Of the many social media tributes to Thich Nhat Hanh since his recent passing, one image in particular stood out to me. Taken at the Sweet Potato Community in 1976 by the recently departed author and peace activist Jim Forest, the picture of the Buddhist monk as a young man caught me off guard. It wasn’t just because he was dressed in lay clothes or because his head was uncharacteristically full of hair.
Thich Nhat Hanh looked like someone who could have been the father or brother of one of my many Vietnamese American classmates growing up in Orange County, California—home to one of the largest Vietnamese communities outside of Vietnam. More significantly, he could have been the young Vietnamese American Buddhist man who was brutally murdered by a white supremacist on my high school’s tennis courts during my sophomore year.
While as a society we might celebrate Thich Nhat Hanh, many remain deeply suspicious of Asians residing within our own nation who share his Buddhist faith.
While as a society we might celebrate Thich Nhat Hanh and aspects of his teaching, such as mindfulness, many remain deeply suspicious of Asians residing within our own nation who share his Buddhist faith.
As an Asian American Buddhist who researches American Buddhism, race, and mindfulness in education, I know that the outpouring of appreciation for Thich Nhat Hanh has been qualitatively different from the disregard often shown to Buddhists of Asian descent across the United States.
Ironically, the popularization of mindfulness, a Buddhist practice often attributed to Thich Nhat Hanh—who is celebrated as the “father of mindfulness”—reveals the continued reality of a combined anti-Asian sentiment in the United States.
Though mindfulness is a growing phenomenon in the United States, especially in public schools where its uptake has increased during the upheaval of the pandemic, its success has depended in large part on the downplaying of its association with Buddhism. To sell “The Mindful Revolution,” as Time magazine labeled it, to mainstream U.S. audiences, it has been packaged by U.S. proponents as a secular technique.
As Ohio Congressmen and mindfulness advocate Tim Ryan has written, practicing mindfulness “does not require giving up religious faith, or adopting a ‘foreign’ faith.” Ryan’s rhetoric here demonstrates the lingering perception that, for many non-Asians, Buddhism—and Asian religions in general—are mysterious, “other,” and most of all, un-American.
Such anti-Asian sentiments harken back to the experiences of the early Chinese immigrants who first brought Buddhist practices to America and were labeled a racial and religious “peril” to the nation.
Deemed heathens, they were marginalized from society as “aliens ineligible for citizenship.” Fear of Chinese religious difference peppered Congressional debates around the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which expanded citizenship and voting rights following the Civil War.
Elected officials in Western states, such as California Representative William Higby, were concerned that advancing citizenship for Black Americans would open the gates for a Chinese racial and religious incursion. The Chinese are nothing but “a pagan race,” Higby warned. “You cannot make good citizens of them.”
Echoing the past, Representative Ryan’s assertion that mindfulness is not religious underscores a social climate that still sees Asian Americans and Buddhism as a foreign threat. Moreover, the fear of a Buddhist mindfulness is often tied to a panic about covert conversion into a supposedly superstitious, idol-worshiping Asian religion.
In many ways, it parallels the misgivings about yoga instruction by evangelical Christians. Last year, for example, Alabama lifted a thirty-year ban on yoga in public schools but forbade the use of the common South Asian greeting namaste and included an amendment banning “meditation, or any aspect of eastern philosophy and religious training.” Fearing Hinduism, conservative Christian groups in Alabama had wanted to maintain the ban.
The banning of namaste and discussions of “eastern philosophy” demonstrates how the legal framework of religious protections can serve as a cover for racist sentiments. In the aftermath of First Amendment-based challenges to yoga instruction in schools, many mindfulness programs similarly encourage instructors to refrain from using non-English words and referencing Asian religions.
The racialized suspicion of Buddhism is also echoed in Jon Kabat-Zinn’s explanation of his development of Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction, or MBSR, one of the most well-known mainstream mindfulness programs: “[F]rom the beginning of MBSR, I bent over backwards to find ways to speak about it that avoided as much as possible the risk of it being seen as Buddhist, ‘New Age,’ ‘Eastern Mysticism’ or just plain flakey. To my mind this was a constant and serious risk that would have undermined our attempts to present it as commonsensical, evidence-based, and ordinary, and ultimately a legitimate element of mainstream medical care.”
They call attention to the Buddhist foundations of mindfulness as a sort of invitation for others of all faiths or no faith to participate.
Kabat-Zinn’s explanation demonstrates how the ongoing racial and religious stigmatization of Buddhism as a “risk” is at the heart of transforming mindfulness for mainstream appeal and consumption. Though Kabat-Zinn has practiced with Buddhist teachers himself and his book, Full Catastrophe Living, includes a preface by Thich Nhat Hanh, his strategic erasure of Buddhism reinforces racial and religious stereotypes in order to appease a white-dominant social structure.
To be sure, Thich Nhat Hanh and his Plum Village tradition have also advocated for mindfulness in schools and have expressed the idea that mindfulness is non-religious. The difference, however, is that their discussion of mindfulness is not weighted down by a historical racialized fear of Asians and Buddhism. Rather, they call attention to the Buddhist foundations of mindfulness as a sort of invitation for others of all faiths or no faith to participate with mutual regard. In other words, Buddhism is not treated as a liability.
While a majority of mainstream mindfulness practitioners are likely well-intentioned and do not mean to cause harm, the racial suspicion of Asians, and Buddhism, embedded in many mainstream mindfulness programs has very real impacts. These attitudes reinforce longstanding sentiments of Asian American Buddhists as perpetual foreigners, leading many of us to internalize a racial-religious shame and to hide our faith.
This was my experience growing up and, as a former elementary school teacher, I worry about how young Asian American Buddhists are internalizing the popularization of a brand of mindfulness that treats Buddhism as a problem.
As I stare at the photo of a young smiling Thich Naht Hanh, I’m reminded of the six Vietnamese Buddhist temples that were vandalized in Orange County in November 2021—part of a slew of temple desecrations during the pandemic. One of the statues in the temples was spray painted with the word “Jesus”—a reminder that the present moment of mindfulness is also a historical one.
A reminder, too, that the ongoing history of Asian American Buddhist exclusion is also the ongoing history of our community’s persistent existence in this nation.