The Fire Inside

Vince Fakhoury Horn speakswith Rima Vesely-Flad about The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde—the silence she found in her own Buddhist community when she began writing about Palestine, Baldwin and Lorde's distinction between hatred that corrodes and rage that comes from the examined life, and the question they keep returning to: how to feel it all without causing more harm.

Vince Horn: So, Rima, great to see you.

I’ve been really loving getting to know you as a person and also your work. I’ve been reading your book. Unfortunately, I also spilled water on my copy, so it is a little... If you see me struggling to flip through the pages, that’s ‘cause we had a bit of an accident here. But I’ve really enjoyed reading your work. Can’t wait to get into it with you. Thank you so much for your time.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Thank you, Vince. It’s been great to get to know you, too. We’re so close. Amazing. Amazing.

Vince Horn: Yes, and it’s amazing as adults, we can carve out the time to hang out. So that’s sometimes the hardest part. I feel like being in middle age is, like, making time to spend with cool people, so appreciate your time.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Me too.

Vince Horn: So let’s talk about your new book. This is The Fire Inside: The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde. Of course, before reading this book, I was familiar with you and your work. But it really struck me that you were writing in this book, like from the very beginning, you’re writing about Palestine and Israel, which is not something I see many Buddhists really writing about or talking about in America.

So it stands out just the fact that you’re even talking about this subject. And then on top of that, you’re bringing to bear these beautiful Dharma teachings and wisdom teachings from the Black tradition of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, bringing them to bear on this topic in the first chapter of the book, which I thought was quite courageous.

And I really appreciate it, you know, as someone who has Palestinian family members and people in the West Bank I care about. So just on a personal level, really am grateful that you centered this in your writing. And I thought maybe we could start with that first chapter if you’re up for it.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Absolutely. It was actually the very last chapter I wrote. I wrote this book of course over several years, but as I was concluding in real time, the genocide was taking place, and I just found myself absolutely in a state of grief and rage and was really politically active around it in ways that I hadn’t been in quite some time.

Like feeling very pushed to speak out and to contact the Biden administration and representatives, people here in North Carolina who might or might not speak in Congress, and just found that I needed ways to speak out, and this is my community. The people who self-identify as Buddhist claim these traditions, these lineages, these practices, these schools of thought, and yet there was so much silence, and I felt really compelled to speak into that silence. And I know that’s something that you feel and understand in a deep way. And then also, I’m not by any stretch the first Black activist or academic or thought leader to make the connections between oppression of people of African descent whose ancestors were enslaved and people who are in a state of survival as their land is being taken in real time. So all of those connections were very present, and yet in the Buddhist world, there was so much silence, so much evasion or even erasure of what’s taking place. And it felt like it wasn’t separate from my practice, and I had to speak.

Even though at the time I hadn’t even visited the West Bank. I since have, but at the time I was thinking and writing and observing and feeling from afar.

Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. I didn’t realize you’d gone to the West Bank. Wow, we’ll have to talk about that sometime. Yeah, there’s early on in the book, there’s a quote here that’s really echoing what you just shared.

I thought I’d share this ‘cause it really moved me quite a bit. You said, “I, like many Black Americans, like Southwest Asian and North African Buddhists, observe that violent oppression of Palestinians can never bring safety and security to Jewish Israelis. And as a Buddhist practitioner, it’s important for me to speak out against the violence sanctioned by my government, my tax dollars.

The policies of the US government do not represent my commitments. I’m horrified by the massacres in Gaza day after day, by the constant terrorizing of Palestinians in the West Bank. I think daily of Baldwin’s words, ‘You don’t know what’s happening on the other side of the wall because you don’t want to know.’”

Rima Vesely-Flad: Wow. Even just hearing Baldwin’s words in that context again, it really brings me chills. And so prescient, right? So prescient in terms of just anticipating how much more extensive... At the time actually that Baldwin visited, there wasn’t a formal occupation, although there was theft of land. But this— that was 1961, and then the wall— right now the walls, the checkpoints, the just sheer magnitude of aggression and violence. Like Baldwin anticipated that, and then the myopia in Israel and in the United States.

Vince Horn: Yeah. I think at the same time though as I read through your writing on this, I was really also struck that you’re really trying to hold multiple realities here at once.

You know, both holding the suffering of the Palestinians and the apartheid state that you’re describing. At the same time, you have a lot of, as I do, Jewish friends and people that you care about who may not be able to hold that reality in the same way or who are struggling to in some cases. Who...

and you treat that with real compassion I think in your writing and in your words. As I try to, you know, my best. And it’s, of course, important to differentiate between Jewish identity and Israeli identity, which is often, you know, merged intentionally by the State of Israel.

And for many people it’s the way they’re inculturated. It seems like that was kind of an unconscious merger in a lot of folks’ identity. At least I’ve noticed that with close friends and even students in the last few years where we’ve had conversations around this. There’s been real tension.

