“Hands in the Dirt”

It was 4:35 p.m. on a Sunday in late July, and Eric and I were perched atop our suitcases, sweating, on an unshaded corner in a small town near Seville. Hopefully the promised van would come around the corner, but all we could do now was to cross our fingers and wait.

Our plan was to go “WWOOFing”—the colloquial verb-ification of WWOOF, or World Wide Opportunities in Organic Farming, the program that was (loosely) facilitating our summer adventure. If all went well, we would soon spend three weeks working on a vegetable farm here in La Puebla del Rio, offering our labor in exchange for room and board. We would wake up with the sun, tune up our Spanish, share stories with our hosts, learn the ins and outs of small-scale organic agriculture, swim under the shade of a lychee tree, and go days without spending a cent.

But more than that, we would be part of a project—a global experiment of sorts. Here was an exchange of labor, knowledge, space, and resources that was not, technically, a “job”; in fact, it seemed to be positioned squarely, and thrillingly, outside of the market. No money was changing hands here. No contracts were being signed. Holding then, as I do now, a strong skepticism toward the United States’ existing frameworks for labor and capital exchange, I was intrigued by the idea of something different, something separate, and something new.

But for now, we had to wait for our ride.

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WWOOF was founded in 1971 by Sue Coppard, a secretary in London with deeply romantic ideas about the value of nature and “the countryside.” Originally called “Working Weekends on Organic Farms,” Coppard conceptualized the new program as allowing “unskilled townies” to support the organic project, learn new skills, and come into contact with nature. Even as WWOOF has grown, these idyllic notions remain central to how the organization bills itself, both verbally and visually.

By March 2023, WWOOF had linked over 100,000 volunteers to 12,000 farms worldwide. According to the most recent data available, from 2010, WWOOFers are overwhelmingly young adults, with nearly three-quarters between the ages of 19 and 28. A still-significant portion are older. I’m focusing on the experiences of Brown students here, which is not to discount the broad range of people who participate in the program.

WWOOF is largely decentralized. Each of WWOOF’s dozens of member countries maintains their own website, which provides a platform for basic research and initial communication between volunteer and host. Beyond that, the process of planning and negotiating a WWOOF stay is largely left to the participants themselves. The hands-off nature of the program and the unpolished, early-Internet look of many of the countries’ websites adds to WWOOF’s gritty, exciting, almost radical feel. But what stories actually emerge from this quasi-anarchic smorgasbord of photos and phone numbers and plane tickets and farm stays?

I talked to six Brown students who’d been WWOOFers in the past. Their recountings helped me interrogate the ways that WWOOF, in its current form, falls short of its utopian, anti-capitalist potential. Escape, it seems, is not so easy.

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You might know WWOOFing as I know it: a fun, relatively cheap way to spend a school break; an out-of-the-box experience with both educational and practical merit. Janek Schaller spent several months WWOOFing in Austria and Italy in 2020. To him, it was a chance to “engage more practically and tangibly with the stuff that I had been thinking about and learning about in classes on campus.” Olivia, who asked to be referred to by a pseudonym, WWOOFed in California during the fall of 2021. She spoke about wanting “to do something in real life, and not sitting on a computer in my apartment when everyone seemed to be doing that.”

These are common, and legitimate, goals. But to other WWOOFers, the program means something more. For those who are struggling to find housing, the program can offer food and shelter. This was true for Rose, who WWOOFed one spring break when her school’s dorms were closed and it was too costly to return home to Hong Kong.

Two interviewees told me, secondhand, about WWOOFers using the program to escape unsafe or uncomfortable situations at home. Kate Cobey WWOOFed at what she called a “lesbian farm” in southern New Jersey in 2021, and said she “[got] the sense that … to some extent, it had been used as a queer network of support for people who are looking for a place.” Even for those not directly facing housing instability, WWOOF is a potential source of support and community for queer folks. Maddie told me that they “didn’t have a lot of trans and nonbinary community” growing up, and “wanted to have a space to build that” during their WWOOF stay in the winter of 2022.

The WWOOF program can be essential for farmers, too. In both the U.S. and Europe, agricultural consolidation, inflation, and climate change all threaten the economic viability of small-scale farming. At this point, explains food and agriculture writer Sarah Mock in an article for The Counter, “to build a successful small family farm, you have to prioritize profit above all.”

