ON MAY 4, Higashi Honganji Buddhist Temple in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo hosted May We Gather: A National Buddhist Memorial Ceremony for Asian American Ancestors.
The event, livestreamed to an audience of tens of thousands, marked the forty-ninth day after the shootings in Atlanta in which six Asian American women were murdered: Tan Xiaojie, Feng Daoyeu, Hyun Jung Grant, Soon Chung Park, Kim Suncha, and Yong Ae Yue.
Clergy representing the Fo Guang Shan, Jodo Shinshu, Nichiren, Zen, Theravada, Thien, Tibetan, and other Buddhist traditions chanted sacred texts, offered dharma teachings, and reflected on the long history—and terrible present—of racialized violence suffered by Asian Americans.
An event to remember and bear witness, May We Gather was a fierce declaration, a proclamation of Buddhist unity, and a powerful act of defiance and healing.
—MIHIRI TILLAKARATNE, Associate Editor
Funie Hsu
EVENT CO-ORGANIZER, INTERDISCIPLINARY SCHOLAR
We gather as Asian American Buddhists and allies in an expression of our fundamental interconnectedness. We do not suffer alone, nor do we heal alone. Only when we join together as a sangha can we truly support each other’s freedom.
When our Chinese immigrant ancestors came to these shores in the 1850s, we faced exclusion and violence, our Buddhist and Daoist temples desecrated and set ablaze. When our Japanese American forebears were herded into U.S. concentration camps in the 1940s, our priests were classified as a threat to national security, our Buddhist faith deemed un-American. When our South and Southeast Asian parents and grandparents arrived in this country in the 1970s, many fleeing
