Buddhist Geeks

Vince Fakhoury Horn speakswith Rima Vesely-Flad about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde—the silence she found in her own Buddhist community when she began writing about Palestine, Baldwin and Lorde's distinction between hatred that corrodes and rage that comes from the examined life, and the question they keep returning to: how to feel it all without causing more harm.
Vince Horn: So, Rima, great to see you.
I’ve been really loving getting to know you as a person and also your work. I’ve been reading your book. Unfortunately, I also spilled water on my copy, so it is a little... If you see me struggling to flip through the pages, that’s ‘cause we had a bit of an accident here. But I’ve really enjoyed reading your work. Can’t wait to get into it with you. Thank you so much for your time.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Thank you, Vince. It’s been great to get to know you, too. We’re so close. Amazing. Amazing.
Vince Horn: Yes, and it’s amazing as adults, we can carve out the time to hang out. So that’s sometimes the hardest part. I feel like being in middle age is, like, making time to spend with cool people, so appreciate your time.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Me too.
Vince Horn: So let’s talk about your new book. This is The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Of course, before reading this book, I was familiar with you and your work. But it really struck me that you were writing in this book, like from the very beginning, you’re writing about Palestine and Israel, which is not something I see many Buddhists really writing about or talking about in America.
So it stands out just the fact that you’re even talking about this subject. And then on top of that, you’re bringing to bear these beautiful Dharma teachings and wisdom teachings from the Black tradition of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, bringing them to bear on this topic in the first chapter of the book, which I thought was quite courageous.
And I really appreciate it, you know, as someone who has Palestinian family members and people in the West Bank I care about. So just on a personal level, really am grateful that you centered this in your writing. And I thought maybe we could start with that first chapter if you’re up for it.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Absolutely. It was actually the very last chapter I wrote. I wrote this book of course over several years, but as I was concluding in real time, the genocide was taking place, and I just found myself absolutely in a state of grief and rage and was really politically active around it in ways that I hadn’t been in quite some time.
Like feeling very pushed to speak out and to contact the Biden administration and representatives, people here in North Carolina who might or might not speak in Congress, and just found that I needed ways to speak out, and this is my community. The people who self-identify as Buddhist claim these traditions, these lineages, these practices, these schools of thought, and yet there was so much silence, and I felt really compelled to speak into that silence. And I know that’s something that you feel and understand in a deep way. And then also, I’m not by any stretch the first Black activist or academic or thought leader to make the connections between oppression of people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and people who are in a state of survival as their land is being taken in real time. So all of those connections were very present, and yet in the Buddhist world, there was so much silence, so much evasion or even erasure of what’s taking place. And it felt like it wasn’t separate from my practice, and I had to speak.
Even though at the time I hadn’t even visited the West Bank. I since have, but at the time I was thinking and writing and observing and feeling from afar.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. I didn’t realize you’d gone to the West Bank. Wow, we’ll have to talk about that sometime. Yeah, there’s early on in the book, there’s a quote here that’s really echoing what you just shared.
I thought I’d share this ‘cause it really moved me quite a bit. You said, “I, like many Black Americans, like Southwest Asian and North African Buddhists, observe that violent oppression of Palestinians can never bring safety and security to Jewish Israelis. And as a Buddhist practitioner, it’s important for me to speak out against the violence sanctioned by my government, my tax dollars.
The policies of the US government do not represent my commitments. I’m horrified by the massacres in Gaza day after day, by the constant terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank. I think daily of Baldwin’s words, ‘You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know.’”
Rima Vesely-Flad: Wow. Even just hearing Baldwin’s words in that context again, it really brings me chills. And so prescient, right? So prescient in terms of just anticipating how much more extensive... At the time actually that Baldwin visited, there wasn’t a formal occupation, although there was theft of land. But this— that was 1961, and then the wall— right now the walls, the checkpoints, the just sheer magnitude of aggression and violence. Like Baldwin anticipated that, and then the myopia in Israel and in the United States.
Vince Horn: Yeah. I think at the same time though as I read through your writing on this, I was really also struck that you’re really trying to hold multiple realities here at once.
You know, both holding the suffering of the Palestinians and the apartheid state that you’re describing. At the same time, you have a lot of, as I do, Jewish friends and people that you care about who may not be able to hold that reality in the same way or who are struggling to in some cases. Who...
and you treat that with real compassion I think in your writing and in your words. As I try to, you know, my best. And it’s, of course, important to differentiate between Jewish identity and Israeli identity, which is often, you know, merged intentionally by the State of Israel.
And for many people it’s the way they’re inculturated. It seems like that was kind of an unconscious merger in a lot of folks’ identity. At least I’ve noticed that with close friends and even students in the last few years where we’ve had conversations around this. There’s been real tension.
And anyway, I appreciate that you’re holding it with compassion, both realities here, not trying to sort of demonize Israelis or Jewish people. And really being aware of the antisemitism that this whole issue is also bringing about. Or it’s... I’m not sure if it’s bringing about or giving excuse to people to be bigoted.
So I think it’s cool the way that you’re trying to weave those different things. And I guess I’m curious if you could say a bit about how you’re taking that approach or why that’s important to you.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yes. I start off the book talking about a relationship I had with a, I would say a mama bear, a mother figure who claimed herself, who self-identified as my godmother, and she was born in France to a very well-known filmmaker who had the opportunity for asylum in the United States, and he and his wife were granted this opportunity to flee, but were told they couldn’t take their daughter, who was my godmother Via–
Vince Horn: Wow.
Rima Vesely-Flad: –was sent to a convent in France. So a Jewish girl sent to a Catholic institution, and she was blamed for the war and has suffered horrific antisemitic abuse. And it scarred her indefinitely. When she came to the United States, she took off the first part of her name, just called herself Via.
She died of cancer many years later, and the wounds of that period were still quite evident at the time. I just remember, I have such extraordinary memories of her and what she suffered. And so part of my compassion and empathy, which is real, is that this nation state we call Israel was founded as ostensibly a refuge for people like Via and her parents.
And this is a nation state founded upon theft of land. And what it meant practically is that 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their ancestral lands, and they and their descendants still to date live in refugee camps, which I was able to visit when I went to the West Bank. These are no longer tents.
They’re now concrete buildings, but stacked very high, very crowded, very narrow passages for walking, no play space for children. One of the refugee camps I visited in Bethlehem has an entryway that consists of keys welded into an arc, and these are the keys for return. People still possess the keys to their homes they were driven from 75 years ago. So to recognize the terror that took place during the Holocaust in Europe, and then to recognize the consequent suffering that was inflicted upon Palestinians, I think is not simple. Yes, safety, but one thing Baldwin says that stays with me over and over is that Palestinians should not pay for the sins of Europeans.
Europeans committed the genocide, the Holocaust, and Palestinians should not have had to pay for that and should not have been driven from their lands to establish what is supposed to be a state of safety. And yet the atrocities being committed by this government and other governments, not saying that this very right-wing government is the only government that has committed atrocities against Palestinians. To say that this is a state of safety for people whose ancestors were exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust is, I think, to be very myopic, very limited. And part of what I’m trying to wrestle with is such deep confusion, like a deep state of confusion of how, if your ancestors have experienced the Holocaust, could you inflict this upon another peoples?
So that’s some of what I wrestle with in this first chapter is just like—
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —what? And I’m not the only one. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates starts off his book talking about the— the book is called The Message. And he starts off his book saying like, “I just don’t get it.” And I feel that too. I just don’t get it. But then also, I don’t understand this claim to sacred land, and that’s part of what’s happening with the atrocities in the West Bank in real time. And you know, all of us know it has escalated dramatically in the past few weeks.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Like even worse than when I was there. And when I was there, that’s when the farmers during harvest, the Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest were being terrorized.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Including many Jewish activists, similarly from the United States and from Israel were being terrorized, all of them. Everyone who was in the fields trying to harvest the olives.
Vince Horn: Right.
Rima Vesely-Flad: That was happening in October, but now it has escalated dramatically in a city called Nablus and its surrounds.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: I actually went to Nablus. That was one of the places we spent some time.
Vince Horn: Yeah. That’s where my cousin is based. So yes. Oh, yeah. And I’ve heard that as well from her. So that’s, in recent, like week or two, her house was broken into by the IDF and they destroyed one of the walls and were calling out for someone who they have no idea who it is.
Yeah. And just, you know, like that’s becoming more just kind of more standard. Like that’s just happening all over the place. Yeah.
Rima Vesely-Flad: It’s becoming normalized.
Vince Horn: Normalized, yeah, exactly.
Rima Vesely-Flad: That aggression. Yes, so much. And one of the things I just sat with when I went, you know, I was in Jerusalem initially.
There is coexistence. It’s, you know, people are not separate. They are coexisting in real time. And yet, when I went to the West Bank and, you know, it’s like I just don’t understand. Jewish refugees were given 51% of the land by initially Britain and the United Nations then in 1948, 1947, 1948.
Drove out Palestinians from their ancestral villages into refugee camps. Why do they want more? And one of the things I realized is that the West Bank consists or has many holy sites, both for Palestinians who practice Islam and for Jewish peoples who see these sites also as their holy sites. So I was based in a city called Al-Halil, and there’s a mosque there that’s called the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and that is one of the holy sites also for Jewish practitioners, people who are adherents.
They have built settlements on top of Palestinian buildings, especially in the old village. So I saw all of this actually arrive just as there was an incursion of young people from these settlements into the city of Al-Khalil, which is also called Hebron. In any case, that claim to holy space in the sense, the idea, the narrative that God gave it to a certain peoples who are chosen and therefore all of the land is theirs, something I don’t understand. And I have some real hatred— with regards to the atrocities taking place. And I feel that part of my practice is to really own that and feel that in my body, and then to work with it in such a way that it doesn’t come out and get directed towards people.
But I can feel that. And so part of what it means for me to claim these practices, like you, I’m in the Insight Diaspora, so we likely know many of the same practices. But part of it is working effectively with the body so much so that it’s not targeted, it doesn’t come out in random ways and cause further harm.
But it’s a hard practice, and some of what you see in that chapter or read is that muscle being flexed of like, how do I feel without it coming out in a way that causes harm? That is part of the wrestling. That is part of the practice.
Vince Horn: Yes. And it’s one that I noticed, like in my own training, I didn’t get a lot of tools for that in the insight tradition because hatred was sort of like something we’re trying to transcend or, you know, like notice and then counteract.
That was usually the frame around hatred. It wasn’t something like you can actually feel this anger and really feel rage. Like although sometimes people would, I think, give lip service to that, it never felt to me like a culture where people were actually doing that.
And so I was just sort of repressing all this rage and sort of like carrying on. And now I realize that the wisdom of what you’re saying is like, if you repressed all that rage it goes inward, it goes outward. It is not constructive. It’s not generative. It’s not healing. It’s just kind of like a time bomb ticking.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah I think that’s so wise. It causes anxiety and depression. It needs a place to land, and part of what I think we’re meant to do with this work is cultivate that place to land, but do it in a way that’s skillful so that we’re not creating more harm. And I don’t think that... is harmful, but I think it, when it’s not effectively worked with, it does come out sideways, and then it can inadvertently or maybe—
Vince Horn: Intentionally even.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —intentionally create that. But I think part of it also is recognizing it, giving it space to be named—
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —and legitimizing it. Like, it is a just rage. And hatred— actually Baldwin and Lorde both talk about hatred as corrosive. They talk about how it does actually impact us in ways that are not useful, and it does need to be worked with skillfully.
But rage, they both say, comes from the examined life. It comes from legitimate and clear observation of patterns of oppression taking place and experienced in real time. And so that’s energy that can be used, that can be directed in fruitful ways. And I think that distinction is really important, and it did inform my own experience of hatred.
Of like, “Oh, it’s here. How do I work with it in a way that doesn’t corrode my spirit or it doesn’t corrode relationships that matter to me?”
Vince Horn: Yeah. I love what you’re saying there. It seems like conflating hatred and rage would be one mistake there, to think like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be experiencing this anger or this rage because somehow it’s a sign that I’m, like, in this corrosive state of hatred.”
But like, oh, it’s real, and it’s arising in response to something real. Like, I had never seen this quote from James Baldwin about how being a Black American means living with rage all the time everywhere, and that hit me so hard. I’m like, yeah, that’s what it feels like as a Palestinian right now. I feel that and have always felt that.
I didn’t know that’s what I was feeling for so many decades. But now that it’s out in the open and it’s like, oh yeah, like it’s just this constant sense of rage at being constantly policed. You know, having your tone of voice policed, your words. Not being able to be a certain kind of emotive or, you know, loud.
Like, all these things that are culturally, like what I grew up with. This was like the way that our family was. Like, it’s not okay in this larger kind of white culture to display these kinds of things. And so you just like, you gotta tamp it down.
Rima Vesely-Flad: And, you know, Foucault would say we learn to police ourselves to discipline ourselves. And I think part of our work then, in terms of recovery, is to name the ways that we self-oppress.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: I would say that’s a huge, huge part of my practice, ongoing.
Vince Horn: Yes. That makes so much sense because it is, like you’re saying, it’s internalized.
Like, I— yeah, it’s like I only need to get a few social signals before I start to realize, ‘cause I’m a socially intelligent being, like we all are. Like, oh, like, this is not okay. And if I continue to do this, there’s gonna be kind of repercussions. And I think the bravery and the courage to do it anyway, and to deal with those repercussions, like, that seems to be where your work lives here, and it’s a hard place to live.
Rima Vesely-Flad: It is hard, yes. I mean, one of the things I also talk about in this book more broadly is that I grew up in a family where I wasn’t wanted. My birth was not welcome, and that was something I knew from a very early age. So I learned to adapt. I learned all of these ways of trying to be wanted, trying to be claimed, being exceptional.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: So the idea that I would self-exile is, like, anathema. And that’s where I start talking. And part of the way I use Audre Lorde’s work in this first chapter in particular is to say, she calls us out, saying, “We must speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” But for me to speak in ways that might be confrontational or perceived as offensive is a very hard edge.
But to self-silence is also to betray myself and my people. And that’s the edge, right? To speak and to risk exile for someone like me, who has been exiled just because of the way I appeared in the world with dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair, curly hair. And then also to adapt in so many ways that I recognize a level of self-betrayal or a betrayal of the people to whom I’m accountable.
And I do consider my people are people of African descent who have been oppressed because of their embodiment in this particular context, which has shunned people of African descent as unworthy, as less intelligent. Has seen a kind of embodiment as inferior. We come up against that. I came up against that in my own family.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: It’s a hard edge, and I think part of the work is to actually not be so alone, to find our people, to find people with whom we feel mirrored. That’s also hard work, but it has come over time. I have found community, and that matters. And I think part of this work of sangha, which I think in our lineage is not so prioritized—
Vince Horn: Right.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —but if we take it on intentionally, we can truly honor it as one of the three jewels. Part of our work is really investing in sangha, even when it feels scary or even when it feels like, wow, I have to be held accountable for things that I say that might actually really harm somebody else. But to keep doing that work and to ask for that feedback and that accountability.
Vince Horn: Yeah, that strikes me as so true, and I understand why sangha isn’t prioritized when you have such an individualistic kind of culture of, you know, meditative achievement and self-work. It’s like, oh yeah, well, of course if we’re all just focusing on ourselves together, we’re not gonna be focused on the bonds that connect us.
And yeah, I found that to be a limitation really for many years now in that community. And sort of what drove me to like explore relational practices and other things that felt like they kind of help soften those boundaries and begin to kind of get a felt sense for like what interbeing feels like in real time.
It’s like this is what it actually is like to be connected to someone or to disconnect or to lose myself in someone else’s perspective. I guess I wanted to honor too that like you’re talking about all the reasons that one could not speak out even if there’s injustice and one wants to speak out on behalf of people they care about and are identified with.
That on top of the racial dimension of this, there’s also imagine the gendered dimension of this for you as well. Like I see with my wife and other women I know who are raised in a more kind of gendered female way. Like it’s just speaking up in general is hard to do. Or it’s not something that’s encouraged or, you know, people don’t have...
they’re not offered that same level of training often when they’re in a female body. So I guess I’m curious like is that also part of what you’ve had to work with in addition to the racial dimension of this?
Rima Vesely-Flad: That’s a really good question. I think initially, yes.
Like, I was raised to watch and serve and people please. And that’s how I got my goods, as my therapist would say. Like, I felt wanted when I—
Vince Horn: Right.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —gave people what they wanted, and I think that is a very, very gendered experience. I cleaned the house at an early age. I took care of my younger brother.
I was with a single mother who worked a lot, so I held things together in the family home. And yes, I think that is a highly gendered experience that I’ve carried into adulthood. I think I have patterns that I’m still trying to work with around serving and adapting, people pleasing and what have you.
I do also feel like there’s some corrective, if you will, by becoming an academic. I think in my line of work, having jumped through a thousand hoops, I did three master’s degrees, I did a PhD, I learned how to cite research and ask questions and back up and demonstrate. You see it in this book, right?