In Europe, Brexit was an added shock to agricultural markets, while the COVID pandemic has had a disruptive effect worldwide. There’s an additional problem of generational replacement: farmers of the last generation are getting older, and their children have been slow to take up the mantle. The situation in Europe is just as dire, where the number of farms decreased by 37 percent from 2005 to 2020.

Amidst this predicament, WWOOF is a potential saving grace: a source of mostly young, extremely low-cost labor that many farms desperately need. +++

There are all the hopes. But what about the reality?

First, and maybe most straightforwardly, WWOOF has issues with access. In order to go WWOOFing, you need (at least) consistent internet access, in order to find and communicate with farms; you also need to come up with a small annual fee for membership to each country’s WWOOFing network.

WWOOFers aren’t able to make or save up money as they work, since WWOOF labor is compensated solely with room and board. Again, this puts the program out of reach to many young people who need to spend their summers or gap years earning an income. The same issue applies for adults, for whom WWOOF might be a temporary way to stay afloat while jobless—but doesn’t afford the opportunity for economic advancement or longterm stability.

For those who are able to WWOOF, there remains a complex and fundamental tension between who stands to gain the most from the labor exchange and who actually does. Cobey, who WWOOFed in New Jersey, mentioned that farms with more resources might be better able to serve as places for community-building. More WWOOFers might yield a stronger or broader community, but “what kind of resources do you have to be able to afford that?” The cost of hosting multiple WWOOFers—providing them with housing and buying them food—is, while not as much of a financial burden as paying hired workers a living wage, often greater in monetary terms than what each volunteer brings in with their labor directly. For this reason, already well-established farms with wealthy owners are best-positioned to take in and take care of their WWOOFers.

Olivia, in her time WWOOFing in California, saw the flipside: farms that were stretched thin, and therefore struggled to provide the kind of support that she and her companions needed. At her first destination, a date farm in the Mojave desert, one of the other WWOOFers threatened violence toward a member of Olivia’s group. The hosts responded by asking her group to leave the farm. We were “not the best workers in the world… we [were] twenty-year-olds who [had] never done this before,” said Olivia. “They didn’t have the capacity to be, quote, ‘babysitters,”... [they were] running a business in the middle of COVID [and couldn’t] mediate this conflict in a way that was the most fair.”

After being asked to leave the first farm, Olivia and her group were taken in by a second family that was facing even greater challenges. Their vegetable-growing operation was so new that housing for WWOOFers was still under construction when the group arrived; she and her three companions stayed in a single-room garage with one bed. After a week, Olivia reported, the group was again asked to leave. “The owner made a little speech to us as he was kicking us out that we did ‘shit work,’” she said. “And he said, ‘I could hire migrant laborers, who are hungry and have seven hungry children, and they would do this work in half the time.’” It was clear to Olivia that the host was unwilling to pay more than the bare minimum for work— drawing on a long history of exploitative labor practices in U.S. agriculture.

There are families for whom farming and hosting WWOOFers is “a little pet project,” says Olivia. Although these farms have the time and resources to invest in education, community building, and cultural exchange, they don’t stand to benefit from WWOOF in the same tangible ways as poor, strug gling farms do. But this benefit comes from the farms’ absolute reliance on unpaid labor for their livelihood—which lends itself, at worst, but not infrequently, to exploitation.

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When working conditions are ripe for mistreatment or abuse, the brunt of this treatment is not often equally borne. Again, WWOOFers who need the program the most—because they lack housing, money, or community support—are exactly those who are most vulnerable to potential harm.

Vulnerability in WWOOFing comes from all sides, and was acknowledged by every WWOOFer that I interviewed. “You have to be really trusting to be a WWOOFer, I think, or at least very cautious,” said Maddie. “It is a labor exchange… but doesn’t have a contract [or] national labor protections associated with it. Like any kind of informal work that you’re not under contract for, I think this can get really sketchy really fast.”

WWOOFing requires you to count on strangers for your most basic needs—housing, food, and occasionally medical treatment. In some cases, WWOOFers also rely on their hosts for transport to and from the farm. For Cobey, “trying to leave those positions is always scary. There’s a clear imbalance of power, and you’re relying on faith entirely.”

There is also rarely any predicting or accounting for the people you might be working for, or with. Maddie, Cobey, and Simone all spoke about wanting to avoid host families who might be intolerant of their gender or sexual identities. Cobey specified: “As an LGBTQ individual, it was really important to me that I [didn’t] end up on a farm with people who are homophobic.”

