Japanese Buddhist temples throughout Hawaii and North America have a secret. Move past the usual public spaces—the hondo (main hall) and the social hall—and you’ll quickly discover it. Lurking behind the altar area, squatting in the minister’s office, and hiding in libraries, closets, and random corners are innumerable dark wooden boxes. Shiny with black lacquer, dusty with age, some smaller than a breadbox and others big enough to crawl into, there are the mortal remains of fading Buddhist devotion. They are butsudan (sometimes spelled with the honorific “O,” meaning “respected”): home Buddhist shrines filled with sacred objects, religious icons, loves, fears, and maybe even a ghost or two. Their presence in the back spaces of temples reveals much about changing Buddhist patterns in the West.

Historically, the majority of Buddhists have been ordinary householders with home-based practices. In many Buddhist cultures such as Japan, domestic Buddhism has centered on a home shrine or altar. That family Buddhism was brought to Hawaii and North America with the early Japanese immigrants, providing an anchor for Asian Buddhists in an often hostile land without Buddhist culture or Buddhist ancestors.

Most Japanese Americans and Canadians can call to mind a family butsudan, whether their own or their grandparents’. Ordained Jodo Shinshu minister Alice Unno is an important mentor to generations of Shin Buddhists. As she was growing up in California’s Central Valley in the 1930s, the family butsudan often occupied her imagination:

It was really important to my parents that we had an Obutsudan at home. My parents always told us that if ever there were a fire, the altar was the first thing we had to take out of the house—that and the drawer underneath it, which contained the sutras and important papers like birth certificates. I was always scared of dusting the altar because it was so special and sacred. My mother always said you shouldn’t just use an ordinary rag. There was a special cloth to clean it with. We bowed to it in the morning and in the evening before we went to sleep.

Butsudan remain cherished items in many Japanese American and Canadian homes. But many others have become orphans as patterns of religious belonging and practice shift, and they ultimately end up sheltering in nearby temples. Refugees of a secularizing society, these cast-out sacred objects wait to be adopted by new generations. But if they can’t find a new family, they face eventual destruction.

Buddhist cultures often have a tradition of domestic altars. The butsudan became ubiquitous in all Japanese households, from the lowest peasant to the royal family, during the long Tokugawa period (1603–1867) that preceded Japan’s forced entry into the modern world. Their basic shape is a wooden cabinet, taller than it is wide, with double doors on the front that open to reveal a mini-world of buddha statues, scrolls, and ihai (ancestral tablets). There are candles, memorial books, incense burners, stands for offerings, and other items that cluster around or within the altar. Butsudan range from humble to grand, with gold leaf, black lacquer, delicate carvings, hanging adornments, and other flourishes suggesting levels of devotion, sectarian affiliation, and, frankly, conspicuous wealth in some cases.

Butsudan historically held an honored place in Japanese homes, often with a separate shrine room. Devout family members gathered daily before the butsudan to pray, make offerings, chant scriptures, and commune with the spiritual figures enshrined within. Monks would visit the home on memorial days and Buddhist holidays to perform services at the butsudan.

The lack of clear distinction between buddhas and ancestors is a key aspect of the Japanese Buddhist tradition. Buddhist funeral rituals involve dressing the corpse as a monk and bestowing an ordination name on the departing spirit so that they become enlightened in the afterlife. In this way, the ancient tradition of ancestor veneration melds with the long-ago-introduced practices of Buddhism, accommodating both religious impetuses. The butsudan is the primary tool and site in this Japanese spiritual blend. Memorial plaques for deceased parents and grandparents are placed near the central buddha image, and all receive offerings and devotion. Family members take on the patina of awakened tathagatas, and buddha figures may be considered ultimate household patriarchs.

The swirl of forces that centers on the butsudan is complex. Rituals help to placate the spirits and send them away on their journey to the next life. Rites also help to hold on to missing loved ones and rebind them to watch over the family. Dharma practices inculcate values of selflessness, nondual wisdom, and transpersonal perspectives. And learning and repeating the lineage and religious procedures cultivates family identity and cultural continuity.

As such, butsudan are more than boxes. They are storytellers and lineage holders. They act as meeting places for the living and the dead, for foolish beings and compassionate buddhas. Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation. As sites of practice, mourning, and renewal, they are visible reminders of the competing forces that comprise the lives of ordinary people in an imperfect, challenging world.

All of this was magnified in the initial immigrant generations. Cut off from their homeland, Japanese immigrants set up butsudan when their parents died far away on the other side of the ocean. Unable to be with them in person, the butsudan provided a portal to lives and loved ones separated by water, nation, and death. The butsudan provided a way to care for departed elders, calm the mind, and hold on to a private symbol of Buddhist commitment in a place where Buddhists were often under suspicion or attack.

Given the importance of butsudan in Japanese Buddhism, why are so many coming to live at American and Canadian temples? Primarily, abandoned butsudan arrive at a temple in the wake of a death. An older family member has died, and the next generation inherits their property, including the butsudan. In the past, the newly deceased would be enshrined with an ihai. The inheritors would use the butsudan as the focus of their devotions, teaching their children the ways of respect so that they might one day receive and carry on the butsudan and its traditions.

But religiosity has decreased in newer Japanese American and Canadian generations just as in most non-immigrant populations; already into the fifth and sixth generations, Japanese North Americans and Hawaiians are not a majority immigrant group. More and more Americans and Canadians of every background are dropping out of formal religion, sometimes opting for a more diffuse spirituality or simple secularism. Even among those who retain an interest in Buddhism, the older traditions are often lost as economic and social forces cause people to live far from family in nuclear units. It was mainly the more senior, often retired generations who actively used the butsudan; they also did much of the childcare, and thus wisdom and practices were naturally passed down through the generations. Now that so many live apart from their parents and grandparents, these transmission lines are weakened or broken. Thus, when they inherit butsudan, many people are clueless about their purpose or how to use them.

Butsudan are places of holding on and letting go, of detachment and identity formation.

As such, the arrival of butsudan at temples represents a decrease in Buddhist practice in the Japanese American and Canadian subcultures. But it’s also a sign of trends far beyond the Buddhist community: the fraying of family ties, weakening of social bonds, and rise of a distracted, drifting society increasingly out of touch with the valuable aspects of its heritage.

There’s another factor to account for too: some people view butsudan as creepy. They’re dark boxes within which spirits perhaps dwell. Not knowing their function, people with minimal Buddhist training may fear that bringing one into the home invites bachi (bad luck). Rather than a source of love and respect, butsudan can provoke fear in those who only know that Grandma used to kneel and mumble in an unfamiliar language before this strange cabinet when they visited her.

But suppose the accumulating butsudan at temples indicates a decrease in Buddhist devotion and weakened family ties. In that case, their presence also indicates the staying power of Buddhist material culture and respect for family, no matter how distant. After all, lots of furniture, clothing, and knick-knacks that people inherit go immediately to the thrift store or garbage bin. But many butsudan and their associated items are recognized as sacred—if not to the new owners, to someone—and are carefully (if sheepishly) deposited at Buddhist temples in the hope that someone else will care for these things.

Ministers have mixed feelings about the tide of butsudan washing up at their doorsteps. Their immediate reaction is to try to make the family feel comfortable and to express gratitude to them for not tossing the butsudan in the trash. Ministers accept that the butsudan’s journey with this family has ended and rarely try to persuade anyone to keep it.

Their gratitude exists alongside some sadness as well, as Reverend Matt Hamasaki of the Sacramento Buddhist Temple expressed:

I appreciate that people have the respect to put it someplace that it belongs. But it does make me sad that people don’t want to keep it. Within my own family, I don’t think anyone has an obutsudan except for me, and I inherited my grandparents’ because no one wanted it. It makes me sad that no one would want it. But like I said, I appreciate that they bring it to some place instead of just throwing it out.

Some ministers experience frustration over the clutter that results from so many butsudan huddling in the back of their temples, occasionally taking over whole storage rooms and crowding out other possible uses of the space. Many butsudan languish for years, with no one to take them home yet reluctance by the temple to dispose of them.

When the time comes, the decision to get rid of old, often broken-down butsudan presents its own challenges. Most ministers are unwilling to toss them in the dumpster. In Japan, the usual method for disposing of sacred objects is to burn them, mirroring the respectful cremation of bodies. Many ministers carry out a funeral ritual for aged butsudan, chanting a sutra and offering thanks for the shrine’s work to uphold the buddhadharma and care for families. Burning the butsudan can be a problem: most temples are on the West Coast, where strict fire laws prevent easy disposal. One temple used to get around this by using them as fuel for beach bonfires when they were still permitted—but even that possibility has been cut off in the new age of extreme climate change. Thus, respectful funerals for old butsudan may become another casualty of global warming.

Not all butsudan end up cremated. Some temples run butsudan adoption programs, advertising available shrines in their newsletters, displaying them at community events, and showing them to new members. In March, the Fresno Betsuin Buddhist Temple displayed a dozen butsudan, and all found new homes.

The community’s youngest members are also not always indifferent to butsudan and their practices. The Young Buddhist Editorial (YBE) is one of the most dynamic initiatives to recently emerge from Japanese American temples. A collective of primarily young Japanese American Jodo Shinshu Buddhists, YBE ran a special feature titled “Home is Where the Buddha Is.” Dozens of people contributed photographs of their butsudan with short remarks. For example, YBE editor Gillian Yamagiwa wrote:

My Obutsudan was inherited in 2005 from my great uncle after he passed away. Both of my aunts felt that I would appreciate the sentiment and importance of the Obutsudan the most, coming from a family that regularly practiced Buddhism. As a kid, I never really understood why we had an Obutsudan, but as I got older, I began to see it as a way to honor and remember loved ones that have passed.