Actually, the book initially was an academic book where I just took on Baldwin and Lorde and tried to show how they illuminate these incredibly important and timeless teachings that we now associate with Buddhism or call Buddhist. And I had a friend and a mentor, Ruth King, say, “Actually, we need your practice in this book.
We need this to not just be through the third person, but we actually need your voice in this book,” which was really important and also incredibly hard. But part of why I felt I could take it on is that I was in a world in which I was expected to speak and facilitate, and I think there was a training not necessarily in the broader environment to which you’re pointing, but in an academic environment where standing up and giving a talk or a lecture or doing Q&A on the spot was something I learned how to do.
So in that way, I think there’s more of a sense of, oh, I have this. I can do this. And that feels more, I would say, naturalized, for lack of a better word, just because it’s been two decades of doing this so explicitly. And I’ve loved the academy, you know, being with people who read thick books.
And I’m the kind of person, I’ll walk into a store and I’ll look at the endnotes before I look at the introduction, just ‘cause I wanna know who’s cited and, you know, what research are they relying on? And like, who has informed this work? That matters to me even more so than the title or even the introduction.
I wanna just know who, what school of thought is this author drawing upon. And I love being with people who also operate in that way. And I have this funny story of being a consultant for a book project for a friend of mine, and we were all taken out to Portland. It was my first time in Portland, and you know, beautiful city.
And we hung out and talked and conversed and worked through these chapters, and then we sat in the hot tub and discussed Foucault. And, you know, it’s just so, for me, natural to be in an environment where something like that is really fun. And that is, I think, a part of learning how to speak. I think the harder part, and this goes back to the gender question, is having been a Black girl in a white family and trying to figure out how to survive in such hostility.
So yes, I do think that’s both racialized and gendered kind of experience.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, makes sense. I hadn’t considered the training in academia would be such a sharp training. But it makes sense, yeah, that you’d sort of be expected to be able to receive critique and offer it and speak and debate.
Yeah, that... I could see that both being kind of traumatizing and a very good training at the same time.
Yeah. I appreciate it so much that you did bring your story into this book as well, because I feel like at least for me as a reader, it gives me something personally to connect with where I can sort of see, like, how the universal becomes personal, you know, in a way. Where it’s like all these things that you’re describing, and Baldwin and Lorde are describing, like, they make sense to me and I understand it.
But then when you describe, you know, your experience of coming up with your grandparents and the specific ways, like not having your picture hanging up with the rest of your cousins, for instance. Like, that specific experience and the way that you shared it just made... It made all of the abstract universal stuff real for me in a way, you know, that I think it sticks with me, and it’s like it lands in my heart, you know, in a way that is transformative.
So I suspect that’s probably true for others as well. So thank you for sharing that.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah, I would say that was hard in a way that academic citations and reading for ideas, making arguments is not so hard. Like, it actually comes very naturally. But the harder work of communicating the harm that was done and how I received it, and certainly because I was raised knowing them, my grandparents’ rejection of me based on my skin color in particular was, it was deeply traumatizing, and I still work with some of my patterns of adapting, ways that still do not serve me.
And then too, and this is something I’m more present with, is my experience of being abandoned by my father. Actually, yesterday was his birthday, August 2nd, also James Baldwin’s birthday, and I found myself honoring James Baldwin, and having a really hard time honoring my father, who I had not seen at the time that he passed away for more than 40 years. And I also feel that, and the disconnection not just from him, but also my lineage. And a big part of this book is actually not attempting to reconcile with my grandparents or the members of my family that are still very overtly racist, and there are many, but actually to find my father’s people and to cultivate a sense of lineage and belonging through my father’s people who came from the Mississippi Delta.
My grandmother moved north during the Great Migration, and I am in touch with those family members who descended from her. She’s now deceased, but, and my father is also deceased. But to have some sense of connection and being claimed, to have visited the graves of my great-grandparents, in a certain way it’s not full circle, but it is a sense of return, and by that I mean return to ancestors, biological ancestors who I now know the names of and have a place to go and now developing relationships with in terms of a broader family system. And those are folks who have claimed me.
I, about a month ago, maybe just about three weeks ago, got to talk to the matriarch of my father’s family, one of, uh, his youngest... Uh, not my father, I’m sorry. My great-grandparents, their lineage. I was able to speak to one of their youngest daughters, my great-aunt who turned 100 last December.
Vince Horn: Wow.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Who’s now about 100 and a half, and I just think, wow, how amazing to have met her. That she knows my name, that I had some time with her, that she still wants to speak to me on the phone. That she sees me as a way to connect to her sister, my grandmother, who’s, as mentioned, deceased. Sometimes I think that healing process is not attempting to reconcile with the people who have denied or rejected your existence, but to find people who claim you and who want to be part of you.
I think that also speaks to this broader political environment. It’s not about getting accepted by the people who have ideas of your inferiority. It’s not about proving that you are, in fact, worthy of X, Y, and Z, but it’s actually about claiming and developing and cultivating your own spaces. And I’ll say this in a personal way, not so much about being accepted by a dominant white culture community, as much as cultivating the spaces that do feel supportive, in which I am mirrored.
And I feel like both Audre Lorde and James Baldwin were oriented that way as well. Like Audre Lorde was part of the second generation women’s movement, and they weren’t, like, trying to fit into some stereotype of women. They created their own communities, and they had relationships with one another. She was a self-defined lesbian, and was with a community of women who honored their own sexuality and their gender, and who sought a kind of alternative to the broader dominant culture. I think that is so important. And Baldwin, as a gay man too, was oriented towards honoring his own sexuality and creating communities that essentially I don’t want to use the word affirmed in, like, a tidy way, but just said, like, all of you, every part of you is welcome here.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: And so I do think that is incumbent upon us as well, not to look for acceptance, not to be claimed, but rather to invest in communities that we want to be part of.
Vince Horn: Yeah. So it’s like you’re getting your belonging needs met by creating or finding the kind of community that you can be yourself there and not have to be constantly seeking external validation from a culture that’s not going to validate you, or probably not for the next few decades at least.
Rima Vesely-Flad: We could even say that within our insight lineages.
Vince Horn: Yeah, absolutely. I guess that’s the need for diasporas is rooted there. You know, finding... I remember the early community of people I hung out with were mostly people that were unabashedly interested in, like, mastering the states and stages of the path, which is a weird thing to say now ‘cause that’s not where I am at all.
But yeah, it was like a subculture of people who were like, “Yeah, we’re really interested in hardcore meditation.” And that wasn’t the scene in the insight tradition. It was more like healing and kind of long-term retreat. So yeah, I can absolutely relate to what you’re saying. I’m curious to go back a little to the part of the book where you talk about karma.
Because this is, I think this is an area where I’ve always struggled with early Buddhist teachings. And I remember the first class I took at Naropa on the first turning with Judith Simmer-Brown. We really explored karma in depth there, and it became clear to me, like the early Buddhist vision of karma was very individualistic.
It was like you are the cause of— it was primarily putting everything back onto the individual. So I thought it was interesting when you’re trying to bridge that with collective understanding of karma as well, and seemed like you’re trying to hold both the individual and collective perspectives together, like not kind of falling into one or the other.
But I always found early Buddhism was like collapsed straight into the individual perspective. So I’m curious, like how do you work with... Is that true from your point of view and from, you know, your scholarship? And like how do you then work with a tradition that seems to be, I don’t know, hyper individualistic when there are also deep teachings on interdependence and interbeing you can find in the tradition as well, though I haven’t found them as prominently in the early Buddhist tradition.
Rima Vesely-Flad: I think that’s true. I mean, the sutta that I rely on at the beginning of the chapter, which I can put into the chat if that’s helpful, is one of the few that explicitly says, oh, and there are other causes and conditions for suffering, and I actually, I’ll read that.
Vince Horn: That’s cool. So it is there.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. It’s, so it’s an early Buddhist teaching or sutta, the Moliyasivaka Sutta, and it says, “Bile, phlegm, and also wind.” So our bodies, what’s around us, “imbalance and climate too—”
Vince Horn: Wow.
Rima Vesely-Flad: —”carelessness and assault, with karma result as the eighth.”
And it’s saying these are all reasons for suffering. But it’s true. It’s one of the few suttas that explicitly acknowledges causes and conditions as sources of suffering. Where I delve into collective karma is, it’s true, I found it less in early Buddhism, more in Mahayana Buddhism, the focus on language actually.
The fact that we come of age as very small beings and learn language, and our language is collective. We are learning certain meanings along with certain phrases, and that is collectively formed, and that is a part of our thoughts. That is something that a number of scholars within the Mahayana Buddhist lineage talk about in many very complex texts over actually several centuries.
So it is to say that we find that less in early Buddhism, but we do find that, and it’s with that analysis in mind that I talk about the fact that we are shaped by the collective, and also that we have agency.
Some of the gleanings I have towards how we might employ karma in a very constructive way come from postmodern thinkers who claim Buddhism, but who are also broadly read with thinkers such as Marx, thinkers such as Foucault, and, you know, people who are making connections in ways that, of course, are very far removed from early Buddhism.
But one of the things that is drawn out by now a wide range of postmodern Buddhist scholars, so people who both practice Buddhism and are scholars of Buddhist teachings, is that we have agency. We’re not simply beholden to actions of the past or even the collective, that we actually can practice and cultivate our thoughts, cultivate our words, cultivate our actions in a way that allows us to break free of patterns that are harmful or do not serve us. So that’s where I go with that chapter on karma.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Wanting to say we inherit so much, and we do. We inherit language. We also inherit culture. We inherit ways of thinking, and it’s hard to see that because we swim in the waters even as we are inheriting them, yet there is some capacity for agency.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Rima Vesely-Flad: And that is what we can do. And maybe that’s the emphasis in early Buddhism, is that we can work on our minds. We can free our minds from these oppressive patterns.
Vince Horn: Yes. Yeah, and that makes so much sense in the context of, like, Indian caste system and the emergence of this, like, other way of living that’s kind of outside of that caste system.
I mean, it seems like such a powerful move to claim agency when you’re in a culture that’s, like, so determined by birth and status.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yes.
Vince Horn: And then now, but in 21st century America, it feels like in some ways that view prevents moving forward to me with some of the deep learnings that the postmodern theorists have offered us over the last decades, you know, around the way that power gets calcified and ossified in systems, you know, that we’re embedded in, in cultures that we are raised in.
You know, having grown up here in the rural South, you know, this is a lot of what I’ve reflected on when it’s come to reading works like yours and looking at racialization. Is like how I can’t separate myself out from the place that I came up in. And I can see even with a Palestinian mixed racial household, like I was in a sea of white Southern Baptist Christians mostly.
And, like, it had a huge effect on the way I talked and the things I thought were acceptable to say or to think. And, you know, I can even see the ways that I was always... I was trying to bridge the gaps with folks who are different because my grandfather moved into the part of town where the only Black folks in the entire county lived.
There were two students in my high school who were Black. They were both... We rode on the bus together. I was quite close friends with one person. And it’s like growing up in the small little mini minority space I remember trying to make connections with folks and sometimes just like really messing up and not because of that inculturation.
I remember one time I wanted to share this story, which I’ve never shared before. Which I think it... I want to meet you in your vulnerability here because you shared so much in the book. But I remember a friend of mine had a friend over, young Black girl, and she was, I forget her name, but she came over.
We were hanging out and getting to know each other. And I remember this thing that I said to her as a... Really, my intention was to try to connect. And I said, sometimes me and my family, we’re also called “sand,” and then I used the N word. And this was my— and I said it totally smiling, you know, like really assuming this would bridge some gap between us, and that she would see, like, I’m like her.
But the impact that it had was totally the opposite. You know, it’s like, it really bothered her. She was crying later. My friends were like, “What the heck is wrong with you? Why did you say that?” And I was like, oh my gosh. And it was just such a rude awakening to the reality of race, and I could see that even as an older adult, you know, asking people where they’re from to try to connect, when I appear as white, has this impact of really causing people to feel paranoid or feel like I’m coming at them in a way that’s racially biased.
You know, where I’m trying to, like, figure out where they’re from ‘cause they’re not from around here, you know, and stuff like that. And I could see how even being well-intentioned when you’re trying to connect across difference, it’s very easy to, because of ignorance, to really harm people. And I can see that in the community of white Buddhist practitioners, you know, where a lot of very smart and well-intentioned people, as they engage with this work, like, we struggle to figure out how to do that in a way that’s not perpetuating harm on a racial basis.
It seems safer to just not talk about it sometimes. And I can see that this is a real problem. Like, it prevents learning and it prevents people from being able to kind of see their own conditioning and kind of acknowledge like, oh, this is really ugly. You know, it’s really ugly that I thought it was okay to just, like, use that language and that it wouldn’t have that kind of impact.
Like, I thought for some reason it was neutral.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Yeah, that, I think that does speak to what we were just talking about with regards to karma and language and how we are socialized, how we inherit so much, and how even a word that has been weaponized with such vitriol and hatred over centuries in real time is still like a brick at the body.
Like, it can land and it’s almost... Yeah, I could even feel, like your reference to it, just how it landed, ‘cause it’s still such a powerful word, and it does point to the fact that we do exist in conditions of such hatred and violence, that we are landed upon all the time, and we have to figure out, like, how to acknowledge that in ways that don’t take us under or, frankly, if this is wanted on all sides, create rupture so that there can’t be a way forward to acknowledge the weight of what’s taken place.
And I think for people who have had that hatred— and again, I’m thinking of both Baldwin and Lorde speaking to this with such clarity and self-empathy. For that hatred to be received over and over, especially in early years, but not exclusively in early years, and to have ways to acknowledge it and to come out of it, I think is something that we are all called to do.
And to maybe to, and I say this with real tenderness, ‘cause I am still learning and asking for feedback all the time. With some tenderness to, if you notice that something has been, that some harm has taken place, that something has caused rupture, or if you’re told that by other people to go in, not with some sense of defensiveness or a sense of needing to explain yourself, or even needing to clarify your intention, but to come in and to say with real humility, “I’m sorry, and I want to know what this is for you, and it matters to me that your inner being, that your wellbeing is cared for.”
That’s what matters. And actually, I had a moment a couple of weeks ago, not even quite that long, where I said something quite offensive to a friend of mine, and I noticed. I just— you know, noticed by reading facial expressions, and this is part of our work too, right? To observe. And so I asked, and was able to receive some feedback and to really hear it.
And I think something that I struggle with, and I imagine for you, Vince, this is real as well, is we both are parenting young kiddos. You have an 11-year-old, I have a 10-year-old, about to be 11. We are really busy. We’re running households, and I think some of what I come up against in my own work is, where is the time to do that inner work of reflecting, processing, synthesizing how we might have created harm, returning to the relationship?
Like, where is the time to really do that? And that is something I’m sitting with, is if I have said something or not said something and it has created harm, where is the space to process that? And so this practice of sitting every day, of taking refuge, creating a kind of consistent place to land every day, I think that is some of the work as well, is to have a place where we can receive ourselves and how we are working with that harm that we have imputed upon someone else.
And that’s a big part of the practice as well for me, is just to create that level of consistency. And to feel into that remorse, to feel into that regret, to feel how it lands with us, and to hope that we might be able to convey that and to be received. And we don’t always know. We can put ourselves out there.
We may not be received, but just to have that sincerity of approach and to not make it about us, but to really focus on how it has landed for the other person, and then in our own practice to do our work. I think that, for me anyway, has been a way forward. Not that I could write a rule book or some set of instructions. I would not say that. But, you know, I take real guidance from Audre Lorde who said, like, “It’s on me to see my heel print on another woman’s face.” I have to do my own work even if I do self-identify as someone who has had that level of systemic and interpersonal harm coming at me.
I’m also in a place where I can oppress other people. I’m doing real harm for other people. And it’s not one or the other. It’s not simplistic, but it involves a level, I think, of spiritual and emotional maturity to really see that for ourselves and to be open to whatever has arisen and whatever harm has been done, and then to be accountable, to put ourselves in a position of being accountable to a group or to another person it is really hard work. Really very hard work.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, I mean, I can see that’s the only way to gain in wisdom is to be able to do that work and then be like, “Oh, yeah, now I know better. You know, I know a little better how to engage or be with folks in a way that’s not gonna cause as much harm.
It’s going to, you know, support others.” So yeah, thank you for talking to me today and for exploring this with us here in the Insight Diaspora. I wanted to mention, too, that you’re very generously offering up sort of in-depth content around this for sanghas and other communities and leaders that are kind of interested in bringing this work into their communities.
I don’t know if you wanted to mention that for those that are listening and might want to reach out to you and explore that.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Oh, yes. And I can put... I have a couple of things I want to put in the chat, but I can put my website in, and the bottom of the page are these offerings. Yeah, so—
Vince Horn: Please.
Rima Vesely-Flad: I have recorded a number of Dharma talks, eight Dharma talks with two practices based on the book. And the hope is that this is a self-guided course, but the hope is that people can both listen and then practice. And the hope is in community that actually that can happen. And still trying to figure out exactly how to essentially package all of that.
