When Larry Ward died suddenly on August 19, Buddhism in America lost a unique and powerful voice.
“His dharma name was True Great Sound, and he was indeed a master of sound,” said dharma teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo after his death. “He soothed, uplifted, and gave confidence through his soulful songs, through the way he recited a poem from the depths of his being, and through the way he directed us in his teachings to listen to the sounds of the world—both the suffering and the joy—and to respond wholeheartedly.”
Lama Rod Owens, a Black Buddhist minister and activist, paid tribute to him as an elder who “felt like a grandfather within the Black American Buddhist community. My deep respect for him was rooted in his many years of practice, as he exemplified what it looked like for Black men to embrace the dharma and make it ours. May he rest well with the ancestors.”
“I hear his thunderous laughter in the wind, his poetry in the chirping crickets, his deep insights in the night sky,” said singer/songwriter Joe Reilly.
Just six weeks before his unexpected death, I had a long conversation with Larry and his wife and co-teacher, Peggy Rowe Ward. I was doing a story about their partnership, both dharmic and romantic, which made them leaders in American Buddhism. Now that story becomes a memorial and celebration of Larry’s life and all they accomplished together.
Larry Ward began life seventy-seven years ago, when he was abandoned as an infant in Cleveland. His adoptive mother, Viola, picked him from the window of a hospital nursery, where Larry had been for six months. She became for Larry “the embodiment of how to love,” including how to “love a stranger.”
Knowing you were abandoned as a baby could understandably foster deep resentment, but Larry instead identified with Moses and chose to reframe his beginnings as blessed with magic and mystery. Larry told me he counted his childhood—in a predominantly African American neighborhood that also included a variety of ethnicities—as happy. Yet he also noted that folks moved about there “in a kind of stunned silence about race, as if hoping that by never acknowledging it, the bitterness just under the surface would not leak out.”
People who knew Larry’s boundless energy and compassion in later life would not be surprised to learn that he grew up playing lots of sports while simultaneously making a deep connection to Christianity, attending services in Pentecostal, Baptist, and Lutheran churches near where he lived. Larry’s embrace of Christianity as a path of love and liberation led him to become ordained as a minister at twenty-four. He took to it with a missionary zeal that drove him for the rest of his life.
A few years before his ordination, Larry had become attracted to the work of the Ecumenical Institute, based in Chicago. The institute had emerged from a recognition in the World Council of Churches that, as Larry put it, “The walls erected between various denominations had stood in the way of slowing the rise of Naziism. We needed to do better.” A “theological revolution” was required, and it was while attending a course with that very name that Larry decided to commit himself to the institute’s mission. He moved to Chicago and for the next ten years led seminars on religious studies in the U.S. and around the world. It was a special project, though, in a sixteen-block area in Chicago, that would become the catalyst for the next stage of Larry’s ministry.
It was called “Fifth City,” and the animating spirit driving it was Applied Christianity, a foreshadowing of Larry’s work as one of the leading proponents of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Engaged Buddhism. The mission, he said, was to “work with a community to create its own transformation, resulting in a new kind of city where the neighborhood takes care of itself. We ended up doing housing, rehabilitation, food service, schoolteacher uplift, preschool, and much more.”
As word spread, requests came from India, Africa, and Southeast Asia to export the model, taking Larry all around the world for years to come, with the program eventually reaching fifty-two countries. While doing Ecumenical Institute work in Calcutta, he did a deep study of the Buddhist eightfold path and began to put it into practice. According to Larry, the more he learned about Buddhism, the more he discovered he was already living it.
One thing I picked up right away in talking with Larry was his commitment to lifelong learning. In the midst of the ecumenical work, he pursued bachelor’s degrees in both organizational development and psychology. It was this evangelical zeal to learn and to teach that would eventually bring him into contact with Peggy Rowe, a true kindred spirit.
Larry and Peggy met in 1986 when they both happened to enroll in the same three-year course in expanding human capacities led by Jean Houston, a pioneer of the human potential movement. On day one, they were each exhausted from travel and not feeling very participatory. So, in a summer camp gymnasium in upstate New York with 180 participants from fourteen countries, they felt overwhelmed and wanted to lie low and ease into things. But Houston enthusiastically announced that the program would launch right away with a renaissance festival, and Larry and Peggy were randomly picked to be king and queen. As they sat abreast of each other on makeshift thrones on a dais, clothed in silk robes, surveying their “kingdom,” they had hours to get to know each other. A Platonic love affair began, and they vowed to keep in touch.