And anyway, I appreciate that you’re holding it with compassion, both realities here, not trying to sort of demonize Israelis or Jewish people. And really being aware of the antisemitism that this whole issue is also bringing about. Or it’s... I’m not sure if it’s bringing about or giving excuse to people to be bigoted.

So I think it’s cool the way that you’re trying to weave those different things. And I guess I’m curious if you could say a bit about how you’re taking that approach or why that’s important to you.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yes. I start off the book talking about a relationship I had with a, I would say a mama bear, a mother figure who claimed herself, who self-identified as my godmother, and she was born in France to a very well-known filmmaker who had the opportunity for asylum in the United States, and he and his wife were granted this opportunity to flee, but were told they couldn’t take their daughter, who was my godmother Via–

Vince Horn: Wow.

Rima Vesely-Flad: –was sent to a convent in France. So a Jewish girl sent to a Catholic institution, and she was blamed for the war and has suffered horrific antisemitic abuse. And it scarred her indefinitely. When she came to the United States, she took off the first part of her name, just called herself Via.

She died of cancer many years later, and the wounds of that period were still quite evident at the time. I just remember, I have such extraordinary memories of her and what she suffered. And so part of my compassion and empathy, which is real, is that this nation state we call Israel was founded as ostensibly a refuge for people like Via and her parents.

And this is a nation state founded upon theft of land. And what it meant practically is that 750,000 Palestinians were driven from their ancestral lands, and they and their descendants still to date live in refugee camps, which I was able to visit when I went to the West Bank. These are no longer tents.

They’re now concrete buildings, but stacked very high, very crowded, very narrow passages for walking, no play space for children. One of the refugee camps I visited in Bethlehem has an entryway that consists of keys welded into an arc, and these are the keys for return. People still possess the keys to their homes they were driven from 75 years ago. So to recognize the terror that took place during the Holocaust in Europe, and then to recognize the consequent suffering that was inflicted upon Palestinians, I think is not simple. Yes, safety, but one thing Baldwin says that stays with me over and over is that Palestinians should not pay for the sins of Europeans.

Europeans committed the genocide, the Holocaust, and Palestinians should not have had to pay for that and should not have been driven from their lands to establish what is supposed to be a state of safety. And yet the atrocities being committed by this government and other governments, not saying that this very right-wing government is the only government that has committed atrocities against Palestinians. To say that this is a state of safety for people whose ancestors were exposed to the horrors of the Holocaust is, I think, to be very myopic, very limited. And part of what I’m trying to wrestle with is such deep confusion, like a deep state of confusion of how, if your ancestors have experienced the Holocaust, could you inflict this upon another peoples?

So that’s some of what I wrestle with in this first chapter is just like—

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —what? And I’m not the only one. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates starts off his book talking about the— the book is called The Message. And he starts off his book saying like, “I just don’t get it.” And I feel that too. I just don’t get it. But then also, I don’t understand this claim to sacred land, and that’s part of what’s happening with the atrocities in the West Bank in real time. And you know, all of us know it has escalated dramatically in the past few weeks.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Like even worse than when I was there. And when I was there, that’s when the farmers during harvest, the Palestinian farmers during the olive harvest were being terrorized.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Including many Jewish activists, similarly from the United States and from Israel were being terrorized, all of them. Everyone who was in the fields trying to harvest the olives.

Vince Horn: Right.

Rima Vesely-Flad: That was happening in October, but now it has escalated dramatically in a city called Nablus and its surrounds.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: I actually went to Nablus. That was one of the places we spent some time.

Vince Horn: Yeah. That’s where my cousin is based. So yes. Oh, yeah. And I’ve heard that as well from her. So that’s, in recent, like week or two, her house was broken into by the IDF and they destroyed one of the walls and were calling out for someone who they have no idea who it is.

Yeah. And just, you know, like that’s becoming more just kind of more standard. Like that’s just happening all over the place. Yeah.

Rima Vesely-Flad: It’s becoming normalized.

Vince Horn: Normalized, yeah, exactly.

Rima Vesely-Flad: That aggression. Yes, so much. And one of the things I just sat with when I went, you know, I was in Jerusalem initially.

There is coexistence. It’s, you know, people are not separate. They are coexisting in real time. And yet, when I went to the West Bank and, you know, it’s like I just don’t understand. Jewish refugees were given 51% of the land by initially Britain and the United Nations then in 1948, 1947, 1948.

Drove out Palestinians from their ancestral villages into refugee camps. Why do they want more? And one of the things I realized is that the West Bank consists or has many holy sites, both for Palestinians who practice Islam and for Jewish peoples who see these sites also as their holy sites. So I was based in a city called Al-Halil, and there’s a mosque there that’s called the Tomb of the Patriarchs, and that is one of the holy sites also for Jewish practitioners, people who are adherents.

