insists our cultural and ancestral bodies be stripped, denounced, and replaced by ahistorical and racialized hierarchies of power. Ancestry, then, can for us bear a timeless love and encouragement or a deeply cutting domination and erasure. Our ancestors can be as close to our bodies as our very breath and they can be rendered the unnecessary, cultural baggage of less reasonable peoples.

How then do we morally navigate the many intersections of our personal and Buddhist ancestries so our views and actions cultivate healing and liberation for all beings, rather than furthering the harmful, colonial, supremacist legacies of our world and nation? As we unpack this question together, we are excited to learn from three people who have devoted their lives to working intimately at these very intersections.