Most of the butsudan in the YBE photo essay are traditional black wooden boxes, like Yamagiwa’s. But a significant minority are little handcrafted ones made as dharma school activities from materials like kamaboko (fish cake) boards or shoeboxes. Some freestyling interpretations of butsudan also exist, using statues, personal mementos, and even light-up buddha images. The less traditional shrines suggest that even if some butsudan complete their life cycle and are cremated, the impulse to maintain personal sacred space lingers. The karma of butsudan practice hasn’t been extinguished.

That ability to be reinterpreted and reborn through individual meaning-making may provide the longest staying power for butsudan in a rapidly changing world. As domestic religious objects, butsudan have often existed in tension between the orthodox views of organized Buddhist sects in Japan and the quotidian desires and needs of regular laypeople. Stored within homes rather than temples, butsudan have always had the potential to be adapted to their families’ preferences. Two stories from Reverend Henry Adams of the San Mateo Buddhist Temple illustrate the push and pull of orthodoxy and domesticity.

Rev. Adams had a traditional monastic education in Japan and recalled a story about his teacher being taken to a home to conduct a service at the butsudan. The family had set a cup of tea in front of the butsudan, probably as an offering to an ancestor who enjoyed tea during their life. This isn’t orthodox Jodo Shinshu behavior, and the officiating minister dropped a match into the teacup after lighting the candle as if to say, “Surely this is why this teacup is here—what other purpose could it serve?” As a trainee, Rev. Adams was impressed by this story, which suggested that the head minister was bold in righteously fulfilling and passing down the proper tradition from 800 years ago.

But his attitude changed after becoming a minister. He was invited to conduct a memorial service at a temple member’s home and was surprised to find several glasses of water laid out in front of the butsudan, another violation of the orthodox practice. As he noticed that the people being memorialized all had the same date of death and remembered that the member was from Nagasaki, he realized that she had lost most of her family in the atomic bombing. She told him the people injured by the bomb were terribly thirsty and called out for water as they died. So, she remembers her loved ones lost to war and offers glasses of water to honor them.

Usually, we think of ministers instructing laypeople. But here the layperson showed the minister the true potentiality that the butsudan possessed. As Rev. Adams related:

That was very eye-opening to me, you know—it meant that I needed to be much more flexible and open to appreciating the ways in which the obutsudan can serve as a focal point for people in their home spiritual lives. And in the case of this woman, it’s really her lifelong process of navigating the grief from that traumatic event of her childhood.

The ever-growing number of butsudan at temples suggests that Buddhist devotion and traditional practices are losing their grip on people’s hearts and imagination, even as some manage to find new homes and some young people work to maintain and reinvent their religious heritage. Those discarded butsudan all have stories to tell like the one from Nagasaki. Some were assembled from scrap wood during the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans and Canadians. Others have less dramatic, yet no less poignant, origins in the everyday lives of immigrants and their children discovering how to be American and Canadian Buddhists. All watched over generations of Buddhists as their families grew, played, quarreled, and went about their daily lives. Resting in the dim corners of temples, away from the bustle and chanting of the main hall, they wait to see what karma has in store for them.

 ⧫

To learn more about the contemporary fates of butsudan, see Jeff Wilson’s chapter “The Afterlives of Butsudan: Ambivalence and the Disposal of Home Altars in the United States and Canada” in Buddhism and Waste: The Excess, Discard, and Afterlife of Buddhist Consumption, edited by Trine Brox and Elizabeth Williams-Oerberg (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022).

The post Remnants of Devotion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

We really could use someone to look up to these days. 

In Living Nembutsu: Applying Shinran’s Radically Engaged Buddhism in Life and Society, religious scholar Jeff Wilson presents us with a radical role model: Shinran Shonin (1173–1263). Shinran, who founded the Jodo Shinshu school of Pure Land Buddhism, lived during a time of social, political, and religious upheaval in medieval Japan, a time that produced fellow radical religious thinkers like Honen, who first advocated for chanting the nembutsu, and Nichiren. By rejecting mainstream Buddhism, with corrupt monks and monasteries, Shinran worked to create a Buddhism that was available to everyone regardless of their social and economic standing; all one has to do is put their faith in Amida Buddha and call his name to be born in the Pure Land. 

Living Nembutsu, published in March 2023 by Sumeru Press, includes chapters called “Queer Shinran” and “Refugee Shinran,” and explains how engaged Shin Buddhism and Shinran himself can inspire Pure Land practitioners and help us navigate today’s most pressing issues. Wilson, a Tricycle contributing editor, is professor of religious studies and East Asian studies for Renison University College at the University of Waterloo (Canada) and an ordained Jodo Shinshu minister. He recently spoke with Tricycle about how “radical Shinran” worked within the Buddhist tradition to once again make Buddhism’s liberatory potential available to everyone.  

What’s the story on how this book came to be? The project has been percolating for a long time. Jodo Shinshu has been my primary community of practice for the last twenty-five years or so. I went to graduate school and became a professor of Buddhism, and eventually I got ordained—I serve in a supporting ministerial role at the Toronto temple. And as part of all that, I’ve been asked to give dharma talks and participate in seminars for the past twenty years. When you’re a speaker, you talk about the things that you’re interested in, but people also start asking you things that you eventually start incorporating into your talks. And one thing that often comes up is the intersection of Buddhism and various social issues—the hot topics of the day. 

A lot of people wondered about the role of Jodo Shinshu in social, political, and environmental issues. There is a stereotype that Pure Land Buddhism has been passive, not engaged. I’m a historian and anthropologist in addition to being a practitioner, so from my research I know that actually many people, both historically and currently, have been involved. 

Shinran himself was very involved in the social issues of the day. We think of him as a religious reformer, but 800 years ago in Japan and everywhere else on the planet, there was no separation between the religious and secular. And Shinran was politically persecuted because he was teaching what we today might call a Buddhist liberation theology. If you’re trying to liberate people from the oppressive social order through religious means, the powers that be are not going to take kindly to that. He was a political prisoner, exile, and refugee. And so I thought, this is easily the most important single monk in Japanese history, the cultural impact of his teaching is larger than anyone else, his movement is the largest and has been deeply involved in politics for over 800 years. So why do we keep asking these questions about whether Jodo Shinshu has a history of social engagement? 

How did you first encounter Shinran: as an academic or practitioner? I first read Dr. Alfred Bloom’s book Shinran’s Gospel of Pure Grace (first published in 1965) in the mid-nineties when I was studying at Sarah Lawrence College. It was interesting, different, not at all like the other stuff about Buddhism I was reading in English at the time. And the “gospel of pure grace” seemed so Christian … he had to work within the language constraints of the time, when religious studies in North America were dominated by the study of Christianity. I was attending all sorts of different groups: Zen, Shambhala, Insight, in order to broaden my understanding of Buddhism to the greatest extent. And I started to steer more into Jodo Shinshu, especially as I became disillusioned with my time with Zen Buddhism. It wasn’t that Zen was bad; it had a tendency to pump up my own ego—the better I got at meditation or keeping the precepts or the more I could talk intelligently about koans, the more self-conceited I started to get. It wasn’t a good match. I was also concerned about how few Asian practitioners there were in many of these spaces. And then I began attending the New York Buddhist Church on the Upper West Side, and became more and more drawn in until Jodo Shinshu became the tradition that I was adopted by.

What was going on in Japan during Shinran’s lifetime that led him to such radical thinking? What I’ve tried to convey in my talks at Jodo Shinshu temples and in other situations is just how radical Shinran was. Jodo Shinshu grew to become the largest Buddhist school in Japan—one out of every three Japanese people’s family background is Jodo Shinshu—it’s all kind of very normal (at this point). I wanted to convey the really unique things about Shinran. 

Shinran was born into an ossified medieval social hierarchy, where Buddhism’s revolutionary potential was profoundly muted by social conditions that put the dharma and Buddhist practice out of the reach of all but the most privileged. Japan was wracked by constant civil war, environmental disasters, epidemics, the threat of foreign invasion, elite Buddhist monastic complexes that hoarded their power with armed monks, and a vast gulf between the lives of the enfranchised and the great mass of poor regular people. The old style of Buddhism, including the Tendai school he was trained in, was beautiful and true but no longer relevant. Worse yet, establishment Buddhism had become one of the primary obstacles between average people and Buddhahood. Shinran wanted to create a Buddhism focused on freeing those who had been excluded from the current Buddhism.

“Shinran drew on his own suffering, exile, downward mobility, and outlaw status to build a true solidarity with the people of Japan.”

Buddhism for the 99 percent. That’s right. Shinran turned to the Pure Land teaching of Honen (1133–1212), another radical monk, as a solution. Honen created a revolutionary sangha, sort of like a Pure Land ashram where men and women, monastics and laypeople, upper class and lower class all mingled freely as practitioners of the nembutsu. Their flouting of strict social standards that were designed to keep everyone in their carefully ordered place, and their insistence that the expensive and esoteric rituals of elite Buddhism were unnecessary due to the liberating power of Amida Buddha, earned them the enmity of the powerful monasteries. Honen and Shinran’s community was smashed and their Pure Land Buddhist teaching was made illegal. They were exiled as criminals, their ordination stripped by official censure. In those days, conditions in Kyoto were relatively better, and Shinran was thrown out into the “real” Japan. He was living among the peasants and fisherpeople, and this reinforced his idea that “these are the people that the Buddha cares about but that elite Buddhism doesn’t care about.” 

