May We Gather

Last month, I attended May We Gather, a national Buddhist memorial ceremony for Asian American Ancestors, held in Antioch, California. Birthed from conversations between Duncan Ryūken Williams, Funie Hsu, and Chenxing Han, the first ceremony was held on May 4, 2021, 49 days after the racially motivated Atlanta shootings on March 16, 2021.

We all come from ancestral lineages with elaborate rituals around death. Every culture has a way of preparing the body for death and ensuring that the deceased becomes a healthy ancestor— is welcomed into the next realm. In some Buddhist traditions, the 7 weeks following death is a special time, including prayer, making offerings to the deceased, chanting liturgies, practicing generosity, and a number of other practices. In modern American culture, we have lost many of these ideas, which makes us a country of hungry ghosts — cut off from ancestry, haunted by a lack of meaning while living, and haunted by the dead who have not fulfilled their purpose. (But we have Netflix, Amazon, TikTok and Doritos!)

I attended the ceremony with a few Buddhist friends and despite the seriousness of the event, laughed so much together journeying there and back. We heard from a variety of female-bodied practitioners, from Reverend Grace Song, who talked about a former courtesan turned practitioner who helped to fund Won Buddhism in early times), to Sujatha Baliga, who blew our minds with her powerful voice and heart aching honesty and fierceness. I was touched by the chanting in Pali, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Lao— the shining faces of the monastics and the familiar cadences reminding me of the months I spent living in a Taiwanese monastery.  My friend Sasanna Yee, whose grandmother Yik Oi Huang died from injuries sustained from a hate crime in San Francisco in 2020, participated in the ceremony.

“I haven’t seen our diversity as Asian Diaspora represented spiritually in one ceremony,” exclaimed a Filipina American friend who practices in the Zen tradition. Taiwanese American qigong teacher Sally Chang nodded hello as giants of American Buddhism such as Chinese American Larry Yang, one of the founders of the East Bay Meditation Center strolled by. Another friend of mixed Chinese American ancestry and I remarked on the low number of people in attendance, a sign of how little Asian women (and their deaths) are valued in American culture, even among avid Buddhist, marital arts, or taichi/qigong practitioners.

We stepped outside to witness a Daoist healing ceremony conducted by Master E-Man and Sumo Liu and I found tears streaming down my cheeks, feeling the power of turning to ancestral ways for healing modern pain.

In all, May We Gather was a meditation on life and death…on the rituals that connect the dead and the living…the human and the non-human realms. I was alternately bored, overwhelmed, joyful, exhausted, awed, and impatient.

This meditation on death— on the little deaths that occur daily that prepare us for the big death— has been a steady part of my life. I am in a study group on the book Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, which posits that modernity (the world as we know it), is unending linear progress within a closed system (the earth). We are conditioned so deeply to relate to the earth (including our bodies) with domination and control. There is a strong possibility that human beings will become extinct in the not too distant future— which was destined from the moment that man decided to wage war on nature. The road to extinction is sure to be chaotic and ugly.

The month before May We Gather, I enrolled in a three week course with Anuttara Lakshmin Nath, a powerful Vajayrana Buddhist teacher, called Nourishing Your Ground. As a result of those teachings, I have been spending significantly more of my time listening and being. We all descend from indigenous peoples who spent vast swatches of the day observing nature, remembering that we are earth— made of the same elements, our lives inextricably linked. Meditation, prayer, silence, qigong, yoga, chanting, Buddhist and Taoist teachings, being in nature, and reorienting myself towards relationship and receiving has brought me home to myself in a profound way. I remember that this body is my home for this lifetime. And from this place of peace and belonging, more connection is possible with my community, family, and clients.

When I kneel at my altar and listen, it is clear that chaos is coming— in the form of civil unrest, climate collapse, illness and death of proportions unknown to me and those around me. Like racism and hate crimes, these truths are overwhelming to face— it is natural to feel terror, panic, hopelessness, and rage. And I find that facing the truth allows a level of clarity and wisdom that strengthens my life. We have the honor of choosing how we live and die, this moment, this day, and over lifetime(s). What do you long to align your heart with?

*Collage of Yik Oi Huang by Rosanna Chang