An American Buddhist in Tibet

 How will I honor the Tibetans and their practice? What can I do? 

I’m just one person. 

Ichi-go, ichi-e is a Japanese saying that translates to one chance in a lifetime or one encounter in time, not to be replicated.  I try to remember how precious, unique and sacred one encounter can be. This phrase carries meaning as I reflect upon my glimpse into Tibetan culture, history and people I've  respected from afar for decades and who occupy a significant place in my heart. I realized soon after arriving in Lhasa, Tibet that it would be impossible not to look and see the occupation, oppression, domination of the Tibetan people by the Chinese government. What was I going to do with the conditions, privilege that brought me here?  How was I being complicit by taking non-action? Bearing witness and telling what I saw to whomever will listen is my first responsibility.

Sweet smoky cypress imbued the air igniting my senses. 

Standing amidst thousands of Tibetan prayer flags near a 17,000 foot summit, I felt the power of wind flow through me. Prayer flags adorn the landscape and carry sutras, Buddhsit scriptures on the wind in the ten directions. Each flag represents an element of nature red-fire,white-air/wind, blue-sky, yellow-earth, green-water.

 Sheer determination in the steps and prostrations of devoted pilgrims impels me to speak up.

Have you ever witnessed an injustice by a group who uses power, intimidation, imprisonment over another?  Have you ever felt paralyzed from your natural desire to stand up to injustice because the heat of fear rose up in your body? I witnessed a people disrespected and intimidated by a powerful force. This is a personal account of facing fear for my safety while standing up for the Tibetan people-people I've not often seen in major media. As an American, I am most familiar with exiled Tibetans forced to leave their country for India, Nepal, U.S. and Europe. Rarely have I had the chance to know what Tibet is like for Tibetans. 

I’m compelled to tell what I saw because I made a promise, a vow to myself not to forget the devotional people of Tibet I met. I witnessed a practice of Buddhism steeped in ritual and devotion of over 1000 years that deserves to be told. I hope to convey an account of how I was inspired and why it left an indelible mark on my heart. I need to tell what I saw to honor the Tibetan people residing in Tibet. Standing up amidst fear for my safety and for that of my traveling companions. 

Central to the Dharma, Buddhist teachings, is the 8 Fold Noble path, often the entry point is skillful or wise understanding. Near to my heart was the Bodhisattva Vow to end the suffering of all beings.

 I consider Tibetan Buddhists my siblings on a path.  We are interconnected. I felt a deep kinship toward family members wanting to fully practice the traditions that have been a part of their daily lives for over a millenia.  Growing questions and uneasiness arose each day toward the Chinese government that occupies Tibet. The historic places we were fortunate to see felt like a police-state surrounded by breathtaking landscape, amidst modern hotels and comfortable amenities and I was perpetually on alert.  

Will I be awake or asleep to the injustice, oppression and discrimination? 

It became clear that I was bearing witness in real-time to injustice, oppression and surveillance not experienced by many Americans. It became clear,  as I gave up my passport daily,  in the unspoken uneasiness of my companions and at police checkpoints, that surveillance was a way of life here.  As a seasoned traveler,  I keep my passport with me. I was aware of my discomfort several times a day when it was surrendered. 

We bear witness to special occasions, celebrations and sometimes accidents and crimes. We bear witness to remember the truth. This is my testimony of what I witnessed.  It would have been easy to be mesmerized by the dream-like landscape of Tibet but it would be unconscionable to be unconscious to the vast injustice witnessed in this occupied country. 

I will never forget you.

 A daily invitation of color and light.

Yongbulakang Palace, the oldest palace in Tibet.

   There are restrictions to the auspicious spirtitual sites where Tibetans can pray, there is intimidation in the overwhelming police presence, seen and unseen. There is an oppressive nature in the lack of Tibetan language I witnessed in local shops, hotels and cafes. The language I noticed was Mandarin. It seemed like the Tibetan language and culture was endangered.  Empathy, compassion and a sense of needing to speak up awakened in me. 

When I think of the term compassion,  His Holiness Dalai Lama is who I envision. He is the spiritual leader of one of four major branches of Tibetan Buddhism, called Gelug or Geluk. He is revered by the Tibetan people. 

 It’s illegal to have a photo of the Dalai Lama in your car, in one's home, in one's wallet. Citizens and tourists can be intimidated, beaten, or jailed by local authorities for possessing his photograph. 