This unjust persecution helped to truly set Shinran free. It was clear to him that the powers that be would never support a Buddhism of universal liberation, regardless of their supposed commitment to Mahayana Buddhism. And with nothing left to lose, Shinran turned fully to preaching a Buddhism he felt was designed for his times. He drew on his own suffering, exile, downward mobility, and outlaw status to build a true solidarity with the people of Japan. He did so by teaching in the vernacular, offering dharma lessons that could be distributed and read out loud at gatherings for the benefit of the illiterate majority. He composed dharma hymns that could be memorized and performed in meetings or individually, without the need for scriptural study. He told the farmers, soldiers, and women who came to listen to him that there was a path designed for them, in their ordinary, toiling, oppressed lives, one that didn’t demand expensive dana payments, unrealistic moral precepts, or rejection of the family and community ties without which life was literally impossible in regular society. And he demonstrated this by eating meat, drinking alcohol, marrying, and raising a family, while still fulfilling the role of a monk through teaching, wearing robes, and performing rituals.

You write that Shinran transformed Buddhism by working within the existing framework, but it just seems to me that he was doing something completely different! If you take a look at The Collected Works of Shinran, which is a massive, two-volume set, and start reading through it, you’ll see he does a lot of proof texting and quoting from other sutras, and you might think to yourself, “oh, this guy is super traditional.”

He didn’t advocate abandoning the classic texts, nor did he critique the famous teachers. He used their words, images, and ideas constantly in his own preaching, but he reinvigorated them with readings and meanings that teased out the fundamental principle of Amida’s Buddha’s compassionate liberation of all beings, which he felt underlay all Buddhism. He continued to use the resources his forebears had preserved and transmitted to him—Amida Buddha, the Pure Land, the nembutsu, the Primal Vow, the way of the bodhisattva—but he ensured their continued vitality by applying them in different, sometimes opposite, ways from their uses in the past, so that they met the needs of the suffering disenfranchised classes rather than insisting those with the least agency somehow overhaul themselves according to demands of unobtainable social positions or ancient cultures impossibly distant from their own. He was comfortable talking about Amida, the Pure Land, and other aspects of Buddhism with literal, symbolic, and pedagogic approaches according to the needs of his listener, and inhabited all of these modes as a person liberated from the boundaries and boxes that society wished to impose and enforce.

This method of respect for the past, combined with attention to the needs of the present, remains an important model for Jodo Shinshu temples today. Our times and places are not those of Shinran any more than Shinran’s were those of Shakyamuni Buddha, so we have to navigate the breathtaking pace of social and technological change and find ways to keep the dharma stream flowing as a genuine source of life and support. And we have to avoid succumbing to the modern Western temptation to simply throw away the old and entrust in the salvific power of the latest cool thing. We’re fortunate to have a guide like Shinran, who showed how to focus on what truly matters: the liberation of all people, not as a theory but as a way of living together in inclusive sanghas that can transform suffering into gratitude and joy.

The book focuses on modern Jodo Shinshu communities and how they’ve served LGBTQ communities, among others. Can you talk a little bit about projects in your sangha? My temple is involved in refugee assistance, and an important previous minister, Rev. Newton Ishiura—this was before my time—was quite involved in Indigenous matters, helping First Nations and Inuit people push for rights in Canadian society. And over the last dozen years or so there’s been a growing push within Jodo Shinshu communities in North America and Hawaii to become educated and sensitive on LGBTQ+ inclusion. 

Jodo Shinshu is sangha-based, it’s not an individualistic, solo-meditator type of Buddhism. It’s family Buddhism, and so if someone comes out to their temple, they’re also coming out to their parents, aunties, grandparents, best friends—if you have difficulty being out to your family, you can’t be out at temple, because it’s the same people. We’re trying to highlight how Buddhism is supportive of LGBTQ+ people and that they’re an important part of the sangha. The nembutsu is precisely for those people whom our culture has labeled “evil” in the first place; when there’s more suffering, that is where Amida Buddha is rushing to. And if we can make our temples an inclusive, affirming, and empowering place, this will flow out to other places as well. Making it OK to be out as yourself at temple can then make it OK to be out at home, at work, on the street, etc.

“We’re fortunate to have a guide like Shinran, who showed how to focus on what truly matters: the liberation of all people.”

We have various LGBTQ+ affinity groups in some of the temples. Gardena Buddhist Church’s Ichi-Mi group just released a video called “A Profound Silence” that interviews various queer people and their allies about their experience as Buddhists and some of the challenges they face. 

This doesn’t mean that these spaces were always inclusive, not because there were reasons in Buddhism for noninclusivity but because people didn’t understand how to be inclusive. From both Japanese and North American culture we’ve inherited degrees of homophobia, sexism, racism, and other challenges that we’re working to eliminate so that we can fulfill the central vision of Pure Land Buddhism: a harmonious, inclusive, welcoming sangha that serves as an engine for liberation.

Organized religion is on the decline in favor of more individualistic forms of practice. Is this the case in Jodo Shinshu communities in North America? And how might Shinran’s message of acceptance and the community’s embrace of often-marginalized groups—like the LGBTQ+ community and immigrants—help keep a congregation strong and connected? Yes, many Jodo Shinshu temples have experienced a contraction in the past generation, just as other religious institutions have. Within all areas of life, our society is undergoing a profound shift from smaller, closely interconnected, local and intimate relationships to larger, loosely interconnected, dispersed networks. Of course that comes with all the advantages and drawbacks—such as freedom and loneliness—that result from such an unprecedented and rapid cultural change.

Those changes represent challenges and opportunities for Jodo Shinshu temples. We’re subject to the same socially corrosive, centrifugal forces as everyone else. But within and between our temples we have an inherently resilient web of intergenerational bonds which helps to mitigate those forces to some degree. Now we need to continue to foster awareness of and continue to activate the radical welcome at the heart of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism.

  As Shinran declares: 

In reflecting on the great ocean of shinjin (the awakened, trusting heart), I realize that there is no discrimination between noble and humble or monks and laypeople, no differentiation between men and women, old and young. The amount of evil one has committed isn’t considered; the duration of religious practices is of no concern. It is a matter of neither practice nor good acts, neither sudden nor gradual attainment, neither meditative nor non-meditative practice, neither right nor wrong contemplation, neither thought nor no-thought, neither daily life nor the moment of death, neither many-calling (of mantras) nor once-calling. It is simply shinjin that is inconceivable, inexplicable, and indescribable. It is like the medicine that eradicates all poisons. The medicine of the Tathagata’s Vow destroys the poisons of our wisdom and foolishness.

Shinran is saying here that Amida Buddha’s vow of universal liberation is a great warm ocean that floats all of us, no matter who we are or what we’ve done. It breaks down all distinctions we erect between our group and so-called others (our “wisdom,” which the Buddha reveals to be foolishness) and accepts everyone just as they are. Our sanghas are called to be part of this great ocean of shinjin, of total acceptance and embrace. The point isn’t to build membership numbers, but naturally when you do have a community that can welcome in those who aren’t given welcome elsewhere, and where people of whatever type feel supported and connected, that will be a place that people want to be. So if we live up to our central religious principles of inclusion and acceptance, that will have a positive effect on keeping the sangha healthy and continuing as an institution that is valued by the community.

A thread throughout the book is Shinran inverting a teaching to make it clearer, and something you wrote in your chapter on the environment really struck me: the Earth is sick without us. Can you speak about this? Some of this comes from the Buddhist experience, but other perspectives as well, such as Indigenous issues in the US and Canada and the Landback movement. There is this idea of nature with a capital “N” as something pristine that we are spoiling. This is a romantic fantasy based on European enlightenment ideas; it has literally never existed. 

And today, whether it’s about the rainforest or whatever is looking bad, we’re like, “oh no, poor Nature.” Even that creates an us and them situation. Everywhere you go, the Amazon, on top of mountains, and in caves and the deserts—there are people living there, and there have always been people living there. This idea that we’re destroying nature is a mental mistake, like when we draw a line around our skin and say, “this is me,” and beyond my skin is not me. Some people talk about getting rid of humans, like we’re a cancer or something. What we need is to slow down and develop a better relationship, better balance, so we stop destroying this thing that we ourselves are a part of. Shinran talks about the ability of the ocean to accept and purify even the most polluted rivers: it’s a metaphor for how Amida Buddha naturally transforms all beings into awakening. The Earth really does have amazing regenerative abilities, but we’re selfishly outstripping its capacity to handle our activities. We need to remember that our presence is part of what makes the land and water healthy, and lean into that role rather than ignorantly treating it all as “natural resources.” 

This attitude is developed by the EcoSangha movement in the mainland Jodo Shinshu temples, and the Green Hongwanji program in the Hawaiian temples. And we saw an example of this at the Jodo Shinshu temple in Winnipeg. They inducted an elm tree as a member of the temple. It’s a small act but a significant one: it recognizes that trees are part of the sangha with us and that we support one another. It’s a reflection of the Pure Land, which is described as a beautiful place where people, birds, trees, and waters all live in harmony and enable one another’s awakening. That’s the vision that animates our temples, and we need to apply it in all areas of life.