They have built settlements on top of Palestinian buildings, especially in the old village. So I saw all of this actually arrive just as there was an incursion of young people from these settlements into the city of Al-Khalil, which is also called Hebron. In any case, that claim to holy space in the sense, the idea, the narrative that God gave it to a certain peoples who are chosen and therefore all of the land is theirs, something I don’t understand. And I have some real hatred— with regards to the atrocities taking place. And I feel that part of my practice is to really own that and feel that in my body, and then to work with it in such a way that it doesn’t come out and get directed towards people.

But I can feel that. And so part of what it means for me to claim these practices, like you, I’m in the Insight Diaspora, so we likely know many of the same practices. But part of it is working effectively with the body so much so that it’s not targeted, it doesn’t come out in random ways and cause further harm.

But it’s a hard practice, and some of what you see in that chapter or read is that muscle being flexed of like, how do I feel without it coming out in a way that causes harm? That is part of the wrestling. That is part of the practice.

Vince Horn: Yes. And it’s one that I noticed, like in my own training, I didn’t get a lot of tools for that in the insight tradition because hatred was sort of like something we’re trying to transcend or, you know, like notice and then counteract.

That was usually the frame around hatred. It wasn’t something like you can actually feel this anger and really feel rage. Like although sometimes people would, I think, give lip service to that, it never felt to me like a culture where people were actually doing that.

And so I was just sort of repressing all this rage and sort of like carrying on. And now I realize that the wisdom of what you’re saying is like, if you repressed all that rage it goes inward, it goes outward. It is not constructive. It’s not generative. It’s not healing. It’s just kind of like a time bomb ticking.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah I think that’s so wise. It causes anxiety and depression. It needs a place to land, and part of what I think we’re meant to do with this work is cultivate that place to land, but do it in a way that’s skillful so that we’re not creating more harm. And I don’t think that... is harmful, but I think it, when it’s not effectively worked with, it does come out sideways, and then it can inadvertently or maybe—

Vince Horn: Intentionally even.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —intentionally create that. But I think part of it also is recognizing it, giving it space to be named—

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —and legitimizing it. Like, it is a just rage. And hatred— actually Baldwin and Lorde both talk about hatred as corrosive. They talk about how it does actually impact us in ways that are not useful, and it does need to be worked with skillfully.

But rage, they both say, comes from the examined life. It comes from legitimate and clear observation of patterns of oppression taking place and experienced in real time. And so that’s energy that can be used, that can be directed in fruitful ways. And I think that distinction is really important, and it did inform my own experience of hatred.

Of like, “Oh, it’s here. How do I work with it in a way that doesn’t corrode my spirit or it doesn’t corrode relationships that matter to me?”

Vince Horn: Yeah. I love what you’re saying there. It seems like conflating hatred and rage would be one mistake there, to think like, “Oh, I shouldn’t be experiencing this anger or this rage because somehow it’s a sign that I’m, like, in this corrosive state of hatred.”

But like, oh, it’s real, and it’s arising in response to something real. Like, I had never seen this quote from James Baldwin about how being a Black American means living with rage all the time everywhere, and that hit me so hard. I’m like, yeah, that’s what it feels like as a Palestinian right now. I feel that and have always felt that.

I didn’t know that’s what I was feeling for so many decades. But now that it’s out in the open and it’s like, oh yeah, like it’s just this constant sense of rage at being constantly policed. You know, having your tone of voice policed, your words. Not being able to be a certain kind of emotive or, you know, loud.

Like, all these things that are culturally, like what I grew up with. This was like the way that our family was. Like, it’s not okay in this larger kind of white culture to display these kinds of things. And so you just like, you gotta tamp it down.

Rima Vesely-Flad: And, you know, Foucault would say we learn to police ourselves to discipline ourselves. And I think part of our work then, in terms of recovery, is to name the ways that we self-oppress.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: I would say that’s a huge, huge part of my practice, ongoing.

Vince Horn: Yes. That makes so much sense because it is, like you’re saying, it’s internalized.

Like, I— yeah, it’s like I only need to get a few social signals before I start to realize, ‘cause I’m a socially intelligent being, like we all are. Like, oh, like, this is not okay. And if I continue to do this, there’s gonna be kind of repercussions. And I think the bravery and the courage to do it anyway, and to deal with those repercussions, like, that seems to be where your work lives here, and it’s a hard place to live.

Rima Vesely-Flad: It is hard, yes. I mean, one of the things I also talk about in this book more broadly is that I grew up in a family where I wasn’t wanted. My birth was not welcome, and that was something I knew from a very early age. So I learned to adapt. I learned all of these ways of trying to be wanted, trying to be claimed, being exceptional.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: So the idea that I would self-exile is, like, anathema. And that’s where I start talking. And part of the way I use Audre Lorde’s work in this first chapter in particular is to say, she calls us out, saying, “We must speak remembering we were never meant to survive.” But for me to speak in ways that might be confrontational or perceived as offensive is a very hard edge.

