Dear friends,

It started, predictably enough, with sourdough. Kombucha and heirloom yogurt quickly ensued, the latter in varietals redolent of IKEA furniture (Filmjölk, Piimä, Viili). Other millennial clichés that apply to me, years after the pandemic spawned these kitchen ferments: 

• total dependence on the air fryer

• inability to resist avocado toast

• overly educated

• spiritually seeking

• (thus) downwardly mobile

This summer, no longer able to imbibe gluten/caffeine/sugar/dairy with abandon—boba-drinkers and croffle-chompers of the world, have another for me!—I’ve turned my fermentation obsession to slower cultures. From the farmer’s market, I carry home hefty green pearls of cabbage, garlic scapes like nāgas with lotus-bud heads. Shred the cabbage, slice the scapes, massage in salt, wait a month, et voilà: tangy, crisp sauerkraut. 

The hardest part is waiting. Kshanti practice.

🌍
In a recent newsletter on “Devotional Health,” my yoga teacher writes,

To teach: it is first to learn to make worlds. Nothing less. 

Though nowadays it tends to connote spiritual friendship, kalyanamitra (Sanskrit; Pali: kalyanamitta) is among the oldest words for “spiritual teacher” in the Buddhist tradition. The Upaddha Sutta (SN 45:2) opens with Venerable Ānanda’s declaration that admirable friends/companions/colleagues are half of the holy life. The Buddha protests:

Not so, Ānanda! Not so, Ānanda! This is the entire holy life, Ānanda, that is, good friendship, good companionship, good comradeship. 

Dried soybeans, soaked and hulled and boiled and dried once more, if inoculated with Rhizopus spores and incubated in the right conditions, will grow a layer of edible white mold. This fuzzy jacket announces the arrival of a succulent block of tempeh, bound together by mycelial threads.

Fungi knit the multitude of individual beans into a single, delicious cake. Rhizopus urges the legumes to soften, rendering complexity into nourishment.

A great teacher makes life’s liberatory lessons wholly digestible. 

🪂
Back in Michigan after a week and a half in Massachusetts, I’m only beginning to digest the milk-rice days of the fourth annual Roots & Refuge Asian American Buddhist writing retreat. Thank goodness rest is woven into the mycelial network of R&R. As my chaplaincy supervisors once said to me, with love and concern: You have a tendency to overdo it. I suspect I’m not the only R&Rer so predisposed. In honor of rest—and to prove to our Revision Workshop facilitators that I was paying attention—I’ll avoid the temptation to narrate the entire retreat here. 

Only this year did I realize why I founded Roots & Refuge as a hybrid retreat of fervent experimentation and experiential ferment. I was, and still am, intrigued by the question:

What does it take to change the culture of _____?

(Fill in the blank as you wish: American Buddhism, my family, this local sangha, a broken world…)

A corollary question:

What flavor and feeling and sound and pace do you want this change to convey?

For much of life, my answer has collapsed into impatience: fast-food flavors, doing over feeling, loudspeakers proclaim progress, get this done quick! After R&R 2026, a different set of answers ripen: the flavor of Asian condiments, the feeling of sukha, the sound of laughter, the pace of steadiness.

How to leave behind thirty teacher-friends, kalyanamitta whose listening and care and creativity and kindness knit together the spiritual path? Why not bring them along, as part of an inner sangha that welcomes all the ancestors and contemporaries and future-beings who might join us in seeking refuge under the capacious canopy of Buddhist Asian America? 

💫
In the “Constellating Buddhist Asian America” workshop that I led for this year’s Roots & Refuge, we encountered thirty-one quotes from an incomplete-but-sparkling constellation of Filipino, Thai, Indian, Black, Palestinian, Lao, Burmese, Tibetan, Sri Lankan, Cambodian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, and Japanese American writers. Poets, novelists, academics, creators of hybrid works. Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana Buddhists from many traditions. Queer writers, Dalit activists, artists living and no longer alive.

We treated each quote as a sacred sutra, through contemplation, hand-copying, and recitation. We read them aloud all at once, in a swelling crescendo followed by a tapering decrescendo, until a lone voice solemnly uttered the tail end of the longest quote: 

A few months before the United States entered the twentieth century, two Japanese Pure Land priests, Rev. Dr. Shuye Sonoda and Rev. Kakuryo Nishijima, set foot on American soil. 

They were responding to an impassioned plea by a lay collective of devout young followers of Jodo Shinshu (Shin) Buddhism, the largest branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan and the U.S. …

Their letter is striking not only for the intensity of devotion it reveals, but also for what it says about the fraught place of Japanese Buddhists in America. “In the eight directions are non-Buddhist forces surrounding the Japanese Buddhists, and we cannot be at ease,” the collective wrote. “It is as if we were sitting on the point of a pin; no matter how we move, we will be pricked. Our burning desire to hear the Teachings is about to explode from every pore in our body.”

–Jean-Paul Contreras deGuzman, “The Pure Land is in the West”

What fervent, devotional desire threatens to explode forth from every pore in your body? Who is your inner sangha? How do they hold your grief? Can you hear their voices? Does their laughter knit you whole?

Til the next quarter moon,

~Chenxing

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