Chenxing Han gave a dharma talk to SBZC where she weaved together reflections from her two books, "Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists," and "one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care." ​​​​​​

Chenxing Han is the author of Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, and one long listening: a memoir of grief, friendship, and spiritual care. She is a regular contributor to Lion’s Roar, Tricycle, Buddhadharma, and other publications, and a frequent speaker and workshop leader at schools, universities, and Buddhist communities across the nation. She is a co-teacher of Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard at Phillips Academy Andover, and a co-organizer of May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial for Asian American Ancestors.

Full Transcript

Thank you so much, Rebecca. Like you said, it was such a joy to meet you at the Sakyadhita Buddhist Women's Conference a few months ago now in Seoul, Korea. And thank you all at the Santa Barbara Zen Center for inviting me, giving me this opportunity just to sit with you all, sit and chant and walk and be with all of you.

I was thinking back to when I've been to Santa Barbara. I think it was a couple years ago when I was still in the Bay and I drove down because I knew it was very beautiful in Santa Barbara and we have some family further south in LA. But it is so beautiful down there and I hope I'll be able to go back someday to spend time with Buddhist communities there in particular. I was also thinking in particular of Daigan Dor who is at UC Santa Barbara and I believe it was about a year ago now that she took some of her undergrads to SBZC and they got to learn a little bit as they were learning more about their local Buddhist communities. So I'm happy to be in community and sangha together.

For today, I thought I would just give a short talk kind of related to my two books. So maybe I'll introduce myself briefly. My name is Chenxing Han, and I'm a Buddhist lay person. I'm the author of these two books: "Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists," which came out in 2021, and then earlier this year, "One Long Listening: A Memoir of Grief, Friendship and Spiritual Care." I suppose the title of this talk might be an intertwining of the themes of these two books, but it would be "Listening for Refuge: A Celebration of Spiritual Friendship."

I wanted to open with a short passage from my most recent book, "One Long Listening":

"Have you ever thought about all the karmic causes and conditions that made it possible for you to be here with us in this moment?" my favorite professor at the Buddhist College asks us one day in her Topics in Holistic Education class. Here I am, a Chinese American former chaplain among Taiwanese students of wide-ranging ages and professions, some of whom were not even raised Buddhist. Wait, how did we end up here? Silence settles thickly upon the room as the 20 of us think back to the choices and coincidences, loves and sorrows, lives and deaths, vows and caprices that have coalesced into this very now.

How often do we make time to stop and reflect on the countless causes and conditions that have made it possible for us to be here in this very moment? I invite each of you to take a moment to contemplate this question.

When I reflect on this question, the first people who I think of are my parents. I'm an only child. I was born in Shanghai, China, where both my parents grew up, though my mom is originally from southern China. My parents and I immigrated to the US when I was four years old. And for the next 14 years, my parents lived in different states because of their work: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Washington State, California. And currently now I live in Michigan, a recent move. Until the end of fifth grade, I lived in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area. Then I moved to Washington and lived there until the end of high school before coming out here to the Bay Area for college. And as I said, I guess out here is no longer out here. I have to keep reminding myself I'm no longer in California.

My parents are atheists. And this is pretty common for people of their generation who survived the Chinese Cultural Revolution. How did I come to the Dharma then? When I think of the Taiwanese Buddhist teacher's question about all the karmic causes and conditions that led to this moment, the second thing I think of is all the spiritual teachers and friends who have guided me to and on this path.

For my first book, "Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists," I interviewed 89 young adults from different backgrounds, including South Asians, Southeast Asians, East Asians, and even some folks of Central and West Asian heritage about their spiritual journeys. There were people whose families had been Buddhist in this country for multiple generations, people whose parents and grandparents raised them Buddhist, and then people like myself from non-Buddhist backgrounds.

I started the interviews as part of my master's thesis at the Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California, which is the oldest Buddhist seminary in the US, founded in 1949 by Japanese Americans to train Jodo Shinshu ministers. During that time, I learned from a 2012 Pew Forum report that Asian Americans make up two-thirds of American Buddhists. But when I read about American Buddhism in scholarly books or in Buddhist magazines like Tricycle and the Shambhala Sun, which is now Lion's Roar, I was struck by how little representation there was of Asian American Buddhists and other Buddhists of color.

