Zen in Ten: "Love & Justice Are Not Two"

The Wisdom of Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Sensei, author, and activist

Rev. angel Kyodo williams is an author, award-winning activist, international speaker, Master Trainer, and Zen priest. She has been bridging the worlds of personal transformation and justice since the publication of her critically acclaimed book, Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living With Fearlessness and Grace. Her book was hailed as “an act of love” by Pulitzer Prize winner Alice Walker and “a classic” by Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. In 2016, Rev. angel published her second book titled, Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation. Rev. angel is the second black woman recognized as a teacher in her Zen lineage.

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1. “Radical Dharma is insurgence rooted in love, and all that love of self and others implies. It takes self-liberation to its necessary end by moving beyond personal transformation to transcend dominant social norms and deliver us into collective freedom.”

2. “My formal Zen practice and training were teaching me to find a more restful place that I could abide in within myself despite the chaos and calamity that living in an unjust society meant we were constantly surrounded by it. It also gave me a way to be in response to sometimes overwhelming situations that could just lead me to downward spiral of anger and negativity. I didn’t know a lot, but I knew that I didn’t want to live a life driven by anger and rage.”

3. “In the teachings of the Dharma, the first teaching is that life is suffering. It’s not a thought, it’s not an idea, it’s not something that you should take as you go off onto the second Noble Truth—it’s teaching. It’s something that you actually have to come to know. And if you don’t know, know intimately that ‘life is suffering,’ then you cannot know what it means to seek liberation.”

4. “May all beings be granted with the strength, determination and wisdom to extinguish anger and reject violence as a way.”

5. “The great fraud of the construct of whiteness is that it has coerced and convinced most white folks to no longer see their own oppression: by men over women, by straights over LGBT, by hetero fathers over their sons in arbitrating their masculinity, by capitalist values of personal acquisition over the personal freedom of one’s soul. White folks have been duped to trade their humanity for their privilege. The most insidious lie is that racism is a Black problem or colored folks problem. White folks wake up: not only oppressed people are complicit in oppression. It’s your problem too.”

6. “Much of what is being taught is the acceptance of a ‘kinder, gentler suffering’ that does not question the unwholesome roots of systemic suffering and the structures that hold it in place. What is required is a new Dharma, a radical Dharma that deconstructs rather than amplifies the systems of suffering, that starves rather than fertilizes the soil of the conditions that the deep roots of societal suffering grow in.”

7. “One of the extraordinary things about liberation is that you do not feel the need to control things when you’re free because the illusory nature of control becomes clear to you.”

8. “The notion of transforming society from the inside out is something that is challenging for people to understand. Understanding that part of our capacity to make change outside in a way that’s actually generative comes from having done work inside so we can actually have empowerment that doesn’t have to do with external conditions.”

9. “Without inner change, there can be no outer change, without collective change, no change matters.”

10. “Love and justice are not two.”

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Most of the quotes above are from Rev. angel’s book Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love and Liberation.