Long overlooked and newly energized, Black Buddhist studies challenges US Buddhist history

Faith & Reflection: Voices from the Black Church and Beyond

(RNS) — When Pamela Ayo Yetunde began hospice volunteering with an organization that utilizes mindfulness to help patients confront their own deaths, she was already far removed from her Methodist upbringing and on a quest for “peace of mind.” At the same time, she was reading the book “Touching Peace” by the influential Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh. Shortly thereafter, she began sitting for meditation retreats.

Those introductions to Buddhism changed the trajectory of her life. Yetunde has now been a Buddhist for 24 years and is an accomplished pastoral counselor, educator and author of several works, notably contributing to “Black and Buddhist: What Buddhism Can Teach Us about Race, Resilience, Transformation, and Freedom.”

Yetunde told RNS that many Black people are increasingly drawn to deeply practiced Buddhism, in part because it lacks the “guilt and shame”-based practices and beliefs common in Christian traditions.

Long overlooked and newly energized, “Black Buddhism” is emerging as a movement and academic field to rewrite the history of Buddhism in the U.S. — a history that has overlooked the role of Black practitioners and intellectuals for more than a century, scholars argue.

In early August, Princeton University will host a four-day Black Buddhism Faculty Training workshop that aims to “foster generative conversation among scholars of African American religion and Buddhism” and develop resources to teach about Black Buddhism in their classrooms. The workshop is sponsored by Princeton’s Black Buddhism Faculty Project (BBFP) launched in 2023. The initiative draws attention to the growing study of Black Buddhism, which it describes as “a boundary-crossing field” in its bridging of scholars across Buddhist Studies, American Religions, African American Studies and Comparative Literature and Philosophy.

Black Buddhism as a self-identified movement emerged in the ’90s and accelerated after the 2020 Black Lives Matter reckoning, when some Buddhists began engaging in conversations about race and karma and held meditation retreats specifically for people of color, said Adeana McNicholl, an assistant professor of religious studies at Vanderbilt and part of Princeton’s BBFP. 

Most historians trace the origins of Buddhism in the U.S. to the mid-19th-century Gold Rush, when Chinese laborers and immigrants arrived on the West Coast and in Hawaii. Buddhism’s national presence only expanded in the late 19th century with the arrival of Japanese immigrants. But scholars say that isn’t the whole story. 

“Black people have been engaging with Buddhist thought and ideas for nearly as long as Buddhism has been in the United States,” said McNicholl, who is writing a book about her research on the history of Black Buddhism and “Afro-Asian Solidarity.”

Jonathan C. Gold, a professor of Buddhist Studies and the director of Princeton’s Center for Culture, Society and Religion, of which the BBFP is a part, said those behind the initiative hope to strengthen academic knowledge of Black Buddhism. The faculty contend Buddhism is fundamental to American religious history and intersects meaningfully with African American religious history.

Buddhist ideas, figures and tenets — particularly the commitment to nonviolence — played an important role in the long Civil Rights movement, spanning from the end of Reconstruction to the late 1960s, said Ralph H. Craig III, an assistant professor of religion at Whitman College who is involved in Princeton’s project. Influential Black thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois, Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin engaged with various Eastern philosophies and Asian anti-colonial movements.

Notably, Black Civil Rights leaders meaningfully interacted with Hindu leader Mahatma Gandhi, who drew inspiration from the Buddha’s approach to nonviolence and transformed it into a tool of political resistance. Later, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. developed a close friendship with Nhất Hạnh, the Buddhist monk, who once told King that some referred to him as “a bodhisattva, an enlightened being.”

Buddhist ideas trickled down to broader African American public spaces, influencing Black newspapers, the musical world of jazz, new religious movements and other cultural products, Craig said.

“It’s not necessarily just because they happened to pick up a book in a bookstore and it blew their minds, right? There is a kind of circulation of ideas that’s happening,” Craig added. 

By the end of the 20th century, Buddhism had become more familiar to Americans and was promoted by many celebrities, including the “Queen of Rock ’n’ Roll,” Tina Turner.

Despite its historical presence and popularity, only 1% of U.S. adults identify as Buddhist today. Of that population, a majority were born outside the U.S. and nearly 60% are Asian, a quarter are white, and only 3% are Black. Yet McNicholl cautioned against taking survey results at face value. “It’s limiting if we just assume that religious identity is equivalent to formal professions of faith or attendance,” she said, adding that those who engage in practices like Buddhist meditation but wouldn’t necessarily call themselves Buddhist get left out.

Black Buddhists like Yetunde say the tradition continues to grow and is appealing to many Black Americans in its offering of a radical acceptance not easily found within other U.S. religious traditions. “You can be a Black woman, you can be a Black trans woman, trans man, queer and … you can still be a leader within Black Buddhist traditions and Buddhist traditions,” she said. 

Princeton’s BBFP has partnered with and received support from the Numata Foundation, Lion’s Roar and the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies. Since its inception, the BBFP has established a digital library, held three workshops and begun developing teaching resources and curricula that bring together scholars and practitioners. 

For now, Gold measures the initiative’s positive impact by the growing confidence among those who defend Black Buddhism’s distinctive contributions to contemporary Buddhism. Gold cited several recent panels related to Black Buddhism at the annual American Academy of Religion meeting as examples.

Nonetheless, McNicholl acknowledged that persisting within Buddhist studies is “a lingering sense that what counts as real Buddhism is Buddhism in Asia, and not necessarily Buddhism in the United States,” she said. Even further removed are Black Buddhists, because “they’re not Asian, they’re not white, which is sort of like the predominant demographics of the academy of Buddhist studies in the United States,” she added.

“American Buddhism, Buddhism in the West, is up for debate,” Craig told RNS. And claims to authentic Buddhism are not limited to the academy. Craig noted that in addition to Asian Buddhists and Black Buddhists, there are also alt-right, white supremacist Buddhists. 

Tenets like karma also remain topics of meaningful and contested discussion. Last year, the BBFP hosted a conference called “Race, Caste, and the Challenge of Karma” that examined how it can be “difficult to reconcile traditional Buddhist approaches to karma with projects to counter systemic injustice.” The discussion was spurred by the work of Rima Vesely-Flad, who wrote “Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition” and created the Initiative for Black Buddhist Studies.

Vesely-Flad became interested in karma after one of her students at Union Theological Seminary, a 70-year-old Black woman enrolled in the school’s Buddhism program, asked a visiting monastic how he explained the suffering of Black people. His response was, “You suffer because of your karma.”

“She left the Buddhism program after that,” Vesely-Flad told RNS.

Karma is a central Buddhist doctrine. “We can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” Vesely-Flad said, adding that Buddhists must acknowledge it has been weaponized against subjugated people to blame them for their own oppression. Yet Vesely-Flad also remains interested in how karma has been used to confront harm.

The term “Black Buddhism” is similarly contested. Vesely-Flad, for instance, distances herself from the term, which she claims flattens the nuance that Black practitioners are a part of a variety of Buddhist lineages with distinct practices and interpretations. Instead, she prefers terms like “Black Buddhists” and “Black Buddhist thought.”

McNicholl noted that the field of Black Buddhist studies is growing around the juncture of America’s 250th, as the country is thinking about how “we tell the story of religion in the nation,” she said.

“Uncovering this history of Black Buddhism allows us to see the diversity of religious life in the United States” and to recognize that Buddhism has been a part of the national fabric for much of the nation’s lifespan, she added. 

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