Cobey was wary of the living situations that WWOOFers sometimes encounter, noting that one of her fellow female WWOOFers had to share a bunk bed with an older male volunteer. “The idea of being somewhere where I can’t lock someone out, especially if that someone is an older man, immediately gives me the heebie jeebies,” she said. She contextualized this feeling within the larger experience of “traveling anywhere as a female-bodied person,” with all the worry, risk, and discomfort that it entails.

These risks are the most profound for WWOOFers facing instability in food, housing, safety, or community outside of the program. While neither Schaller nor Cobey were in this position, one can imagine being forced to stay in a problematic setup for lack of a viable alternative—or struggling immensely if or when, like Olivia’s group, they are unexpectedly asked to leave.

In a labor relationship based on interpersonal trust, the only shields available when that trust is broken are pre-existing privileges.

In Olivia’s case, she acknowledged, there were “a number of safety nets that allowed me to be fine when things went south.” One of the members of her group had a van, equipped with a mattress and other gear, that allowed the four WWOOFers to depart the first farm immediately once they felt unsafe. Olivia had money to pay for gas and food, and two of her companions knew people at the Claremont Colleges who agreed to take them in for several days.

Safety nets can be financial and social; they can also correspond to one’s racial and gender identity. Schaller, who WWOOFed in Austria and Italy, acknowledged that “the identities that I hold [as a cisgendered white man] made it a lot easier for me to travel on my own throughout Europe.” But what about the others—those without the same confidence, connections, or credit cards?

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To fully understand this problem, we need to step back and consider the broader labor system under which WWOOF falls. The agricultural labor force in both the U.S. and Europe is dominated by migrant workers—in the U.S., 86 percent of farm workers are foreign-born, and 45 percent are undocumented. Migrants without papers often are not included in, or cannot take advantage of, legal protections against exploitation and abuse. In Italy, where Schaller worked as a WWOOFer, a high proportion of migrant laborers find work through the illegal and inherently exploitative caporalato system, in which they are often underpaid, live and work under extremely poor conditions, and are vulnerable to physical, sexual, and psychological violence. But exploitation is endemic in agricultur al systems throughout the EU, as it is in the U.S., too.

When the owner of Olivia’s first farm compared the WWOOFers to “hungry” migrant laborers “who would work in half the time,” he showed an inability, or an unwillingness, to think beyond existing exploitative structures for agricultural work in his conception and use of the WWOOF program. The WWOOF organization, too, lacks the self-awareness about its role in this broad er system that it would need to address and ameliorate that system’s violence. Take Coppard, WWOOF’s founder. In an early article she wrote about the program, the subtitle she thought most appropriate was “Rent-a-Serf.”

WWOOF is a relatively young organi zation, and I’m hopeful that it’s capable of change. Some fixes are straightforward. When I asked the WWOOFers I spoke to what they thought the program could do better, multiple people emphasized the importance of communi cation with their hosts. Simone suggested that WWOOF should, among other things, offer a set of questions that both host and volunteer were required to answer before starting a visit. For example: “If I decide that I want to leave, will you be okay with that?” Of course this solution is incomplete; stated commitments can only do so much when there are no structures in place to ensure that hosts follow through. WWOOF could do much more to establish for everyone some of the safeguards against vulnerability and abuse that volunteers, for now, must sporadically create for themselves (if they can). And it should make a particular emphasis on protections for queer people, low-income people, and people of color, who stand to gain the most from WWOOF.

But all this aside, for WWOOF to truly be able to protect and support its participants, it needs to recognize its place within the broader labor market. Many, if not most, WWOOF farms also employ paid laborers in some capacity. Is it possible to recognize certain advantages of this setup without capitulating to typical, tired structures of labor exchange? Full-time workers sometimes do benefit from protections and defined contracts. This can make their positions in some ways more stable than the volunteers’. Olivia said, of the paid workers on her first farm: “it was clear that they had built these relationships; that they felt secure in these jobs… they could have left; they also could have stayed.”

But within a broader context of exploitation and lack of regulation in the agricultural labor market, this experience of paid farm work is almost certainly not the norm. The greatest improvements to the WWOOF program might actually come from outside it—in the form of radical changes in the way that our agricultural economy is structured and regulated, and in the treatment of the people on whom its labor relies. As long as WWOOF is situated within a system as violent as the one we have now, it can’t truly operate as a space of safety or support.

