We often hear the fight for justice described as a “struggle.” But Dr. Kamilah Majied believes that this struggle can be and has been joyful. In her view, justice is inextricable from joy, and it involves accessing the inner joy that is available to us when we treat ourselves and others as enlightened beings.
Dr. Majied is a mental health therapist, clinical educator, and consultant on advancing equity and inclusion through contemplative practice. In her new book, Joyfully Just: Black Wisdom and Buddhist Insights for Liberated Living, she draws from Black cultural traditions and Nichiren Buddhism to lay out a path to justice that is grounded in courage, curiosity, and embodied joy.
In a recent episode of Tricycle Talks, Tricycle’s editor-in-chief, James Shaheen, sat down with Dr. Majied to discuss the parallels between Buddhism and Black wisdom traditions, why she believes joy is a mode of self-transcendence, and how we can learn to suffer without being insufferable.
Some of our listeners may not be familiar with Nichiren Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai. Could you tell us about the SGI? The SGI is an international organization based on the practice of Nichiren Buddhism, which comes from the Mahayana lineage of Buddhism. Nichiren Daishonin was a Japanese priest who studied all the works of Shakyamuni Buddha and recognized that the Lotus Sutra, one of the last sutras that the Buddha expounded, encapsulated a lot of his essential teachings. Nichiren proposed that chanting the title of the Lotus Sutra, which is Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, could be an invocation that would allow everyone to tap into their fundamental enlightenment and to realize the lived meaning of the Buddha’s teachings. That’s what Nichiren Buddhism is fundamentally about.
The Soka Gakkai was founded because Tsunesaburo Makiguchi, who was a philosopher and educator in Japan, was looking for a way to elevate the life state of people in Japan and in the world. He started studying Nichiren Buddhism and founded the Soka Gakkai, which means “value creation society.” Later, Josei Toda and Daisaku Ikeda expanded the Soka Gakkai to become the Soka Gakkai International, which now has twelve million members worldwide in 122 countries and territories.
You say that Nichiren Buddhists chant nam-mhyoho-renge-kyo. Can you have a quick translation of that chant? Absolutely, and I often say that trying to say what Nam-myoho-renge-kyo means is like trying to define love—we’d need all day! I feel like I’ve understood its true meaning more through practice, but here’s the literal translation of the words. Nam is generally translated as devotion or fusion, to completely connect. Myoho is translated to mean mystic law, and not mystic in the sense of magic but mystic in the sense of phenomena that transcend intellect or cannot be understood by intellect alone. Renge is translated to mean the lotus flower, and the lotus flower is significant in Buddhism because it flowers and seeds at the same time, symbolizing this simultaneity of cause and effect. The lotus also grows in the muddy swamp, symbolizing that we can manifest a beautiful life condition from the muddy struggles of life. And kyo is translated as sound, action, or vibration. Together, the phrase speaks to fusing our lives with this mystic law of cause and effect through sound, vibration, and action so that we unite our lives with this universal principle in a way that helps us to manifest our enlightenment.
When we chant Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, we’re saying, “I am myoho renge kyo. My life is myoho renge kyo.” In that way, we’re tapping into the power of the universe, this compassionate, essential aspect of all of life. We’re chanting to turn the muddy swamp of our own challenges and of the distress in our world into a flower of wisdom.
The Soka Gakkai’s membership is probably more reflective of the American demographic than any other Buddhist school. Why do you think this is so? From the very beginning, the Soka Gakkai has been about inclusion, and it’s based on the principle that all humans are fundamentally enlightened. Every living entity has an enlightened aspect. And so when folks experience rejection in other spiritual communities based on some aspect of their being—sexual orientation, ethnicity, or what’s called race—they often encounter the SGI as one of the first places where they’re not hearing, “You have to change some aspect of yourself to practice Buddhism here.”