Around this time, Larry received an invitation to speak at a large company, which led to a consulting contract, and when word started to spread about his work, his “ministry” migrated to workplaces and police forces, where he specialized in cultural transformation, teamwork, and forging new habits and pathways.
Buddhism entered Peggy’s life in 1991 as a result of a tragedy. With a doctorate in adult education, she was doing corporate training work and living in Idaho when her husband Steve died in a skiing accident. While she was struggling with being a widow, a client of hers came into her office with a flyer for a Thich Nhat Hanh retreat called “Peace in Every Step.” Sparked by those words and the photo of Thich Nhat Hanh’s beatific face, she wondered, “Wow, would it be possible for me to feel peace in every step?”
At her first retreat, at Mount Madonna in California, she made a deep connection to Thay, as Thich Nhat Hanh was known to his students. Peggy knew little to nothing about Buddhism, but what Thay gave her, she says, “rekindled my Christian love of Jesus, and I fell in love with him.” Buddhism did not come across to her as philosophical or cerebral; it was something warm and healing.
By the time Peggy’s husband died in 1991, Larry and the couple had been friends for years, so Larry moved to Idaho, where he and Peggy began doing workplace training and consulting together, including diversity training. As their relationship blossomed into romance, Peggy told Larry, “If you’re going to be with me, you have to meet this teacher.”
Thich Nhat Hanh officiated the wedding of Larry Ward and Peggy Rowe Ward in 1994. The Wards went on to ordain as lay dharma teachers in the Plum Village tradition, and they frequently taught together.
Soon after, Peggy brought Larry to a Thich Nhat Hanh retreat. He’d known of him from many years before when then Atlanta mayor Andrew Young told him about the young Vietnamese monk who’d urged Martin Luther King Jr. to oppose the war in Vietnam. King’s assassination had been a watershed moment in Larry’s life, so to know of Thay’s connection to King moved him deeply. It was no surprise, then, that on the retreat he immediately felt he’d found his teacher.
Thay married Larry and Peggy in a ceremony at Plum Village in France in 1994, and at the same time he encouraged them to teach, “in your own way.” A few years later, with Thay’s encouragement, they founded the Lotus Institute, a nonprofit educational and membership organization that would serve as a home for both their in-person and online teaching. In 2001, Thay bestowed the dharma lamp transmission on them, formally acknowledging them as teachers of buddhadharma.
Larry Ward taught Buddhism for over three decades, and counting his work as a Christian minister—which he would have—he propagated dharma for half a century. His teaching had many aspects, but perhaps four of them stand out prominently: a nonsectarian ministry that moved freely between his Christian roots and Buddhism, embracing a wide and deep spirituality; a commitment to love and a focus on relationships; an understanding of our racial karma and how to transcend it; and what he called “Deep Buddhism,” a trauma-informed understanding that brought together neuroscience, the wisdom of nature, bodywork, poetry, and societal transformation—a complex amalgam he made simple through the power of his unique voice.
For the Love of Jesus
Kaira Jewel Lingo first knew Larry as a Baptist minister at the Ecumenical Institute in Chicago, where her parents were colleagues of his. Since the community’s children were cared for collectively, Larry took care of Kaira as a baby. He came to call himself a “dharma preacher,” which fit one aspect of his teaching perfectly. He felt, Kaira says, “that Jesus and Thích Nhat Hanh were deeply aligned, and his life reflected the way these two traditions could harmonize. At times, his voice carried the power and fire of a Baptist preacher, and at others, the gentleness and clarity of a Buddhist teacher—blending seamlessly into something uniquely his own.”
Larry could find inspiration in Buddhist scripture, the Bible, or a Hindu chant. In teaching about the Buddhist paramita (transcendent perfection) of generosity, he said Jesus’s teaching that there is “no greater thing a person can do for their friends than to lay down their life” refers not simply to martyrdom, but to any act of caring for others. In another talk, he spoke of spending the morning “in the world of Hinduism”—chanting, moved by the feeling of being together with others in presence, rather than in entertainment, which engenders “the kind of mind we need to create the new world.” The fire in his voice was not directed toward mere contentment, but the fierce determination to make the world a better place.
Love’s Garden
On a trip to China with Thay, Peggy overheard him talking about a “wonderful American Buddhist couple.” She thought, How cool they sound! Then she realized he was talking about her and Larry. Not long after, Thay asked this “wonderful couple” to write a book on relationships, and the groundbreaking Buddhist classic was born: Love’s Garden: A Guide to Mindful Relationships (Parallax Press). A short sentence from the book captures the heart of their message: “The practice of mindfulness is the practice of love.”
