The Way of Tenderness: Awakening through Race, Sexuality, and Gender
Feb 2015 · Sold by Simon and Schuster
4.4star
5 reviews
Ebook
152
Pages
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About this ebook
“What does liberation mean when I have incarnated in a particular body, with a particular shape, color, and sex?”
In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege.
Manuel brings her own experiences as a bisexual black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us.
This is a book that will teach us all.
In The Way of Tenderness, Zen priest Zenju Earthlyn Manuel brings Buddhist philosophies of emptiness and appearance to bear on race, sexuality, and gender, using wisdom forged through personal experience and practice to rethink problems of identity and privilege.
Manuel brings her own experiences as a bisexual black woman into conversation with Buddhism to square our ultimately empty nature with superficial perspectives of everyday life. Her hard-won insights reveal that dry wisdom alone is not sufficient to heal the wounds of the marginalized; an effective practice must embrace the tenderness found where conventional reality and emptiness intersect. Only warmth and compassion can cure hatred and heal the damage it wreaks within us.
This is a book that will teach us all.
Ratings and reviews
4.4
5 reviews
James Whitener
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April 9, 2021
The author lays a clear plan for dealing with issues of race, sexuality, gender and other divisions through the lens of Buddhism. The surface value notion of transcending the body and focusing only on the spirit is turned on its head; instead, we find that acknowledging the various types of bodies we have can create dialogues that lead to even greater spiritual growth. There is clear language and use of anecdote here, making this just as easy a reading for non-Buddhist and Buddhism expert alike. There seems to be a lot of repetition of ideas however, padding out sections that could be more succinct.
About the author
Rev. Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, PhD, author, visual artist, drummer, and Zen Buddhist priest, is the guiding teacher of Still Breathing Zen Community in East Oakland, CA. She was raised with two sisters in Los Angeles after her parents migrated there from Creole Louisiana. She is the author of Tell Me Something About Buddhism and contributing author to many books, including Dharma, Color and Culture: Voices From Western Buddhist Teachers of Color and The Hidden Lamp: Stories from Twenty-Five Centuries of Awakened Women. She lives in Oakland, CA
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