One of my biggest inspirations during this time was Aaron Lee, who started an anonymous blog called "The Angry Asian Buddhist" in 2009. That blog was the first time I saw someone reflecting on race and representation in American Buddhism from a young adult Asian American perspective. So "Angry" may have been in the title, but it was clear to me from reading Aaron's blog that his writing came from a place of deep love for the American Buddhist community. He was responding to young people who looked at media representations that cast Asian Buddhists as Oriental monks or superstitious immigrants, and responding to these young people who were starting to wonder if their own family's practices were backwards or were not real Buddhism.

In interviewing these 89 young adult Asian American Buddhists, I saw that there are as many ways to be Buddhist as there are Buddhists. And I was truly astounded by the diversity of perspectives that make up the fabric of American Buddhism. My interviewees urged me to share their stories with others. But I didn't know how to weave all these stories together into a book. It was a nine-year journey from my first interview to the publication of "Be the Refuge."

During this long journey, a piece of advice that the author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki gave me was hugely helpful. She said, "Make it an account of your curiosity. Write yourself in." It took me many years to incorporate her advice. And I found it to be uncomfortably vulnerable to write about myself. I even wrote an entire first draft of "Be the Refuge" that was extremely academic and boring and where I buried all of my own stories in the 500 or so footnotes. Maybe I had three or four of those footnotes where some personal stories were. But then I thought about the young adults who had shared so openly with me about their own lives. And I saw that it would be unfair of me to withhold my own story.

In the affinity chapter of "Be the Refuge," I share some of this story:

It's hard to pinpoint an exact moment when I converted to Buddhism. It was more of a gradual steeping, Buddhism's fusing my life the way tea remakes water, a subtle flavor intensifying over time. To borrow an insight from one of my interviewees, you connect the dots in retrospect. I might trace a line beginning from high school, clawing my way out of a suffocating depression, seeking relief from burnout and despair, finding no comfort in my secular upbringing. To a gap year in Australia and Asia, the couple who introduced me to meditation on their farm in rural New South Wales, a beloved uncle whose death from cancer made my months in Shanghai a tear-soaked lesson in the dukkha of impermanence, the Buddhist art and architecture and devotions that awed me in Thailand and Nepal and Tibet.

I go on in the book to talk about how I got caught up in the busyness of college for a couple years before joining the ecumenical Buddhist group on campus. And in my junior year, I studied abroad in Cape Town, South Africa, taking with me a big stack of books in my suitcase: Sister Chan Khong's "Learning True Love," Sogyal Rinpoche's "The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying," Joanna Macy's "Widening Circles," Shunryu Suzuki's "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind," books by Jack Kornfield and Jon Kabat-Zinn.

Reading made me curious to visit living communities. And some of the first sanghas I spent time with were in South Africa, including Sokka Gakkai and Tushita. When I got back to California, I kept following my curiosity. So from the book again:

Back in the Bay Area after my time in Cape Town, a cascade, a smorgasbord, call it what you will: meditating at Insight and Zen centers, visiting Cambodian and Taiwanese and Vietnamese and Thai and Chinese American temples, taking the refuges in Khmer-inflected Pali, chanting repentance rites in Japanese and English, paying homage to the Buddha in Cantonese-tinged Mandarin, listening to Dharma talks in a profusion of languages, poring over Buddhist books, wondering why they all seem to be authored by white converts or Asian monastics, feeling out of place at both Asian immigrant and white convert sanghas, yet more connected to these communities than any of the Christian spaces I'd ever been to. Feeling an odd sense of familiarity with Buddhist teachings and practice, though all of it was strange and new. Feeling nevertheless, hesitant to call myself a Buddhist, and even more reluctant to identify as a convert, though isn't that what I was?

As a college student, there was so much I didn't know. And there's still so much I don't know, even though I'm now twice as old as I was when I started college. I used to think that not knowing was something to be embarrassed about, a shortcoming to be ashamed of. But then I learned of the Zen expression, "not knowing is most intimate."

I kept coming back to this koan, "not knowing is most intimate," during the nine-year journey of writing my second book, "One Long Listening." Not knowing can open up worlds of possibility. When we aren't trying to control every moment, every outcome, we expand ourselves to wonder and awe, as well as more difficult feelings like grief and anger. We become intimate to the surprises that our bodies and minds and relationships are always serving up.

