An Tran

He saw Buddhism as the means to spiritual liberation & Marxism as the means to material liberation, spreading this teaching to the masses, & embodying it in his own life & conduct.

A really remarkable and admirable figure in histories of Buddhism and Engaged Buddhism that does not get his due. 6/6

He was the first Buddhist monk to become a member of the Communist Party of Indochina, and used the language of Buddhism to awaken class consciousness in the masses—a true forefather of Buddhist-Marxist apologetics, who provided the opening for Buddhists en masse to lend support to the Marxists. 5/

In 1928, Sư Thiện Chiếu organized a series of mass protests in Vietnam, demanding basic rights for Buddhists under French occupation. His efficacy as a leader at generating mass movements routinely caused issues for the French colonizers, and he was arrested multiple times for being a dissident. 4/

He opened up monasteries across Viet Nam to serve as orphanages to raise the children left orphaned from the war, and encouraged monks and nuns to use their education and social privilege to lend support to and shelter revolutionaries. 3/

Sư Thiện Chiếu argued that Buddhism was not compatible with colonial exploitation and worked hard to both spread literacy among the masses while simultaneously publishing literature that skillfully re-expressed Marxist revolutionary ideas in Buddhist language, using Buddhist doctrinal defenses. 2/

Lately I’ve been learning about Ven. Thích Thiện Chiếu (1898-1974), an exemplar of the Vietnamese #EngagedBuddhism tradition and an important revolutionary figure in Sài Gòn's colonial resistance. He published many commentaries that connected ideas of Buddhist liberation to national liberation. 1/

YouTube video by Fearless Wisdom FW Chats: Ẩn Trần and Vietnamese Buddhism

I was interviewed by the Fearless Wisdom podcast on the history of Vietnamese #Buddhism! Grateful for the opportunity to share some of my experience with the tradition & shine light on its rich history. 🙏🏼

(You’ll have to forgive how horribly I butcher some of the pronunciations of terms here.. 😅)

Has anyone else ever noticed how often Sakyamuni Buddha in his past lives slanders the dharma? 😅

In MN81, he had to be dragged by the hair to go see the Buddha after disparaging him. In T09, he insults the past life of Amitabha as a fraud. Just going around talking smack bout the Buddha and sangha.

San Francisco’s Tu Quang Temple: Vietnamese Buddhism and Regeneration in the Heart of the City - Buddha Weekly: Buddhist Practices, Mindfulness, Meditation Down the hill from the San Francisco Mint towards a bustling intersection at Duboce Avenue and Market Street, the beautiful blue and white sculptural relief

A great write-up about the beautiful little temple in the Mission serving San Francisco’s Vietnamese Buddhist community.

Okay—took me a few days to get myself to the bookstore, but I cannot tell you how excited I am to crack into Ocean Vuong’s latest novel!

#booksky #oceanvuong #emperorofgladness

I’m so very grateful to @tricyclemag.bsky.social for the opportunity to share more about Vietnamese #Buddhism and some of the history the oft-overlooked Thien-Pure Land Dual Cultivation tradition. It’s a true blessing to write about and share the dharma w/ others.

Nam mô A di đà Phật
🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️🙏🏼🙇🏻‍♂️

Auction of ancient Indian gems ‘imbued with presence of Buddha’ condemned Sotheby’s sale of Piprahwa gems, excavated after burial with Buddha’s remains, denounced as perpetuating colonial violence

Absolutely. Vile. 😡

Sotheby’s to auction off a collection of STOLEN gems that had been found in India alongside the relics of the Buddha as an offering, known to have been excavated and taken by British colonists.

Imperial violence against #buddhism still going strong in 2025.

At that time, Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva emerged from his seat. Pressing his palms in reverence, he addressed the Buddha saying, “Bhagavan, I have made up my mind to become a Buddha. I have long seen the beings of the human realm toiling in the fields. With their ten fingers, they claw at the mud until blood flows. “For this reason, I vow to be reborn in the body of the ox. I vow to save the toiling masses. With the two horns on my head, I will pull the plough, break up the earth, and turn over the soil.” ~Sutra on the Ox-King Mahasthamaprapta

Mahasthamaprapta Bodhisattva is a comrade—confirmed. ✊🏼

Honestly, I'm really moved by how pro-labor this #Buddhist scripture seems—like, it appears to argue/imply that the primary duty of both divine and stately power is improving the well-being of the working masses.

🙏🏼 Nam mô Đại thế chi Bồ tát 🙇🏻‍♂️

I don’t know if you’ve ever had lapsang souchong, a Chinese black tea popular with westerners, but it tastes the way an Asian grandma’s house smells—that is, like rancid Chinese medicine from a Taoist geomancer called Uncle Seven who smokes like a chimney and gambles behind the 99 Ranch market.

