The Ancestral Mandate: Why This Generation’s Spiritual Work Extends Beyond the Self

In an era fixated on personal enlightenment, Norma Ryuko Kaweloku Wong Roshi offers a radical reframing: our spiritual practice is not merely for our own liberation but for generations we will never meet. “We are the ancestors of descendants yet to come,” she writes, grounding Buddhist practice in the Indigenous wisdom of her Native Hawaiian and Hakka Chinese heritage.

Wong’s new podcast, The Horizon Story, revives the oral tradition as a vehicle for intergenerational knowledge. Rather than a solitary meditation on the cushion, she positions spiritual work as collective action—a reclaiming of “agency, interdependence, and indigeneity” in what she calls the “timeplace of collapse.” Her thirty years in electoral politics inform a vision where dharma and civic responsibility are inseparable.

As abbot of Anko-in temple, Wong challenges the notion that spiritual maturity means withdrawing from worldly crises. Instead, she suggests, the job of our generation is to become worthy ancestors—to cultivate the courage and aloha necessary for those who follow. The question is not merely who we are becoming, but whose future we are becoming for.