Love’s Garden is not all rainbows and unicorns. The couple admitted that blending their lives was not always easy, but Larry appreciated how Peggy embraced his family, including Larry’s son from his first marriage, Emmanuel, an IT consultant and sometime actor and athlete living in Los Angeles. She, in turn, honored Larry for the enormous space he fostered for the development of her teaching. They danced without stepping on each other’s toes, partners in every respect.
Larry Ward was cofounder of The Lotus Institute, an educational non-profit that offers tools and experiences to help heal trauma and inspire the co-creation of a more compassionate world.
A core teaching in the book focuses on “being a real human being,” one who will encounter darkness. We deny problems at our peril, doubly so in relationships. “We all have the capacity to be greedy,” they write, “to want too much, to give too little to ourselves as well as others. But these things are just shadows passing across the ground of the real human being.” In relationship, our partner gives us “a wonderful opportunity to practice cultivating our best self.” By weathering the dark clouds with love, we help each other find who we really are.
Healing Racial Suffering
Larry Ward knew the trauma of racism. When he was only eleven, he was shot at by police for playing baseball in the wrong part of town. Just six months after their wedding as an interracial couple, Larry and Peggy’s home in Idaho was bombed by the Aryan Nation, causing them to take refuge at Plum Village in France to heal. Larry had a strong motivation to work directly with the racial trauma so prevalent in America, which he did in two principal ways.
First, in 2004, he was instrumental in launching Colors of Compassion, the first people-of-color retreat in the Thich Nhat Hanh tradition. More than three hundred people of African American, Asian American, Pacific Islander, Latin American, Native American, Southwest Asian, and North African descent, plus a few European American family members, took part. It remains the largest BIPOC Buddhist retreat ever held in the U.S., and Larry went on to organize BIPOC retreats for years to come.
Second, Larry worked long and hard to bring his book America’s Racial Karma: An Invitation to Heal (Parallax Press) into being in 2020, because, he told me, “Our previous approaches to the racial issue have been too superficial. For a while before he passed away, Thay said the issue with Buddhism is now not just engagement, it is application. How can we apply the dharma to our current realities in the world? In that respect, I wanted us to have a responsible relationship to the race issue, which I don’t see at the moment.”
The book opens with a potent thesis: “Our racial suffering is deep and wide. It is a particular kind of samsara. Repeated cycles of bitterness, pain, and fear. It is sustained by our conditioning, both individual and collective. It is the undercurrent of a failed paradigm of aggression, ownership of peoples, and enduring institutionalized racism. This failed paradigm of views presents us with a profound opportunity to rebuild the shape of our thinking, speech, and action as we can and must redefine what it means to be a human being.”
Larry had a PhD in religious studies, with an emphasis in neuroscience and Buddhist meditation, and as the book progresses, he draws on this understanding to consider how views stored deep in our consciousness guide our habits. He implores us to find the means to alter those deeply planted patterns. Without going deep, change cannot emerge.
Returning to Earth
Matt Dorma, both a friend and student of Larry’s, recalls his frequent encouragement to “be in the company of birds, deer, and trees, and sit in the natural wonder of Mother Earth—and try not to worry too much.” Larry loved to sit outside on his back porch and rest in open awareness. In one potent teaching, he said, “Listen to the earth, as if the earth is speaking to you. What is the earth saying to you…the rivers and oceans…the fire…the wind?” Our biggest problem, he asserted, is “separation from ourselves, separation from each other, and separation from the ultimate dimension of life. Healing those separations is the key to healthy society.”
Just before his death, Larry completed a book of poems—Morning Night: Poems on Spirit, Race, and Nature—which now serves as his farewell message. In one poem, “Sit with Me,” he invokes the power of nature to call us home to our deepest way of being, even as we fade away:
Please stop, come home,
sit with me in
the cool night air
listen to the sound
of the garden trees
in the silence of the night.
See the miracle of
the spider web in
front of your face
with its luminous lines
connecting heaven and
Earth. Relax and enjoy
your breathing.
One day everything we
see, touch, feel, and
imagine will all
disappear.
Smile while you
are in the here and
now.
Let all of your worries
and fears float
down the river
of tears. No need to cling.
Fluttering in the wind as
prayer flags.
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