But to self-silence is also to betray myself and my people. And that’s the edge, right? To speak and to risk exile for someone like me, who has been exiled just because of the way I appeared in the world with dark skin, dark eyes, dark hair, curly hair. And then also to adapt in so many ways that I recognize a level of self-betrayal or a betrayal of the people to whom I’m accountable.

And I do consider my people are people of African descent who have been oppressed because of their embodiment in this particular context, which has shunned people of African descent as unworthy, as less intelligent. Has seen a kind of embodiment as inferior. We come up against that. I came up against that in my own family.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: It’s a hard edge, and I think part of the work is to actually not be so alone, to find our people, to find people with whom we feel mirrored. That’s also hard work, but it has come over time. I have found community, and that matters. And I think part of this work of sangha, which I think in our lineage is not so prioritized—

Vince Horn: Right.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —but if we take it on intentionally, we can truly honor it as one of the three jewels. Part of our work is really investing in sangha, even when it feels scary or even when it feels like, wow, I have to be held accountable for things that I say that might actually really harm somebody else. But to keep doing that work and to ask for that feedback and that accountability.

Vince Horn: Yeah, that strikes me as so true, and I understand why sangha isn’t prioritized when you have such an individualistic kind of culture of, you know, meditative achievement and self-work. It’s like, oh yeah, well, of course if we’re all just focusing on ourselves together, we’re not gonna be focused on the bonds that connect us.

And yeah, I found that to be a limitation really for many years now in that community. And sort of what drove me to like explore relational practices and other things that felt like they kind of help soften those boundaries and begin to kind of get a felt sense for like what interbeing feels like in real time.

It’s like this is what it actually is like to be connected to someone or to disconnect or to lose myself in someone else’s perspective. I guess I wanted to honor too that like you’re talking about all the reasons that one could not speak out even if there’s injustice and one wants to speak out on behalf of people they care about and are identified with.

That on top of the racial dimension of this, there’s also imagine the gendered dimension of this for you as well. Like I see with my wife and other women I know who are raised in a more kind of gendered female way. Like it’s just speaking up in general is hard to do. Or it’s not something that’s encouraged or, you know, people don’t have...

they’re not offered that same level of training often when they’re in a female body. So I guess I’m curious like is that also part of what you’ve had to work with in addition to the racial dimension of this?

Rima Vesely-Flad: That’s a really good question. I think initially, yes.

Like, I was raised to watch and serve and people please. And that’s how I got my goods, as my therapist would say. Like, I felt wanted when I—

Vince Horn: Right.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —gave people what they wanted, and I think that is a very, very gendered experience. I cleaned the house at an early age. I took care of my younger brother.

I was with a single mother who worked a lot, so I held things together in the family home. And yes, I think that is a highly gendered experience that I’ve carried into adulthood. I think I have patterns that I’m still trying to work with around serving and adapting, people pleasing and what have you.

I do also feel like there’s some corrective, if you will, by becoming an academic. I think in my line of work, having jumped through a thousand hoops, I did three master’s degrees, I did a PhD, I learned how to cite research and ask questions and back up and demonstrate. You see it in this book, right?

Actually, the book initially was an academic book where I just took on Baldwin and Lorde and tried to show how they illuminate these incredibly important and timeless teachings that we now associate with Buddhism or call Buddhist. And I had a friend and a mentor, Ruth King, say, “Actually, we need your practice in this book.

We need this to not just be through the third person, but we actually need your voice in this book,” which was really important and also incredibly hard. But part of why I felt I could take it on is that I was in a world in which I was expected to speak and facilitate, and I think there was a training not necessarily in the broader environment to which you’re pointing, but in an academic environment where standing up and giving a talk or a lecture or doing Q&A on the spot was something I learned how to do.

So in that way, I think there’s more of a sense of, oh, I have this. I can do this. And that feels more, I would say, naturalized, for lack of a better word, just because it’s been two decades of doing this so explicitly. And I’ve loved the academy, you know, being with people who read thick books.

And I’m the kind of person, I’ll walk into a store and I’ll look at the endnotes before I look at the introduction, just ‘cause I wanna know who’s cited and, you know, what research are they relying on? And like, who has informed this work? That matters to me even more so than the title or even the introduction.

I wanna just know who, what school of thought is this author drawing upon. And I love being with people who also operate in that way. And I have this funny story of being a consultant for a book project for a friend of mine, and we were all taken out to Portland. It was my first time in Portland, and you know, beautiful city.