But at the moment, people can register for a self-guided course and listen to Dharma talks, some of which come from the book and are somewhat expanded, and some of which come from other work I’ve done. So there’s one called The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and then there are three that will be offered live with a good friend of mine, Rashid Hughes, who has put together a practice he refers to as rest.
He is a lovely human. He’s done restorative justice work for a long time. He also has a Master of Divinity degree and leads a sangha in DC. And so Rashid will offer practice spaces live, and I will record Dharma talks. The next one is called Buddhism and Black Liberation. That comes from a book I published in 2022.
And then there will be one offered in January called The Discipline of Liberation, and I think that’s my next project. I’m just starting to get my head around it, but it’s informed and guided by the writings of bell hooks.
And then there will be one that actually points to exactly what we were just talking about with regards to harm and conflict and how to work with it internally and how to be in community, and I think a lot of us don’t have that training, and I’m still someone, even now, who if I receive something in a hard way, I will go to my cushion before I’ll go to another person.
And maybe that’s okay, except if I don’t ever get off the cushion and go to that person, that’s not okay. So really trying to, this is in real time, also trying to learn, like, how to have these harder conversations and do repair. That’s really what I’m pointing to, how to do repair effectively so that there isn’t only rupture, but there’s a relationship that’s sustained. So there will be one self-guided course. It will open in about a month on Tuesday, September 1st, and then three live classes with my friend Rashid, and starting in October, and then in 2027, two classes. And my hope is that we start to create some spaces that are trainings and also collective spaces where we can be guided, especially by, in my case, I’m thinking of Black thinkers, although always in conversation with other lineages, but really wanting to bring the wisdom of Black thinkers to the center of Dharma practice.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Palestinian voices as well. I am really invested in that, too. And a friend, Kareem Gandoor, refers to Palestinian dharma, and I think, yes, that really resonates with me.
Vince Horn: So yeah, Kareem. I know Kareem. Good stuff. Yeah, I’ve recently just connected with Mohsen Mawdawi, who is the president of Buddhist Association at Columbia.
I think— didn’t you do your grad work at Columbia?
Rima Vesely-Flad: I did one of those degrees there. Uh-huh. In the same program he was in, yeah.
Vince Horn: Uh-huh. Yeah. And it’s been so nice to connect with fellow Palestinian Buddhists. All five of us are now connected. So I feel a lot of solidarity with the work that you’re doing, and the way that you’re centering the wisdom of Black teachers in the Buddhist lineage, bringing that to bear.
So thank you so much for that work. I hope you continue doing it for a long time.
Rima Vesely-Flad: Well, thank you. It does feel like the right work, and I feel so grateful to be able to do it long term. I mean, that’s I think where I’m going here. Actually, being able to work... I’m gonna put my website into the chat.
Being able to organize some of these classes is an attempt to make this work more sustainable, in addition to being like it both informs the next project and is an outgrowth of the current project.


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Vince Fakhoury Horn speaks with Mushim Patricia Ikeda about working class dharma—from growing up as "the minority of Greensburg, Ohio" in a third-generation Japanese American family, to training in penniless Korean Zen temples where renovating the building was the practice. Along the way: bliss bunnies, samadhi junkies, mutual aid networks, and why affordability may be the grassroots issue of 2026.
💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: Okay. So yeah, I think it was really the beginning of this year — I was teaching a retreat in Portugal with a friend. It’s our annual Pragmatic Dharma retreat. And while I was there, I had picked up recently this book called Emergent Dharma, by Dr. Sharon Suh, and I scrolled through the chapters, and I looked, and I went straight to yours, and I read it.
That was the first thing I read, and I just loved hearing about your story. For me, some of the coolest part about the Dharma is hearing people’s, like, stories and their biographies and, like, their real lived experience of the Dharma, and I just felt that in your story in the chapter there — you’re talking about how you were raised, and your family, and where you came from, and how you started engaging with Buddhism, and just the whole story there, that I’ve heard now more of since I’ve gotten to know you better over this year.
And really, I was just hoping we could talk about, you know, your story in part here, because the theme is working class Dharma. And when we last spoke, we decided that was a good kind of place to focus some of the conversation. But a lot of it is about your experience, really.
Like, what does it mean to live in the, quote-unquote, working class in the modern world, and to also be a Dharma practitioner? And how different is that in a heritage Asian ethnic tradition than in a white convert tradition, which is more how Emily and I have come up? I think that’s an interesting conversation too, because now we’re talking about class and ethnicity — two different dimensions that are often interwoven, or braided.
So anyway, could you share a bit about your story, Mushim? I know you come out of the Zen tradition, both in Japan and Korea, but how did you get into this? Was it a family tradition, or is it something that you came back to explore — like, the roots of your family’s tradition — later?
Mushim Ikeda: Yeah, thank you so much, Vince. So I was born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1954, and I am, by our system — meaning Japanese Americans, by our system — a third-generation Japanese American. We count the first generation to be the immigrants, so those were my grandparents on both sides, and they’re the Issei — “ichi,” meaning one.
My parents were the Nisei, meaning they were both born in the United States, and they were the Nisei — “ni,” two. Three is “san,” so I am Sansei, or third-generation Japanese American, by how we count. I was born in Cleveland, grew up in Ohio, because that’s where my father’s work took him. And we grew up very working class.
In Cleveland, when I was born, my father sold Wear-Ever pots and pans from door to door, and then he got a job inspecting fruit and vegetables — perishables that were being shipped on the railroads — working for an independent company called the RPIA, Railroad Perishable Inspection Agency.
And that took us down to the rural area between Akron and Canton, going a little bit toward the middle of Ohio, south of Cleveland. And most of my classmates in the public schools that I attended — I would say the majority of them were children of people from West Virginia who came north to Akron, then the tire capital of the world.
Goodyear, Firestone, Seiberling — they were all there, along with Quaker Oats, which produced a very interesting smell when the wind wafted from Akron our way, with a mixture of burning rubber and toasted oats. That was the smell of my childhood. And the air pollution was incredible, producing magnificent sunsets. And that’s where I grew up. So my classmates were children of the tire factory workers for the most part, as well as some were children of the remnants of the dairy farms, the cow pastures in that area that were gradually turning into suburban housing tract lands and so forth.
That was my childhood. We were in an all-white community, except for us. One of my teachers used to call our family “the minority of Greensburg, Ohio.” And at home, we had a very strong sense of who we were. We were Japanese American. We were not Japanese. We were certainly not white or middle-class Americans.
We were working-class Japanese Americans. And little by little, my parents wanted us to go to college. They rose into the lower middle class, then vaguely towards the middle middle class. However, I realized as I’ve grown older that I was raised — so, this is to just be completely fair: I was formed by my parents, and I do have a prejudice, and their prejudice was against what they perceived as upper-class privileged people, which in this case meant mostly white Americans who would look down upon their fellow white Americans who had come up from West Virginia and worked in the tire factories, and certainly looked down upon us, since we were not privileged white Americans.
So there we see, like, race, ethnicity, class, as always, are completely interwoven. And I freely admit I was raised to not be entitled and superior, and my parents would say snotty — like, in their words — a rich kid.
Vince Horn: It seems like, immediately hearing you, the way you’re describing that, that sounds like a good thing.
Mushim Ikeda: I hope so.
Vince Horn: And I mean, there’s a clearly good dimension to what you’re describing that I so appreciate. I guess I’m relating to this — the way you described it, almost like there’s, like, a spectrum of experience here, where you’re talking about the white West Virginian expats who are coming over to Ohio. In terms of the sort of hierarchy of sort of caste, I guess, for lack of a better term.
Mushim Ikeda: It is caste.
Vince Horn: Yes. You have this sort of racialized caste system. And it seems like I can relate to what you’re saying from where I was formed, in this formation, you know.
And it’s like, oh, I can see growing up with a Palestinian family, and I can see the racialized part of that, and the opportunities that were lost there, and the economic opportunities, and the bootstraps attitude — like, you gotta help yourself if you want any help; like, no one’s gonna help you.
Like, all of those things were very formative. But at the same time, you know, my grandfather did well with that attitude, and he had resources. And I knew, like, I was never gonna be homeless, you know? And that was something — I had friends that didn’t have that same level of security. You know, to know that they had someone — that, you know, even if your parents, your single mom, couldn’t earn any money or got sick or something, you had people that could take care of you.
That’s a huge level of security not everyone has. So I guess I’m relating to it from there — of, like, oh yeah, the further you’re down in the caste system, the less support you have, and the more, in a sense, it’s like up to you to kind of, like, hard-knuckle it through really adverse conditions that, you know, are imposed.
Mushim Ikeda: Very much so. And of course, to state the obvious, we have the legacy in the United States of the World War II incarceration into internment and concentration camps of the Japanese immigrants and their children, the Japanese-American citizens.
Vince Horn: Right. How did that specifically impact your family system?
Mushim Ikeda: The way it impacted my family was that my mother grew up in Hawaii, on Oahu, near Pearl Harbor, and there actually is a family story, which is true — we have evidence. The attack was in the morning, and my mom’s mom, my maternal grandma, who was a Shin Buddhist practitioner —
her husband, my grandpa, was a Soto Zen Buddhist practitioner. They had a mixed Buddhist marriage. So the family lore is that in the Pearl Harbor attack, Grandma was sitting on the toilet, and a giant shell, a bullet, came whizzing into the bathroom and went through the side of the porcelain enamel bathtub, and she came out screaming at the top of her lungs.
Vince Horn: Oh, my gosh.
Mushim Ikeda: And the family still has that unexploded ordnance. So she grew up in Hawaii, and there was no need to put the Japanese immigrants and their children into camps, because the island was a camp. What were you gonna do? Swim away? Everyone was under surveillance. Their homes were searched for illegal shortwave radios and enemy weapons.
And so the joke, again, in my mother’s family, was that the FBI came, searched the house, and the kitchen was full of large knives — for cooking, of course — but they decided to confiscate my grandfather Sawada’s pocket knife as an enemy weapon.
Vince Horn: Wow.
Mushim Ikeda: I know. So they were like, “Ah, this is just completely stupid and asinine. Here we are.” And it was the community leaders in Hawaii — Buddhist priests, any kind of community leaders — who were arrested and taken to the continent for the concentration camps. But they were all under surveillance. So that was my mother. She was used to being under surveillance.
However, they had food. And they stayed in their homes, under surveillance. And then my dad grew up on a farm in Indiana — the Ikeda Brothers Farm in Indiana — and there were too few Japanese immigrants and their children in Indiana and the Midwest, for the most part, to bother with. I think most of the deportations happened from California,
and from areas with larger populations. That having been said, of course they were aware — my father’s people were aware of what was going on. And he always said that he had a memorable moment in his life when he was drafted into the Army in World War II. He said, “I opened up the letter” — he said, “I got the mail outside the farmhouse.
I opened up the letter, and it said, ‘Greetings from your president.’” You now have to report for duty to the United States Army — to the same government that could have seized their property and sent the entire family off into a camp. That irony was not lost on him. And so both my parents, in some ways, were very model minority.
They both worked hard. My mother became a pharmacist. And they worked hard. They wanted to send us all to college. They always taught us to behave well in school. They passed on a love of learning, particularly science. And from the outside, we did look like the model minority. But looking back, on the inside, both my parents had so much very clear, thought-out, and thoughtful points of resistance, of education.
And their basic message to us was, number one, “Don’t act like privileged rich kids who are idiots,” and number two, “Never forget who you are, and don’t try to pretend you’re white, because you are not.”
Vince Horn: Hmm. Yeah, that is a resistance, in terms of holding on to their culture and being like, “I’m not going to,” yeah, integrate in that way. Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: Mm-hmm, and they were very confident. It’s not like they made a big deal of it; it’s just the way we lived. For instance, bath time in the evening: we didn’t have a Japanese ofuro bathtub. However, we would draw a tub full of hot water, and then the family would take baths in order of seniority.
Vince Horn: Okay, like age?
Mushim Ikeda: Yes.
Vince Horn: Yeah, got it. Got it. Makes sense. They gotta have some ordering principle.
Mushim Ikeda: Really, really tough on the youngest child in the family.
Vince Horn: That’s for sure. That is for sure. A side note, Mushim — just a kind of interesting side point before I ask you another question here. I learned only, yeah, 10 years ago or so, that the county that I grew up in, that my family moved to in North Carolina, was where the German Americans were interned, in a little town called Hot Springs. And I had no idea of the history of that growing up here until much later.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. I didn’t know it was in that area; however, you’re jogging my memory.
Vince Horn: Yeah. So that’s in the county that I grew up in. For sure, it’s a beautiful place — but nowhere is beautiful to be interned. I’m curious — I know, hearing about your history too, that you’ve spent a lot of time in monastic communities, and obviously one of the things that’s well known about a monastic community is that it’s typically operating on almost nothing, except for the generosity of a small community that’s supporting it, perhaps, if you’re lucky.
And, like, the people in the community are usually building everything — unless they have a bunch of wealthy donors, in which case they can hire people to do that for them. And it sounds like you have not been in those kind of communities where you had a lot of wealthy donors.
Mushim Ikeda: Completely the opposite.
Vince Horn: Mm-hmm.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And to go back and pick up a strand of a question from you I think I didn’t answer: I did not grow up in a Buddhist household in Ohio, because my father’s family didn’t espouse any particular religion that I knew of. And for my mother’s family in Hawaii, all of the Buddhist temples had been shut down — plus the after-school Japanese language schools that she and her siblings went to, they’d all been shut down as soon as, of course, World War II, Pearl Harbor, the attack on Pearl Harbor.
And so my mother came to Indiana, met my father, we raised a family in Ohio. She came from a Buddhist household but didn’t grow up as a Buddhist, so to speak — as a practicing Buddhist — whereas her siblings who remained in Hawaii did. They all went to Buddhist temples, and they were Buddhist.
So there was a certain rift there. However, when I, quote-unquote, “discovered Buddhism” later on, as a college student and afterward, it felt very familiar to me, and that’s because so much of it was passed down in our family in terms of values.
Vince Horn: Right. That’s something I’ve noticed as a Dharma teacher — like, when I’ve worked with folks who come up in Asian cultures, some of them, they’re new to the practice, but they’re not new, because they sort of were inculturated with a lot of the values, and it sort of shows, actually.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And so again, class comes in, because I went to college on scholarship. I went to graduate school — I received aid there and did a TA and that kind of thing.
I just never had much money, and went into an existential crisis in my late 20s. I happened to be in Ann Arbor, Michigan after finishing graduate school in poetry writing at the University of Iowa, and discovered — I think it was the only Zen Buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I was interested in Zen from reading I had done.
The only Zen Buddhist temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, I think, at that time, was Korean Zen — which I had never heard of. Zen is a Japanese word. And they called themselves, and do call themselves, Zen Buddhist Temple of Ann Arbor. However, when I actually went, they were proudly of the Korean Zen lineage. And after learning to practice meditation there, getting to know that just-beginning, scrappy, tiny little community that moved into a two-story house on a main thoroughfare in Ann Arbor and pulled the down payment together — and then the teacher, who lived in Toronto, a Korean Zen monk, his method was to get together the down payment. So it was usually not from one wealthy donor, but might be from some people who did have inheritance or something like that.
But anyway, bring that together. In the case of our temple in Toronto, it was the Korean-Canadian community, the immigrant community — they pooled their money. And so his method was: put a down payment onto a big enough, totally devastated house or dwelling that was nevertheless okay enough to legally inhabit, and then begin to do renovations while living and practicing in it, and while holding services for the general public, who would then come, and would often stay as volunteers to help with cleaning, construction, and whatever needed to be done.
We never had any money, and therefore it wasn’t separate from meditation practice. Meditation practice done in the meditation hall was, of course, very mindful. There were forms, there was order, there was silence, there was concentration, there was respect, there was good rapport with the people around you.
And all of those things, one simply transported and transplanted into whatever job one was given. It could be cutting vegetables in the kitchen. It could be cleaning up the construction mess from our carpenter monks, and monks who were learning how to be carpenters, ‘cause everyone did, to some extent.
What was called work practice was integral. It was not in addition. It wasn’t genteelly, gently folding kitchen towels from the kitchen and dreamily thinking, “Ah, I am so mindful.” There’s nothing wrong with that; however, that was not the way I was trained. Everything we were doing, we had to be highly aware of safety
issues, and we had to conform to building codes, or our work would’ve been for nothing.
Vince Horn: This brings up something for me around, like, just, like, the difference of traditions too. ‘Cause in the early Buddhist tradition — which the insight meditation tradition still patterns itself off of, mostly — they really seem to be aiming for, like, more exclusive forms of jhāna, where you’re excluding yourself out into these states of formlessness. Whereas the Zen Shikantaza, for me, has always felt like almost the opposite direction — of, I’m just trying to include everything that’s here and not turn away from what’s happening.
Mushim Ikeda: Because one goes into this, like, bliss state — which I know is not the ultimate jhāna, I do know that; however, it is jhāna, as I understand it. So one is blissful, and everything’s radiant and quiet and still, but you’re spaced out, essentially.
