Hearing the Cries Without Looking Away
I’ve been sitting with Chapter 25 of the Lotus Sutra, often called The Universal Gate of Avalokiteśvara.
When the bodhisattva Akṣayamati asks why Avalokiteśvara is known as “Perceiver of the World’s Sounds,” the Buddha’s answer is simple: because Avalokiteśvara hears the cries of suffering beings and responds.
Not selectively or because they deserve it.
Not because they belong to one nation, one religion, or one people.
Suffering calls forth compassion.
But what happens when the cries are political?
What happens when those cries come from Gaza?
From eastern Congo?
What happens when those cries echo histories that many in this country would rather remember as finished than ongoing?
As a black man and Buddhist practitioner, I don’t encounter this chapter from nowhere.
Like every practitioner, I read it through the experiences that have shaped me.
I carry histories where entire peoples were declared less than human…
Indigenous nations were driven from their lands.
Africans were stolen into slavery.
Jim Crow.
Redlining.
Mass incarceration.
Those histories don’t sit outside my practice.
They shape how I hear the cries Avalokiteśvara is said to hear.
To me, Buddhist practice isn’t about hiding behind doctrine so that we never have to wrestle with the world as it is.
It asks something much harder.
To listen.
To question.
To remain present even when what we hear unsettles us.
Can the Bodhisattva hear some cries and ignore others?
Because the answer, if Chapter 25 is taken seriously, has to be no.
Not if they’re Palestinian, Congolese, Israeli, or Sudanese.
Not if they’re Native American, Black, white, civilian, prisoner, or soldier.
The cry comes first.
The Universal Gate doesn’t ask for passports before it opens.
Compassion crosses borders.
Accountability does not disappear at them.
That doesn’t flatten moral responsibility. It expands moral concern.
The hardest part of compassion isn’t loving those who suffer. It’s refusing to surrender the humanity of those causing suffering while never surrendering the truth about what they’re doing.
The practice isn’t asking us to abandon our convictions.
It’s asking us to hold them with enough humility that we remain teachable.
Because certainty, when it hardens into dogma, can become another way of refusing to see.
The Living Dharma has taught me not to be afraid of questions.
Questions don’t weaken my practice.
They keep it alive.
They remind me that the Dharma is something I enter into, not something I possess.
The moment I become certain I’ve arrived, I’ve probably stopped listening.
What becomes of the Bodhisattva Vow when the cries of the world are politically inconvenient?
I don’t know that Chapter 25 gives us an easy answer.
But I do think it refuses to let us choose which cries are worthy of our compassion.
And perhaps that refusal is where the practice begins.
Stay in your rhythm.
-DT