And we hung out and talked and conversed and worked through these chapters, and then we sat in the hot tub and discussed Foucault. And, you know, it’s just so, for me, natural to be in an environment where something like that is really fun. And that is, I think, a part of learning how to speak. I think the harder part, and this goes back to the gender question, is having been a Black girl in a white family and trying to figure out how to survive in such hostility.

So yes, I do think that’s both racialized and gendered kind of experience.

Vince Horn: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, makes sense. I hadn’t considered the training in academia would be such a sharp training. But it makes sense, yeah, that you’d sort of be expected to be able to receive critique and offer it and speak and debate.

Yeah, that... I could see that both being kind of traumatizing and a very good training at the same time.

Yeah. I appreciate it so much that you did bring your story into this book as well, because I feel like at least for me as a reader, it gives me something personally to connect with where I can sort of see, like, how the universal becomes personal, you know, in a way. Where it’s like all these things that you’re describing, and Baldwin and Lorde are describing, like, they make sense to me and I understand it.

But then when you describe, you know, your experience of coming up with your grandparents and the specific ways, like not having your picture hanging up with the rest of your cousins, for instance. Like, that specific experience and the way that you shared it just made... It made all of the abstract universal stuff real for me in a way, you know, that I think it sticks with me, and it’s like it lands in my heart, you know, in a way that is transformative.

So I suspect that’s probably true for others as well. So thank you for sharing that.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah, I would say that was hard in a way that academic citations and reading for ideas, making arguments is not so hard. Like, it actually comes very naturally. But the harder work of communicating the harm that was done and how I received it, and certainly because I was raised knowing them, my grandparents’ rejection of me based on my skin color in particular was, it was deeply traumatizing, and I still work with some of my patterns of adapting, ways that still do not serve me.

And then too, and this is something I’m more present with, is my experience of being abandoned by my father. Actually, yesterday was his birthday, August 2nd, also James Baldwin’s birthday, and I found myself honoring James Baldwin, and having a really hard time honoring my father, who I had not seen at the time that he passed away for more than 40 years. And I also feel that, and the disconnection not just from him, but also my lineage. And a big part of this book is actually not attempting to reconcile with my grandparents or the members of my family that are still very overtly racist, and there are many, but actually to find my father’s people and to cultivate a sense of lineage and belonging through my father’s people who came from the Mississippi Delta.

My grandmother moved north during the Great Migration, and I am in touch with those family members who descended from her. She’s now deceased, but, and my father is also deceased. But to have some sense of connection and being claimed, to have visited the graves of my great-grandparents, in a certain way it’s not full circle, but it is a sense of return, and by that I mean return to ancestors, biological ancestors who I now know the names of and have a place to go and now developing relationships with in terms of a broader family system. And those are folks who have claimed me.

I, about a month ago, maybe just about three weeks ago, got to talk to the matriarch of my father’s family, one of, uh, his youngest... Uh, not my father, I’m sorry. My great-grandparents, their lineage. I was able to speak to one of their youngest daughters, my great-aunt who turned 100 last December.

Vince Horn: Wow.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Who’s now about 100 and a half, and I just think, wow, how amazing to have met her. That she knows my name, that I had some time with her, that she still wants to speak to me on the phone. That she sees me as a way to connect to her sister, my grandmother, who’s, as mentioned, deceased. Sometimes I think that healing process is not attempting to reconcile with the people who have denied or rejected your existence, but to find people who claim you and who want to be part of you.

I think that also speaks to this broader political environment. It’s not about getting accepted by the people who have ideas of your inferiority. It’s not about proving that you are, in fact, worthy of X, Y, and Z, but it’s actually about claiming and developing and cultivating your own spaces. And I’ll say this in a personal way, not so much about being accepted by a dominant white culture community, as much as cultivating the spaces that do feel supportive, in which I am mirrored.

And I feel like both Audre Lorde and James Baldwin were oriented that way as well. Like Audre Lorde was part of the second generation women’s movement, and they weren’t, like, trying to fit into some stereotype of women. They created their own communities, and they had relationships with one another. She was a self-defined lesbian, and was with a community of women who honored their own sexuality and their gender, and who sought a kind of alternative to the broader dominant culture. I think that is so important. And Baldwin, as a gay man too, was oriented towards honoring his own sexuality and creating communities that essentially I don’t want to use the word affirmed in, like, a tidy way, but just said, like, all of you, every part of you is welcome here.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: And so I do think that is incumbent upon us as well, not to look for acceptance, not to be claimed, but rather to invest in communities that we want to be part of.

Vince Horn: Yeah. So it’s like you’re getting your belonging needs met by creating or finding the kind of community that you can be yourself there and not have to be constantly seeking external validation from a culture that’s not going to validate you, or probably not for the next few decades at least.

Rima Vesely-Flad: We could even say that within our insight lineages.