I was certainly surprised by the trajectory my life took after college, as I write in "Be the Refuge":

Connect the dots, causes and conditions, call it a trail of affinities, call it what you will. Starting a job in Boston, quitting to spend time with my grandmother in California before she died, meandering into realms I hadn't considered: hospice volunteering, a Buddhist chaplaincy training program, applying to the Institute of Buddhist Studies, since the chaplaincy training program counted for class credit there. Taking summer trips to Asia, a Buddhist women's conference in Thailand, a Buddhist studies conference in Taiwan, a Guanyin workshop in China, interviewing Asian American Buddhists, finishing my master's thesis, though the project wasn't quite finished with me. Completing a hospital chaplaincy residency, recovering for a semester at a Buddhist college in Taiwan, moving to Southeast Asia with my partner Trent, spending much of the past four years in Theravada Buddhist countries, feeling somewhere along the way that spurning the label of Buddhist was getting to be more trouble than it was worth. At what point does water become tea? It's hard to say when I became a Buddhist, though the triple gem has left its indelible mark on more facets of my life than I could ever have imagined.

Reverend Seigen Yamaoka, a former bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America, and one of my teachers at the Institute of Buddhist Studies, used to remind us that every person we meet is a teacher, even the difficult ones, especially the difficult ones. I write about him in "One Long Listening," a book that might not exist if I hadn't taken his class:

The Buddhist chaplaincy students at my grad school are required to take one class from a Jodo Shinshu minister who is age-dappled but still dapper. There is only one assignment for the entire semester. Write an essay about your spiritual journey and read it out loud to your classmates. We asked for more direction. How long? What format? Where to begin? He chuckles and offers only one suggestion: "The more suffering the better."

The same reverend also says, "Chaplaincy is one of those things where it's hard when you're in it. But then you look back and find the lessons and gifts." He pauses. "But really, all of life is like this."

A dozen years ago in 2011, I had a chance to visit San Quentin State Prison to attend a session of the GRIP program. I was in a year-long training through the Sati Center for Buddhist Chaplaincy. And I remember that first visit felt overwhelming to me at the time. I was drawn to chaplaincy and spiritual care. But I was also worried about my own inadequacy. One of our teachers, Gil Fronsdal, wrote to me:

Because some of these challenges have to do with self-doubt, I will mention my belief that chaplaincy works better if the chaplain is not perfect. Your own shortcomings can provide a channel for you to connect better with someone else. This is especially so if rather than being dismayed by your shortcomings, you have confidence in practicing with them.

This reminder that our imperfections can help us care more deeply for each other has stayed with me all these years. It reminds me again and again of the importance of that third gem of the sangha.

One of my favorite Buddhist texts is the Upaddha Sutta from the Samyutta Nikaya. It's a simple dialogue between the Buddha and Ananda, his cousin and attendant. As Thanissaro Bhikkhu translates it:

On one occasion the Blessed One was living among the Sakyans. Now there is a Sakyan town named Sakkara. There Venerable Ananda went to the Blessed One and, on arrival, having bowed down to the Blessed One, sat to one side. As he was sitting there, Venerable Ananda said to the Blessed One, "This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie."

And here Thanissaro Bhikkhu points out that this means not only associating with good people, but also learning from them and emulating their good qualities.

The Buddha responds: "Don't say that, Ananda. Don't say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life."

So both of these books at their heart are a celebration of spiritual friendship. They are each inspired by dear friends who died of cancer too young: my spiritual sister and college roommate Amy, at the age of 29 in 2016; my Dharma brother Aaron at the age of 34 in 2017. In their life and legacy, Amy and Aaron have taught me that these bonds of friendship continue even when their physical bodies do not. Even in our most despairing moments, when we most want to give up, there are spiritual friends and ancestors cheering us on, reminding us that we have everything we need, that change is always possible. And how we spend our moments matters for the past, present and future.

I'd like to close with a quote from the author Alexander Chee that speaks to this point. Chee talks about writing here. But I think we can replace that with whatever activity stokes the fires of creativity for us, whether that's singing, gardening, cooking, dancing, origami, drawing, or the art of conversation, or the art of sitting in silence. Chee is writing after 9/11. And even though that heart-shattering moment in history is now two decades ago, his words feel like they ring truer than ever:

When you think you might stop, speak to your dead, write for your dead. Tell them a story. What are you doing with this life? Let them hold you accountable. Let them make you bolder or more modest or louder or more loving, whatever it is, but ask them in, listen, and then write. And when war comes, and make no mistake, it is already here. Be sure you write for the living too, the ones you love, and the ones who are coming for your life. What will you give them when they get here?

Thank you.