Vince Horn: Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah. You’re off in your own little blissed-out—
Mushim Ikeda: World. And then it’s time to cook, with big boiling pots of soup and sharp knives, or vegetables, or it’s time to do something where people are using power tools, and they’re cutting big lengths of planks and using screw guns and things like that. I mean, that’s freaking dangerous. And so our practice was to include everything that was pertinent to the task at hand.
So if you’re in the meditation hall, you’re fairly safe, because you’re on your little meditation cushion, and people aren’t moving around and using fire or electrical things. Then the governing principle of that was: you couldn’t space out — because, well, one could, but not for very long, because the physical posture — and we had no chairs at all — the physical posture, past a certain point, was really, really painful.
So these days, there’s so much talk of embodiment and somatics. I am sorry, I laugh. I laugh. In the environments I was raised in as a child, we were always working. My dad always had heavy — it was very similar — heavy construction projects, like digging giant holes in the yard and hauling wood and rocks.
I mean, as small children, we did heavy labor.
So the principles were really the same. What we’re now, these days, kind of in a fancy way calling somatic awareness — you had to have body awareness, or you’d be injured, or you’d injure someone else. And in the meditation hall, when you were seated still in your own little area, the way that happened was that after a while, you could be thinking all you liked about nibbana or whatever the fuck you were fantasizing about, and then everything would become, “My knees hurt.
My hips hurt. My back really hurts. Plus, this is so boring. When will the bell ring? I wonder what they’re cooking for lunch. Oh, okay, okay — boring, boring, boring.” Back to, in this case, counting the breath. And some of us had a meditation question, or what might be called a koan.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. So I’m getting the sense of, like, this is a very non-dualistic kind of practice setup, where you’re not just going off into blissful states, because the pain in the body, in that form of practice, is not gonna let you do that for long.
Mushim Ikeda: No. And of course, one can hit a certain point, after many, many hours, where the physical pain drops away — and I’ve seen these descriptions. We weren’t part of the jhāna system, because we were Mahayana
and Korean Zen. However, it’s all human physiology, as far as I’m concerned. And so there will be certain points where all the pain drops away,
and things are quiet and radiant and really nice. I mean, it’s so nice. And then, Zen being Zen, what it does is — the teacher kicks that out from underneath you, if you have a good teacher.
They can see that you’ve become a little bliss bunny, and it is time for the bliss bunny’s delusion to be dispensed with.
Vince Horn: Okay. I love that as the description of what happens in the tradition, and then also kind of as a metaphor for what we’re talking about — the big picture here for, like, American Buddhism. And there’s this sort of sense of, like, yeah, I can see how convert American Buddhism, by and large, has the bliss bunny problem, and I can see how I’ve perpetually had that, you know?
That’s how I know it’s true.
Mushim Ikeda: I have in the past written a piece, a long time ago, for an insight meditation publication, and I did use the term — I’m sorry — samadhi junkies.
Vince Horn: Samadhi junkies. This is great. No, I love this. The jhāna junkie is the term that I’ve used as well. Similar. Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: Same thing.
Vince Horn: Yeah. And I think there’s something really real about what you’re saying there, looking back, you know, on the time in practice where I practiced more like a jhāna junkie. As a parent, I haven’t been on a jhāna junkie retreat in 12 years. You know, I swore off those kind of retreats for the very reason you’re saying, which is it wasn’t helping me function in the world
and do the things I needed to that were right in front of me.
Mushim Ikeda: Exactly. Like — I mean, don’t get me wrong. Zen is samadhi. It means jhāna. Yes. Absolutely. Zen is the same word as jhāna.
Vince Horn: Yes. Agreed.
Mushim Ikeda: So, concentration. In fact, my original teacher, Korean Zen monk Samu Sunim — he was fluent in English; he’d been in Canada for a long time — he used to have a formula, and he said, “What is Zen?” No — “What is meditation? Meditation is concentration. What is concentration? Concentration is oneness.”
“What is oneness? No life and no death.”
Mushim Ikeda: So there, I think we’ll see some probably maybe clear connections to the tradition you were
trained in. And so on one hand, we did have these teachings, and that was completely interpenetrating with the realities of being in a construction site and having no money — hence very little heating, certainly no air conditioning, if it was hot or cold.
One simply was really, really cold, or really, really hot. And we didn’t have beds to sleep on. Everyone slept on the floor in sleeping bags. We lived a very renunciate and working class kind of life.
Vince Horn: Mm-hmm.
I guess the place my mind is jumping to, Mushim, is kind of this contemporary moment that we’re in now — where you, as a Dharma teacher, mindfulness teacher, someone who’s consulted in the DEI space, which for a little bit of time there was a lot of interest in, and then the sort of cultural backlash from the most recent Trump—
So I’m curious, in this time of, like, the most extreme income inequality that we’ve seen since, like, the Gilded Age in this country — generationally severe income inequality, powered by the internet, which just seems to amplify that and make it that much worse. You’re in Oakland, California, which is, like, the hotbed of — a lot of what happens in America, like, often happens in Oakland, so you’re right in the center of things.
Given where you are, what you’re doing, your background that you’ve just shared — curious how you see this moment, in terms of what the Dharma, as you’ve practiced it and understand it, is sort of being called... You know, what’s being called forth from us as Dharma practitioners, as American Dharma practitioners? How do you see that question right now? How are you living that?
Mushim Ikeda: Thank you. That’s a really good question. And to first state: I live with my adult son, who was raised through the Oakland Public Schools, K through 12. And there were other parents who would say to me, “Oh, he’s so bright. Maybe you could get, like, a scholarship at a private Catholic school, where the education would be better.”
Because Catholic schools will accept non-Catholic families if you can pay the tuition, and sometimes they have scholarships. And I just always thought — again, pure prejudice, my parents, especially my mother, were very big on public schools and the importance of education for all, of universal education.
And so we didn’t have any money to begin with. However, I didn’t wanna apply for scholarships for this kid, and he did go through the Oakland public schools, K through 12, and I volunteered as a parent aide to the teachers and a literacy tutor for 11 out of 13 years. I would have done 13 years; however, there were two years of middle school — seventh and eighth — that he went to where the school was on complete lockdown, and they wouldn’t really allow parents in, unless you went in and stayed in the entry point to pick up your kid for a medical or a dental appointment or something like that.
But we were never allowed to volunteer to help the teachers, to go into the classrooms. It was basically like a prison.
Vince Horn: And that’s the one that you said he chose to go to.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. Yes. Yes. The other schools were these, like, kind of crunchy granola... They were Oakland public schools. They were small-school models. They had no grades. They were based on teamwork, on collaboration, and all of the teachers taught what in Ohio we would have called social studies. They did not have labs to teach science. They didn’t have bands or orchestras. These schools had no money whatsoever.
What they did have was great teachers, and these teachers, this being Oakland, all taught the history of the United States not as George Washington and Betsy Ross. They taught the history of the United States through the Oakland legacy of the Black Panthers. There also has been a lot of Black Muslim activity, UC Berkeley and others, throughout the East Bay, and various people’s movements — movements of resistance, of protest — that have shaped this totally racially and economically and ethnically diverse area. Religiously, also.
So we love Oakland. And I personally don’t think — you had said, I think, that maybe Oakland represents what’s happening in the United States. I don’t think so. I am a diversity, equity, inclusion consultant, and I think that the experience of being an American citizen, or an immigrant to the United States, in various regions of the United States — which is very large and has a lot of different environmental ecosystems, as well as socioeconomic systems, so to speak, based on the industries in those regions, whether it’s agrarian, whether it’s, like Akron — again, we made tires and raised cows in that area — so that people are having extremely different experiences.
And of course, people living in suburbs — that’s a different experience than being in farmland, or being in what’s called the inner city. I don’t even know what that means — inside large urban areas such as Oakland. However, what we are seeing — because I’m a core teacher, excuse me, and a co-founder of East Bay Meditation Center, and we were founded to serve what have been called underserved communities.
However, that’s a polite code word for historically excluded and marginalized groups of people. That’s our mission. That’s why we exist. And so most of our sangha, or spiritual community, are lower-income people. And what we’re seeing, that’s logical, that’s happening now, is that people with lower incomes, myself included, have less safety nets.
And so when the economy plunges, when the level of persecution increases — of police surveillance, immigration deportations and so forth, and detentions — when all of that increases, which is happening now, then our communities go from being stressed communities to being desperate communities,
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: and losing the ability to have a space to live in, to have enough groceries to eat. And the big thing I feel is access to healthcare.
Vince Horn: Yeah, I feel you on that.
Mushim Ikeda: So we’re seeing all of that need increase exponentially.
Vince Horn: Yeah, and that’s the environment we’re in, where inflation plus, like, increasing privatization of all of those basic services, which are hitting specific groups hardest first, that don’t have the same levels of support.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And as I always say: wherever there is oppression, there will be resistance, and there will be bursts of creativity. I come — again, my background is in the fine arts, and I highly prize creativity, probably of equal importance along with spiritual aspiration. And I think that vital spiritual aspiration is always creative, is always generative.
Vince Horn: Mm-hmm.
Mushim Ikeda: That’s been my experience. So what I’m seeing in this area, again, are movements for health equity that are very exciting — East Bay Meditation Center is part of those movements — as well as really robust forms of mutual aid.
And I was just recently... Who knows where people get my name, but I was interviewed for the making of a video game, from the University of Utah. They have a gaming department. And the chairperson, the head of the gaming department, did an interview with me to give input to a game that he’s creating with his grad students, on mutual aid.
Vince Horn: Okay. Cool. Sounds like that’s — it’s like the innovation that sometimes happens out of necessity. It’s like, it’s not a good thing that it has to happen, but it’s a good thing that it happens, I guess. If that makes sense.
Mushim Ikeda: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Vince Horn: Yeah, ‘cause there’s a lot, it sounds like, in your community that’s being learned that can be kind of shared, I guess, in other communities where it’s relevant.
Mushim Ikeda: Part of mutual aid is exchange of information.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Absolutely — and sharing of resources. I mean, we experienced that in real time with Hurricane Helene, when our whole neighborhood flooded here, and it’s like all of the modern infrastructure was gone. Internet gone, water gone, power gone.
And it’s like, oh, well, what do you do? Well, you all suddenly turn the local library into, like, a mutual aid hub, and mutual aid networks pop up, and people start helping each other. That’s exactly what happened.
Mushim Ikeda: Absolutely. You know, here, of course, we had the big earthquake in — when was that? 1989.
Yeah. I feel like September or something, the fall of 1989. And I had a very close friend who lived in San Francisco, in an area with a lot of old apartment buildings. And so it wasn’t a neighborhood where neighbors knew each other, or there were front yards where people could be playing or mowing their grass and talking to each other.
People did not know one another in the area he lived in. But he said when the earthquake hit and all the power and everything went out, he would just walk down his street in San Francisco, and neighbors, who had the meat and supplies in their freezers defrosting — what they did was they came out, and they were barbecuing in their yards and giving all the food away for free.
Vince Horn: Absolutely, yes. I can’t tell you how many of those stories I heard in the same context. It’s kind of sad, though, because it makes me realize how usually those networks are not alive, because we’re all relying on the centralized sort of capitalist modern infrastructure together.
It’s only when it goes away that we’re like, “Oh yeah, we can also do it this way too.” So I think there’s something sad there for me. And then, with respect to Dharma — I guess just to kind of wrap up this thread; we’ve been talking for a while, and I really appreciate your time — I’m really interested in what I see with, like, Zohran Mamdani right now in New York,
who is the mayor of New York, who is showing up and just actually delivering results. And this is sort of what I took from Hurricane Helene, one thing: when Hurricane Helene happened, it was mostly right-wing Christian, white Christian organizations that were showing up frontline and actually helping people here.
A lot of money came from people that were more left-leaning politically. A lot of money came in, but that’s not who showed up.
Vince Horn: And I think there’s something there for me. It feels like the edge of, like, showing up and actually being on the ground, in addition to sharing resources, is kind of what I feel is being asked from me as a Dharma person.
Like, not to build any kind of separation between me and who’s suffering, but to kind of try to go in on those things, and really be present to them. Which is exactly the opposite of what I want to do if I’m a jhāna junkie. Those things are really distracting me from my deep bliss, you know?
Mushim Ikeda: Oh, yeah. You have to do social interaction, and figure out how to drive places, and then where are you going to park, or you might get ticketed.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: If you’re in the meditation hall and everything’s comfortable, and you go into jhāna, then you don’t have to worry about any of those things. Which — again, I am not putting that down, because it definitely has its place. And a very important place. That having been said, it’s only one part. It’s only one part of Dharma training. It’s an important part. All the other parts are equally important. Service — direct service to people. And again, here’s my prejudice, my original teacher echoing my parents in many ways: Zen Master Samu Sunim, who died a few years ago.
He was very clear — and again, fluent in English, so if he said something or made a joke, he knew what he was saying, for Canadians and United Statesians. And he once said, “If we’re going to serve poor people” — which obviously he meant that’s what we need to do — he said, “If we are going to serve poor people, we need to live like poor people, and we need to eat like poor people.”
And to push back a little bit on what I think you said a little bit earlier, Vince: among people who are very low income — like, when my son was born, I literally had no money. I came back from the monasteries in Korea with $15, literally, to my name. No savings, no trust fund. That was it. And so I had to rely, and I did, on my Buddhist friends and my non-Buddhist friends as well.
However, the Buddhist community in particular was very supportive, and so we got all these hand-me-downs for clothing. We got hand-me-down baby equipment. One friend — since I didn’t grow up in California — said, “Oh, there’s this thing called Medi-Cal, and you can get medical care through the program.”
So I signed up for that, and I didn’t get prenatal care until I was, like, four and a half or five months pregnant. And then the baby was born, and the hospital costs were covered. As a Medi-Cal patient, it meant that I gave birth at, like, 4:00 PM one day, and I was discharged from the hospital at 11:00 AM the next day.
However, I wasn’t complaining about any of that, because all of this came to me through systems of mutual aid that people who are on the edge of survival do form.
And Mamdani, whom you mentioned — I’ve been really interested in following him and seeing... I just saw a fabulous reel where he volunteered for the New York City equivalent of kind of a 911 or emergency call center that people would call —
not because they were seeing crimes, but because they couldn’t pay their rent, or they couldn’t pay their hospital bill. And so he would just answer and say, “Hi, this is Zohran. Can I help you?” And one person — he said, “And I’m the mayor.” And the other person said, “Yeah, right.”
Vince Horn: Yes, I saw the same clip. He’s like — on-the-job training for the—
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. He has, to me, so much joy.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: And he brings so much positive energy to this central issue that cuts across so many barriers and boundaries right now among the populace of the United States, and in New York City — and that is affordability.
So what we are seeing now, I would say, is the demise of the middle class, of the American dream, and therefore that raises the potential for all of these already-in-place systems of mutual aid and exchange of information on how to get to resources. It enlarges the field of the general population in the United States who are not millionaires and billionaires, who are saying, “How can I pay my mortgage?
I’ve paid my mortgage, I’ve paid my rent — now I don’t have enough for groceries. Now I have enough for groceries and I’ve paid my rent, but I don’t have enough money for textbooks for my kid,” or whatever it is that is needed. “I can’t fix my car.” So this issue of affordability, as challenging as it is, is what I see that has the potential, at this moment in 2026, to create a grassroots movement using all of the tools of mutual aid that are already in place.
Vince Horn: And it seems like the progressive dharma has an important place in all of that as well.
Mushim Ikeda: I would hope so.
Vince Horn: Yeah, right.
Mushim Ikeda: And that is — I will say, we don’t need to get all puffed up with pride about that.
Vince Horn: Yeah, yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: That’s going to be the same as so many Christian churches who say, “Love thy neighbor.” I have a very close Christian friend who’s a diversity consultant, retired, who said — he’s in Virginia, I think — and he said, “You know, in my version of Christianity, it’s not about persecuting immigrants. Jesus taught love thy neighbor as thyself.” So it’s going to be in Muslim communities.
It’s going to be in all religious institutions. Not among all of them; however, among those that honor working people,
and that include and support and understand — because they understand one another — the needs of people who do not have large amounts of savings in the bank, who can’t afford to go on expensive vacations,
including expensive meditation retreats,
which are kind of like vacations.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: So that’s what we’re talking about now. And again, as you’re hearing, I was not trained, in the terms of the Dharma, of Buddhism, of the Buddha Dharma — I was not trained, Vince, in these meditation centers where everything’s climate controlled, and the food is delicious vegetarian food, and your room is so comfortable and nice.
That was a totally new experience to me when I began practicing, or entering into, what I guess you’re calling the Western insight tradition. I had class issues up to here.
Vince Horn: Yeah, no doubt. I mean, I felt some of that as well, so I know if I did, that would be more so for you.
Mushim Ikeda: And I appreciated it. Again, it’s not something that I’m saying, oh, let’s get rid of all that because that’s bourgeois bullshit. How I see those places operating is that they usually have scholarship systems,
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Mushim Ikeda: and they accept people who normally could not afford to pay the full cost, and it acts as a place of rest and regeneration.