♦

The post Shinran’s Engaged Buddhism appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Southern Ontario’s Cham Shan Temple is growing again. Physically, it is one of the largest Chinese Tiantai Buddhist networks in Canada, with ten sizable temples and Buddhist educational sites in the Toronto area, and a museum housed in an imposing pagoda in Niagara Falls. Its various temples boast a large number of full-time monastics, high attendance at their services, and wide influence in the booming Chinese-based stream of Canadian Buddhism. Now an ambitious plan is underway to build four pilgrimage sites on 1,350 acres of land, with temples, eating facilities, and replicas of the four holy Buddhist mountains of China.

Four thousand kilometers away, things are not going quite so well at Zenwest on Victoria Island in British Columbia. The community has created an impressive international network of practitioners, partly through their use of new online methods for delivering teachings and building community. But after thirteen years of sustained effort, Zenwest can no longer afford to pay their abbot’s salary. They have phased him out as a paid employee, a decision that has forced him to get a parttime job to support his family. Because of this, he is no longer as available to do many of the administrative and teaching tasks needed to support the monastery and attend to the needs of students and participants.

As these snapshots suggest, the financial landscape in North American Buddhism varies widely. The uneven distribution of wealth among monasteries and training centers affects their ability to carry out their various activities. Few Buddhists would say they have chosen to pursue the dharma for monetary gain, but the brutal truth is that if Buddhist communities fail to acquire ongoing funding, they will not be able to provide many of their programs or may even be forced to close down altogether.

Buddhist activities have always been costly, of course. Monks and nuns need to eat; communities must build meditation and worship halls; and they have to produce statues, scrolls, books, paintings, beads, and robes. The lineages that have survived are those that have successfully established sufficient funding for their needs. How, precisely, have they managed to do so?

Buddhist communities have used a wide range of means to ensure their financial well-being. Yet one model that developed in the early stages of Buddhism became the primary organizing principle for most of the community’s economic activity and then persisted in nearly all subsequent communities. This model is so fundamental and widespread that it can be seen as the classical formula of Buddhist economic relations. It is the exchange of spiritual labor and financial support between the monastic sangha and the community of lay practitioners. The driving force of this model is merit (Skt., punya; Pali, punna). We may refer therefore to this historic Buddhist system as the merit economy.

Briefly stated, the merit economy is a framework in which the laity provides monastics with the funds to sustain themselves and carry out the religious services the laity needs and wants. This support has many motivations on the part of the laity, including their respect and devotion for the monastics, their wish to see the Buddha’s teachings spread and benefit others, the social pressure they feel to conform to the expected models of generosity, and even legal obligations. But above all, their motivation is to share in the store of merit produced by monastic activities.

Merit—as the currency of this merit economy—is essentially an intangible product of behavior. When an actor performs an action that is considered “good” by Buddhist tradition, this action produces some degree of merit; “bad” actions produce demerit. The resulting amount of merit or demerit depends on a complex set of factors, including the actor’s intentions and purity, adherence to the correct ritual procedure when carrying out the activity, the identity of the recipient, and so on. Merit also influences the actor’s future experience: good deeds lead to good experiences such as a better rebirth, wealth, exposure to the Buddhist teachings, and the love and devotion of family. By the same logic, bad deeds and their demerit lead to various forms of suffering—rebirth in the hell realms, loss of status or wealth, sickness, and so forth. Whether immediately or in a distant lifetime, merit affects the actor in a way that is natural, logical, and inexorable—even if its workings are often hidden.

According to this Buddhist framework, monastics are better suited to produce merit easily and successfully because their codes of behavior help them to cultivate merit and prevent them from accumulating demerit. Furthermore, most Buddhist societies believe that ordination affects a monk or nun ontologically, so that a monastic is different from and holier than the layperson he or she was before. After ordination, monastics engage in various activities that serve as mighty engines of merit production: meditation, scriptural chanting, elaborate devotional services, teaching dharma to others, and more. Indeed, this is their primary role as monastics. It is not true, then, that monks and nuns do not work. Rather, they are a specialized class of workers within Buddhist society who create and disseminate a specific, highly valuable product: merit. The work to produce this merit—the chief commodity of the merit economy—can be called merit labor.

Laypeople are also able to produce merit, but their capacity to do so is limited because their situations force them into demeritorious actions, and because they lack the time, training, and circumstances to perform the most meritorious Buddhist practices. They therefore rely primarily on the monastic sangha to perform merit labor on their behalf. An important aspect of merit is that once it is produced, it can be redistributed. It thus acts as a type of currency that “buys” the laity rebirth in the heavenly realms, physical beauty and health, happiness, and even nirvana or buddhahood. Thus merit is the most valuable Buddhist currency—far more valuable than money, because unlike merit, money cannot buy us love or happiness, and we cannot take it with us when we die. There has never been a historic Buddhist culture or subculture operating without reference to merit, and in almost all cases none has operated without the merit economy at its center.

This economic exchange in which the laity acquires merit from the monastic community is known as dana (generosity). Monastics represent for the laity a field of merit: their purity and ritual expertise are the fertile ground in which the laity sow seeds of generosity to acquire a crop of merit. In turn, the laity represents for the monastics a field of dana in which to cultivate the ideas of merit, karma, and rebirth. This trade—money for merit or the monastics’ material support for the fulfillment of the laity’s wishes—is the foundational basis of the merit economy and, historically speaking, of Buddhism itself.

As Buddhists spread their ideas and practices through Asia, they did so in relation to the merit economy, whose establishment in new societies was the key factor in allowing Buddhism to take root and thrive. Buddhists have often said, “No Buddhism without the sangha,” and one might add, “No Buddhism without the merit economy, the essential lifeblood of the monastic sangha.”

One of the first challenges that Buddhists encountered when bringing the tradition into a new culture was the necessity to confront and transform the preexisting economy. Non-Buddhist cultures operated with their own economies, which were not merit-based; these other models can be called non-merit economies. But because Buddhists could only thrive in situations where they were able to sell merit, the transformation of non-merit economies into merit economies had to be one of their primary concerns.

It is not difficult to see how monks and nuns promoted merit and convinced lay practitioners of its effectiveness in the transmission of Buddhism in a number of cultures. Buddhism’s success in China, for example, was partly due to the introduction of scriptures that extolled the benefits of making merit. One of the first of these texts, the Sutra in Forty-two Sections, taught readers to make merit by offering food to monks. A later text, the Perfection of Wisdom Sutra for Humane Kings Who Wish to Benefit Their States, dramatically upped the stakes by promising that rulers who materially supported Buddhism would be protected from disasters and revolts. When Buddhism was brought to Japan from Korea, it was with the promise that Buddha worship would bring benefits to the royal court. Similar dynamics played out across Asia.

Merit is thus one of the most successful Buddhist ideas in the long history of the religion. By comparison, some of the tradition’s core principles—like the concept of no-self—have been either largely ignored or poorly understood by significant swaths of the Buddhist population. Furthermore, merit accumulation has been the one practice that has united all Buddhists, monastic and lay. This is in contrast with activities like sutra recitation, meditation, doctrinal study, and precepts, which different lineages have engaged in varying degrees. There has never been a historic Buddhist culture or subculture operating without reference to merit, and in almost all cases none has operated without the merit economy at its center.

So how does Buddhism fare in contemporary Western society, where norms often deviate from those established by the merit economy?

While Canada’s Cham Shan Temple is hardly the only wealthy Buddhist organization with significant land and property in North America, its financial success is more the exception than the rule when it comes to Buddhist temples and meditation groups. In fact, in many cases, groups that draw relatively wealthy members are facing the greatest financial difficulties. A significant factor is their failure to promote merit and establish functioning merit economies.

Many groups, temples, and even whole Buddhist networks in North America are operating outside of the Buddhist merit economy. They do not exist within a society that has successfully adapted to the logic of Buddhist merit, and they do little or nothing to create the conditions for such an economy to emerge, not even within their own membership. More than changes in ritual practice, racial composition, gender roles, or social activism, the jettisoning of the central, pervasive, and economically crucial notion of merit is potentially the biggest and most significant transformation in certain Western Buddhist groups and networks. It is a cleavage so momentous in its implications that some day it may appear in retrospect to be a paradigm shift as major as the rise of the Mahayana school in India around the first century BCE (although it may never attain a similar market share of the overall Buddhist community). And yet this change is largely unnoted, even by the very groups that are enacting it.

The term “post-merit Buddhism” may be used in order to frame this new model of Buddhist practice and organization. But it’s important to note that the forms that have emerged from this new framework didn’t simply evolve from Buddhism’s early lineages; they have arisen in the places where Buddhists have failed (by choice or circumstance) to establish merit economies.

Since the introduction of Buddhism into 19th-century North America, significant numbers of teachers from various Theravada, Zen, Tibetan, and other lineages have offered Buddhist concepts and individual practices without stressing the role of merit. One reason for this has been the Western perception that belief in merit is superstitious or unscientific—both handicaps in an era characterized by faith in Christianity on the one hand and in scientific empiricism on the other. The first wave of Asian teachers to bring Buddhism to the West were eager to escape the colonial scripts that portrayed Asian Buddhists as backward; new Western practitioners wanted to pursue only those forms of spirituality that did not clash with their sensibilities. Indeed, some Asian teachers had ambivalent feelings about merit themselves, and those who didn’t sometimes de-emphasized merit-based teachings and practices when they felt these might be misunderstood or ignored. Western students, meanwhile, often edited the teachings they received, bracketing out those that did not resonate with them spiritually or intellectually. This process was as much unconscious as it was deliberate: students simply paid more attention to teachings they found meaningful and ignored the others until over time they were forgotten.