A few times I attempted to explain that there are Tibetan Buddhists practicing in the U.S.  It was difficult to convey the thousands of Tibetan Buddhists in the west. Censorship blocks social media so there were no easy ways to share the many scholars, monasteries, monastics, temples, that have been cultivating for decades outside of Tibet.  Shop owners in small towns thought it funny to see westerners wanting to purchase prayer flags in monastery stores. Propaganda is so strong that the Chinese invasion of Tibet during the cultural revolution is taught as “liberation”.  Some believe China freed the Tibetan people from slavery under the Dalai Lama. Hundreds of monasteries were desecrated and destoryed during the cultural revolution.  Potala Palace, the winter palace of the Dalai Lama is a magnificent testament to the significance of the Dalai Lama lineage. It's iconic architecture, 1000 rooms of art, thankgas, sculpture and chapels exudes an emptiness, not expressing its full potential to serve a nation of devotional Buddhists. Today,  thousands of tourists visit each day. The weight of heavy security, seen and unseen, is felt all over.  

Potala Palace, winter residence of His Holiness Dalai Lama prior to exile.

A celebration we stumbled upon Samye Monastery, uniformed police always present, top left.

Lamas, Tibetan leaders at Samye founded around 795 C.E.

View from Yongbulakang Palace

From the first day we entered ancient Barkhor Square in Lhasa, we were ushered through metal detectors, struck by the degree of police presence and  weapons on rooftops. In our country we call them snipers.  A long black bus with bars on the windows was parked near the entrance of Jokhang Temple.  Video cameras mounted inside our van were trained on us. Hand held fire extinguishers of various sizes were grouped together on some of the busier streets and squares. Investigating, questioning, and curious but there was no one to ask without feeling like I was compromising their safety, our safety. Why so many checkpoints daily? Why do we need to release our passports, visas and permits several times a day?  I learned the fire extinguishers were to immediately quell self-immolation of monks and nuns. Since 2009, there have been over 145 self-immolations of nuns and monks in Tibet in protest of the conditions under occupation.  I’m shocked and don’t want fear to override the truth of what was being revealed. 

Tashi Lhunpo Monastery, founded by the 1st Dalai Lama in 1447

Nomadic camp.

I will never forget you.

Dear Sisters and Brothers in Tibet,  

Please know that your ways of practice have been carried over the Himalayas.  For many decades, we have cared deeply and study your traditions with deep reverence.  Powerful winds continue to carry the sutras across nations and oceans. 

Your spirit can't be suppressed. Your long tradition of Buddhism is too enduring and buoyant to be captured, possessed, or erased. Like clouds shape shifting across the expansive Tibetan sky, your customs are swept across the globe to inform and inspire living beings in countless nations. 

No one government, no arsenal of weapons or cruelty can eliminate your devotion and practices. We are watching, we are bowing in reverence to you. Your steps, prayers and devotion are our steps, prayers and devotion.  

Please do not be dispirited. Please do not lose hope. There are thousands of earnest practicioners who respect your traditons.  Many beings benefit from your practice. You have touched numberless hearts.

I will continue to tell the story of what I witnessed.

No one can stop the wind. 

With love and deep compassion,

Your sister

Jokhang Temple in Barkhor Square. Police on rooftops, rappelling down the buidling at the top first and fourth windows.

The next time you see Tibetan prayer flags, please remember the Tibetans living in Tibet.  Remember their determination and devotion under some of the harshest conditions. Many are still imprisoned and tortured. Prayer flags are a part of our culture now, in part because of the Tibetans both inside and outside of Tibet. Sutras are not the only messages on the flags as they flow in the wind. So too, does the essence of a people.

Bodhisattva Vow

May I be a protector to those without protection,

A leader for those who journey
And a boat, a bridge, a passage
For those desiring a further shore.

May the pain of every living creature
Be completely cleared away.
May I be the doctor and the medicine
And may I be the nurse
For all sick beings in the world

Until everyone is healed.      -Shantideva

To learn more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/opinion/tibet-is-burning.html
https://freetibet.org/about/travel-guide
https://www.dalailama.com/
(https://tricycle.org/magazine/noble-eightfold-path/)

Part 3 Bearing Witness on Charnel Ground

Noble ancestor in Kyoto.

Home returning

This post culminates my personal journey, part pilgrimage, part odyssey. The third part of my yearlong journey takes me to Japan, my ancestral homeland. I began this journey a year ago to reconcile and heal ancestral wounds.  I felt a rooted connection in Japan; a homereturning in a most nourishing way. As with healing from wounds, they become scars, an intricate web of tissue and cells that serve as a layer of protection. I have learned to wear my scars with the concept of wabi sabi, a Japanese phrase that roughly translates to embracing the impermanent nature of all things and the beauty of imperfection. Simplicity, elegance, wisdom. Scars make us who we are as sentient beings. Imperfectly perfect.

 Wabi Sabi is wisdom, grace, courage, history, true elegance of form.  

pieces of broken pottery adorn the floor in the potter's studio

Potter's studio, Obama, Japan

So I continue to heal and feel as if I'm carrying kindred souls with me. 