Vince Horn: For sure. And, you know, looking at my own experience as, like, a teen and 20-something-year-old, you know, on a spiritual journey — it’s a great institution for doing that thing, where you’re going off and doing your spiritual trip.
Mushim Ikeda: And then you do it, and you get the learnings,
and hopefully the insights. It’s the insight tradition, for God’s sake. Hopefully you get some freaking insights. And then what do you do with them?
Vince Horn: Exactly.
Mushim Ikeda: Is it the insight of, oh, we’re all one, Vince. We’re all interconnected with the moss and the pigeons and everything and all the people. It’s so beautiful.
Vince Horn: And terrible.
Mushim Ikeda: Yes. And then how do you apply it?
Vince Horn: Yeah. Yeah, ‘cause there’s the terror of oneness, too. It’s like you’re one with all of the people being genocided as well, you know, at that level.
Mushim Ikeda: Thich Nhat Hanh, of course, I feel was the great teacher of this century, who, through his art, through his teaching, and through his way of life and the sanghas he built, spread the very clear message — which is, I think it’s really hard. It’s hard for me, and I do believe it. It’s very Mahayana. And in his famous poem, Call Me by My True Names, he says, “I am the torturer, and I am the person being tortured.”
That viewpoint excludes no one.
Vince Horn: Mm-hmm.
Well, I’m sure Elon Musk is probably grateful to hear that — that even the tech billionaire, trillionaire broligarchs are included.
Mushim Ikeda: I don’t think he’s grateful at all.
Vince Horn: I don’t think—
Mushim Ikeda: I don’t think he cares.
Vince Horn: No — I was being completely facetious there.
Mushim Ikeda: However — however, I care.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Yeah. And whether or not he cares, he is, like you’re saying — there’s some level that includes everything. I think, like, that’s such an important level to remember. I appreciate you pointing out that level, too. And thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us.
I just wanted to highlight again, as people leave: thank you so much for being here in this kind of experiment. Please support the East Bay Meditation Center, if you feel moved to support this project that also supports the folks we’re inviting in as guests, like Mushim. So thank you there for anything you can contribute. We’re grateful.
Mushim Ikeda: Thank you all, and thank you, Vince, for your work of the Insight Diaspora, Buddhist Geeks, of Pragmatic Dharma. As you know, I’m following you very closely, because I feel that the work you’re doing is so fresh, it’s so open, and really — I’m finding it so friendly. It really is friendly to practitioners, in opening up these containers for very frank discussion.
I am grateful.


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In “The Fourth Turning of the Wheel,” Vince Horn traces the Three Turnings of the Wheel of Dharma from early Buddhism to Tibetan Vajrayana, then argues we’re living through new turnings right now—the modern, postmodern, and metamodern waves of Buddhist practice—and asks what it takes to hold them all.
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💬 Transcript
Vince: So Modern Buddhisms — this title’s really in part inspired by my time at Naropa University. I should just say that up front, because being there for about four years or so in the mid-aughts really influenced me as a Dharma practitioner and then later as a teacher. When I started teaching, of course, my view had already been really molded and shaped in the halls of Naropa, you could say.
Naropa was founded by a Tibetan Buddhist teacher named Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who’s quite both famous and infamous for his influence on American Dharma. When I was a student at Naropa, one of the core offerings in the Religious Studies department, which is where I spent most of my time and where I got my degree, was called the First Turning, the Second Turning, and the Third Turning — the Turnings.
There was a class on each one of them. I took the First Turning with Judith Simmer-Brown, who was an acharya, a teacher in that lineage, and a professor at Naropa. And it was cool to really learn in an in-depth way over six, seven months — a college class, you’re writing papers and reading a stack of books — in more depth about the tradition that I was in love with.
And seeing it from the point of view, in this case, of this Tibetan model called the Three Turnings. As I said, Chogyam Trungpa was Tibetan, so this model was influential and informed a lot of the curriculum at Naropa. The Tibetan model of the Three Turnings emerges later in the evolution and history of Buddhism.
So to talk about modern Buddhisms, we of course have to talk about historical Buddhisms too. We can’t just skip to the modern era — unless we’re being really hyper-modern, then we would. Then we’d be like, “Oh, yeah, it all began today. Here we are.” No. We’re going to actually kind of try to trace this back a little bit.
And of course, this is such a huge area, with so much history and so many people involved, and I’m going to totally do it injustice by compressing things and making big, broad points and claims. So I just want to kind of apologize for that upfront. It’s kind of one of the things you unfortunately have to do to talk about a topic that’s so broad and make any sense at all, I think.
So I’m going to try to make some sense without shredding apart reality here too badly. The way I understand it, and understood it then at Naropa, is that early Buddhism starts with the historical Buddha Siddhartha Gautama in Northern India, Nepal — modern-day Nepal. And there’s a particular kind of flavor to that early Buddhist philosophy, even as it starts to become diversified into many different schools.
There were, like, 17 schools of early Buddhism intact at one point in India, just kind of all competing for meme share. And what we have now that’s kind of extant, that’s currently evolved from there, is just one of those 17 schools that came through: the Theravada school of early Buddhism.
They called it the Path of the Elders, which is where most of my teachers had trained, in that lineage. This becomes known as early Buddhism, or what the Tibetans would later call the first turning of the wheel — the First Turning dharma. And why is it called the first turning? Because this is when the Buddha first taught his unique approach — what we call Buddhism now.
And the wheel represents the teachings that the Buddha gave, the core of the teachings, which are the Noble Eightfold Path, sometimes compressed down to or simplified as the three trainings, the Threefold Training. The Threefold Training in what? In Ethics or Morality or Virtue, in Concentration, Meditation, and in Insight, Wisdom.
These are the things that the Buddha taught, and this is the unique collection of trainings that made it Buddish. This is how you know the Buddish pattern, when you see these eight represented as the Threefold Training and this sort of unique constellation and specific ways of looking at things.
In the Eightfold Path, we have two in particular that are quite important here, which are Right Intention and Right View. This is how we see and do the thing. This is how we’re seeing and doing it.
So in early Buddhism there’s a particular view and intention that goes along with that view. The intention is to put an end to suffering. And the view is that it’s possible. Suffering does exist, but it’s possible to experience a cessation of suffering. The end of dukkha.
And there’s a path that you follow to do that called the Eightfold Path. This is the view of early Buddhism.
You’re stuck in samsara and there is freedom. It’s called nirvana. You can get out. You can have an experience of freedom. Later Buddhists don’t disagree on this point — they just disagree, I would say, on how far to extend it and how much to fall in love with our concepts about what’s happening here.
The Second Turning — I remember at the very end of the First Turning course I took with Judith Simmer-Brown at Naropa, she basically delivered the big rug pull after learning all these models, the Four Noble Truths and the 12 Links of Codependent Origination — I mean, model after model after model.
We’re just learning and reading texts and learning. And at the end she says, “In the next course, the second turning, they’re going to come through” — and just kind of point. And we read The Heart Sutra, and she’s like, “They’re going to point out that the problem with this whole edifice of early Buddhism is that people fell in love with their concepts and wanted to try to explain everything.”
That’s what the Abhidhamma ends up becoming — this attempt to describe how everything is related. We’re going to describe and map the entire world of interdependent phenomena and describe everything in detail. And there was something about that that was problematic, which was the freezing or the reifying of that, and it said, no.
Basically, like, no. This is not the move. And it negated that in a way that was meant to de-reify that tendency to kind of build mental sandcastles and to believe that our thoughts are the things that are real. And early Buddhism has this built in, in a way, because the early Buddhists say, “Here’s the right view. This is the way you need to understand things.”
And that is an understanding of early Buddhism. You want to download this view and understand things this way. Practice in a way that you see that this is true — the three characteristics of experience. You want to see impermanence, see selflessness, see all this stuff.
But the problem there is you’re taking the view quite seriously. It’s like, this is the right view. If you get too attached to your view — in the Second Turning, there’s a recognition that this becomes problematic, and we can describe this as emptiness: to let go of your fixed views.
To realize, oh, this is more open and fluid. So the second turning emerges. It’s described in terms of non-duality of samsara and nirvana and the emptiness of views — of not believing there’s some thing over there called nirvana that’s separate from this experience of samsara. Cosmological dualism. Oh, no, that’s a problem.
If that’s really true, we’ve got a problem here. The Second Turning releases the problem by pointing out that the problem is fixed dualistic thinking. Ah. Okay. Now we’re in the realm of non-duality. The view here shifts from the three characteristics in the First Turning — the Second Turning is about Emptiness and Interdependence. Compassion is just as important as wisdom in the second turning. I remember Shinzen Young explaining this in a way that really struck me. He said, “In the Second Turning, in Mahayana Zen, compassion has equal precedent — it’s equally important to wisdom.”
In the first turning, wisdom was still kind of more important. It’s like an absolute teaching, and then you have the relative brahmavihāras, and there’s this sort of ranking where wisdom is kind of the highest. Here, it’s like, no, these are two dimensions of the same realization, or the same awakening. Bodhicitta. One awakening heart-mind. So, to me, this is like a correction. This is an evolution, right? And this is how it’s kind of explained in later Buddhism. This is an evolution of the tradition. What’s so interesting about the Third Turning teachings in Tibetan Buddhism to me is that they understand their own tradition as having what we would now call evolved.
They didn’t use that word, evolve, and maybe they have a different understanding of it than I do. But it’s so interesting to me that they see the revolutions of the turnings. I love John Vervaeke — he’s a scholar and a cognitive behavioral therapist and psychologist at the University of Toronto.
He says, “Evolution is revolution with change.” That’s the way he defines evolution. Well, the turnings are just this revolving wheel of people understanding Buddhism in new ways, in different ways over time, over a thousand plus years, two thousand plus years. The three turnings model in a sense is the tradition’s first understanding of itself as an evolutionary development.
It’s something that’s evolved over time, and you can kind of look back — and what do they do in the three trainings? They say they’re all important. They don’t just reject them. In some sense you could say the Second Turning is a rejection of the First Turning, right? Or it’s a negation of it. You can understand that.
Of course, when you negate something, you affirm it. That’s also important to understand, right? I always think about being a college-age atheist, which I was a little bit. I’ve seen other people that are more atheist than me. But you become like a militant atheist, right?
You’re like, “I am anti-God,” and you make your identity about being anti-God and hang out with a bunch of people that talk about being anti-God, and you read a bunch of books by people that are talking about how God doesn’t exist, and it’s like your whole life is built around God. And likewise, this is how I understand the Second Turning.
It wasn’t that they were negating in any sense that they’re trying to get rid of it — it was more just sort of pointing out the holding on to. To do that, you have to point out the actual specifics: no suffering, no cause of suffering, no end of suffering, no path to the end of suffering.
In the Heart Sutra, they repeat all the models. All the lists are there. It’s not like the Buddhist lists get evaporated and we don’t remember what they are because they got rid of them. No, this is an affirmation through negation in the Second Turning. The Third Turning includes all of it intentionally in this sort of larger Buddha matrix of teachings.
And in a sense it holds the whole collection of teachings. That’s why it’s such a complex tradition in a lot of ways, the Vajrayana, because there’s so much that it’s holding in its library of esoteric teachings, including ones that are emerging and still coming from beyond, in terms of the Terma tradition.
So they’re still uncovering new Dharma teachings that are somehow timeless, by the way. So this evolution is a timeless evolution from the point of view of the Third Turning. Now we’re going to move, finally, to the topic at hand, which is modern Buddhism. So what happens when we enter into the, quote-unquote, Western Enlightenment period?
Quote-unquote, modernity. There’s a big, huge change of thinking in the Western world by Western Enlightenment thinkers. These books, of course, are being printed, and people are reading them, so that’s why this is spreading so quickly — because we’re sitting on top of the Gutenberg innovation already here, and there’s increased literacy.
Thanks, by the way, back to Egypt and Palestine — the Palestinians, my ancestors — for the innovation of the phonetic alphabet, which allows language to be communicated and carried much easier by people that don’t have to learn, like, a million hieroglyphs. Anyway, here we are in the modern world with all of these supportive technologies and infrastructure that’s kind of built toward connecting the whole of the world — of course, through colonialism primarily, through one group gaining this sort of incredible advantage in terms of certain technologies and geographies and things like that, histories of empire, resources.
That’s one part of the view, of course. There’s the looking at the Western Enlightenment as a noble thing, and there’s looking at it as a terrible thing. I’m going to try to hold both views here at once. This is a hard thing to do. But I do see truth in both.
And what I will say here is that I think we are ourselves going through different turnings now of the wheel of Dharma since the beginning of modernity, since this move toward increased globalization, which has pushed these traditions into contact with each other like has never happened before, even though it was happening before.
The way I think of it is like we’re in an atom crasher, in a way. Since modernity, all these things are crashing into each other. And there are different ways of relating to that. I will go ahead and say here what I want to explore through the course of this training together are three particular modern turnings of the Wheel of Dharma.
So these are all part of what I guess you could call the fourth turning we’re in now. Since modernity has started, I think we’re in the modern yana. We’re in this new period of Buddhist history. And the first wave of that we could just, I think, call Modern Buddhism, Buddhist Modernism, where the move is toward secularizing the practice, toward making it compatible with science, and to make it a trainable system, like a mental psychological system.
It’s to make Buddhism work for the modern individual. That’s kind of the goal of this Buddhist modernism — to improve your capacity at work. This is why the secular mindfulness movement has done so well. I would claim it’s a modern form of Buddhism that’s completely, in a way, unbundled from the original tradition, except for some of the meditative techniques and views. Of course, there’s a lot of problems with this Modern Yana that you’re probably familiar with and have heard about.
McMindfulness is one of the first critiques I heard of Buddhist modernism. And it’s so true. If you’ve studied deeply in a tradition and you really love it, you understand its roots, and you know how little you know. It’s weird to see some commodified version of a very narrow kind of slice of that becoming hyper-popular and everyone talking about it.
And it’s like, what just happened? Part of your tradition just got modernized. And sometimes modernized essentially means extracted and commodified and turned into financial value, because that’s part of the modern infrastructure — capitalism, right? So modern Buddhism is extremely integrated with capitalism, and capitalism is a global system of commerce.
So this is the first wave, I’d say. You have this sort of integrating with capitalism, integrating with science, integrating with technology. This is a very powerful wave. It’s still waving very hard now. This is how Buddhist Geeks got started. I got onto this wave at a specific time when the internet was changing, and caught this Buddhist modernist wave, which had been waving for hundreds of years actually.
It wasn’t a new thing. It was new for me and a bunch of other people, is how I would say it now. But what happens if you keep engaging with these yanas — they open themselves up in practice, right? In the same way that we can look at the earlier three as a developmental journey you go through, you can move through, so too, I think, with these modern yanas — you can move through them.
What started to happen for me in Buddhist Geeks, where we were exploring really our main question over like 10 years, was: how does Buddhism converge with modern science, technology, and culture — this globalized culture? What does Buddhism have to offer the global culture and technology, and what do these things have to offer Buddhism? Let’s not assume Buddhism is fixed and doesn’t have anything to learn, like the traditional kind of failure mode would be. Instead we want to learn and adapt, but we also want to remain intact.
What I learned through Buddhist Geeks is that one of the best ways to understand what’s happening in the modern era is that Buddhism is getting unbundled as an institution, as are all institutions which were developed in the pre-modern era. All of them, as a kind of bundled form of different things, are getting pulled apart and then commodified.
This is how global capitalism works. This is how it develops — extracts value culturally. It does that through natural capital as well, which is part of why we have an ecological crisis. And here, what’s the equivalent crisis, I wonder, for our spiritual traditions? What happens when you extract all of the essence out of them and make it really popular, and then no one knows that there’s still this deep, profound engine of transformation at the heart of these traditions?
No one cares because they’ve got their mindfulness app or whatever — they’re fine. Well, I’d say it’s something like a spiritual crisis. We don’t know what life is for. It’s like, oh, just to be comfortable, to make it through a difficult period. No, that’s not what life is for.
Remember the three trainings — the training in ethics? Well, the Postmodern Yana, the next wave, I would say, of Modern Buddhism comes around, and it really critiques hard, as I’m starting to do here, the modern Buddhism, Buddhist modernism. It points out how white-centric it is, how Eurocentric it is, how Christian it is without acknowledging its Christianity and the influence of Christianity on it, how capitalist it is, how oppressive it is when it doesn’t acknowledge the way it participates in these systems.
And there’s a powerful critique that comes online about the systems of power that are hiding inside of the modern story. This critique is powerfully deconstructive philosophically. I remember when I first encountered this critique aimed at me, when I was doing Buddhist Geeks.
There were a number of professors, a bunch of academic Buddhists, who got together and they started a project called Speculative Non-Buddhism. And they were critiquing lots of popular Buddhist teachers and using these really powerful post-modern philosophical methods for doing that, as well as just being total assholes.
They would just call people names and they would not be civil at all. That was actually part of their method — it was intentional, to goad nice Buddhists into showing their nasty sides. And often it worked. Smart people just ignored them. But for me, I found it fascinating.