But beliefs, both affirmed and rejected, have real economic effects. When merit stops being a viable currency, sweeping changes occur in nearly all other aspects of Buddhism. For example, the traditional merit labor of monks and nuns ceases to have value, which threatens their ability to cultivate the laity as a field of dana. Instead, Buddhist monastics become experts—along the lines of doctors, lawyers, professors, and other secular professionals—rather than merit producers. They are valuable not because they are ontologically superior and produce karmic benefits for those who engage with them, but because they have expertise in a body of knowledge they may share with non-experts.

Connected to this shift is a devaluation of monasticism in general. If celibacy and other monastic practices are no longer necessary to ensure the production of merit, and what truly matters is the knowledge that monks and nuns possess, then lay professionals can displace the monastic sangha as the new, quicker-footed experts and instructors. These lay professionals may be nominally ordained but still have jobs and families (as is common in Zen lineages, for instance). Or they may be former monastics—even former Buddhists—who teach aspects of Buddhism from a therapeutic perspective (as often occurs within the mindfulness movement). Without merit, models that turn Buddhist practice sessions into fee-for-service events become ever more common, and—consciously or unconsciously—teachers begin to see practitioners as potential customers in a competitive marketplace.

Simultaneous with the loss of merit is the diminished importance of karma. Without karma, the central concepts of rebirth and past and future lives collapse, leaving Buddhists to focus on the present life alone, forced to dramatically reimagine most elements of Buddhism. Without karma, the reality of powerful buddhas, saints, and deities becomes suspect or irrelevant. The threat of rebirth in hell evaporates, depriving Buddhists of a longstanding marketing tool for their services. Related ideas about gender—that rebirth in a woman’s body is a karmic punishment or that women’s defilements cause them to be reborn in a boiling pool of blood—become even more dubious than before. This is good for equality but bad for business: premodern Asian monks and nuns were successful at fundraising by convincing women that donations to the sangha represented their only hope for a better (future) life. Or maybe not: hopefully the presence of such misogynistic beliefs would themselves present an economic liability in modern North America.

In addition, as the concept of merit continues to disappear from certain Buddhist communities, the value of Buddhist statues, images, scriptures, and pilgrimages decreases, and consequently practitioners treat them less reverently. Without the ability to endow amulets, charms, scrolls, statues, and other items with meritorious power, post-merit Buddhist communities will lose another vital source of funding. This is especially true as they compete with outlets like Home Depot and Amazon for the sale of cheap Buddha statues and mass-produced Buddhist texts, to say nothing of the resources available online at no cost.

In post-merit forms of Buddhism, practices like silent meditation—repurposed as a tool for self-improvement—replace other merit labor activities such as long periods of sutra chanting. Through this process, formerly rare Buddhist practices become mainstream, perhaps dominant, and practitioners reconceive their benefits as scientific, medical, and psychological in nature rather than based on systems of invisible merit and its effect on future lives.

The loss of merit also impacts end-of-life and memorial rituals, which in many Buddhist cultures are essential sources of income. Without the need to manipulate merit at those moments when rebirth is assumed to take place, these rituals lose their urgency and laypeople stop paying for them. The loss of merit substantially undermines the foundations of traditional Buddhist ethics as well, creating the need for major reconstruction. Without merit, we are no longer able to explain our current life circumstances in light of our past behavior, and our current actions do not predict our destiny. Fear and desire stop acting as motivators, and empathy and compassion achieve an even greater importance than before as key ethical values. Thus, appeals to Buddhist donors will play more on their feelings toward the community and highlight the good works of Buddhism in the world at large.

Finally, given post-merit forms of Buddhism’s commitment to particular, often reformist, visions of the tradition, they are likely to have a difficult time according equal value to merit forms of Buddhism, their communities, and their practices. They will also have trouble understanding the Buddhist past and will continually reinterpret Buddhist history, seeing their own new practices and visions in productively misinformed ways tinged with romanticism. Instead of regarding their innovations as new, untested ideas and patterns, they will believe them to be actual inheritances from tradition.

None of this should be taken as a suggestion that specific groups need to immediately switch to a merit-based approach to Buddhism. For many, that would be artificial, or even antithetical to their approach to the dharma in the first place. Historical Buddhist practices are not necessarily superior just because they were common—Buddhist monasteries often sustained themselves through the use of enslaved labor as well. The point is to become more aware of the economic implications of various choices and note their effects. Whenever one type of successful fundraising is abandoned, some other equally effective means must be developed, or financial difficulties are inevitable. And the shift to new models carries many unintended doctrinal and practical implications, for better or for worse.

Still, the merit model is alive and well in parts of North American Buddhism. Cham Shan—which makes ample use of the merit economy—shows that merit-driven Buddhism can continue to operate within non-merit economies like that of the larger Canadian society. At least one way they do so is by employing the rhetoric of merit and actively cultivating local merit economies. With luck and inventiveness, creative Buddhists should be able to tap opportunities that exist within merit and non-merit economies simultaneously. Indeed, something like this already exists within the Tibetan Buddhist world in America, where some lamas offer merit-based teachings and practices for their Tibetan-American followers but emphasize post-merit activities to their non-Tibetan audiences.

Ultimately, if Buddhist groups don’t successfully adapt North American society to Buddhist models or attitudes, Buddhism will have to be adapted to answer the needs felt by North Americans. The proliferation of the mindfulness movement for improving our work, parenting, eating habits, and sex lives is one clear example. Another possible example is presented by social engagement: by offering refuge amid political, economic, or cultural turmoil, by instilling social activists with sustainability and resilience, or by becoming socially engaged themselves, some Buddhist circles may attract sufficient funding by being relevant to our society’s current state of affairs.

How Buddhist centers in the West continue to evolve and find funding for their operation will be keenly watched not only by researchers and those pursuing courses in Buddhist studies but also by leaders of dharma centers and those teachers who are aware of the wider history—and ambiguous future—of their tradition.

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Adapted from “Buddhism without Merit: Theorizing Buddhist Religio-Economic Activity in the Contemporary World,” which first appeared in the Journal of Global Buddhism, vol. 20 (2019).

The post The Merit Economy appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In recent months, several states have passed sweeping anti-abortion legislation—including some of the most restrictive laws since abortion became legal under the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade—in an effort to bring a legal challenge before a new generation of conservative justices who could overturn the 1973 ruling. By and large, the pro-life activism driving the effort is rooted in the religious right’s view that abortion violates the Christian prohibition on killing. While debate over the legal status of embryos and fetuses has raged in American politics for decades, a similar development in Japanese Buddhism offers an interesting contrast for how the issue of applying religious doctrine to modern medical technology has been approached against different cultural and historical backdrops.

In postwar Japan, conservative Japanese politicians and right-wing commentators bemoaned the degradation of a rapidly modernizing society, citing the soaring abortion rate as the clearest evidence of Japan’s moral decline. They argued that the immorality of women was, in part, responsible for the erosion of traditional social values. Partnering with monks of a similar mindset, they used the rhetoric of mizuko kuyo, a Japanese Buddhist ritual meant to pacify the distraught spirits of babies who have been lost either by abortion or miscarriage. The ritual itself invokes the bodhisattva Jizo, who acts as a guide in the afterlife.

Published a decade ago, Jeff Wilson’s Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual Comes to America investigates mizuko kuyo and its transformations over time. He explains how the ceremony was seen in Japan as a means for women to atone for their alleged wrongdoings and to resubmit to their proper position in society. But in the late 20th-century transmission of Buddhism to the United States, mizuko kuyo took on a wholly different significance and became a way for both Buddhist and non-Buddhist women to grapple with pregnancy loss—shifting the purpose of the ritual from mandatory penance and the placation of angry ghosts to the healing of personal wounds.

After nine states passed bills to dramatically restrict access to abortion, Tricycle spoke to Wilson to get some more context and take a look at how Japanese and American Buddhists have dealt with abortion, both today and in the past.

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Mourning the Unborn Dead suggests that the rise of abortion as a moral issue in the United States and Japan followed a somewhat similar timeline; both became religious causes only after World War II. Could you tell us more about this?
In Japan, abortion was not legal through the war years, but it wasn’t a big issue one way or the other. However, in the postwar period, a new social situation led to a greater demand for pregnancy control. As abortion became more common, people reacted against that and began retroactively developing hardline religious stances.

Interestingly, in the postwar period in the US, religious groups were actually important agitators in helping to move the bar on abortion rights progressively through the fifties and sixties, to its culmination in the Roe v. Wade decision in the early 1970s. These were mostly liberal Protestants and liberal Jews who were arguing that women are harmed, and sometimes killed, by their lack of access to reproductive technologies. During this period, what we think of today as conservative religious groups, primarily Christian groups, were very, very quiet on the abortion issue. Abortion was a procedure that was illegal, had always been illegal, and was not anything they really cared about. Then Roe v. Wade dropped like a bombshell and helped to create the religious right of the last 50 years or so. By the end of the 1970s, abortion was already their defining issue.

You write that the “religious right” in Japan sometimes blamed societal problems on the women who had abortions—they believed that the troubled spirits of forsaken babies can come back and haunt not only the women and their families but also society as a whole.
There were plenty of conservative Buddhists, mostly monks, who propagated this idea of mizuko, or spirits created by the termination of a pregnancy. Yet it would be incorrect to say that the “religious right” in Japan shared one uniform opinion on the abortion issue. There was no coordinated movement that resembled the pro-life movement in the United States. While some of the monks and right-wing commentators specifically attacked women’s choice to end their pregnancies, others did not make a strong differentiation between abortion, miscarriage, or stillbirth. For these folks, any kind of pregnancy loss was indicative of negative karma on the part of the woman in question. Although they differed in their exact opinions, all conservative Buddhists were united in believing that women whose pregnancies didn’t come to term were karmically troubled, and thus in need of ritual intervention by Buddhist specialists.

