Forum How Millennials Are Reframing the Buddhist Path
I’M A MILLENNIAL BUDDHIST, and growing up queer and transgender, I bore witness to a lot of suffering. I was called a cross-dresser and stared at with anger for wearing a suit. I was laughed at in center field while playing softball in high school. I knew early on how much our bodies carry, and that we wound easily and heal slowly—if at all.
The world that I and other millennial Buddhists have inherited is not an easy one. The recession of 2008, the inundation of student loan debt, and the current economic and health crisis resulting from the coronavirus all capture the struggles and uncertainty millennials endure. We have witnessed communities suffering from climate change and must confront the fact that we may not have a safe and livable planet much longer. These are some of the collective generational traumas we live with—and that weigh on our hearts and minds.
In this Forum, I talk with four millennial Buddhists who are deeply aware of the problems the world faces and conscious of the suffering involved (and to come). They talk about Buddhism in the same breath as taking care of the world, and they also—though they had just met—take care with one another in the course of our conversation. In these truly difficult times, times in which we are all inside, it is so hard to feel heard, and held. Alone in my apartment, I listened to these millennial Buddhists try to envision what a more peaceful, intentional, and enlightened Buddhism might look like. And suddenly, I was no longer alone. We had each other.
The Forum takes a close look not only at how Buddhism can serve the world but also at how it can repair itself and expand to include a diversity of people and perspectives, as well as practices and wisdom from other traditions. We explore issues such as sexual violence, race in American Buddhism, and questions of community. We discuss our love for Buddhism, and grounded in that love, we discuss how we hope Buddhism might change, and where it might go. We share our vision for a Buddhism grounded in hope, creativity, and liberation for all beings.
Millennial Buddhists are concerned about making our world more inclusive and safe for all, and they’re asking: what does it look like to hear and honor another person’s experience? How do we see ourselves in the suffering of another? How can I make my sangha more inclusive and equitable, so that we might all find refuge on this path? How might this path engage all bodies? When it forgets a body, how might the path meet this moment and body with compassion, intention, responsibility, and understanding?
I believe millennial Buddhism is about discovering these answers, together. It’s about achieving liberation, and the seeds of home, safety, and belonging, together. It’s about addressing oppression and the suffering of our world, together. It’s about forging a new, intentional, and hopeful path, together.
The frame for this conversation is simply that we’re millennials, although our generation is still pretty invisible in the Buddhist world. I’m curious: is “millennial” an important part of how you understand yourself? Do you think it informs how you