One of the things that is compelling to me about Buddhism is that you can come as you are. Manifesting your enlightenment within your particular cultural heritage is proof of the validity of Buddhism. If only one ethnic heritage can benefit from Buddhism, then that’s saying that there’s a limitation to Buddhism. But the true proof of Buddhism is that people in Togo, Japan, Missouri, and New Jersey are all tapping into their enlightened nature and expressing it through their own cultural experience. And I think when people walk into SGI meetings and see different kinds of people sharing a practice and a vision of improving themselves and the world, it’s exciting.
Your new book is titled Joyfully Just. So what does it mean to be joyfully just? It means that we’re able to engage with ourselves and the world in a way that is fair and equitable and that honors our fundamental enlightenment. That’s a core principle of Buddhism: that we all possess this enlightened life condition and that we are just toward ourselves in honoring the Buddha within. What that means is releasing some of the negative self-talk and oppressive ideas that we’ve internalized about ourselves, as well as releasing oppressive ideas that we’ve internalized about other people. Buddhism articulates interdependence, so if we think that a particular group of people matters less, then we’re actually cutting off one of our own limbs and limiting an aspect of our own enlightenment. Being joyfully just means accessing the inner joy that is available to us when we treat ourselves as enlightened beings and strive to develop our own enlightenment as we strive to recognize and honor the enlightenment of everyone and everything around us.
You say the goal of the book is to reclaim joy by using meditative practice to be just toward ourselves and the world around us. So how do you view the relationship between joy and justice? Often, when people think about working for justice, they only focus on the part that is challenging or difficult. They often describe it as a struggle. It is a struggle—and it can be and has been a joyful struggle. In the book, I draw from both Buddhist traditions and Black wisdom traditions. African Americans have created wisdom traditions that are emulated the world over because they articulate the human experience, especially the experience of suffering, with joy. For example, the Blues originated from enslaved people singing in enslavement. That was a self-transcendent wisdom practice, and it remained so as African Americans moved through Jim Crow and continue to move through civil rights battles. It’s a deeply self-transcendent practice of hope in the midst of grief.
This is where I see a connection between Buddhism and Black wisdom traditions: Both help us to navigate suffering and injustice with joy and with equanimity. Sometimes people think that justice and joy are separate because working for justice is hard. But you have to do hard stuff to be joyful! That’s just a fact of life.
My mother once wrote, “The greatest impediment to happiness is lack of courage.” When we lack courage, we can’t have all the joy because we try to stay within our comfort zone and not do the things that scare us, like working for justice. We think, “I’ll just stay over here in my own little corner, and I’ll be safe.” But there’s no safety in that kind of hiding.
We’re chanting to turn the muddy swamp of our own challenges and of the distress in our world into a flower of wisdom.
Yeah, you refer to the joy of facing injustice, and you quote the Buddhist educator Daisaku Ikeda in saying that “Enlightenment comes from seeing the truth, no matter how unpleasant it may be.” So how can facing injustice actually be joyful or even liberatory? My doctoral research focused on looking at how racism and homophobia impact Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian people. One of the findings of that study was that people who were involved in advocating to end racism and homophobia were more joyful because they were reaching for this life force energy to transform reality as opposed to succumbing to it. It’s kind of a joyless life when you say, “That’s the world, life’s a [bitch], and then you die,” as opposed to saying “I’m alive, and with all the power and life force I have, I’m going to do things to make things better.” So it’s the joy of manifesting our own potential and committing to be just toward ourselves and to create justice in the world around us.
The data of my research showed that folks who are involved in resisting oppression tend to be more psychologically well, less depressed, and less anxious, because they recognize that they have an internal locus of control, which is what Buddhism helps us develop: “I’m not powerless. I can create change. I can change my own mind in terms of how I interpret my experience, and I can create change in the world to make it better.” That’s how it becomes joyful. We live in the world of possibilities when we work for justice.
You also explore how we can learn to suffer without being insufferable. So what does this look like, and how can it help us heal addictive or harmful behaviors? In the book, I quote one of my favorite books that I read when I was a little girl: Daddy Was a Number Runner by Louise Meriwether. One of the characters has a substance abuse problem and had been siphoning off money from the family pot. When the matriarch of the family finds a way to block his access to that money, he turns to her and screams, “What am I supposed to do?” And she replies, “Suffer! Suffer, like the rest of us!”