Vince Horn: Yeah, absolutely. I guess that’s the need for diasporas is rooted there. You know, finding... I remember the early community of people I hung out with were mostly people that were unabashedly interested in, like, mastering the states and stages of the path, which is a weird thing to say now ‘cause that’s not where I am at all.

But yeah, it was like a subculture of people who were like, “Yeah, we’re really interested in hardcore meditation.” And that wasn’t the scene in the insight tradition. It was more like healing and kind of long-term retreat. So yeah, I can absolutely relate to what you’re saying. I’m curious to go back a little to the part of the book where you talk about karma.

Because this is, I think this is an area where I’ve always struggled with early Buddhist teachings. And I remember the first class I took at Naropa on the first turning with Judith Simmer-Brown. We really explored karma in depth there, and it became clear to me, like the early Buddhist vision of karma was very individualistic.

It was like you are the cause of— it was primarily putting everything back onto the individual. So I thought it was interesting when you’re trying to bridge that with collective understanding of karma as well, and seemed like you’re trying to hold both the individual and collective perspectives together, like not kind of falling into one or the other.

But I always found early Buddhism was like collapsed straight into the individual perspective. So I’m curious, like how do you work with... Is that true from your point of view and from, you know, your scholarship? And like how do you then work with a tradition that seems to be, I don’t know, hyper individualistic when there are also deep teachings on interdependence and interbeing you can find in the tradition as well, though I haven’t found them as prominently in the early Buddhist tradition.

Rima Vesely-Flad: I think that’s true. I mean, the sutta that I rely on at the beginning of the chapter, which I can put into the chat if that’s helpful, is one of the few that explicitly says, oh, and there are other causes and conditions for suffering, and I actually, I’ll read that.

Vince Horn: That’s cool. So it is there.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. It’s, so it’s an early Buddhist teaching or sutta, the Moliyasivaka Sutta, and it says, “Bile, phlegm, and also wind.” So our bodies, what’s around us, “imbalance and climate too—”

Vince Horn: Wow.

Rima Vesely-Flad: —”carelessness and assault, with karma result as the eighth.”

And it’s saying these are all reasons for suffering. But it’s true. It’s one of the few suttas that explicitly acknowledges causes and conditions as sources of suffering. Where I delve into collective karma is, it’s true, I found it less in early Buddhism, more in Mahayana Buddhism, the focus on language actually.

The fact that we come of age as very small beings and learn language, and our language is collective. We are learning certain meanings along with certain phrases, and that is collectively formed, and that is a part of our thoughts. That is something that a number of scholars within the Mahayana Buddhist lineage talk about in many very complex texts over actually several centuries.

So it is to say that we find that less in early Buddhism, but we do find that, and it’s with that analysis in mind that I talk about the fact that we are shaped by the collective, and also that we have agency.

Some of the gleanings I have towards how we might employ karma in a very constructive way come from postmodern thinkers who claim Buddhism, but who are also broadly read with thinkers such as Marx, thinkers such as Foucault, and, you know, people who are making connections in ways that, of course, are very far removed from early Buddhism.

But one of the things that is drawn out by now a wide range of postmodern Buddhist scholars, so people who both practice Buddhism and are scholars of Buddhist teachings, is that we have agency. We’re not simply beholden to actions of the past or even the collective, that we actually can practice and cultivate our thoughts, cultivate our words, cultivate our actions in a way that allows us to break free of patterns that are harmful or do not serve us. So that’s where I go with that chapter on karma.

Vince Horn: Yeah.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Wanting to say we inherit so much, and we do. We inherit language. We also inherit culture. We inherit ways of thinking, and it’s hard to see that because we swim in the waters even as we are inheriting them, yet there is some capacity for agency.

Vince Horn: Yes.

Rima Vesely-Flad: And that is what we can do. And maybe that’s the emphasis in early Buddhism, is that we can work on our minds. We can free our minds from these oppressive patterns.

Vince Horn: Yes. Yeah, and that makes so much sense in the context of, like, Indian caste system and the emergence of this, like, other way of living that’s kind of outside of that caste system.

I mean, it seems like such a powerful move to claim agency when you’re in a culture that’s, like, so determined by birth and status.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yes.

Vince Horn: And then now, but in 21st century America, it feels like in some ways that view prevents moving forward to me with some of the deep learnings that the postmodern theorists have offered us over the last decades, you know, around the way that power gets calcified and ossified in systems, you know, that we’re embedded in, in cultures that we are raised in.

You know, having grown up here in the rural South, you know, this is a lot of what I’ve reflected on when it’s come to reading works like yours and looking at racialization. Is like how I can’t separate myself out from the place that I came up in. And I can see even with a Palestinian mixed racial household, like I was in a sea of white Southern Baptist Christians mostly.