Related: Liquid Life: Abortion and Buddhism in Japan

The majority of monks disagreed with these streams of thought. But mizuko kuyo, used to placate the distressed spirits of fetuses, was their culturally available resource to help their parishioners process what might have been feelings of loss or guilt. The wag-your-finger monks, who blamed women for society’s problems, used the media to amplify their minority voices. But unlike in the US, in Japan there was no political movement to remove access to abortion.

Many American converts initially turned to Buddhism for its alleged dissimilarity to a dogmatic Christianity. There’s a sense of shock and unease when they encounter systems of Buddhist ethics that are pretty stiff and unyielding, and conflict, say, with pro-choice views.
Belief in karma is extremely weak in North American Buddhism compared with what you see in Asian Buddhisms. Karma suggests that because killing is wrong, the termination of a pregnancy is wrong. But how wrong it is ranges widely. North American Buddhists encounter these ideas, and they wonder, “Why is Buddhism, which I thought was so liberal, so anti-choice?” But it’s not about choice—it’s about not incurring karmic debts.

Termination of a pregnancy is believed by most Buddhists to be a demeritorious act (bad karma, in street language), just like any act of harm. So how does it compare to, for example, eating meat, going fishing, or killing vermin? There is little formal guidance on these matters. For some, that means that they don’t see these acts as especially deleterious, while for others the lack of discussion is itself an opportunity to stake out a claim that these are very bad acts indeed.

Do you think that most North American practitioners remain politically pro-choice but morally anti-abortion?
North American converts are almost by definition coming to Buddhism as adults. In other words, these are people whose political opinions are already formed. It’s my observation that Buddhism doesn’t impact their voting practices one way or the other.

For some people, exposure to Buddhism moves them a bit toward the center, but not very far. After discovering that Buddhism generally has a negative view toward abortion, some left-leaning converts feel pressure to endorse an anti-abortion attitude but remain pro-choice. They are wrestling with the fact that women need the right to access, but they also don’t want to be too far out of step with Buddhism as they understand it. They’re trying to find a middle ground. A very small contingent moves all the way to the right, and become pro-life, but I don’t think it’s a terribly significant number of people.

There is the idea that a human rebirth is extremely rare, and as a result destroying a potential human life via abortion might also be destroying someone’s opportunity for enlightenment.
That’s actually not the logical conclusion that Buddhists have typically come to, although it is a potential consequence of Buddhist thought. If we reach into the bag of Buddhism, we’ll find an idea that human rebirth is really auspicious, especially because it’s a rare chance to reach Buddhahood. And if we reach again into the bag of Buddhism, we’ll also find beliefs around non-killing, which includes non-termination of pregnancies. But it’s only recently we’ve seen this particular combination of ideas. Today’s Christians are doing something similar when they reach into the Bible to find quotes that support their pro-life agenda.

I’ve noticed that some Christians cite the “will of God” to justify a pro-life viewpoint even in the face of terrible things like rape. How might this compare to ideas about karma?
Large portions of the pro-life movement sees it as a type of civil rights movement. Motivated out of a sense of compassion and altruism, they believe they are saving the lives of millions of innocent human beings who have no ability whatsoever to protect themselves. They are not ignorant of the fact that, in the process, women are negatively impacted by this. Generally speaking, they believe a person is better off having an unplanned pregnancy than having an abortion. Whether or not they’re right about that, they believe they are meddling in other people’s lives in a very positive way.

Related: Bible Belt Buddhism

Other cultures are not nearly as meddlesome. In Japan, there’s much more of a sense of not involving yourself in other people’s affairs. Buddhists want to end suffering, but historically they have not sent out vast armies of missionaries across the world to try to change other people’s level of suffering to the extent that Christians have. Most Buddhists assumed that the workings of karma would bring everybody around to the right situation in the fullness of infinite time. Christians don’t believe that. They believe it’s one and done: if you didn’t raise somebody’s happiness or salvation level in this life, you missed your chance. These differing views might explain that while in both countries some anti-abortion sentiment is there, it’s only in the United States that there’s been this significant push to restrict women’s access.

The post Pro-Life, Endless Births: Buddhist Views on Abortion appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Shinran (1173–1262), the founder of Jodo Shinshu (“True Essence of Pure Land Teaching”) had a universal vision of Buddhism’s liberating power for all people. But because Shin Buddhism (another way of referring to the Pure Land school Shinran founded) has been such an important part of Japanese culture for 800 years, that all-inclusiveness isn’t always noticed by people outside of the tradition. I think that many Buddhists in North America see Shin more as an expression of Japanese culture than as a form of Buddhism meant for each and all.

The Shin philosopher Kaneko Daiei (1881–1976) can help us understand Shinran’s vision. Kaneko, a professor at Otani University in Kyoto, Japan, who was highly critical of how materialistic his Buddhist lineage had become, was excommunicated from the denomination for 10 years. In his writings, he occasionally used the term “inner togetherness,” by which he meant the natural bonds that we share with other beings. There is an emotional quality to this feeling of “fellowness” with others, so that when someone else is suffering, we too suffer. Troubled by the suffering of ourselves and others, we look to see what its cause is. We look at the real situations of actual people in their everyday lives, rather than focusing on an ideal of how we ought to be in order to avoid suffering. This approach is very much a part of the Shin path, as it looks to ordinary beings instead of monastic ideals. The monk Ryokan (1758–1831) wrote a poem about the buddha of the Pure Land, Amida Buddha, which expresses this process very well:

“When I think about the misery of those in this world, their sadness becomes mine. Oh, that my monk’s robe were wide enough to gather up all the suffering people in this floating world. Nothing makes me more happy than Amida Buddha’s Vow to save everyone.” –trans. John Stevens

Kaneko says that in realizing that we and others are fellow beings bonded by an inseparable inner togetherness, we seek a solution to our misery that will be adequate for all. The answer, according to Kaneko, is the Primal Vow—Amida Buddha’s oath to bring all beings to oneness, which embraces all beings just as they are. This great vow provides the nembutsu (the recitation of Amida Buddha’s name, Namo Amida Butsu) as an easy practice that anyone can perform.

This is about as far as Kaneko took his idea, but I want to expand on this concept of inner togetherness. To me, it is emblematic of what is best about Shin Buddhism. In my understanding, the concept arises from the truth of interrelatedness. Interrelatedness, or interdependence, is the central insight of Mahayana Buddhism. It means that nothing exists separate from all the other things in the universe. Every person lives only by relying on the support of others. No matter how far out you trace the web of relations, there is always more that can be said about it: it is infinite and total, and only a buddha can truly perceive its full extent. Indeed, in the Mahayana tradition it is often said that comprehension of this totality is what precipitates buddhahood or is buddhahood itself. Thus while I seem in my deluded mind to be one individual person struggling in the world against others, in fact from the Buddha’s viewpoint there is no separation between self and other. In traditional language this is often called emptiness, because we are empty of independent existence. But “inner togetherness” is a uniquely Shin term for this understanding, which stresses the positive side of connection and the fellowship aspect without losing sight of the interrelatedness that informs the basic concept of emptiness.

There is no separation between self and other, and my life exists only because of others. It is the power of others, the power-beyond-myself, that sustains my entire existence. We say there is no self, but another way to express it would be to say that when you have a near-death experience, the entire history of the universe ought to flash before your eyes. This vision is embedded in Shin within the story of Amida’s Pure Land, a representation of the liberated peace and bliss of nirvana. In Pure Land Buddhism we say that we wish to be born together with all beings in the Pure Land, so again we see the emphasis on togetherness. We seek a common destination that will be acceptable to all people. In this life, we have separations and disputes with other people based on our deluded egos: this is a fact of living that we cannot fully overcome. The story of the Pure Land upholds our greatest values, confirming that even though we are imperfect, we are embraced by great compassion, and even though we are unable to get along now, our goal is total reconciliation and togetherness.

Shinran expressed this well in A Record in Lament of Divergences, when he contrasted the Pure Land path with that of the sages. He said that the path of sages is to have pity and look down toward other beings. Sages are great Buddhist saints who by their own efforts have achieved freedom. But because they have separated themselves off to reach freedom, they cannot feel the pains of ordinary beings: they look down with pity upon the rest of us. The path of the Pure Land, by contrast, is to be born together with other beings into nirvana, the Pure Land, and then to immediately return to help others forever and ever. This Pure Land type of compassion keeps the practitioner in constant relationship to others, not separating him off as a saint.

There is no separation between self and other, and my life exists only because of others. It is the power of others, the power-beyond-myself, that sustains my entire existence.

We may try to become holy, pure, or good enough to qualify to enter heaven or achieve buddhahood, but life is hard and we are weak, and few people can measure up to the standards set by religion. Worse yet, if we do manage to make some progress, that itself turns into an obstacle. The holier we get, the more puffed up our egos often become, and this removes us from fellowship with other ordinary people. I’ve experienced this myself. In the quest to kill the ego, we feed it ever more food and tell ourselves that we are becoming truly spiritual. But if you become a saint, you are different from suffering beings and can no longer relate. Thus from Shinran’s perspective the arrogance of the saint represents a type of failure.