I think that we suffer more than we have to when we believe that we should not suffer. That is the first noble truth: There is suffering. There is a path to end suffering, but it’s not an avoidant, escapist path. We can turn toward the fact that we will suffer and that the path to end suffering is to release attachment and to create value out of the suffering, to be creative, and to access our enlightenment in the suffering. We can’t access our enlightenment by trying to escape.
Photo by Jeenah Moon
You also write about the power of levity and playfulness in the face of suffering and oppression. So what can we learn from lightening up?Now, when I say lightening up, I don’t mean not focusing on the challenges. I mean turning squarely toward them and deciding that the freedom and the joy is in facing them. The joy that I’m talking about in Joyfully Just is not pleasure. It’s the joy that you often have to weep through sorrow to get to. The joy we access is from deciding we can face this and realizing that we are together in our human condition. It’s the joy of recognizing interdependence because we realize that suffering is what connects us to all of humanity. When we turn toward one another’s suffering, we also experience the profound joy of our connection.
James Baldwin once said that you think your pain and your sorrow are unique and singular in the world, and then you read, and in reading, you realize that every pain you’ve ever suffered has been articulated or experienced by other human beings in some way. It’s in this deep connection where we are working to alleviate one another’s suffering that we actualize the joy of interdependence and the reality that we are fundamentally a part of one another. As Dr. King said, we are all tied together in a garment of destiny. With that understanding that we’re a part of this fabric, joy emerges even as we suffer. There are parts of the fabric that are fraying that we can reach for and hold, and there’s joy in that.
You also describe joy as a mode of self-transcendence. So how can joy help us transcend the bounds of the separate self and experience this sense of interdependence? By connecting with the suffering of others. That’s the shortest answer to that question. When I’m talking about joy, I’m not talking about any kind of spiritual bypassing. It’s the opposite of that, because that doesn’t lead to joy. It’s asking, “Who’s suffering? Who can I reach for?” Daisaku Ikeda and Rosa Parks had a dialogue where they talked about how when we’re so bogged down in our own personal struggle, it can be hard to wriggle out of it. Rosa Parks said something like, “If I find myself too focused on my own problems, I go out and do something to support someone else.” A lot of the time, this seems counterintuitive because we think, “I’ve got my own problems. I can’t go and support the unhoused people in my community or participate in an antiracism protest. I’ve got too much to do.” But the actual truth is that doing something to support someone else puts our problems in some perspective and in connection to all the other human challenges in the world, and we return to our personal challenges with a vigor and awareness of our connectedness in this human web of interbeing.
Yeah, service really changes everything. In the book, you quote the novelist Toni Morrison, who says, “I am suggesting that we pay as much attention to our nurturing sensibilities as to our ambition. You are moving in the direction of freedom, and the function of freedom is to free somebody else.” This feels like another iteration of the bodhisattva vow. Could you say more about how this quote has guided you in your own work of liberation? Dr. Morrison is one of my favorite authors, and her work is a deep wisdom transmission for all of humanity. In this quote she’s recognizing that service gives us a sense of self-transcendence because it frees us from the limited worldview where we are only seeing ourselves and our own problems in our own little corner of the muddy swamp. What Dr. Morrison is saying is that when we reach for others who are suffering, we disentangle ourselves from the paralysis of fear, from the paralysis of shame, from the paralysis of hopelessness. Hope is a practice. Ikeda Sensei often talked about hope as a decision. It’s not something that’s going to be bequeathed to us. If you don’t have it, go get some! We practice to arouse hope. It’s not going to come as a bestowal. It’s something that we have to create, especially in the most hopeless of times.
African American people and African heritage people throughout the diaspora are excellent models of this. If you study the wisdom of people who were enslaved themselves and who saw their grandparents and grandchildren enslaved, you see that hope was a decision that they made. And I think that’s what we can learn from studying the history and the wisdom transmissions of Black people and of Buddhism.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Visit tricycle.org/podcast for the full episode.
