Liberating Buddhist Chaplaincy: From Neoliberal, Mindful Whiteness to Diaspora Buddhist Spiritual Care
Matthew Zheng, Harvard Divinity School, Cambridge, MA
Interest, practice, and scholarship of Buddhist chaplaincy has been growing steadily in recent decades. However, little attention has been paid to the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism, white supremacy, and anti-Asian racialization which are inextricable from the arrival of Buddhism to Euroamerica, as well as its extractions into neoliberal commodities like mindfulness.
In this paper, I formulate and advocate for a liberation approach to and through Buddhist chaplaincy. Rather than practicing race blind (and thus racist) notions of Buddhism which problematically focus on narrow, limited views of Buddhism as only sitting, silent meditation, I conceptualize of a Buddhist chaplaincy based on the full diversity and resources of the global Buddhist migrant diaspora. Such a framework builds on my recent research that has coined 'diaspora Buddhism', a future-oriented recategorization of Buddhism as best defined by its diasporicity (rather than any particular philosophy, practice, bodily technology, etc.).
A diaspora Buddhist chaplaincy attends to the sociopolitical realities of the vast majority of Buddhist care seekers in Euroamerica and beyond, whose lives have all been touched by the structured experiences of violence, racism, migration, and beyond. These Asian Buddhists are too often invisibilized and cast out from popular, scholarly, and clinical notions of who 'counts' as a Buddhist, and are thus wildly underserved in terms of spiritual care and chaplaincy.
Building on my own immersive experiences in Clinical Pastoral Education in a major downtown Boston Level I trauma hospital, I point out that endemic assumptions about 'Buddhist chaplaincy' really serve to reproduce and reify latent white supremacy through self-affirming a 'Protestant Buddhism', a term coined by the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere to describe the white-majority forms of Buddhism which seem much more similar to Protestant Christian ideals, values, and practices than historical, textual, or otherwise social Buddhism in Asia.
The paper ends with a set of tangible recommendations for chaplains and chaplain educators, focusing on developing education protocols which ought to be standardized and required of all Buddhist chaplains as much as is institutionally possible. While these recommendations do focus on Clinical Pastoral Education as a primary site of organized clinical standards, they are intended to reach far beyond the ACPE's auspices and into the broader industry of Buddhist chaplaincy.
In this paper, I formulate and advocate for a liberation approach to and through Buddhist chaplaincy. Rather than practicing race blind (and thus racist) notions of Buddhism which problematically focus on narrow, limited views of Buddhism as only sitting, silent meditation, I conceptualize of a Buddhist chaplaincy based on the full diversity and resources of the global Buddhist migrant diaspora. Such a framework builds on my recent research that has coined 'diaspora Buddhism', a future-oriented recategorization of Buddhism as best defined by its diasporicity (rather than any particular philosophy, practice, bodily technology, etc.).
A diaspora Buddhist chaplaincy attends to the sociopolitical realities of the vast majority of Buddhist care seekers in Euroamerica and beyond, whose lives have all been touched by the structured experiences of violence, racism, migration, and beyond. These Asian Buddhists are too often invisibilized and cast out from popular, scholarly, and clinical notions of who 'counts' as a Buddhist, and are thus wildly underserved in terms of spiritual care and chaplaincy.
Building on my own immersive experiences in Clinical Pastoral Education in a major downtown Boston Level I trauma hospital, I point out that endemic assumptions about 'Buddhist chaplaincy' really serve to reproduce and reify latent white supremacy through self-affirming a 'Protestant Buddhism', a term coined by the anthropologist Gananath Obeyesekere to describe the white-majority forms of Buddhism which seem much more similar to Protestant Christian ideals, values, and practices than historical, textual, or otherwise social Buddhism in Asia.
The paper ends with a set of tangible recommendations for chaplains and chaplain educators, focusing on developing education protocols which ought to be standardized and required of all Buddhist chaplains as much as is institutionally possible. While these recommendations do focus on Clinical Pastoral Education as a primary site of organized clinical standards, they are intended to reach far beyond the ACPE's auspices and into the broader industry of Buddhist chaplaincy.