Home Is Here: Practicing Antiracism with the Engaged Eightfold Path

A guide to living the Engaged Four Noble Truths: antiracist practices for wholeness, healing, and collective liberation.

For readers of Be the Refuge, The Way of Tenderness, Love and Rage, and Radical Dharma.

Home is Here builds on foundational Buddhist teachings--the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path--offering an intersectional frame to help you embody antiracist practices and tend to your own healing under racism and oppression.

Grounded in practice, memoir, and mindful self-help skill-building, Rev. Liên Shutt’s Engaged Four Noble Truths illuminate a path toward healing and liberation. She shares her own experiences with anti-Asian hate--as a teen riding her bike, meditating in whitewashed monasteries--and asks, what does it mean to attend to our suffering in body, heart, and mind when racism can cause such intense hurt and pain? What does it look like to heal?

While written mainly for Asian American Buddhists and other BIPOC practitioners, Home is Here moves us all from knowing and contemplation to a place of action and wholeness.

In the doing is the realization, and in practicing antiracism, we build a home for all beings. This is reflected in Rev. Shutt’s choice to frame each step of the Engaged Eightfold Path not as ＂right＂ but as ＂skillful＂--to convey both the knowing and the practices essential to healing harm. In this way:

• Skillful view helps us understand and unpack the layers of our racial conditioning within systemic white supremacy.
• Skillful motivation allows us to understand our agency and align our actions with wholeness.
• Skillful effort guides us when working through difficult or triggering situations
• Skillful speech helps us communicate wholly truthfully, even (and especially) when navigating challenging conversations.

An engaged reframing of core Buddhist spiritual principles, Home is Here connects foundational practices to urgent causes--and invites readers on a path home to wholeness.

Rev. Liên Shutt is a recognized leader in the movement that breaks through the wall of American white-centered convert Buddhism to welcome people of all backgrounds into a contemporary, engaged Buddhism. As an ordained Zen priest, licensed social worker and longtime educator/teacher of Buddhism, Shutt represents new leadership at the nexus of spirituality and social justice, offering a special warm welcome to Asian Americans, all BIPOC, LGBTQIA+, immigrants, and others seeking a ’home’ in the midst of North American society’s reckoning around racism, sexism, homophobia and xenophobia. Shutt was a co-founder of Buddhists of Color in 1998 and founder of Access to Zen in 2014. As the creator, producer, and host, she is launching a podcast series Opening Dharma Access: Listening to BIPOC Teachers with Kaira Jewel Lingo and Lama Karma Yeshe Chodron.