And as long as WWOOF is part of such a system, it feels short-sighted to concentrate on limited program reforms. The fundamental problem here is not WWOOF; it’s the broader labor economy from which it tries, and fails, to offer an escape. +++

At 4:48 p.m. in La Puebla, we saw a dusty blue van come around the bend. Tatiana, our host, rolled down the window with a greeting. Eric and I looked at each other. It seemed like a miracle: that she was really here; that there was a car for us, and a spacious, thatched-roof hut down the road, and a fridge filled with fresh tomatoes and three weird varieties of eggplant and blocks of mozzarella cheese.

For nearly three weeks it stayed miraculous. The two of us worked, but not too hard; we ate abundantly, and one of the other WWOOFers introduced us to her favorite German pop songs. In the evenings, from the highest point in the sunflower patch, you could just barely see the rooftops in the Sometime during the second week, I asked Tatiana about her house—a gorgeous behemoth of yellow-and-bluepainted concrete. She told me that it dated from the 11th century; the whole property had been a Moorish oil mill. I realized suddenly that the house, and the property, must be worth at least a million dollars. What we were bringing in in weekly vegetable deliveries could be little more than a few hundred. This was plainly a family of significant means, for whom the farm had come out of passion, rather than necessity. And here we were, Eric and I; two teenagers with credit cards and American passports, perfectly positioned to enjoy our ‘escape’ from a market that had helped us far more than it had hurt. Better said, we had never left at all.

Iwas fortunate enough to be introduced to meditation in a cold, silent room at a local Kadampa temple, where behind my softspoken, robed, bald instructor, a multitude of gold figures—Buddhas from all throughout the Vedic tradition—stared back at me with painted eyes. My father sat next to me, his long body towering over my 10-year-old self; we stayed frozen, with crossed legs, hands placed in lap one atop the other, opposing thumbs connected, for what felt like hours to my wandering mind.

My father has practiced Buddhism on and off since he was in college, where he had discovered the late end of Buddhist spiritualism’s introduction to the American counterculture, popularized by writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg as well as spiritual musicians like John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, and Herbie Hancock. As he bounced between cities and jobs, my father tended to seek out whichever Buddhist organization happened to be closest to him— he wasn’t always consistent in his practice, but he seemed to always, eventually, fall back into place at a temple. And since my early introduction to this ancient practice, I haven’t frequented a Buddhist institution or immersed myself in Buddhist literature with any sort of consistency, yet the guidance I have received from soft-spoken monks and spiritual readings remains planted in my mind, helping me make sense of my world.

While I first encountered meditation in an intimate, spiritual space, millions of Americans are introduced to meditation and mindfulness practices in secular, corporate, for-profit locations; meditation is now reportedly a $1.8 billion industry as companies like Amazon (with a repulsively named AmaZen program), Google, and Goldman Sachs invest in efficiency-boosting programs that train their employees to endure workplace exhaustion and stress through meditation. Similarly, massively valuable, neatly-designed apps like Headspace dominate social media advertising space, turning an Instagram feed into an unceasing spew of self-help promises. Headspace claims that you can “feel 14 percent less stressed in just 10 days” and commands you to “do it for yourself, and everyone you love.” A cursory Google search for “mindfulness products” returns thousands of overpriced items promising to help you “find your zen.” The American bourgeois existence is stuffed with faux-Buddhist, plastic spirituality, twisting the ancient religion into a trendy commodity to be sold alongside sets of yoga pants, diet plans, and self-help books.

The earliest records of meditation date back to around 1500 BCE at the beginnings of Vedic— pre-Hindu—schools in India. Yet the practice is most commonly associated and plays the biggest religious role in Buddhism, founded in the 6th century BCE by Siddartha Guatama (known most commonly as Buddha Shakyamuni) as Vedic religion developed into Hinduism, from which Jainism and Buddhism were born. Mindfulness and meditation are key components of the Buddhist journey to enlightenment—this religion cannot exist without these pieces.

