Editing Radical Buddhism in the West (section)

== Black Radical Buddhism ==

A distinct and increasingly influential current of Western radical Buddhism has developed from the encounter between Buddhism and the Black radical tradition in the United States. Black Buddhist practitioners have often confronted a double marginalization, situated within predominantly white convert Buddhist institutions while also experiencing the effects of racism, mass incarceration, and other structures of racial domination in wider American society; for some thinkers within this current, these experiences have produced a form of Buddhist social thought in which individual liberation cannot be separated from struggles against racism and other forms of collective suffering.<ref>Vesely-Flad, Rima (2022). ''Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition: The Practice of Stillness in the Movement for Liberation''. New York: New York University Press, introduction.</ref>

The clearest expression of this current is ''Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation'' (2016) by Rev. angel Kyodo williams, Lama Rod Owens, and Jasmine Syedullah.<ref>Williams, Rev. angel Kyodo, Owens, Lama Rod, & Syedullah, Jasmine (2016). ''Radical Dharma: Talking Race, Love, and Liberation''. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, chap. 1.</ref> Rather than treating racism simply as an external problem to which Buddhists should respond compassionately, the book examines how racism and unequal relations of power are reproduced within Buddhist communities themselves, and calls for a form of Dharma that transforms rather than merely diversifies existing institutions.<ref>Williams, Owens, & Syedullah (2016), ''Radical Dharma'', chap. 3.</ref> williams had already developed an explicitly Black Buddhist perspective in ''Being Black: Zen and the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace'' (2000); Owens, trained in the Kagyu Tibetan tradition, connects spiritual practice with trauma, power, and queer liberation; and Syedullah, a political theorist working on abolition and Black feminism, brings an explicitly institutional analysis of domination into dialogue with Buddhist philosophy. The book's use of "radical" to mean a willingness to address the roots of social suffering, rather than simply an unusually intense form of practice, makes it a particularly clear contemporary illustration of the distinction between engaged and radical Buddhism used throughout this article.

The scholarly literature on this current remains limited but has grown significantly with Rima Vesely-Flad's ''Black Buddhists and the Black Radical Tradition'' (2022), which situates Black Buddhist practice explicitly within the historical Black radical tradition rather than treating it as one instance of engaged Buddhism among others, and which draws attention to the further intersection of this current with questions of gender and sexuality.