Episode 9 - Brian Victoria: Zen At War

Brian Daizen Victoria is a native of Omaha, Nebraska and a 1961 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan University in Lincoln, Nebraska. He holds a M.A. in Buddhist Studies from Sōtō Zen sect-affiliated Komazawa University in Tokyo, and a Ph.D. from the Department of Religious Studies at Temple University.

From 2005 to 2013 Brian was a professor of Japanese Studies and director of the AEA “Japan and Its Buddhist Traditions Program” at Antioch University in Yellow Springs, OH. Currently he is a Visiting Research Fellow at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan where he is writing a book tentatively entitled: Zen Terrorism in 1930s Japan. Brian is a fully ordained Buddhist priest in the Sōtō Zen sect.

In this episode Brian Victoria, author of Zen at War, discusses how Buddhism, and Japanese Zen in particular, have a long history of violence. From Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II to Corporate Zen training of "industrial warriors," Brian Victoria expounds on the dangers and risks of religion when it serves the powers of nationalism and the state.

For additional articles on Buddhism and violence and critiques of Zen, click here.

Episode 8 - Ruth Whippman - America The Anxious

Ruth Whippman is an author, journalist and documentary film-maker from London, living in the USA.

 Ruth’s humorous essays and comment pieces have appeared in The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Guardian, The Independent, The Huffington Post, Glamour Magazine and The Pool among other places.  She is a regular contributor to Time.com and a blogger for the Huffington Post.

She is the author of America the Anxious, How Our Pursuit of Happiness is Creating a Nation of Nervous Wrecks (St Martin’s/ Macmillan, out 4th October 2016).

Before becoming a full time writer, Ruth was a producer and director at the BBC making numerous documentaries and current affairs shows for BBC television.

In this interview, we explore what Ruth learned about the multi-billion dollar happiness and positive psychology industry, noting the numerous similarities and parallels to the hype, hyper-individualism and emotional isolationism of the mindfulness movement. She debunks the myth that our happiness is merely a choice, where the primacy of individual effort is all that is standing in our way. Ruth tells of her journalistic investigations into American's obsession with the pursuit of happiness. While Americans spend the most money on seeking their bliss--whether it be self-help, mindfulness, positive psychology--Americans are one of the least happy countries in the world. Her encounters with corporate gurus and academics, her visit to Zappos and Wisdom 2.0, are funny and humorous. But her critique is dead serious: our social life is in crisis, yet public policy is moving in the direction of marketing interventions which ignore and deny structural obstacles to happiness.

Episode 7: Barry Magid - What's Wrong With Mindfulness

Barry Magid, MD, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He received Dharma Transmission from Charlotte Joko Beck in 1998 and has been teaching Zen at the Ordinary Mind Zendo for the past twenty years.

In addition to co-editing “What’s Wrong with Mindfulness (And What’s Not) with Bob Rosenbaum, he is the author of three books integrating Zen and psychoanalytic theory and practice: "Ordinary Mind"; "Ending the Pursuit of Happiness", and "Nothing is Hidden” all published by Wisdom Publications. He has also edited (with Hugh Witemeyer) a volume of the correspondence of poets William Carlos Williams and Charles Tomlinson, as well as "Father Louie: Photographs of Thomas Merton by Ralph Eugene Meatyard,"  and “Freud’s Case Studies: Self Psychological Perspectives.” 

In this interview, Barry shares his concerns when mindfulness is reduced to a self-improvement technique within a Western consumerist culture. He discusses "The Three Shaky Pillars of Western Buddhism" in terms of deracination, secularization and instrumentalization. This "practice-as-gain" approach epitomizes the McMindfulness trend, which poses a risk and danger of obscuring the fundamental nature of Buddhism itself.

Episode 6 - Katie Loncke - Confrontational Compassion

Katie Loncke is a Co-Director of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF), combining dharma with social justice. She connects with others similarly fixated on the paradox: how to love and accept the world as it is, while fighting like hell to change it. Nationwide she speaks, facilitates, and trains groups on combining Buddhist ethics with concrete skills for nonviolent direct action. Her writing has appeared in digital and print publications — most recently, she authored the chapter on race and racism in A Thousand Hands: A Guidebook to Caring for Your Buddhist Community (2016, Sumeru Press), edited by Nathan Jishin Michon and Daniel Clarkson Fisher.                   

Katie loves lemons, cats, warm nights, Black Power, clean water, and the Temptations. 

In this interview, Katie Loncke begins by sharing her personal journey of how she came to be both a Buddhist and activist for social justice. As a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor from the most infamous Nazi concentration camps, and her grandmother a descendant of Afro-Caribbeans who survived the Middle Passage, Katie’s activist roots go deep. Her mother--an attorney for Planned Parenthood in Sacramento; her father--one of the first black students to attend Yale and become a state judge. From her education at Harvard University to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Katie offers a wealth of insights forged from being on the front lines of socially engaged Buddhism.

We explore how organizing for direct action can be conjoined with Buddhist ethical principles to wage “confrontational compassion” in the face of racism, inequality, militarism, oppression and environmental destruction. We learn how the Buddhist Peace Fellowship has been on the forefront of social and environmentally engaged Buddhism, straddling a dynamic tension between meditative equipoise and fearless action.

Katie reflects on her article in Turning Wheel Media,  When MLK, Jr. Rejected an “Obnoxious Peace” explaining why peace must always entail justice. Katie reflects on her experiences in leading, organizing and participating in direct actions, sit-ins, and non-violent civil disobedience. From blockading the Oakland Marriott Hotel, which hosted Urban Shield (a weapons expo and militarized training site for police), to taking to the streets to confront fracking and environmental racism, to joining the indigenous tribes and Water Is Life Protectors at Standing Rock Sioux Reservation—Katie shares her insights and principles of how dharma can be combined with direct action.

