Dear friends,
In a happy confluence of karmic circumstances, I’ll be in Massachusetts for the next few days. I hope to see some of you at the opening of Temple of Our Ancestral Dreams, a new exhibit curated by Sung-Min Kim and Wenxuan Xue that will run until June 19 at the Pao Arts Center in Boston’s Chinatown. Saturday’s community gathering, Ancestors of Chinatown: A Day for Remembering and Dreaming, will feature a tea reception, a storytelling panel and film screening of Kenneth Eng’s Mt. Hope Cemetery, and a Ching Ming (Tomb-Sweeping Day) ancestral ritual for the earliest Chinese migrants to Boston. The ceremony, organized by Jiamin Li and led by Venerables from Thousand Buddha Temple,
will honor the memories of those buried at Mount Hope Cemetery and offer collective remembrance for those who have shaped and sustained Chinatown and the wider Boston community. Together, participants will be invited to honor the familial, chosen, and place-based ancestors whose lives and care made our gathering possible.
在清明掃墓之際，我們邀請你參與緬懷和紀念埋在望合山墓園中的華埠早期移民的活動。在故事座談中，我們將傾聽來自望合山華人墓地修復團隊講述早期波士頓華人移民的故事和回憶，並且觀看來自導演伍少文的最新紀錄片《望合山墓地》。座談結束後是來自昆市千佛寺僧人所引導的祖先紀念儀式，由此緬懷埋在望合山墓地的華人集體記憶，銘記那些往往被遺忘的鑄造波士頓華埠的先驅者。我們也邀請你一同紀念血緣內外以及華埠社區的祖先，並為其表達感恩。
🎋
After Saturday with the ancestors, I’ll spend Sunday with the next generation. Specifically, the youth group members at Chùa Tường Vân, who never fail to remind me that sangha can be a joyously raucous gem. An indelible temple memory: Playing the game where everyone splits into six teams to represent the six Buddhist realms of existence (heaven, asura, human, animal, hungry ghost, hell). Imagine musical chairs on steroids, the person in the middle calling out, in Vietnamese, which two groups need to switch—A-tu-la! Ngạ Quỷ!—while the Buddha on the main altar gazes serenely on.
The youth group members range from elementary to high school age. Even over the din of shouting and sprinting, the group never lets the littlest and most confused kids get stranded in the middle. When the game is over, there are no winners and losers, because haven’t we all just danced a microcosm of life, this constant movement between the rapture of the heavens and the jealous ambition of the demigods and the survival instincts of the animals and the thirsty yearning of hungry ghosts and the pain of the hell denizens and the joys and sorrows of humans?
In Buddhism, the human realm is considered the best place of all for spiritual cultivation—better, even, than the heavens, where conditions are too perfect to require compassionate action. Besides, impermanence brooks no exceptions—even heavenly perfection eventually comes to an end. Better to be somewhere with mud if you’re looking to grow lotuses.
🪷
This Sunday, I’ll need to duck out of youth group for a couple hours to attend part two of an online class on navigating the mud-abundant realm of writing. At Ruth Ozeki’s retreat last November, I enjoyed long conversations about ethics/religion/teaching/poetry/community/fiction with Mónica Gomery and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a pair of friends who run a poetry salon in Philadelphia, so I knew Moriel’s two-part seminar on “Crafting a Cold-Hearted Workplan” would be taught with elan and compassion.
“Cold-hearted” is a bit tongue-in-cheek, Moriel laughingly told us at the end of our first class. You might lose some sleep, but above all, have fun with it. We were left with the koan of how to find playfulness in the rigidity of scheduling and the seriousness of our self-imposed workplans.
🩵
Cataloguing our Cambodia-related books this past weekend, my partner and I noticed that many of the titles contain the word “shadow.” Does it have a negative connotation in Khmer the way it often does in English, I wondered. ម្លប់ mlup? Trent mulled it over. Not at all. It’s something you would seek out in ស្រុកខ្មែរ srok khmer, cooling shade in the sweltering heat.
Perhaps this is why “cold-hearted,” like shadows and darkness, fails to evoke anything sinister for me. In Thai, the calm composure of ใจเย็น jai yen (literally: cool heart) is a quality of the highest order; it’s hot-hearted ใจเร้อน jai ron you have to watch out for. (My understanding of jai yen as emotional lexicon and spiritual ideal is indebted to Julia Cassiniti’s Living Buddhism, an ethnography of a northern Thai community with a wrenching account of how one family responds to their son/brother’s life-endangering drinking.)
Maria Heim considers this ใจเย็น – ใจเร้อน tension in the classical Indian context when she weighs the potential for kshanti (forbearance, patience, forgiveness) to justify oppression. Heim argues:
Kshanti… makes clear-eyed compassion possible, and compassion is always about alleviating suffering, not submitting to persecution (Words for the Heart, 177)
A sliver of hope: It’s possible and worthwhile to cultivate cooling compassion, lest the fires of war and violence and suffering consume us all.
☂️
My cold-hearted workplan necessitates a pre-dawn wakeup tomorrow, so I’ll leave you with some cooling lines from The Kaya Anthology of New Asian North American Poetry, edited by Walter K. Lew and published in 1995.
From Russell Leong’s “Unfolding Flowers, Matchless Flames,” in a stanza about the Buddha:
Poetry block
would he recognize the Pure Landin the West,the country wherebywe sought rebirth? (543)
From “The Heron” by Patricia Y. Ikeda (i.e., Mushim Patricia Ikeda):
Poetry block
Bodhisattva of Compassion, Kwanseum Posalhas 1,000 eyes 1,000 hands to helpyet usually sitsgolden and motionless, smiling slightly (555)
And from Ikeda’s “Wild Iris” (her child is just a year old):
Poetry block
the suffering and terror continues,bad jokes and bad jobs.I know that some things fall down, others build,I know my son fits a cover to a boxas though it were important. It might be so. (553)
May it be so. May our tiny gestures and slight smiles and motionless moments manifest a glimpse of the Pure Land, here in the places where we have sought rebirth.
Til the next quarter moon,
~Chenxing