The Eightfold Path, the most common summary of the Buddha’s teachings, offers eight elements that one must master simultaneously to free oneself from the cycle of suffering (samsara) and reach enlightenment (nirvana); among these eight are Right Effort, Right Mindfulness (sati), and Right Concentration (samadhi), all three of which are exercised by meditation. Each of the eight divisions of the Path interact with and are essential to the mastery of one another: Right Mindfulness reinforces Right Speech which in turn reinforces Right Conduct and so on. Buddhist texts are adamant that each of these skills are necessary for enlightenment and that each skill is necessary for the perfection of the others. With meditation seen as the key to training the mind to think, speak, and act rightly, and with this righteous lifestyle seen as necessary to gaining the wisdom and resolve to continue on the strenuous path to enlightenment, Buddhism cannot exist without meditative practices; they are woven through each fiber of the ancient religion.

Gen Kelsang Menla is the Resident Teacher of Texas’s Kadampa Center and a wonderful guide for my family. Most weeks, my father attends Menla’s lessons, often staying behind to ask for advice. The conversations are casual and grounding. Each time I sit down with Menla, I am surprised I’m talking to a religious leader; he speaks like an ordinary, well-educated man, albeit one wearing robes and with a shaved head. This time is no different, when I meet with him over Zoom in an interview for the College Hill Independent. He tells me, over his lunch, that meditation “enables us to release our minds from bonds of delusion, attachment, and anger.” There’s a difference between Right Mindfulness (samma sati) and Wrong Mindfulness (miccha sati); the purpose of the practice should not be for “worldly kinds of goods,” i.e. efficiency, productivity, or any sort of material profit. He labels meditation for those pursuits as “self-indulgent.” Menla says that he sees positive intention in the recent spread of meditative practices and that he’s glad that these beneficial techniques have been made more accessible, yet, for him, meditation devoid of its spiritual context is “taking one small benefit when the whole practice can bring you so much more.”

But this divorcing of mindfulness from its religious and moral context is unsurprising in a corporate setting. Americans are more stressed, and working more hours, than ever—we need any coping mechanism we can get our hands on. And corporations are unlikely to deliver Buddhist practices in their spiritual contexts, which would likely emphasize a work-life balance, a reduction in materialism, and an increased focus on ethical consumption and action. So in the midst of workplace stress, employees are taught to distance themselves from their anxious lives through the use of meditation. The trainings are often successful, as seen in the raving reviews (Google’s director of executive development Richard Fernandez reported having “less reactivity in high-stress meetings”) and long waitlists for Google’s Search Inside Yourself program, a training program designed to improve workers’ leadership skills and emotional intelligence (EI) through mindfulness exercises. The program has received a rating of about 4.75 out of 5 from anonymous employee surveys. So companies can have more efficient, less stressed employees without making any structural changes to better workplace environments. Chade-Meng Tan, the founder of this groundbreaking program, comes from a Buddhist background and considers himself a sometime follower of the religion. While the program is secular—Meng has stated that he isn’t interested “in bringing Buddhism to Google”—it draws on Buddhist lessons: Meng tends to reference teachings by monks like Matthieu Ricard, a Tibetan Buddhist who hails from France and has been called “the happiest man in the world.” The New York Times, when the Google program first began, celebrated reports of employees who, after taking the course, proudly shoulder increasingly copious amounts of work, while Forbes, in an article praising Search Inside Yourself, even went on to summarize the program’s teachings as instructing employees to “take a deep breath when your job sucks.”

The purpose of the program is to transform Buddhist spiritual practices into corporate qualifications.

In an interview with WIRED, Meng stated, “Everybody knows this EI thing is good for their career, and every company knows that if their people have EI, they’re gonna make a shitload of money.”

While it’s hard to find any empirical data, these applauding anecdotes can be found from employees at other prominent companies like Goldman Sachs and Intel. But while this “lessened reactivity” and greater “emotional intelligence” may be beneficial for many employees in a stressful workplace, I doubt that taking a deep breath is an effective, long-term solution. When employers offer this patronizing yet trendy nonsolution, the burden of staying sane at work falls to the workers; companies can avoid their duties to make structural changes that would create a healthier workplace.

And it isn’t as if this corporate borrowing gets approved by any Buddhist authority. “Buddhism exists through the form of various lineages from master to master, the teachings have been passed down,” Menla tells me. “To take these extraordinary practices out of the context of these lineages can really be seen as appropriation.” Throughout our discussion, Menla consistently referred to workplace mindfulness as a form of corporate appropriation or exploitation. The religion tends to focus on a teacher’s passing down of their own interpretations of Buddhist principles to their students through personal connection. Whether it is corporate training programs disseminating these practices to their employees or entrepreneurs looking to design a product, spreading these practices without paying homage to or asking for the consent of these teachers commodifies religion and stings with disrespect. He tells me that the founder of Headspace, Andy Puddicombe, got the idea for the app while studying at a Buddhist monastery in India and probably received no permission to use his learning in the making of a for-profit enterprise. In fact, Menla mentions that it is common practice in Buddhist communities for ordained monks to sign legal agreements stating that they won’t use their teachings for self-promotion or any material personal gain. Doing so, he says, would be “stealing something” in a moral sense from the long genealogies of teaching.