A story in “Notes on Oral Teachings,” an account of teachings given by Shinran, provides another example of the Pure Land view of compassion. The story may not be accurate, but it reflects Shinran’s spirit well. In it, Shinran is recorded as saying that if someone loses a loved one and comes to you in distress, you should not get on your high horse. Instead, you should briefly teach them the dharma, Shinran said, and then drink with them. When they can smile and forget their pain for a little while, you leave them be. I don’t know whether or not this is the best response, and as I said, the story may not be true, but it points to the feeling of Shin. You don’t deliver an abstract lesson about why people shouldn’t be attached to anything because all things arise and pass away: you just get right down there with the person who’s suffering and share their sorrow, drinking together and cheering them with your companionship. This is acting from the recognition of inner togetherness, a recognition that brings you toward others rather than removing you from the everyday world.

Related: Pure and Simple Practice

In Buddhism we talk about how we seek to go over to the other shore, to nirvana, the Pure Land, buddhahood. But in the Shin tradition we don’t have to ferry ourselves all the way across the vast ocean of delusion. Instead, the other shore is constantly coming over here to us. In his most celebrated work, Kyogyoshinso (The True Teaching, Practice, and Realization of the Pure Land Way), Shinran says: “There has never been any separation: Amida’s vast vow always, of itself, grasps and holds beings. This is the necessary way of its working.” It is when we relax and trust that we are transformed.

When he wrote to a follower in one of his letters, Shinran pointed to Jodo Shinshu’s unique emotional quality of gratitude: “Signs of long years of saying the nembutsu and aspiring for birth [in the pure land] can be seen in the change in the heart that had been bad and in the deep warmth for friends and fellow-practitioners.” Deep warmth for others is the sign of nembutsu coming to fruition in one’s life, not detachment. The true and real practice of the nembutsu does not beg for salvation, create good karma, focus the mind, or bring about any of the benefits that we vainly chase after. Instead, when we realize how we are benefitted just as we are, gratitude arises from within and we express it by saying nembutsu with joy and humility. Nembutsu, therefore, is a grateful expression of thanksgiving: it is an end, not a means. The path has already been accomplished for us, and our part is simply to relax, trust, and say “Thank you,” Namo Amida Butsu.

Inner togetherness is also a vision of totality: All beings will be born together, all are embraced. In The True Teaching, Shinran quotes the Nirvana Sutra (Mahaparinirvana Sutra) as follows: “All sentient beings without fail ultimately realize great shinjin (the trusting heart of awakening).” This vision of Shinran’s was so expansive that elsewhere he said that 10 billion maras (demon-like beings in Buddhist mythology) were liberated when the Moon Matrix Sutra was preached, and that in the Sun Matrix Sutra the king mara (i.e., Satan himself) was converted to Buddhism and worshipped the Buddha. That’s an incredible concept. If even Mara will be liberated, that means that all beings, even those we hate, will be freed. And it means that even the aspects of ourselves that we hate the most will nonetheless be released in the end. Shinran doesn’t stop there, however. In Notes on “Essentials of Faith Alone,” Shinran proclaims that “this Tathagata [Amida Buddha] pervades the countless worlds; it fills the hearts and minds of the ocean of all beings. Thus, plants, trees, and land all attain buddhahood.”

Related: Jodo Shinshu: The Way of Shinran

Given that religion so often focuses on dividing the world into some version of the saved and the damned and on proclaiming how other people are justifiable objects of our suspicion and even hate, Shin’s all-embracing teaching is, I think, radical. Because we are used to confirming our prejudices, it can also be an uncomfortable one. If you take a moment to think of two or three people you dislike, you’ll see what I mean. Perhaps it’s a coworker, a politician, a neighbor, or even a family member—the Shin teaching says that that person is valued just as much as you, and that they too are destined for the Pure Land. You can’t get away from them, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton included.

When we awaken to our togetherness with others, our experiences give rise to gratitude. And gratitude, in the Shin tradition, is expressed through nembutsu. Shin theory usually involves emotional expression rather than dry assent to beliefs and doctrines. We are at our best when we are moved by the dharma, and the emotional feeling of inner togetherness with others can help us to expand the circle to encompass all of North American society and beyond.

The post Born Together With All Beings appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Over the past 25 years, Tricycle has covered the mindfulness movement from a variety of perspectives. We’ve shared practice instructions by Buddhist teachers, interviewed a neuroscientist about how mindfulness meditation research is being portrayed in the media, and published a point-counterpoint debate about whether mindfulness belongs in public schools, among many other pieces.

Along the way we’ve tried to strike a balance between exploring critical issues for the Buddhist tradition and advocating for a practice that enriches people’s lives. In the following pieces, we continue this tradition by offering an essay from scholar Jeff Wilson that examines the nominally “secular” mindfulness movement as a religious phenomenon and a series of personal reflections from real-life MBSR practitioners.

–Sam Mowe, Contributing Editor

The Religion of Mindfulness

by Jeff Wilson

Not long ago, I was at an academic religious studies conference presenting research on mindful sex. Among all my vaguely pornographic slides and details about how Buddhist-derived mindfulness meditation techniques are being used to assist with orgasm and sexual performance anxiety, I tried to make a coherent argument that this represented a natural—if perhaps eyebrow-raising—evolution of Buddhist practice in a culture that values indulgence over renunciation and considers sexuality something to actualize rather than to overcome. During the subsequent discussion period a Buddhist studies scholar commented with disgust, “But this is all just secular, it isn’t Buddhist.”

His objection was that I was presenting research on mindfulness at a conference on religion, to an academic session dedicated to Buddhism. From his classical Buddhological viewpoint, the mindfulness movement couldn’t possibly be worth investigating in relation to Buddhism, since it lacks sutra analysis, adherence to vinaya rules, traditional monks, nirvanic ambitions, and other elements that he felt were nonnegotiable features that needed to be present for something to be called Buddhist. Although I didn’t agree, I could see where he was coming from. As I carried out the research for my book Mindful America a few years ago, I had many occasions to ask myself just what sort of phenomenon I was investigating. As a scholar of Buddhism and American religion, I am intrigued by the mindfulness movement as an example of the transformation of religion in the 21st century. When I look at the mindfulness movement, it seems very religious to me, in part because of its frequent claims to be secular.

In recent years I’ve voraciously consumed as much literature as I could by and about the mindfulness movement in all its varied facets. I’ve read hundreds of books promoting mindfulness, pored over thousands of articles and Web features, watched countless online videos, followed the discussion on television, Twitter, Facebook, and elsewhere, besides talking to many practitioners about their experiences with mindfulness. From all of this, I’ve noted that the mindfulness movement is staggeringly diverse. It would be hard for anyone to make any statement that would be truly comprehensively accurate about everything that makes up the movement.

Related: The Untold Story of America’s Mindfulness Movement

However, there is a very common narrative that I encounter across the mindfulness movement. This story is especially prominent in the language of teachers of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, in the pages of magazines such as Mindful, and among proponents of meditation applied to practical concerns such as depression, anxiety, poor eating habits, parenting, and work. Basically, it goes like this:

Buddhism may include mindfulness, but mindfulness is not Buddhist, or at least not exclusively so. Mindfulness is an innate human quality, something that all people have as their birthright. What MBSR and other programs are teaching is really dharma, not Buddhism, and dharma is universal. Dharma is just the way things are; therefore, it can’t be the property of any group or sect. In fact, mindfulness is the heart of the dharma, and the aspects of Buddhism beyond mindfulness can potentially be dropped—indeed, it might be best for them to go, since they may hold back the actual substance, the true essence of what is correct in Buddhism, which is meditative awareness and the wisdom and compassion that result from seeing things as they really are. Don’t forget, the Buddha wasn’t a Buddhist. Mindfulness is secular, because it isn’t taught with religious words like buddha and prajna and you aren’t required to believe in things like reincarnation or engage in rituals like devotional pujas to gods and bodhisattvas. Ultimately, mindfulness isn’t a religion, a doctrine, or an ideology—it is a way of life, a way of being that is good and positive and potentially transformative for self and society alike.

I find this narrative compelling, as a vision. I too want to live in a world that is healthier and saner than what we have right now, and I wish for more awareness and insight for myself and those around me. But as a scholar, I also have a role-specific obligation to analyze such statements and understand their dynamics. And the thing that continually strikes me is just how religious “secular” mindfulness really is.

To claim that something is dharma is to make a religious argument. The very term dharma is a religious label that comes to us in the English-speaking world primarily from Buddhism and secondarily from Hinduism as well. Dharma is a word with many possible meanings and uses in differing contexts, but fundamentally it is used to indicate the speaker’s view of the state of things in reality—to paint a picture of existence. It also refers to teachings and practices that are in accord with that ultimate reality, or which help us discover that reality—in other words, it separates things into favored (according with reality) and disfavored (out of accord with reality) categories. Furthermore, to claim that something is the heart of the dharma and that other things can be discarded is to make a religiously sectarian argument. Others will have different views of what dharma is, what should be retained, and what can be abandoned. Defining dharma as universal and above or beyond any particular religion is, of course, itself a religious statement about the nature of dharma.

To say that mindfulness is an innate human quality or capacity is to make a truth claim about human nature, one that is not empirically verifiable (the mind boggles at the question of how we would accurately test all seven billion human beings to see if each one has inherent mindfulness). The real purpose of this truth claim is to express values that define human nature. Claims about human nature and values are religious, or at least they are philosophical claims that clearly overlap with religious concerns. When you say that something is a birthright, you are talking about essences and natures, the very stuff of religion.

