Losing Black Bodhisattva Desmond Tutu

Dalai Lama (Mission Joy); Associated Press, 12/26/21, edited and expanded by Wisdom Quarterly

(Dalai Lama, July 1, 2021) Finding Joy and Happiness: "His Holiness" the Dalai Lama reunites online with Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu from the Tibetan leader's residence in Dharamsala, HP, India on June 24, 2021, on the occasion of the release of their new movie Mission: Joy - Finding Happiness in Troubled Times (missionjoy.org).

Desmond Tutu at an interview with the AP in Pretoria, South Africa, March 21, 2003. Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning activist for racial justice and LGBT rights and retired Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, has died at the age of 90 (AP/Themba Hadebe, file).

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If Jesus were a bodhisattva, Tutu is, too.

What a Kwanzaa this is! Black Bodhisattva and Anglican Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning icon, an uncompromising foe of the country’s past racist policy of apartheid and a modern-day activist for racial justice and LGBT rights, has died today, Sunday (12/26/21) at the age of 90.

A bodhisattva is a Buddhist concept of a person aspiring to buddhahood with universal compassion and the ambition of helping others to win their salvation/liberation from all suffering. If this is regularly said of the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, it can certainly be said of the kind and social justice-seeking Tutu.

Archbishop Tutu was a wonderful Christian

Although Tutu is a Christian of the Anglican communion, he speaks universally of the worth of all humans, the need to uplift one another, to unite us, and to express universal compassion and community (sisterhood and brotherhood with all). Who can say who is or is not a bodhisattva, but some by their actions make it evident that they care so deeply that this title might be granted them even if they are not conscious of the ambition or aspiration to future enlightenment and being a spiritual beneficiary of countless beings, seen and unseen.

Afrikan Wisdom: Liberation

South Africans, world leaders, and people around the globe mourned the death of the person viewed as the country’s moral conscience. Tutu worked passionately, tirelessly, and non-violently to tear down apartheid — South Africa’s brutal, decades-long regime of oppression against its Black majority that only ended in 1994.

The buoyant, blunt-spoken clergyman used his pulpit as the first Black bishop of Johannesburg and later the Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town as well as frequent public demonstrations to galvanize public opinion against racial inequity, both at home and globally.

Nicknamed “The Arch,” Tutu was diminutive, with an impish sense of humor, but became a towering figure in his nation’s history, comparable to fellow Nobel Laureate Nelson Mandela, a prisoner during white rule who became South Africa’s first Black president.

Tutu and Mandela shared a commitment to building a better, more equal South Africa. More

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