There was something in their critique — I was actually like a firefly, drawn to the light. I was drawn to it. I had an interest in philosophy, and the more I sat with their criticisms, even though they were extremely painful because a lot of them were aimed at me personally — they were also right about some things, and I couldn’t help but see that that was true. The way that I was framing things, how we were selling things, our business model with Buddhist Geeks — there were so many things that I was doing that were unconscious, and I just learned to do them that way. I hadn’t questioned them in the way that I’d questioned a lot of things. And they were pointing that out in a way that really shook me to my foundation and ended up actually dissolving the company.
It was a for-profit company. I let it dissolve and fail, Buddhist Geeks. It got reborn later as a nonprofit, which it’s been since. But that was huge for me, to kind of take on those critiques. It felt very sharp, very personal, and yet because there was something to them, I couldn’t help but sit with them, even while I was grumbling and complaining and being a victim — still, something got through, and for me it opened my eyes to these different ways of seeing. These things got further opened for me with the racial awakening of George Floyd’s death in 2020 and the COVID era. My teachers at this point were really leaning into this more Postmodern Yana, I would say, in terms of trying to refashion the insight tradition to take account of these criticisms and try to make space for the truth of them, which I really admired.
Because it’s not easy to do that, to change an organization. And some of you here know that because you work exactly in this field. So the Postmodern Yana, to me, is characterized by a critique of modernity that recognizes that we’ve not been looking at, especially, collective systems-level perspectives.
We don’t see how collectives are being shaped. This is where the Marxist views come in about economics. This is where ecological, environmental views emerge, because we’re looking at this perspective. The hyperindividualism of modernity prevents one from seeing these things. You just can’t see in terms of bigger than you.
Here in the Postmodern Yana, we can go beyond just our narrative, and we can deconstruct it.
But what happens if we go too far in that endeavor? Is it possible to go too far? Because deconstruction leaves you without anything. It’s similar to the Second Turning, right? In relation to the First Turning. You negate the problems of the First Turning.
We can negate the problems of modernity, but that just highlights them. It gives us freedom — but to do what? To be angry, for sure. I think that’s a natural initial response. Once you start to see these things, you get pretty fucking pissed, and you start to see the causes of a lot of suffering in the modern world, and where they come from and how unequally they’re distributed.
You start to feel ashamed, angry, whatever — all these things are natural. But what if it’s possible to move through, at least to some degree, the grief of that and the anger of that, and to sort of say, okay, instead of completely rejecting modernity entirely — it’s hard to do that anyway, because we can’t even imagine what it was like pre-modernity.
I heard stories from my grandfather who came from Palestine, which was much less developed than we were here in America. So he essentially came from, like, several hundred years ago in terms of his living conditions. I’ve heard stories like that directly from other people that I trust — wearing the potato sack to run to school for three miles while it’s raining. Literally that story. So I know there’s a huge difference in living conditions from what my grandfather grew up in and what I live in currently, what my sons are growing up in. Just massive, and that’s largely modernity there. So I know there are some good things about modernity, in terms of expanding lifespan, in terms of modern medicine.
There are some things I’m really grateful to have access to in modernity. Oh my gosh — my friend just moved back here from Mexico City. He loves Mexico City. He speaks Spanish. He loves Mexican people. He loved living in a part of the neighborhood where he was the only gringo.
And he’s that kind of person who really legitimately loves Mexican culture. And he was so happy to be infrastructurally back in the United States. He’s like, “Just a reminder, there’s a lot of things dysfunctional about our politics here, but there’s a lot of things that work in terms of infrastructure, and it’s easy to forget when you have them.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, that’s true. That’s true.”
So what if we hold the modern and some parts of modern life and what it opens up, especially the internet? The internet is wholly a modern development. And we say, okay, could we keep some of the good things about modernity while not doing this hyper-modern thing that’s destroying our planet and culture?
Could we take into account the critiques of postmodernity and do something with them that’s constructive? That to me is the third of these waves of modern Buddhism — I’ll call it here the Metamodern Yana, which is emerging out of the generative tension between modernity and the critiques of modernity, postmodernity.
If we can hold both modernity and postmodernity, instead of collapsing onto one side or the other — this is the middle way practice, by the way, of Buddha — then we can actually find a middle way that exists between and beyond them. That’s the Metamodern Yana. That’s the idea, anyway.
That to me is pretty emergent, at least for myself. I know other people have experienced this and are talking about this. People that are talking about, for instance, the meta-crisis — they’re usually coming at it from a Metamodern perspective. The meta-crisis is itself metamodern terminology; it comes out of that whole cultural philosophical landscape, because you’re seeing the many problems that are happening in the world, in the really crisis period that we’re going through in 2026, globally. They have a deeper generator function underneath them. This is the argument of the meta-crisis, right?
There’s something underlying these different crises that connects them. They’re not just different crises. They’re not just poly. There’s something that connects them that’s meta to them.
And whatever Metamodern Buddhism is, it’s a response to that. It’s a response to the meta-crisis. It’s an attempt to update our spiritual lens to be in alignment with the actual challenge that we’re facing.
There will be different views from Metamodern Buddhists on how to do this and what we should focus on. Just like there’s always diversity, right? That emerges. But there’s a particular way the Metamodern Yana can recognize that there’s truth to both the modern story of progress and to the postmodern critique of it, and that there’s some generative tension in holding both of these together.
Both the desire to move forward and make things better, while also recognizing that we’re always doing that from a limited perspective that excludes certain beings — and thus when we move forward, we actually make things worse for them. So how do we constantly include more while also continuing to move forward?
That’s the koan here, the Metamodern Buddhist koan. The last thing I’ll say is we’re going to use these lenses in this training to explore some questions. We’re going to move through three different questions, taking each of these — the modern, the postmodern, and the metamodern lens — on each.
We’re going to try to inhabit each. The first question is: What is practice for? We’re going to look at it from a modern perspective. What is practice for? Well, it’s for making me better at meditation so I can be better. Okay, what is practice for from a postmodern lens? Well, it’s to help me see the narrative memeplex that I’m embedded in and become liberated from it, so I don’t have to keep participating in the suffering caused by, you know, X.
Okay, great. What is practice for from a metamodern perspective?
That’s the plan for this training in terms of the method. We’re going to be cycling through these almost like perspectives — you could think of this like a yoga of perspective-taking. We’re going to see these questions from the point of view of these different perspectives. The other two questions we’ll look at are: How do we know where we are on the path? How do we know where we are on the path? And then finally, How do we make a good living? We’ll end this training — the last three cycles we’ll be exploring how do we make a good living. We’ll include the modern exploration of that: how do we make a good living from a modern standpoint, where you’re including capitalism as part of what you’re interfacing with, and you are dealing with the realities of global commerce, and you’re trying to operate functionally well within that frame? How does that work? How do you make a good living from a postmodern perspective? Again, bringing this question through each of these, week by week, I want to see what we can learn from them together about these different ways of approaching the path.


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In “The Cost of Silence,” dharma teacher Vince Horn and guest Daniel Klein trace what it costs us—psychologically, relationally, economically, and spiritually—to withhold the truth, arguing that the small silences of the dinner table are the same debt that scales into complicity with collective harm, asking what it takes to finally stop paying it.
💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: So, welcome back to the Insight Diaspora. I’m your host, Vince Fukuri-Horn. Good to be here with you again in this exploration of ... I don’t know, what is it exactly we’re exploring here, Daniel? You have to tell me.
Daniel Klein: I think it’s going to be an emergent phenomenon.
Vince Horn: Great. Okay. Another of those emergent phenomenons. So, no, looking forward to this conversation genuinely. We are talking about the cost of silence today. And for a little background, Daniel and I had a conversation prior to this that we aired through Buddhist Geeks, and it was called The Cost of Truth. And there we were sharing some reflections from both of our experiences, in very different positions, in this sort of Israel-Gaza — I don’t even know what to call it anymore — kerfuckle. This situation is just terrible. We’re coming at it from different places, but both had this experience of speaking up and saying things that weren’t super welcome by our social groups. And so we’re talking about the cost of that, and what happens when you speak up even though it’s not really welcomed.
Today we want to explore the other side of that equation, which is the cost of not speaking up, because we also both have had that experience as well. And it’s not like we suddenly woke up one day and were like, “Okay, I’m going to speak the truth about everything, no matter what.” We’re both social humans, so we have gone through a process of learning how to speak what’s true for us. And I imagine Daniel, like myself, is still going through that process. So we wanted to talk about that today. And also, just before we jump in, I want to say a word about generosity. I’m not a huge fan of the generosity talks and Dharma things. I’ll be honest with you. It always felt weird and cringey to me. Now that I’m on the other end of it, it’s a different matter, of course. And Emily was reminding me that the Buddhist teachings start with the practice of generosity. If you look at the 10 perfections, the 10 Paramis, which are these 10 things we’re cultivating on the path, the first one is generosity.
So it’s sort of foundational. And it’s foundational to this project as well. We’re doing this out of the generosity of our own hearts. We’re organizing this and having these conversations and wanting to talk about things that are not super comfortable sometimes, or popular. And we’re putting a lot on the line to do that. And we’re asking, for folks that find this valuable, to meet us there, and to see generosity as a mutual process. And so, with that in mind, I just wanted to highlight that there are really two ways, in terms of financial support, that you could consider supporting us today.
One is by supporting this project directly, the Insight Diaspora, which runs through the Buddhist Geeks organization, which is an educational nonprofit. There’s a link in the chat if you wanted to become a supporting member of this project; you could do that. That money goes directly to supporting our guests. We donate to our guests to support their livelihood, and it supports us as organizers as well. And then I also wanted to highlight this organization that Daniel’s associated with. Each of these meetings, we want to highlight good organizations that are doing good work in the world. And so I wanted to mention the Soulforce Project, which promotes social justice using music and the arts. And I thought maybe, Daniel, if you could say something about this, because I know they’re your friends. Maybe what the Soulforce Project is about.
Daniel Klein: Well, one of the ways that I describe them is that they’re doing the work that we’re doing, but they’re operating at the level of arts and culture. So how do we promote deep transformational work in the field of liberation and collective liberation by bringing together world-class musicians to facilitate these experiences? Run by an amazing, amazing sitar player—
Vince Horn: Hmm.
Daniel Klein: —who I’ve done a couple events with actually in my own home. So he’s a dear friend.
Vince Horn: Okay. And is this a California-based organization as well?
Daniel Klein: Yeah, Altadena.
Vince Horn: Okay. Great. Awesome. And just for context, you’re based in southern California, I believe?
Daniel Klein: Yes. Yeah, Los Angeles.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Sorry to hear that. Having lived in Los Angeles. No, it’s a beautiful place.
Daniel Klein: I’m in my little bubble. I very rarely leave my living room, and it’s very beautiful up here in Topanga.
Vince Horn: Okay. Oh, yeah, you really are. Topanga is a bubble. So yeah, that’s the way to do it if you’re going to live in LA. Good. Well, again, Daniel, thank you so much for being here. This is such a delight to talk to you again.
Daniel Klein: Thank you all.
Vince Horn: Yeah. So I wanted to start with a quote, if that’s cool with you, Daniel, and just have you, I guess, riff on it or respond. This is the main thing that came to my mind when inquiring about the question of the cost associated with not speaking up, or not saying something which is true. This comes from a book called Trauma and the Unbound Body, by Judith Blackstone. And she says, “Children may be faced with a terrible choice: truth or love. They can limit their own senses and intelligence and be cozily embraced by the family, or they can stick to their view of reality, shutting down their heart instead of their wits and enduring the family rejection.”
Daniel Klein: Hmm.
Vince Horn: Yeah, you can probably see why I brought this quote up.
Daniel Klein: Yeah. Very, very powerful. Very powerful indeed, because I think that it’s really in childhood that we first incur this trauma of: there is a cost associated with speaking the truth. And from my own experience as a child, that’s where my own personal self split. The authentic self, and then all of the walls and masks that I needed to perform and to put up in order to be accepted by my family — and this goes deep into our deepest abandonment and rejection wounds.
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Daniel Klein: And in many ways it’s these small things, obviously, that start in childhood that then scale to mass atrocities. And I always say that, “Genocide starts at the dinner table, not in the halls of politics.”
Vince Horn: That’s a powerful statement. I’ve heard you say that before, actually. Yeah. How did you experience that, growing up in the West Bank? Because we talked about last time how you kind of made a break from the society and culture that you were in, in a certain way. But what happened prior to that? How was that at the dinner table?
Daniel Klein: Yeah. It’s really interesting, because this process of telling the truth is a very long process. Because very often we think things, and we already have this inner clarity, but then to get to the point where you reckon with these truths publicly, there’s this in-between stage, and that’s the stage of the silence where the real suffering is happening, where you’ve had this internal shift, but you are completely misaligned on the outside. And so when it comes to genocide at the dinner table, that’s the stage where people around you could start saying really shocking things. I recall a specific conversation where a close and immediate family member was laughing at the starvation in Gaza, and there was a news headline that said that a turtle had washed up on shore. And this immediate family member said, “I thought they’re starving, they can eat the turtle.” And that’s just really the kind of joke, the kind of comment that somebody can drop. And when you’re in this in-between stage, there’s this nodding along that you have — “Hmm. Hmm. Okay.” — because you can’t really speak about it. And that’s where you’re already caught in this trap and in this cycle.
Vince Horn: Yes. I’m super familiar with that. As you know, now living in the US, for the last decade or so the political polarization has been super high, and it affects these kind of dinner table relationships, where people seem like they suddenly became aware, “Oh, some of my family members are saying really awful stuff about immigrants or about people.” It’s not that they hadn’t been saying those things before. People become more bold and are willing to speak up and start to push back against stuff. But then that seems like it can lead very quickly to just the whole family system falling apart, or relationships getting strained because people start arguing about ideology. Does that make sense? It seems like there’s extremes there, like just being totally quiet, or just fighting with everyone.
Daniel Klein: Yeah, and ultimately it’s all relational. The way I see everything is relational. And so there’s no doubt that when you introduce truth into a relationship that was built fundamentally on the performance or the preservation of untruth, when you introduce that into the family system, there is an inherent collapse that happens. And even though you might see the fracture, it’s actually just revealing that it was fractured all along, and you’ve just been playing along in this fractured system. And when we were thinking about the cost of truth, I was thinking into it in my own life that the cost of truth is the cost of silence. They’re two sides of the same coin. The only difference is that the cost of truth is the cost of silence paid with interest. And so the moment you choose the path of silence, or not speaking truth, that’s the moment where the conversation should have happened, the intervention should have happened, and you chose not to, and that’s where the fracture starts, and that’s where the debt starts accumulating, to the moment you choose to tell the truth. But it’s still the same reckoning. The question is, are you going to deal with it now, or are you going to push it off to a future event?
Vince Horn: Right, where it’s probably going to be worse, because there’s now going to be, like you said, compound resentment that has to be aired as part of the conversation as well.
Daniel Klein: Which is what the family system has really always been built on. But again, that family system comes back to the individual who’s been experiencing and carrying this and playing along with the system, because each side is playing a game here — the side that needs you to perform, and you performing.
Vince Horn: I have a sense that you and I were probably different kinds of children, because I sort of fell on the side of truth over love in my family system, where I was just sort of perpetually saying things that were bothering people, fighting with my mom, pointing out her hypocrisies. Choosing in every single instance to side with the truth over with people finding me easy and enjoyable to be around. I’d choose abrasiveness. I’ve since thought that’s probably in part a function of growing up in a Palestinian-American family. There’s a lot of untruth being spoken, and there’s a lot that just by virtue of that family system you kind of don’t say. And so I think in some ways that was my unconscious reaction to the system. It’s like, okay, I’m just going to err on the side of always speaking up and speaking the truth. But it does lead to a lot more conflict.
Daniel Klein: Did you feel that you had the safety to do that, or what was the consequence?
Vince Horn: Sort of, yeah. I didn’t feel like I was going to necessarily be booted out of the family system, because there’s a lot of people in my family like that. There’s a lot of truth tellers. But there was always some concern that it could potentially break relationships in a way that weren’t fixable. That never happened, fortunately. Our family was able to repair through those ruptures. But yeah, that was the main concern, that I would alienate people.
Daniel Klein: Yeah, and I feel that I come in many ways from the opposite system, which is that there was not only a severe cost to speaking the truth ... Well, it wasn’t only a hindsight thing. I was told growing up what the consequences would be for crossing certain lines and certain truths. So I actually knew that the cost of speaking would be completely blowing up the whole system and all of the relationships, and suffering excommunication, disinheritance—
Vince Horn: That was explicit?
Daniel Klein: —those are the things ... that was explicit, absolutely. I knew what I was getting into. And actually from September 2023 until I started speaking publicly, when I’d initially left Israel at the time, I remember explicitly saying to myself, “Let me just get out of here. I’m going to go find a quiet, peaceful life in Costa Rica.” I had no plan whatsoever about actually speaking about any of it publicly, because I was still trapped within the mechanisms of control within the family and within the broader system, which are deeply, deeply connected, so that you need to pay an exit tax — a social exit tax, a relational exit tax, a financial exit tax, and a safety exit tax. And all of these costs are accumulating, and they’re actually baked into the cost of silence, because the silence that you’re choosing in order to keep the peace — it’s a massive, massive trade-off.