Music credit: Background Chanting, Neuromancer.

Episode 5 - Funie Hsu - Mindfulness And Racial Invisibility

Funie Hsu, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of American Studies at San Jose State University. She received her Doctorate in Education from the University of California, Berkeley with a Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender and Sexuality and served as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Davis in the School of Education. Prior to entering graduate school, Dr. Hsu was a public school teacher in Los Angeles. Her research and teaching interests include education policy, comparative and international studies, history of education, language instruction, ethnic studies, American studies, race, gender, decolonial liberation, Taiwan, women’s studies, and critical animal studies. Dr. Hsu serves on the Executive Board of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF).

Dr. Hsu’s recent article, “We’ve Been Here All Along” recently appeared in the Buddhist publication Lion’s Roar, and was reprinted in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s Turning Wheel Media. Her article touched a nerve, triggering the predictable sort of white fragility reactions from a number of readers. The editor responded and published a commentary by the Ven. Ajahn Amaro. Her chapter, “What Is the Sound of One Invisible Hand Clapping? Neoliberalism, the Invisibility of Asian and Asian American Buddhists, and Secular Mindfulness in Education” was published in the Handbook of Mindfulness: Culture, Context and Social Engagement, edited by Ronald Purser, David Forbes & Adam Burke.

She is a frequent contributor to BPF’s Turning Wheel Media. Some of her blog posts include “Legacies of Collective Delusion: Causes of ‘Youth Violence’”, “A Wake Up Call: The Suffering of Systemic Violence in Student Lives,” “The Heart of Mindfulness: A Response to the New York Times.”

In this interview, Funie Hsu provides a very personal account of why she became increasingly critical of the mindfulness movement, particularly given her Asian heritage. She explains why it’s time we recognize the contributions of Asian American Buddhists by taking notice of the racism and cultural appropriation that has marginalized their voices.  Funie retells a seminal story of the role Rev. Ryo Imamura played in the transmission of Buddhism to the West in the midst of white intolerance and bigotry. We explore how the mindfulness movement has suffered from an unacknowledged white cultural conceit, which often denigrates the contributions of ethnic Asian Buddhists as nothing but a form of “baggage Buddhism.” Likewise, we examine how secular mindfulness in schools is informed by an ideology of white supremacy, along with how such programs are situated within the nexus of neoliberalism and unconscious racism. Funie draws our attention to “structural delusion”, a phenomena inhibiting mindful inquiry and deeper conversations that examine the causes of poverty, oppression and racism. Based on her experience as a social activist and involvement in the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Funie offers us hope and guidance as to how we can incorporate the fight against systemic oppression and pursuit of social justice as part of our Buddhist practice.  

Episode 4: Will Davies - The Happiness Industry

Will Davies, Ph.D., is a sociologist and political economist and a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London and also Co-Director of the Political Economy Research Centre.

Dr. Davies is author of two books, The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty and the Logic of Competition (Sage, 2014) andThe Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing (Verso, 2015).

His blog posts have previously featured inThe New York Times, BBC Online, The Daily Beast and elsewhere.

In this interview, we explore wide-ranging questions as to why corporations have suddenly become interested in measuring and quantifying the well-being and happiness of their employees. Will Davies explains the phenomena of psychological collapse, and how neoliberalism has given rise to the psychosomatic worker. Likewise, we probe the links between the neoliberal ideology driving the quest for employee well-being and social harmony, manifesting recently in corporate mindfulness programs. From Frederick Taylor to Elton Mayo to Hans Seyle, Will Davies articulates the common philosophical thread of utilitarianism underlying these various schemes, which all have relied on messianic messages and charismatic authority characteristic of management gurus. We explore the explosion of surveillance technologies, wearable monitoring gadgets, and data analytics–which are increasingly employed in the service of “well-being optimization.” Finally, we discuss the purpose and value social critique in a world fraught with economic inequalities, social suffering and concentration of global elite power.

Episode 3: C.W. Huntington

The Triumph of Narcissism: Theravada Buddhist Meditation in the Marketplace

Sandy Huntington translates and interprets Sanskrit and Tibetan Buddhist texts. He is Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Hartwick College and author of Maya: A Novel, and The Emptiness of Emptiness: An Introduction to Early Indian Madhyamaka, as well as a number of scholarly articles on Buddhist doctrine and practice. Sandy is particularly interested in exploring new avenues for the translation of ideas and practices of Asian Buddhism into a modern Western idiom. In this episode, we explore his recent article, “The Triumph of Narcissism: Theravada Buddhist Meditation in the Marketplace,” which was published in theJournal of the American Academy of Religion, September 2015.

Episode 2: Manu Bazzano “Buddhism and the Counter-Tradition

Manu Bazzano is a licensed person-centered and existential psychotherapist in London. He studied Zen within the White Plum Asangha (an international community founded by Zen Master Taizan Maezumi) between 1996 and 2006 and was ordained as a Zen monk in 2004. He trained in Person-Centered counseling and psychotherapy and studied Alfred Adler’s Individual Psychology. He is the editor of After Mindfulness (2014, Palgrave), and co-editor (with Julie Webb) of Therapy and the Counter-Tradition; author of the Buddha is Dead: Nietzsche and the Dawn of European Zen (2006, Sussex); Spectre of the Stranger (Sussex);  and numerous academic articles on mindfulness including “In Praise of Stress Induction.” An international lecturer and workshop facilitator, Manu has presented his work in a wide variety of settings, integrating Zen practice with contemporary psychotherapy and the world of ethics, culture, and the arts. His forthcoming book is, Zen and Therapy (Routledge).

Episode 1: The Mindful Cranks Trailer

A new trailer featuring a number of our distinguished guests!