And, like, it had a huge effect on the way I talked and the things I thought were acceptable to say or to think. And, you know, I can even see the ways that I was always... I was trying to bridge the gaps with folks who are different because my grandfather moved into the part of town where the only Black folks in the entire county lived.

There were two students in my high school who were Black. They were both... We rode on the bus together. I was quite close friends with one person. And it’s like growing up in the small little mini minority space I remember trying to make connections with folks and sometimes just like really messing up and not because of that inculturation.

I remember one time I wanted to share this story, which I’ve never shared before. Which I think it... I want to meet you in your vulnerability here because you shared so much in the book. But I remember a friend of mine had a friend over, young Black girl, and she was, I forget her name, but she came over.

We were hanging out and getting to know each other. And I remember this thing that I said to her as a... Really, my intention was to try to connect. And I said, sometimes me and my family, we’re also called “sand,” and then I used the N word. And this was my— and I said it totally smiling, you know, like really assuming this would bridge some gap between us, and that she would see, like, I’m like her.

But the impact that it had was totally the opposite. You know, it’s like, it really bothered her. She was crying later. My friends were like, “What the heck is wrong with you? Why did you say that?” And I was like, oh my gosh. And it was just such a rude awakening to the reality of race, and I could see that even as an older adult, you know, asking people where they’re from to try to connect, when I appear as white, has this impact of really causing people to feel paranoid or feel like I’m coming at them in a way that’s racially biased.

You know, where I’m trying to, like, figure out where they’re from ‘cause they’re not from around here, you know, and stuff like that. And I could see how even being well-intentioned when you’re trying to connect across difference, it’s very easy to, because of ignorance, to really harm people. And I can see that in the community of white Buddhist practitioners, you know, where a lot of very smart and well-intentioned people, as they engage with this work, like, we struggle to figure out how to do that in a way that’s not perpetuating harm on a racial basis.

It seems safer to just not talk about it sometimes. And I can see that this is a real problem. Like, it prevents learning and it prevents people from being able to kind of see their own conditioning and kind of acknowledge like, oh, this is really ugly. You know, it’s really ugly that I thought it was okay to just, like, use that language and that it wouldn’t have that kind of impact.

Like, I thought for some reason it was neutral.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Yeah. Yeah, that, I think that does speak to what we were just talking about with regards to karma and language and how we are socialized, how we inherit so much, and how even a word that has been weaponized with such vitriol and hatred over centuries in real time is still like a brick at the body.

Like, it can land and it’s almost... Yeah, I could even feel, like your reference to it, just how it landed, ‘cause it’s still such a powerful word, and it does point to the fact that we do exist in conditions of such hatred and violence, that we are landed upon all the time, and we have to figure out, like, how to acknowledge that in ways that don’t take us under or, frankly, if this is wanted on all sides, create rupture so that there can’t be a way forward to acknowledge the weight of what’s taken place.

And I think for people who have had that hatred— and again, I’m thinking of both Baldwin and Lorde speaking to this with such clarity and self-empathy. For that hatred to be received over and over, especially in early years, but not exclusively in early years, and to have ways to acknowledge it and to come out of it, I think is something that we are all called to do.

And to maybe to, and I say this with real tenderness, ‘cause I am still learning and asking for feedback all the time. With some tenderness to, if you notice that something has been, that some harm has taken place, that something has caused rupture, or if you’re told that by other people to go in, not with some sense of defensiveness or a sense of needing to explain yourself, or even needing to clarify your intention, but to come in and to say with real humility, “I’m sorry, and I want to know what this is for you, and it matters to me that your inner being, that your wellbeing is cared for.”

That’s what matters. And actually, I had a moment a couple of weeks ago, not even quite that long, where I said something quite offensive to a friend of mine, and I noticed. I just— you know, noticed by reading facial expressions, and this is part of our work too, right? To observe. And so I asked, and was able to receive some feedback and to really hear it.

And I think something that I struggle with, and I imagine for you, Vince, this is real as well, is we both are parenting young kiddos. You have an 11-year-old, I have a 10-year-old, about to be 11. We are really busy. We’re running households, and I think some of what I come up against in my own work is, where is the time to do that inner work of reflecting, processing, synthesizing how we might have created harm, returning to the relationship?

Like, where is the time to really do that? And that is something I’m sitting with, is if I have said something or not said something and it has created harm, where is the space to process that? And so this practice of sitting every day, of taking refuge, creating a kind of consistent place to land every day, I think that is some of the work as well, is to have a place where we can receive ourselves and how we are working with that harm that we have imputed upon someone else.

And that’s a big part of the practice as well for me, is just to create that level of consistency. And to feel into that remorse, to feel into that regret, to feel how it lands with us, and to hope that we might be able to convey that and to be received. And we don’t always know. We can put ourselves out there.