New York City places street sign honoring influential Buddhist monk, Thích Nhất Hạnh NEW YORK (RNS) — The street co-naming honors the life of the Zen master who once lived and studied on the same block of West 109th Street.

What a big moment for Vietnamese #Buddhism in America!

U.S. textbooks portray Asians in a limited and negative light, new study shows An AI-driven analysis of widely used textbooks found that only 1% of sentences contained any mention of Asians or Asian Americans – and most of the references were related to war and foreign affairs r...

Real shocker: study finds US textbooks discuss Asians and Asian Americans almost exclusively in the contexts of being invaders, dissidents, and enemies.

YouTube video by The Ho Center for Buddhist Studies at Stanford Ven. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā: Interview with Miles Osgood

Ven. Bhikkhunī Dhammadinnā is one of the rock stars of Early Buddhist Studies. Her papers on the parinirvana of the Buddha's step-mother, and on the past lives of the Buddha Sakyamuni where he was a woman, are incredible reads for my fellow dharma geeks.

Also this interview w/ her just dropped! 👇🏼👀

The poster for the event. It features art clips of a raised fist and a bodhi tree branch. Session 1 was March 16, called re-grounding Jodo Shinshu in Mahayana Buddhism. Session 2 will be April 20, called A Contemporary Pure Land Path. Session 3 will be May 11, called Venerable Shinran's class consciousness and interpreting Bodhisattva Dharmakara as an abolitionist.

"Building the Pure Land: A Series of Anti-Imperialist Workshops for Jodo Shinshu Buddhists" with Rev. CJ Dunford, presented by the Jodo Shinshu Center. The first in this engaged Pure Land Buddhist series was yesterday.
#buddhism #buddhist #engagedbuddhism #jodoshinshu #shinbuddhism #abolition

Remember Karen Russell promoting VAMPIRES IN THE LEMON GROVE twelve years ago, and how absolutely stunning the short story “Proving Up” was, and how she said she was working on a novel set in the Dust Bowl??

It’s FINALLY here! Cannot WAIT to start digging into this.

Pet cats arrived in China via the Silk Road 1,400 years ago, ancient DNA study finds How and when domestic cats arrived in China has been a mystery. A new analysis of cat DNA suggests traders and diplomats likely carried the pets with them along the Silk Road 1,400 years ago.

This is the real important science.

Free Mahmoud Khalil or we riot. ✊🏼

Went to Chinatown today and came across this statue that is unambiguously Angida the Snakecatcher (aka Clothsack Arhat), and not Maitreya (aka Clothsack Bodhisattva).

Super cool! You almost never see this—normally, you get conflations between the two, sometimes with the Vietnamese Earth God too.

Yeah, all of this 100%

The United States’s foreign policy has always been fascism abroad, to maintain global US hegemony, bullying every nation to submit or be starved/bombed to death, like Vietnam was, Afghanistan, etc. The media isn’t just complicit—it cheers it on, sanitizing ethnic cleaning into “peacekeeping.”

Vietnam to support deportations from US after tariff threats, lawyer says Vietnam has pledged to support the repatriation of a few dozen Vietnamese nationals detained in the U.S. and to quickly handle new requests for deportations after U.S. threats of trade tariffs and visa sanctions, a lawyer briefed on the matter said.

Well, fuck. I knew they’d go after us too. 😠

“Tin said most of the more than 8,600 Vietnamese nationals who are currently facing “an order of removal” from the U.S. were migrants who entered the country usually as refugees before 1995, following the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam.”

Opinion | Trumpists want to make the Presidio a Chinese-style supercity. It's nuts Crackpot libertarians dream of “freedom cities.” The president's executive order moves the fantasy closer to reality.

Oh great, the tech-finance bros want to turn San Francisco into the most corrupt parts of Hong Kong, Macau, and Shenzhen where capitalist tycoons are allowed to run criminal empires with zero oversight—they might as well name it Night City too, go full cyberpunk dystopia.

If the creator had ever laid eyes on my love, her gazelle-eyes, her face made up with sandalwood and saffron, he could have never let her go. But then, he could have hardly fashioned her so, with his eyes covered up. Then it must be true what the Buddhists say— this world has no creator. Verse 40 of the Vidyadhara-subhashita-ratna-kosha, Dharmakirti, 6th century CE

Ancient Buddhist love poetry kinda slaps.

If you don't believe in amnesty, you're saying you're okay with tearing millions of families apart because you do not see these people (nor myself) as Americans. And I can only wish you might know just an iota of the pain that trails the sword of your view.

There are a million reasons why an immigrant might not have paperwork, most of them benign. Some were raised as Americans since their infancy. Some came as refugees of dead states. Some are the adopted children of American parents. And sometimes life circumstances get in the way of filing paperwork.