Vince Horn: Right.
Daniel Klein: What am I actually trading off in order to not rock the boat?
Vince Horn: Yes.
Daniel Klein: And if it’s safety, if it’s sovereignty, if it’s the actual externalized cost at a societal level, that could be the Palestinians as a people.
Vince Horn: Right.
Daniel Klein: But on the relational level, we’re always paying the price of preserving this illusion of silence. And within family systems and within broader systems, this is part of how it keeps people in line and in control, especially in the in-between phase, where they’re actually sitting with the suffering. Which also only comes with awareness too, right? If you’re not aware, you could just continue to perpetuate it. The pain starts when the awareness starts, and now you become aware of all of the pain that you’ve been deferring in order to not rock the boat.
Vince Horn: Yeah, which is built up. It’s interesting, you’re using a lot of accounting metaphors here — which I find interesting — and it has me also connecting the whole economic theory with what we’re talking about, where, in modern economic theory, you have externalities. Things that are happening as a result of whatever you’re doing in your economic system that you don’t see. They could be positive things, but oftentimes they’re negative, right? So it’s like, I bought these pens, they got shipped across the country, and I don’t see all the carbon impact that that has, and being able to get my nice fine point pens that I really like. And so it’s easier to pay the cost if it’s not visible. I’m wondering how that connects with what you’re sharing here, because it seems like there’s so much that’s externalized in that kind of system, like the trade-off gets externalized onto the person, onto the individuals, often.
Daniel Klein: Yeah, which I think is the essence of the colonial mindset and the colonial framework: externalization and othering. And it’s built on the denial of the people who benefit from the system. Because if they were to actually look at what keeps the gears of the system turning, they wouldn’t be able to live with it. And so part of what they need to keep in the silence is this aspect of denial. And silence and denial, I think, come hand in hand, right? We need to be in denial of the immediate reality in order to be able to accept the benefits of the situation.
Vince Horn: Hmm. Yeah. Wow. I’m thinking here of John Vervaeke’s work on the meaning crisis, and how he points out that it’s the same machinery that allows wisdom to occur is exactly the same machinery that allows delusion to function. To be able to hone in on something that you think is salient and then just sort of ignore everything else, for instance. You do that when you’re waking up and you’re letting go of distractions, but you can also do that when you’re just avoiding and ignoring things that are inconvenient to your situation. That capacity can be used for both of those things.
Daniel Klein: And it’s just being in denial of immediate realities, and that’s the essence of delusion, and the source of everything that we’re contributing to without actually looking at it or facing it and confronting it. And that’s where truth comes in. We have to be honest about what is actually happening in reality right now.
Vince Horn: Yeah, thanks.
Daniel Klein: And you had mentioned how using the language of the ledger — for me, this is also where the aspect of karma comes in, right? The ledger here is an immediate feedback loop. As much as we can be in denial of what it is that we’re not saying and what we’re not being honest about, that turns just into an absolute immediate feedback loop with what we’re experiencing in reality, because once you create that inner fracture, your embodiment and your nervous system and all of your programming is now starting to run things based on this untruth, and the consequences of that are impossible to avoid. They start being reflected back to us immediately.
Vince Horn: Yeah, so it’s like a karma that’s not necessarily — it’s a this-life kind of karmic pattern that you’re describing, like a social dynamic.
Daniel Klein: Yeah. That’s what’s being reflected back at us, and it also accumulates with debt over time. The reflection that we see, based on the escalation of denial, escalates on the outside, too, and we can never truly avoid it. If we were honest with ourselves, we would know that there’s absolutely no way not only to avoid the consequence—
Vince Horn: Right.
Daniel Klein: —but to not experience how it affects us every single day with the inner pain that we’re carrying, because to avoid the truth requires a massive amount of energy. And I think we had also spoken about it. Not only does it require so much energy in order to create all of the different mechanisms — you need your alarm bells, you need your walls, you need all of these components that are trying to protect what it is that you know to be true, all of the performance — and all of that energy is wasted. And at a deeper level, I think that when you go deeper into the untruth, that also fractures our own energetic system. That’s where the huge energetic leak goes, and we can’t be whole or complete or aligned or grounded when we have all of our energy leaking out towards this alarm system.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. I wanted to mention too, I’ve been surprised exploring this topic and seeing the places where I’ve been silent, and then I’ve started speaking up, and then I’ve seen what the impact of that is. How frankly good people are at knowing when not to say something, even when it’s not explicit. Like you said, it was explicit in your family. But even when it’s implicit and you’re just picking up on vibes, or you’re just sensing something that could be an issue, I found that’s actually extraordinarily accurate, that sense. And when I’ve then chosen to speak up instead, it has really upset people in exactly the ways that I was sensing it might, but didn’t have any confirmation of. So I wonder, what is it in the human psyche that can attune so well to those relational realities? In a way it seems like a superpower, but we use it to also, again, avoid sometimes things that feel scary but are necessary.
Daniel Klein: Mm-hmm. So what I take from that is that there’s also an important idea, which is the shadow side of truth. Telling the truth is not always in alignment if it’s not serving the right purpose. For example, there’s a possibility where truth telling becomes a way for the ego to feel good about itself. And there are times where it’s necessary — or not even the ego, this could even happen on a chemical level. If I’m addicted to chaos, I might be telling truth at all the right times to all the wrong people, just to get a hit of cortisol and to create a dynamic that is actually wholly unaligned with truth. And so there is a discernment and an intuition of when is truth wise and when is truth serving, right? If our partner is completely dysregulated and we choose that time to share a very challenging truth for them to look at, or a blind spot that they have, that would be wholly unwise. Right? How do you know the right situation, the right people, the right nervous system, and also the ability to receive what it is that you’re saying? Because for many people, truth again just creates unhealthy dynamics. So it’s not to say that truth is always good, truth is always bad, silence is always good, silence is always bad, but rather each one of these things has its place, it has its light, and it has its shadow, and then we need to learn how to maneuver that game. Otherwise, you can get stuck in just rebellion cycles where you run around trying to convince everybody of everything all the time, and all you wind up doing is completely interfering with other people’s journeys too, and that has huge blowback as well.
Vince Horn: Yeah. Absolutely. Yes, and it can be true, but not appropriate, or well delivered, like you said, or timely. I think that was an early Buddhist teaching on wise speech: say things which are true and which are timely.
Daniel Klein: I forget the name of the movie. I think it’s with Ricky Gervais, where he’s the only person in the world that can lie. And so everybody in the world can only tell truth even when it’s not timely, and he develops a superpower to actually tell a lie. So the world in which everybody is telling the truth all the time and is not timely, it can be disastrous.
Vince Horn: Yes. Yes, indeed. I appreciate you bringing that part in — that one can be on the right side of an issue, morally, and still be communicating in a way that’s primarily about them, rather than about the issue. It’s primarily about me getting my needs met, or feeling insecure, or whatever it is. That’s a good, important point.
Daniel Klein: And playing with that. And first of all, having self-compassion, because I guess we always do this all the time, right? And just becoming also aware of how do I de-center myself, right? When do I need to put on the coat of the ego, and when do I need to take it off, in the context of telling the truth?
Vince Horn: Yeah. I’m curious about your thoughts on security, because I feel like so much of what drives people to stay silent — and I could see this for myself too — is that I mainly am not speaking up because I don’t want to introduce something that could make the situation more insecure. Usually this is especially true when livelihood’s involved. For me, it’s like being a teacher inside of a lineage tradition, and speaking up about this when the lineage won’t, I know that’s going to have an impact on my livelihood, a negative one probably. And—
Daniel Klein: Maybe.
Vince Horn: —yeah. It has so far. And so that’s a reality. And so I think there’s some amount of just pragmatism here of, okay, how much truth can be received while still being able to maintain enough relative security that I’m not sacrificing myself, if that’s not the aim here. It doesn’t seem necessary. Maybe sometimes it is necessary to sacrifice yourself for the greater good. I don’t want to exclude that possibility. But let’s say you’re not trying to sacrifice yourself, or you don’t think that’s necessary. You want to do this for the long haul. Okay. Where are the lines at times with how much we say? Because there’s a pragmatic reality here, I think, that gets lost in the idealism of activism, where it’s like, oh, actually, no, you can in some context choose to hold back. I recently did a coaching training program, and I didn’t lead with my Palestinian identity. I didn’t lead with the things that we’re talking about here. I waited until I knew who was in the room, and who was present, and then I spoke with people privately. And I had that sense, if I do this publicly, this could be not good. And it was connected to my livelihood, and I think back and I’m like, “Yeah, that was totally appropriate.” Given that context, given what I was there to do, I’m glad that I handled it that way and didn’t just come in guns a-blazing. So, curious your thoughts on the practical reality of dancing with this — the cost of silence.
Daniel Klein: So you’d mentioned earlier this idea that these systems are connected to the economic systems as well.
Vince Horn: Yes.
Daniel Klein: And it’s interesting because the economic matrix that we live in is also fundamentally built on fear-based systems. And we all live in realities, in one way or another, that if we’re not doing the right thing in the eyes of the system, we might get booted out, in which case I’m not going to have a roof over my head. What about healthcare, right? And so the same system actually is built on fear. And so I would actually challenge you in thinking about what actually does happen if we go to the edge of that fear, because how can we extract ourselves from that strata of the economic analysis, if the silence is actually what’s keeping us trapped in the same system and is what is perpetuating it? So I actually think that the question of Palestine is a reflection for all of the different systems that we find ourselves a part of, and to start asking ourselves the really challenging questions of, what does it take to actually extract ourselves from these different layers of suffering that are rooted in fear-based systems? How do we break that? How do we break it spiritually? How do we break it materially? Because I think that very often, whenever we get to a point where we’re afraid that being in deeper alignment is going to cost us economically, that creates the very conditions for us to actually not be aligned in the right work to receive the things that we might be able to receive if we were honest. And I actually think that there’s an exploration here, because as these systems kind of start their process of collapsing, they need to expose everyone to their deepest fears. Because if we each don’t individually confront these fears, the system is never going to end. And as we move through the era, it’s going to require us to do that. So for me, once I became aware of the exit taxes, I chose the path of going all in. I figured if I’m actually not free to be the person who holds these ideas or these opinions, maybe it’s not a room I should be in. And what I’ve been experiencing is that that’s what starts to open up these kinds of spaces and these kinds of connections with people who are willing to open up new fields of possibility. But it requires walking to the edge and not knowing what’s going to catch you on the other side.
Vince Horn: True.
Daniel Klein: And this could be a multi-year or multi-lifetime journey to learn how do we actually find that safety within. And I guess a lot of it does in fact tie into faith. But how do we find that safety within in order to start breaking these systems from the inside out?
Vince Horn: Yeah. There’s the safety within, and then I would add there’s the safety that comes from your mutual aid, from people around you, your community, et cetera. I was thinking about this. I saw a YouTube clip many years ago from this Rasta elder who was living this very radical life in Jamaica, and he was growing all his own food, et cetera. And he made this point that stuck with me. He said, “You cannot criticize people and still depend on them for help.”
And I thought that’s interesting. I don’t know if I completely agree with that sentiment, but there’s something really to it, where it seems like in order to be critical and to point out the problems of a system that you are implicated in, you have to have some fallbacks, in terms of mutual aid or support. And here the early Buddhist tradition has a lot to offer. It’s like, well, if all you need is a bowl and a robe, then you don’t need much from people, so you can say whatever the hell you want. You may not be living a lush, comfortable life—
Daniel Klein: Which is fair. It’s easy to read about those stories, but it’s a lot harder to put out a bowl.
Vince Horn: Right. Yeah, for sure. Yes.


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In “Dharma & Empire,” Mary Thanissara and Vince Fakhoury Horn trace how the structures of Empire occupy not just land but the psyche—moving from their own Irish, Palestinian, and colonial family histories to Gaza, climate, and class—and ask what a more revolutionary Dharma might require of practitioners right now.
💬 Transcript
Vince Horn: So Thanissara, thank you again. Great to be here with you.
Thanissara: Likewise, likewise. Really, really thrilled to plunge into this Insight Diaspora. That was a brilliant capturing of our wandering, homeless group.
Vince Horn: Yes, indeed. I was curious too. I know you started off in the Ajahn Chah tradition — in the Thai Forest Tradition — as a nun in the ‘70s, and I think you were a nun for like 12 years, when I was reading. So that’s a long time.
Thanissara: Yeah.
Vince Horn: Do you consider yourself part of the insight meditation tradition, or were you coming up at the same time that that whole thing was coming up?
Thanissara: I’ve never really designated a category for myself, other than a Dharma practitioner in quite a broad sense. And having said that, most of the development of my practice has been guided through, first of all, the U Ba Khin lineage, which was transmitted to Goenkaji — those teachers were my first teachers from Burma, Myanmar. And then through Ajahn Chah, and that was a very pivotal formation of my practice, because I was young and very shaped by that lineage and the premise that they were teaching from. And then since leaving the robes, I’ve almost entirely taught and practiced within the lay insight world. That’s been a constant adaptation and inquiry, and not a particularly easeful landing. Well, none of it’s been an easeful landing, because it’s all in transition and having to be translated on so many levels. So I guess there’s no end to that in the Dharma.
Vince Horn: That really fits with how I’ve interpreted your work from afar for many years. I’ve always heard you and Kittisaro’s name mentioned together, and I’ve heard about the work you’ve been doing in South Africa and other places with activism. It has always felt like it’s been a little bit on the emerging edge of the insight tradition. You’re not quite inside, but you’re not outside either. You’re influencing but not quite. You all seem to be strange attractors in this community. And I mean that in the best possible way.
Thanissara: No, it’s a good position to be in, I think, in terms of having space from having to conform, and also being able to help shift some of the parameters of what’s allowed to be discussed or what the Dharma is, from within. Also relationship to the folks that I’ve grown to know so well in that movement — having taught a lot or discussed things over many, many years. So there’s a relationship where both being in and out is an awkward reality.
Vince Horn: Yeah, and I can relate to that.
Thanissara: A sense of tension around that, and creativity maybe.
Vince Horn: Yeah, it’s like generative tension sometimes, and other times it’s just tension. That’s my experience anyway of what you’re describing.
Thanissara: Yeah, totally.
Vince Horn: So we spoke recently for the first time privately, and I think it was interesting to me that the first thing we got into was our family histories. It seemed like there’s no way to really avoid talking about that. Not that I want to at this point, but we both share ancestry from the UK, from Ireland, and I know your family moved at some point to London as well. You mentioned to me that your dad was in the military and that he was posted at some point in Palestine, I believe it was.
Thanissara: Yeah. Well, he was a teenage conscript. But he was trying to really escape the poverty that he grew up in, in the tenements of Dublin — which were quite infamous, and still somewhat, although they were closed down in the 1960s. And the oppression, I think, that he felt, even though Ireland was in a process of liberating itself post the 1916 uprising, and then the liberation that started about when he was born, really, 1925 or so. But it wasn’t very liberated for him. So it’s complex, and I think that’s one of the very interesting things about being both colonized, and yet shape-shifting to find a way out through becoming part of, at that time, the war effort of the Second World War. Which was a movement of idealism, but it was a movement of some feeling of needing to break set from not only the economic oppression, but the religious oppression that he grew up under. Of course, the Catholic Church was both extremely oppressive, and it was also the place that people went to for support, to find solace from this unrelenting violence and oppression that had gone on for so long in Ireland under the British. So in that process, he was posted to Palestine and around many places in the so-called Middle East. And I didn’t really know that until quite recently, actually. My elder brother is the holder of history, and somehow in discussion it came out that he was actually posted. And it was very meaningful for me. It’s like, oh my goodness, that he — and apparently one of the things he talked about that my brother remembered was the Irgun, the terrorism that was going on from the early Zionists that were settling. And of course they were also fighting the British as well, blowing up British posts and things. So that was obviously something that really went deep for him in his memory bank. But he never really talked much about any of that, as that generation didn’t.
Vince Horn: Right.
Thanissara: We have probably in common a lot of lost stories, as people shape-shift and assimilate. And there was also a lot of shame for the Irish fighting for the British, particularly in the Second World War. And it was hard to go home. There’s a lot written about that. They were displaced again in another sort of way, because at that point Ireland didn’t join the war effort — they didn’t want to align with the British. So it was a very complex political dynamic that was going on.
Vince Horn: Yeah, that is complex. And it shines a light on the contemporary situation where Ireland is one of the few countries, and their leaders are one of the few, that actually consistently speak up on behalf of Palestinian people. They can empathize with the situation.
Thanissara: Deeply, deeply. So much was shaped by so much bitterness. I mean, if you go to the west — where, when Kittisaro and I were first together, we stayed in County Mayo, which is on the far west coast of Ireland — they still talk about the great hunger as if it was yesterday.
Vince Horn: Wow.