Buddhism, however, is still a religion that prides itself on its ability to adapt to differing cultural landscapes, first spreading through Eastern Asia in ancient times and in subsequent eras throughout the West. Practices vary across these cultures: Zen traditions are wildly different from those practiced by the several Tibetan sects. One need only look at Buddhism’s interaction and compatibility with Japanese Shintoism to see that Buddhism thrives as it adapts to new cultures: Buddhism was introduced to the island in the 6th century; it’s common throughout Japanese spiritual communities for individuals and temples to practice both religions simultaneously in a common syncretism known as shinbutsu-shūgō which has been practiced since the 18th century. But in today’s for-profit America, Buddhist practices are contorted to serve as a means to an end, a situation that is fundamentally antithetical to the aims of this religion that relies on the pursuit of non-worldly goals and rejects materially enriching actions. Any commodification of this 2,600-year-old practice perverts the teachings of the practice as well as the countless generations of teachers who have kept Buddhism alive.

The prominent Thervadist monk, Bhikku Bodhi, reminds us that “mindfulness can help us to gain greater clarity in fulfilling our responsibility to transform the social order in alignment with our ethical standards.” As it has done throughout its long history, Buddhism can act as a tool of personal and societal growth in our modern day, especially as American monks like Bodhi increasingly teach Buddhism in relation to activism, a practice of Engaged Buddhism that first originated in Vietnam in the 20th century before spreading to India and eventually the U.S. Buddhism, with its ability to adapt, can make a positive impact on an American cultural ethos, but only if it is handled with respect and care in authentically spiritual communities.

How can we engage with Buddhism in a respectful way? Buddhism is a universalizing religion—it is meant to spread throughout communities and localities. Universalizing religions, with their wide spread, inevitably evolve as they encounter peoples with differing interpretations and needs. This is visible in the American context. Much of the initial spread of Buddhism in the U.S. originated from the immigration of East Asian populations to the West Coast between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. Naturally, some change is expected, but what exists in the corporate setting goes further than adaptation. The extractive element of meditation in America comes from the for-profit uses of Buddhist practices that, like yoga, have been divorced from their spiritual roots and made into a trendy image of crossed legs and tight pants. There aren’t clear-cut answers here. It would be ideal if Americans interested in mindfulness practices or meditation could explore them in the spiritual contexts that they arise from, but these Buddhist communities, led by learned monks, are scarcer outside of America’s larger urban areas. Apps like Headspace that commercialize meditation are disrespectful to Buddhist tradition but are much more accessible to the population without the time, information, and location necessary to enter a Buddhist space. And these apps and programs do seem to help many deal with stress and won’t be going away anytime soon; Headspace has 70 million downloads and 600,000 (almost all positive) reviews. They exist as a teleological good—albeit, a minor good in comparison to the actual spirituality of Buddhism—with a morally dubious root.

It’s clear that corporations should not be utilizing these practices for profit and that doing so is extractive and serves an expressly anti-Buddhist purpose. But what about the company employee looking to destress after an hours-intensive week? What about the consumer who wants to use Headspace to better their mental health? Is what they’re doing also extractive? Or is there a way to reconcile personal needs with these systemic implications?

It’s frightening to think that Buddhist practices are increasingly stripped of their context while being used in corporate settings to reinforce the status quo. I worry that they might go the way of yoga or tantric exercises, two deeply spiritual Asian practices reduced to bland, ‘self-indulgent’ workout and sex fads in America. When I chat with Menla, he jokes about what those two practices have become here; he’s cheerful about this whole subject—such is often the way of Buddhist monks.

Maybe this consumerist phenomenon is a starting point for a large section of the American population to eventually engage with Buddhism in a more meaningful, truthful way. Belief systems aren’t static as they move across time and throughout different communities. Buddhism and its practices will continue to evolve in the U.S. I only hope that this ancient practice is able to flourish in a mindful way.

BETO BEVERIDGE B’25 is taking a deep breath.