Ryoan-ji Zen Garden, Kyoto, Japan

I carry the water, air, earth, sunlight for those who need to heal from injustice, discrimination, oppression. What is beginning to surface is the need to share healing and reconciliation, forgiveness and lovingkindness. I am driven to be one who continues to believe in hope and the deep effort it takes to forgive, to love and understand. What also continues to grow is the desire to open my heart for the benefit of all. This has been my experiment to bear witness to what I touched upon at Tule Lake and Hyde Park and opened to last year.

This journey began with a phrase that kept echoing in my mind: I am a descendant of incarcerated people. First it was necessary to let the words have a voice. My words took on more meaning when Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Marselean Manuel, read them out loud with her strong and empathic voice. As she approached the ancestor altar at a retreat for People of Color, a kind of energy arose inside of courage and the tendrils of healing.  Something was shifting. No anger or shame. I knew this opening was to continue. I knew it was bigger than my personal journey. I needed to continue for my ancestors, my 92 year old mother, my father who continued his journey 11 years ago, my siblings and my son and daughter. Today, I continue to offer it to future generations, to those known and unknown, blood relatives and spiritual friends, who want to enter a way to heal and understand, a path of healing and reconciliation. 

The experiences on the Tule Lake Pilgrimage, meditations for FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt in New York have led me to Japan. This is a path I chose, willing and open to move forward with hope and optimism through the practice of forgiveness and lovingkindness. 

Philosopher's Path, Kyoto

Part earth, part water, cedar and bamboo, part indigenous being from Japan.

a view from Miyajima Island

I belong to this part of earth. I came from these islands.

The vitality, hara of native Japan lives inside of me. The roots of my family of trees, mountains, water are a part of me. I feel I can replenish, re-nourish, reunite here. 

"Welcome back, Nakatomi-san, we have been waiting for you." 

Maple trees expressed their vibrancy in Kyoto, a kind of homecoming, homereturning.

 I was walking through a dream. Each day was like a homecoming after a journey of many lifetimes. I had arrived to meet my ancestors discovered in the forests, felt in the air, sensed near the ocean; the land and light of the rising sun. A deep sense of reverence arose. Looking up at the sky, opening my heart to reunite with the trees, the forests, the clouds, and sky.

  I recognized something nameless-felt in the late autumn air, the colors of the landscape of my ancestors, the cadence of native footsteps; so very familiar. I have returned to a source of my roots. 

 

Body returns to feel familiar ground. Separated for a longtime from the nucleus of ancestors and trees, boulders, air, water, sun-all a part of my ancestral DNA from Japan.  Heart softens on temple grounds in Kyoto as I walk across gravel pathways and wooden floors creak as I join the centuries of footsteps of my ancestors.

My feet are the roots that remember, we have returned to the sacred ground, soil, earth for a tender reunion with my relations.

 My hands long to touch, stay, wait, hold, reunite with the bark, the skin of my elder cedar, pine and fir family.

 

ancient ginkgo in Kyoto

Ginkgo leaves alight the ground

I continue to transform generational sorrow and shame as I reunite on sacred, charnel ground. 

   I had abandoned a significant part of me as a child from the pain of feeling other and oppressed by racism. I obscured myself, allowed myself to embrace my ethnicity and heritage at arms distance to protect from the pain of being singled out, of not fitting in. Here, I reunited with stability, vitality, inner wisdom and a connection to nature. Nature welcomed me back without discrimination but with trust, love and deep belonging. Welcome back Nakatomi-san. 

Feeling the pulse of my ancestors who made an epic journey across the Pacific over one hundred years ago, living beings I am connected to, who ventured to another continent, to begin again, to plant new roots, and create different lives of potential-  They survived and thrived from the conditions of poverty, hunger, out of a deep resonant hope for a different life. My grandparents, like so many immigrants and refugees, were the ultimate risk takers, adventurers, those willing to take a leap.



In a way, I'm here to honor and express gratitude by cleansing, renewing myself to this sacred home.

Incense wafting through the air invites me back to the prayers and spirits in nature, from the indigenous Shinto tradition on Miyajima Island near Hiroshima, my father's homeland.

Shinto Temple, Miyajima Island

Pouring fresh water over my hands from a carved stone vessel, a cleansing ritual- homereturning, to my ancestors.  

This is where my childhood connection to nature began in my bones, vessels, cells. Heart connects with the warmth of kinship, of family

Our roots and bodies lived and worked on this land. It's natural to feel an affinity here. It permeates my skin, through my bones and courses through my lungs and vessels with every breath and heartbeat. We share so much DNA, bloodlines felt in the weight of air, the sweetness of water.

 I am looking with the eyes of my ancestors, walking with their feet to offer incense at shrines, feeling sacred ground in Hiroshima. This is my father's family home. 