Thanissara: You still see the little crofting houses that were the Black and Tans, who were very, very brutal. In fact, I think they were sent to Palestine after Ireland. You can still see where they pulled down the houses of people and threw them out as they were starving. And I still think — this is another issue — there was such a big silence about the shame of the deprivation of that. It’s only very, very recently that some of the most awful aspects of the impacts of that constructed famine or starvation, really a genocide by the British, are being discussed. While they were exporting food, and it was very, very desperate, and in the workhouses. And then part of the silence was — I remember when Frank McCourt came out with the book Angela’s Ashes, which was a while ago, but it was portraying this period of history in Ireland, the same time when my father grew up, of this extreme poverty and the struggle. And the whole of my Irish family were very upset by this, because they felt ashamed. They were like, “No, it was like —” But in fact, that portrayed some of the conditions that they were struggling with as well in the tenements. So all of these add to the complexity of lost stories, broken lineages. It’s how empire really shapes identity — not just the occupation of land, but the occupation of psyches. And how that takes up real estate in the imaginal levels of people understanding themselves, and how it shapes language and accents and lost histories, and coming to England, having to change the accent, having to pretend to be — It’s such a different — it’s like oil and water, these two cultures of Ireland and especially southern England, where he was. So in the 1950s, where things were very rigid still, late ‘40s, 1950s, when he got married, and then as post-war happened, people had families very quickly. There was no birth control, but also there was a deep reaction to all the horrors and death that was going on.
Vince Horn: In terms of the story level, the way that I connect with what you’re sharing from my own background is — I’ve often thought recently that it was probably my grandmother’s experience of being — her father was Irish, from Northern Ireland, and immigrated to Canada, I think, in the late 1800s. And then my grandfather is Palestinian. I often think it’s her Irish background and his Palestinian background that allowed them to form a mixed-race couple in a time period where it literally had just become legalized, a year before or something, and it was still frowned upon culturally. What actually brought them together — it seems like they had some kind of trauma bond there. They probably weren’t conscious of that, but I can sort of see the complexity of what you’re describing there, where it’s not something you could see on just the surface of things. You’d have to understand some of the history to get what connects people.
Thanissara: Totally. I think the trauma is such a splitting that you’re sort of like lost beings finding each other in this space. Perhaps you don’t consciously understand exactly. It’s a dynamic of consequence. It’s the consequences of what’s gone before, but you haven’t yet got the story or the history, or it hasn’t landed in narrative to help us understand why people get drawn, and then what we’re living through. And I think that’s where the Dharma really is the break point. It starts to give choice in not having to just repeat the trauma pattern, or being that disassociated split where empire leaves people, but begins to help — in some ways ironically, I know we’re going beyond individualism to collective — but there is an individuated journey out of the historic pattern. That is part of what helps us then to start seeing that patterning in the collective, which is a sort of movement of compassion. We’re reactive, but underneath we’re all working as a result of consequence of things said way before our understanding of them, really.
Vince Horn: It feels like there’s some good news in what you just shared around individuation. It seems to mean we’re collecting some agency in the process. We’re not just at the whims of conditions, but we have some influence, even if it’s small.
Thanissara: Exactly. I think that was a big thing for me to realize — this space between reactivity and response. I know it’s an old hat and slightly tired languaging. But it was a very important insight for me when I first began to — a moment. In a monastic life, you’re pushed into a corner, where it activates your deepest patternings. And Ajahn Chah would have this: when you can’t go up or down, you can’t move, then the practice begins. Because you have to find a whole other place from, you know, fight, flight, freeze, fawn, all these patternings. And for me, that was a process of such intensity and such a strong container. In some way I would relate that to the larger dismemberment that we’re going through now, and intensity, in the collective global sphere. We’re reacting from all these old patterns and traumas, and none of them are really where we need to go. So there’s a pressure, like in a monastery, where at some point you have to make a shift from the old patterning to an agency, as you said. That’s the word. Self-reflective agency and choice. And that is the break point, I think. That is the point where we have that almost evolutionary space we can move into. So the intensity then serves some sort of purpose. Not that — if it’s just unconsciously inflicted, then that’s not kind. But in a way, it’s a choice that we’ve made, I guess. To put yourself in a practice situation or monastery, or to be conscious in the midst of what’s happening and not just hide, then you’re putting oneself in a great state of intensity. Without easy solutions. And so that builds and pushes, and something in us alchemically has to — like a diamond under pressure has to not crack, but somehow form that diamond mind. So that’s something I think is hopeful. But we don’t always know that’s happening until it’s sort of happened.
Vince Horn: Like, in the moment of being turned into a diamond, it’s not like, “Oh, I know what’s happening, and it feels great.”
Thanissara: No, it’s awful. How can I get out of it?
Vince Horn: Yes, how can I escape? It seems interesting, the description you’re sharing of being in a monastic environment where you don’t have anywhere to go. And I’m just thinking about my experience of the insight tradition, the modern tradition of going in and out of retreat. Having maybe a local community, maybe not. It doesn’t feel like that frame really can get me to be in the middle of it without having to leave. It doesn’t ask enough of me to do that. So I wonder, as modern practitioners, where we’ve sort of made individualism — at least in the US and most Western cultures — like we’ve made that the key thing, that whatever you choose to do is the most important thing. How do we square that with what’s needed right now, which doesn’t seem like it’s just to give people the choice to do whatever they feel like, which is usually just then picking the status quo.
Thanissara: Yeah, I think that’s a very deep question. I think in part that individuation is a deep reaction to feeling that there wasn’t any —
Vince Horn: Right.
Thanissara: which was true at a certain place, especially perhaps for first-generation practitioners coming out of the trauma of the wars, century war, brutal, and everything else that went on, civil rights, all of those things. And then into the mechanized world of the 1950s, where you’re a cog in this growing capitalist machine, and suddenly breaking out and having these insights that were transcendent, mostly through psychedelics or various means. But I feel the shadow side of that is — the thing I appreciate, to put it another way, is that there’s a depth that you can tap into with the monastic life. It had a lot of difficulties and faults and challenges in it, but mostly I think because it’s very patriarchal, and that’s complex in itself. But the great gift was having to learn a whole deeper level of resource than shifting the furniture around to have the space that you feel you’re comfortable in, or the language or the narrative. And so being unable to do that, there’s a very, very deep releasing. It’s like a death. It’s literally a training, and Dharma is really a willingness to die, in the best spiritual traditions that actually take on that space. And it’s complex, because there’s a lot of psychology that can happen in that moment that actually can break people down or can be abusive. I don’t want to make this super reductive, but fundamentally I think there’s a big piece that has sometimes gotten missed in this new Dharma —
Vince Horn: Right.
Thanissara: which is a surrender or humility, a hanging at the space that’s most difficult to hang, until something can open beyond the self really.
Vince Horn: So the benefit of being in a traditional culture or practice environment when you’re going through that is you don’t have a choice. But that’s also the downside. You don’t have any freedom, presumably, unless you want to be kicked out of the group.
Thanissara: Yeah. It has its downsides, because it becomes then just a one-gear strategy. You just let whatever it is let go. But then there’s also holding, picking up. And so we see that transplanted into the insight world when we meet something like Gaza. This isn’t about just letting go. It’s about discernment. It isn’t about everything’s equal and it’s suffering and it’s samsara. It’s saying we have responsibility and we have discernment, and this is horrific. And therefore we have, as the Buddha did himself, the agency to shift and challenge the status quo when harm is being done, and that is our responsibility. And I think that can so easily get erased with this passivity of the language of, you know, just let go and it’s just samsara. Which is true. I love this expression of Ajahn Chah: “True but not right. Right but not true.”
Vince Horn: Okay, that’s cool. I’ve never heard that line before. That’s a good one. I’ll be chewing on that. I’m curious too, Thanissara. I run into — around talking about things like Dharma and Empire — there’s a whole group of folks that I run into who are very well-educated. They’ve been on some kind of path of individuation. They’ve had some practice, but they just don’t see the argument that we are living in an empire, like the American empire, for instance. And it’s challenging sometimes to try to support people in seeing the ways in which our life is downstream of these other structures and histories. I’m wondering, how do you work with that when you’re teaching on these things? Do you run into that kind of resistance, of not being able or willing to see the interdependent nature of things?
Thanissara: Well, yeah, of course. I mean, it’s not that I’ve been thinking this all the way along or had the language for it all the way along. You feel the impacts, and sometimes it takes a long time to build the narrative.
Vince Horn: Good point.
Thanissara: But I think that part of the complexity is Buddhism has historically always, in terms of a power system — whether it’s a monarchy or the state — it’s always been in some, even the Buddha himself, in some level of alliance with that power, the political or military power, to survive. So it’s left it in a very — it’s not a straight-out liberationally revolutionary movement, say, as you might see some more left-wing liberation theologies coming out of South America, or the civil rights. You can call on that, that the Christ was a liberatory revolutionary in many ways. The Buddha was too, but he also aligned, came from power. And so there is this historic thread of the Dharma. And often it’s not just about finances, but it is. But it’s about placement and acceptance in the culture. And so you see a lot of — it’s like I thought with the mindfulness movement, as it started to sometimes be reduced to: how do you make it in the capitalist system without challenging the system itself.
Vince Horn: Right.
Thanissara: And there’s still a lot of that. And really, for me, the thing that really blew open the languaging around empire was Gaza. Because Gaza revealed everything. It revealed the absolute craven moral bankruptcy of all of these myths of the US, of even Israel — the most moral army, and the forever victim. They’re all part of the logic of empire. They’re all part of the narrative of empire. So I think we’re in this incredible moment where the veils just keep being pulled away. And so we’re screaming about someone like Trump, who of course — everything that’s going on is dreadful, but we’re just seeing what it’s always been, in a way.
Vince Horn: Yeah. That became very clear to me, that Trump is in some sense like US foreign policy for the last several decades come home to roost. This is how we’ve been. And you’d only know that if you know people that are negatively impacted, or you’ve studied the history.
Thanissara: Right.
Vince Horn: And that’s not many people.
Thanissara: Studied the history. No, that is actually a problem. The sort of dumbing down. But, you know, if you take that logic, then at some point when you see where empire is taking us — into normalizing genocide, normalizing a culture of —
Vince Horn: Ecocide.
Thanissara: Well, ecocide and mass extinction, and replacement with AI robotics. I know this is a very complex subject, but not really. The human — and life itself, nature, the erasure, the ICE, the violence, the domination, all of this, fascism. If you see all of that, of where the last gasp of this system is, then what’s the Dharma for at this point?
Vince Horn: Yeah.
Thanissara: You know, this isn’t —
Vince Horn: To keep a smile plastered on our face while everything goes down, I think.
Thanissara: Right. While everything goes — well, but the thing is, it’s getting more and more impactful for everyone. I’m sitting here literally sweating buckets, because this is our new climate. You think we’re going to survive this if a few more degrees, more continuum — it becomes really hard. So we’re all in this stew, even those that think that they can build their bunkers.
Vince Horn: Literally or metaphorically, yeah. I think the way I’m relating to what you’re sharing is, I’m looking at this from the internal journey process view of — oh, I’ve actually worked with this conditioning that you’re describing. I know it firsthand. I know the logic of turning toward the imperial status quo, because it’s safe. There’s a sense of being able to be protected. For me, having come up in a family where some of my family members were obviously not safe, and they were being actively persecuted, especially after 9/11, being safe made a lot of sense. Trying to stay safe, not sticking out. I understand that logic. There’s the survival logic there. And part of the reason I was able to do that is because I could pass as being part of the dominant culture. People look at me and they don’t see a Palestinian, so I can — unless they’re Arab, and then they do see. But there’s that sense of, what is the wisdom of hiding? It makes sense on a personal level, like your dad trying to get out of the tenements, trying to find some better situation, not knowing that the better situation for him is still causing suffering for others, perhaps.
Thanissara: Right. He became co-opted in the empire. And as working class, poor people, indigenous-line worlds have consistently been fighting for the British, as you’ve read at the table. I mean, there are levels of privilege that I think you have more responsibility — in a culture where for some it is more dangerous to stand out. Maybe they’re brave to do it, but they’ve been more historically targeted. So I think there is a personal reckoning. I feel that very much of the work in South Africa for nearly three decades post-apartheid. And it was very conscious for me — I didn’t want to take payment. I felt it was a deep act of reparation, actually, to have been gifted pretty much pristine white land, to get it to a place where it could be returned to a young, diverse group that could run the center. Or to help start projects that can help women in rural areas, deep rural African areas, become trainers and supporters in their own community when they were impacted by the AIDS pandemic. So I just felt historic responsibility. It’s not that I’m consciously going, I’m doing this because of that, but it’s there. It’s wedded in, as a white person having had a lot of privileges.
Vince Horn: Right. I think that’s the hard part for so many people — acknowledging not just that I have privileges, but that those privileges came at the cost of so many others and their opportunities. Being able to open to that truth, and the shame that comes with that, and the guilt that can be present. It’s like, oh, that’s overwhelming. I don’t want to go there. I’ll just watch some more Netflix or whatever. Maybe my meditation retreat will help.
Thanissara: Well, I don’t think we have to flagellate ourselves. But for me — it’s not that I didn’t feel a lot of white guilt. It was a very sort of shadow there, moving through the post-apartheid world of South Africa. And in many other situations. But it’s like a karmic reckoning. It’s just a measured contemplation for me of, what’s the deep karma here that I’m responding to? It’s not necessarily personal. It may be ancestral. I don’t even know who did what, but it’s just come to me on my plate. And it’s personal and beyond. Palestine, when I heard about my father, connected a lot of dots for me. It would anyway, because it’s just so unjust, so profoundly horrific, what’s been happening — not just in Gaza, but for so long. But it was connecting to say, oh, there is karma. That’s pretty close. I think it’s just the way the Buddhist worldview has integrated into my understanding over a long period of time.
Vince Horn: And that’s a distinctly different view than I sometimes hear from the more — I guess I’d call it the more neoliberal Buddhist spaces, where there’s a lot of focus on social issues and social justice. And Mushim, who’s also here, we’re going to talk about this in a few weeks more directly. It does seem to sidestep the whole issue of class, which is so much at the core of what empire is. It’s like some people are benefiting from these mechanisms, and that benefit is going up to the top of a very small class of folks, and that seems to be how the capitalist empire of America works — it’s built on top of the bone-breaking work of so many people who then feel ashamed, like it’s their fault that they’re not doing better. Which is the kind of twisted logic that keeps that going.
Thanissara: Yeah, no, it’s very — it’s brutal in the US, actually. This feels to me like there are very few safety nets or softening. And there’s deep resentment that the working class have been so shafted. With all of their jobs being sent overseas, and the complete collapse of worth and placement. And I think particularly for men, this has been very — in those traditional spaces — it’s given rise to a lot of toxic masculinity. And all of it has been driven by this brutal capitalist profit machinery, to the point where this billionaire class are extremely dangerous to humanity. They’re extremely dangerous. With the wipe of a pen — I was just reading from The Lancet that Musk’s closing down of all of that American aid that was going — we used it a lot, PEPFAR funding for the AIDS pandemic, the medical. It was very important for a lot of the projects. And people die. They’re saying a huge amount of people, 40 million or something, are going to die, as one billionaire just goes, “Ugh, we just get rid of this.” No collective consideration, no sense of that karma. What do we owe? What does he, as a white South African, owe? And his father extracted the mines. So all of this is lacking wisdom, lacking depth, lacking consideration. And it isn’t necessarily the case that — I mean, we have that billionaire class, but in the UK system of the upper classes, they were also brutalized in some ways. And I’m not feeling particularly sorry, but the boarding school systems — they’re emotionally, deliberately, emotionally stunted, so they could go out and perpetuate this cold empire. And do the business without feeling it very much. So there’s a lot of damage on that level. And you see it in the elite class, the political class of Britain. You see a lot of this emotional stunting. They can’t relate, they can’t feel, and they’re dangerous. So I think all of these things — and everyone is subject to suffering, wherever they are. But unless we understand the internal causes of that, then there’s always a sense we’re compensated by material gain. This is one of the fundamental illusions that we’re under in this capitalist system. So all of this I really think we should be talking about in the Dharma scene, and with a more revolutionary spirit. Because it’s not just going to be a change of policy here and there. There’s such a deep level of systemic shift that has to — and psychological, and of consciousness, underwritten by an understanding of: we’re all in one entangled reality. So it’s a job, I think, of Dharma folks to help narrate that, and help bridge and find ways through, and help illuminate the task at hand, at depth, not just at policy level.
Vince Horn: Thank you. Thanks for that lion’s roar. Thanissara, is this a good time to open it up for other folks’ comments, questions? We’ve got about 12 minutes here. If there’s anything else you want to share before we do that.
Thanissara: No, no. I don’t think I should, sorry. I’ve been on my high horse.
Vince Horn: Well, you know, the lion’s roar — maybe there’s a high horse that the lion sits on sometimes. But I hear a lot of wisdom in what you just shared, and I appreciate it.
Join Us Live Next Week:
If telling the truth can cost everything, what does our silence cost? Vince Fakhoury Horn and Daniel Klein speak about complicity, self-betrayal, and the quiet we mistake for peace.



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