The Way of Tenderness
Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
“What does liberation mean when I have incarnated in a particular body, with a particular shape, color, and sex?”
In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege.
Manuel brings her own experiences as a bisexual black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us.
This is a book that will teach us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Buddhism, the concept of emptiness suggests that enlightenment allows the practitioners to transcend the shackles of the body: if one can train the mind, the body will necessarily follow. Manuel, a black lesbian, offers an alternative interpretation: "Enlightenment... emerges through bodies." Manuel argues that the lived experience of the oppressed, disadvantaged body necessarily changes the spiritual experience. To supersede the body is to ignore the contexts in which moods such as rage, anger, or disappointment (which may be tied to race, sexuality, gender, class, etc.) exist. Ultimately, the belief that enlightenment liberates the practitioner from the body is a deluded whitewashing of the experience of the oppressed. Rather than nonidentity (the significance of which is often inferred from Buddhist concepts of emptiness and impermanence), Manuel asserts the relevance of embodied identity in the face of oppression and hatred. It is by recognizing distinct accounts of life and acknowledging the tenderness that comes from not only compassion and love but also from pain and suffering that the body becomes "the location of awakened experience." Manuel's teaching is a thought-provoking, much-needed addition to contemporary Buddhist literature.