We may not be received, but just to have that sincerity of approach and to not make it about us, but to really focus on how it has landed for the other person, and then in our own practice to do our work. I think that, for me anyway, has been a way forward. Not that I could write a rule book or some set of instructions. I would not say that. But, you know, I take real guidance from Audre Lorde who said, like, “It’s on me to see my heel print on another woman’s face.” I have to do my own work even if I do self-identify as someone who has had that level of systemic and interpersonal harm coming at me.

I’m also in a place where I can oppress other people. I’m doing real harm for other people. And it’s not one or the other. It’s not simplistic, but it involves a level, I think, of spiritual and emotional maturity to really see that for ourselves and to be open to whatever has arisen and whatever harm has been done, and then to be accountable, to put ourselves in a position of being accountable to a group or to another person it is really hard work. Really very hard work.

Vince Horn: Yeah. Yeah. At the same time, I mean, I can see that’s the only way to gain in wisdom is to be able to do that work and then be like, “Oh, yeah, now I know better. You know, I know a little better how to engage or be with folks in a way that’s not gonna cause as much harm.

It’s going to, you know, support others.” So yeah, thank you for talking to me today and for exploring this with us here in the Insight Diaspora. I wanted to mention, too, that you’re very generously offering up sort of in-depth content around this for sanghas and other communities and leaders that are kind of interested in bringing this work into their communities.

I don’t know if you wanted to mention that for those that are listening and might want to reach out to you and explore that.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Oh, yes. And I can put... I have a couple of things I want to put in the chat, but I can put my website in, and the bottom of the page are these offerings. Yeah, so—

Vince Horn: Please.

Rima Vesely-Flad: I have recorded a number of Dharma talks, eight Dharma talks with two practices based on the book. And the hope is that this is a self-guided course, but the hope is that people can both listen and then practice. And the hope is in community that actually that can happen. And still trying to figure out exactly how to essentially package all of that.

But at the moment, people can register for a self-guided course and listen to Dharma talks, some of which come from the book and are somewhat expanded, and some of which come from other work I’ve done. So there’s one called The Dharma of James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, and then there are three that will be offered live with a good friend of mine, Rashid Hughes, who has put together a practice he refers to as rest.

He is a lovely human. He’s done restorative justice work for a long time. He also has a Master of Divinity degree and leads a sangha in DC. And so Rashid will offer practice spaces live, and I will record Dharma talks. The next one is called Buddhism and Black Liberation. That comes from a book I published in 2022.

And then there will be one offered in January called The Discipline of Liberation, and I think that’s my next project. I’m just starting to get my head around it, but it’s informed and guided by the writings of bell hooks.

And then there will be one that actually points to exactly what we were just talking about with regards to harm and conflict and how to work with it internally and how to be in community, and I think a lot of us don’t have that training, and I’m still someone, even now, who if I receive something in a hard way, I will go to my cushion before I’ll go to another person.

And maybe that’s okay, except if I don’t ever get off the cushion and go to that person, that’s not okay. So really trying to, this is in real time, also trying to learn, like, how to have these harder conversations and do repair. That’s really what I’m pointing to, how to do repair effectively so that there isn’t only rupture, but there’s a relationship that’s sustained. So there will be one self-guided course. It will open in about a month on Tuesday, September 1st, and then three live classes with my friend Rashid, and starting in October, and then in 2027, two classes. And my hope is that we start to create some spaces that are trainings and also collective spaces where we can be guided, especially by, in my case, I’m thinking of Black thinkers, although always in conversation with other lineages, but really wanting to bring the wisdom of Black thinkers to the center of Dharma practice.

Vince Horn: Yeah.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Palestinian voices as well. I am really invested in that, too. And a friend, Kareem Gandoor, refers to Palestinian dharma, and I think, yes, that really resonates with me.

Vince Horn: So yeah, Kareem. I know Kareem. Good stuff. Yeah, I’ve recently just connected with Mohsen Mawdawi, who is the president of Buddhist Association at Columbia.

I think— didn’t you do your grad work at Columbia?

Rima Vesely-Flad: I did one of those degrees there. Uh-huh. In the same program he was in, yeah.

Vince Horn: Uh-huh. Yeah. And it’s been so nice to connect with fellow Palestinian Buddhists. All five of us are now connected. So I feel a lot of solidarity with the work that you’re doing, and the way that you’re centering the wisdom of Black teachers in the Buddhist lineage, bringing that to bear.

So thank you so much for that work. I hope you continue doing it for a long time.

Rima Vesely-Flad: Well, thank you. It does feel like the right work, and I feel so grateful to be able to do it long term. I mean, that’s I think where I’m going here. Actually, being able to work... I’m gonna put my website into the chat.

Being able to organize some of these classes is an attempt to make this work more sustainable, in addition to being like it both informs the next project and is an outgrowth of the current project.