At age 8 or 9 or 10, I had an unnameable curiosity and affinity to study history books of the atomic bomb site in Hiroshima. In December, I met my father's second cousin for the first time in Hiroshima.  I discovered that my third cousin was a Red Cross nurse. She perished in Hiroshima while working on August 6, 1945 never to return home, her remains never recovered.  Perhaps she is who I was looking for when I was 8 or 9 in those photos? I knew her, I was connected to her.

I am descendant of Hiroshima Atomic bomb survivors and victims.

Genbaku Dome, Hiroshima, Japan

There is palpable heaviness. Pilgrims young and old, come to learn, to make sense of something senseless.Statistics range from 90,000-226,000 people perished in Hiroshima. Millions of animals and plants perished too.  I believe it takes great courage to come here to witness the devastation and the capability of human beings. Deep sigh, deep sadness, deep silence. 

Feeling the devastation, the remnants, and the very real the pulse of my relatives who still live here. Was there a great deafening noise when the bomb impacted the city center?  Was there a great silence following it? Is that my imagination or can it be my way of connecting to something that touched my heart as a very young child? Difficult returning, harsh homecoming to the land, the islands, the ocean.  

This is part of my family's charnel ground. I was confused as a child and felt a double responsibility for how I was connected to lives in California and Japan, to nature and earth in both places, to loss, devastation seared in my memory. Sorrow felt but rarely spoken. Felt in my body and bones and here in the soil, the air, water, wide open sky. I hope I carry some of my cousin's sweet kind heart, some compassion of a Red Cross nurse.

 This journey grew out of my need to bear witness to my familial truth. The truth of forced incarceration at Tule Lake and Gila River and the conditions 120,000 had to live under for years. The truth of learning racist beliefs held by FDR, who some consider one of our greatest presidents. The truth that Eleanor Roosevelt tried to sway her husband's mind in signing Executive Order 9066, her subsequent trip to Gila River, during my mother's incarceration. The truth of the devastation of war, the atomic bomb and the scars it leaves for the Japanese natives, for many still too painful to visit. 

The truth of learning I have a relative who perished on August 6, 1945. I know why I was drawn to the photos of devastation in Hiroshima as a child. I came to know my suffering and through it the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people here in America of forced incarceration, loss of homes, property, livelihood and rights and something deeper, our humanity. We lost a part of humanity when America dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I think many of us are still recovering from the unimaginable trauma.  

 This journey has let me exhale  in a way I have never exhaled. It's as if I've been holding my breath for a very long time to protect myself or to hide deep shame. I held my breath, my power, my words, my story inside to protect and to survive. Shedding light through writing, investigating, and fully exhaling, a kind of openness has emerged and a kind of fearlessness. I have a growing capacity for peace. I feel like I have the strength and capacity to stand as one of the tall cedars in the forest.  








I am a descendant of incarcerated people 

and

I am a descendant of Hiroshima and Fukuoka and atomic bomb victims
I am a descendant of survivors
I carry a legacy and gift of compassion and energy to heal from my ancestors.

I rise from strong and resilient island people.
I rise with stability, clarity, and an open peaceful heart.
I have the capacity to embrace all relations.


I offer the energy of love, generosity of spirit, and the courage to heal with openness and understanding. 

I am grateful to have the opportunity, resources, and community who support me and makes my writing possible, that in turn make my life possible. Expressing my thoughts and deep feelings into words have been healing for me and for my 92 year old mother. I honestly feel I have healed some generational wounds. I don't know how future generations will heal but perhaps I've opened a small window of hope, through my experience that will remain open, let more light in, more warmth of the sun.  Thank you for encouraging me to tell this story, thank you for supporting me with your kind words and most of all for your warm energy that propels me forward. 

 The theme of offering peace and reconciliation was inspired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela and the courageous survivors who came to tell their stories of the brutality of apartheid at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa in the 1980s. I was touched deeply listening to women and men who walked miles to speak their truth.  I was also inspired to learn about the Zen Peacekeepers led by Tetsugen Bernie Glassman for many years bearing witness at retreats in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I wanted to see if I had the courage and capacity to heal, to grow and meet peace and reconciliation.

And to Dear Thay, Dear Thich Nhat Hanh. I am grateful to you for opening a dharma door 17 years ago, to mindfulness, to practicing and learning to cultivate the insight to forgive, to be grateful for "my appointment with life". You are the teacher I didn't know I was looking for. A deep bow to you.

To my parents, Bette Nakatomi and James Nakatomi and the Nakashima and Nakatomi lineage, pioneers in California, who worked as growers, farmers, florists, early California artisans. What beautiful roots you have planted, what beautiful seeds you have watered in your continuation of children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, four generations of Californians, and soon to be a fifth generation in September!