Claims of being secular are tactics of legitimization, attempts to exorcise the ghost of religiosity that persistently haunts mindfulness. This originates in the fact that the mindfulness movement springs directly from Theravada Buddhism, with significant contributions from Zen and Tibetan Buddhism as well. For that matter, mindfulness is a part of all the lineages of Buddhism in Asia, though not all practice the sort of meditation techniques that have become associated with the mindfulness movement. Additionally, MBSR incorporates postural yoga (a practice derived mainly from Hinduism), and yoga itself has become deeply inflected with language about mindfulness in recent decades.

If I were to write an article pointing out that groceries, clothes, boxing lessons, and law school textbooks are secular, the reaction would likely be that it was a weird choice of topic, if not actual evidence that I have a screw loose somewhere. But as the historian R. Laurence Moore noted in Selling God, “‘Secular’ as a category for understanding historical experience depends for its meaning on the existence of something called ‘religion,’ and vice versa.” The simple fact that the assertion that mindfulness is secular must be repeated constantly demonstrates its ongoing entanglement with religion.

Talk of the secular is really talk about religion, for the purpose of setting the limits of what should be allowed to be perceived as religious and not-religious. Defining beliefs about reincarnation as disposable religious elements, rather than as dharma and simply the way things really are, is a form of boundary drawing and in-group making, the sort of thing that religious movements excel at. Furthermore, terming something a way of being or a way of life, over and against being religious, implicitly claims that religions somehow are not ways of being or ways of life—and most precisely, that Buddhism is not somehow a way of life. There are probably many Buddhists who would dispute that point if it were made explicitly. Indeed, I quite commonly hear Buddhists describe their religion in precisely these terms.

The vast mindfulness industry certainly operates as an evangelical apparatus for promoting certain beliefs, values, and practices. I have said that it is nearly impossible to find something that applies universally to every individual phenomenon in the mindfulness movement, but there is at least one: I have never yet found a mindfulness promoter or practitioner who feels that mindfulness isn’t good and positive, or who doesn’t believe that mindfulness can transform self and society. In fact, a whole world of values is bound up with the package of mindfulness as it is disseminated in the West: mindful people are aware; awareness is good; everyone should be aware; unaware people are at risk of being bad or acting badly; mindlessness is destroying the planet; mindfulness can save us; and so on.

Related: Does Mindfulness Belong in Public Schools? 

Leaving aside the question of whether or not something genuinely is religious (as if this were ever more than a subjective claim from a particular perspective), I find as a scholar that analyzing the mindfulness movement as if it were religious is quite productive, providing insights derived from the study of other religious movements that seem to accurately and usefully explain phenomena we see going on with mindfulness. From a religious studies standpoint, what I see before me is a movement of people who share common values and visions about human beings, life, society, and reality, who place great faith in a particular set of practices and engage in a ritual meant to bring about self-transformation and liberation from suffering, who are convinced of its worth for themselves and enthusiastic about promoting it to others, who react defensively to critiques and police the boundaries of who properly and improperly speaks for and about their movement, and who engage in an ongoing discussion about religion. Maybe that doesn’t meet your definition of a religion, but it sure seems pretty close to being religious to me. 

Mindfulness Practitioners Speak

by Wendy Joan Biddlecombe

In recent years, mindfulness has swiftly spread far beyond the meditation retreats that originally introduced Westerners to this practice of living in the present moment. Secular meditation classes, many of which don’t mention mindfulness’s Buddhist roots, have cropped up in schools, gyms, prisons, and corporate offices.

Critics within the Buddhist community as well as in the world of academia have been at times quick to dismiss these classes, denouncing them as a trendy commodification of ancient practices, an unwitting tool of capitalism, or a troublesome promotion of ethics-free mind training.

Such critiques can be convincing; Tricycle has published a number of them over the years as the mindfulness movement has grown. The issues they point out are meaningful and worthwhile. But they also have a tendency to ignore the on-the-ground, real-life experiences of people who have taken a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) course. How have these people’s lives been impacted? What do they have to say about the effects of mindfulness practice?

Below, we talk with just six of the tens of thousands of students around the world who have taken an MBSR course. Our respondents, who include a police lieutenant, a stay-at-home mother, and a psychiatrist, speak about their experience in the eight-week classes that combine meditation, body scanning, and yoga poses.

Elizabeth J. Coleman  
Age: 68 | Poet, lawyer, MBSR teacher

In 2001 I had endometrial cancer. I was home recovering, and a friend came to visit and brought me a brochure. Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center had just started teaching MBSR (it was a short-lived program). I looked at the brochure and said, “This is the gift I’m going to give myself.” It had never crossed my mind before to do something like this. But I took the course, and I felt transformed from the get-go. It was like a stroke of lightning. I just felt, “Oh my god, where has this been?” A colleague from work came to visit me after I had taken the course, and he said, “You’re different. How do I get what you got without getting what you got?”

Other than that, I had a rift in my family when I started MBSR. It has healed, and I totally owe that to years of doing lovingkindness meditation. My relationships are so much better and more compassionate. I don’t think I would be a poet if it were not for MBSR. I don’t think I would be able to perform if it were not for MBSR. Meditation lets me have a calm that I never had. I am a Type A personality, very driven. That’s just who I am, and I like that self, but meditation allows me to respond and not react. I wasn’t an awful person to start with or anything, but it’s given me this tool that I’ve then been able to give other people.

Talia Sherman
Age: 27 | Associate Fashion Director for Center Core and Shoes at Macy’s

I didn’t know what to expect when I started taking MBSR, but I truly think the class rewired my whole brain in the way that I think, the way that I carry myself, and the way I feel about myself. What I learned through it was that it’s OK not to be perfect, and it gave me a lot of self-confidence as well as the ability to stand up for myself and change both my work and interpersonal relationships. I think I came out of it a very empowered person, and it was awesome.

Last year I was diagnosed with Cushing’s Syndrome, and shortly after that my health fell off a cliff. I gained about 30 pounds and had a bunch of other nasty symptoms. I couldn’t sleep; I was uncontrollably hungry. They found a tumor on my right adrenal gland, which meant that my body was overproducing cortisol. So my body thought it was stressed all the time. I had surgery in September of last year and have been in a yearlong recovery since then. And I believe 100 percent that my mindfulness training was like a black belt for me this year. It helped with both the mental and physical pain. It was easier to be patient; I know that the pain is transient and is not going to be here forever.

Richard Goerling
Age: 47 | Police lieutenant, retired Coast Guard reservist, police reform advocate

I didn’t have a tipping point of “this happened to me, so I sought out mindfulness.” What I had was a journey as a leader in policing and in the military reserves. In 2001 I was recalled to active duty after 9/11. I don’t have any horror stories about going into combat, but I had a front row seat to the problems that affect a lot of police and first-responder organizations: the fast-paced work tempo, the stressors, the pressures to define what we were supposed to do after 9/11, group-think, and so on.

Mindfulness spoke to my warrior soul. Mindfulness training taught me to cultivate a level of awareness in body, mind, and health that allowed me to take care of myself and to develop a greater capacity to regulate my own emotions and experiences. In uniform, I could have anger and compassion in the same space while dealing with someone in crisis. Mindfulness gives me the awareness of the suffering of the people I’m trying to help.

My original objective in learning mindfulness was to improve the police-citizen encounter, because I didn’t like the outcomes that I was seeing. I approached this from the human performance perspective. The only way that an encounter between a police officer and a citizen is going to go well is if that police officer is resilient in heart and mind and body; if they have the capacity to be self-aware and aware of others; and if they have compassion and empathy and don’t judge the people they encounter. Then their performance is going to have a more acceptable outcome.

Cristina Profumo
Age: 53 | Psychiatrist

Mindfulness helps me to figure out that I have a mind. I know that as a psychiatrist it sounds strange to say that, but I’ve never sat down and observed my mind the way I do with mindfulness. I was kind of terrified of some of the thoughts and feelings that could come up. But little by little, doing it on a daily basis, it has helped me see that feelings and thoughts come and go. It’s the impermanence of all the things that we do in life—if I feel a certain way in a certain moment, that doesn’t mean that it’s going to last. And noticing that it does not last gives you a sense of being able to feel more—not more in control, but more aware of what’s going on, and to respond in a way that is more present rather than reactive. In my work and in my life, mindfulness has improved my attention, my presence, and my patience.

You don’t have to convince me that mindfulness is a spiritual experience. I’m not religious, because I feel that in religion you have to blindly trust an entity, and that’s not what I can do, that’s just not who I am. But this practice has given me my own spiritual road, whereas before mindfulness I had none. This road is making sense of my life and of how I can decrease my suffering and simply accept what is good and what is not good, and work with it.

Kenneth Kraus
Age: 60 | Businessman

What was going on at the time [when I decided to take an MBSR course] was what had been prevalent in my life: a tendency to get caught up in worrying about things, whatever they would be. And wanting to find a discipline or a place that could calm that tendency, or channel it.

This is a very, very gradual thing. This is not the type of thing where you go for a course, and then you have an experience, and you bring meditation to it, and suddenly a whole new world opens up. For a lot of people, and for me, it’s very incremental.

Some days are better than others. I’ve been working at this for 11 years. It helps me do things like sleep better, slow down circling thoughts, or at least have the ability to observe myself. And there are absolutely times where I say, “Gee, I wonder if this is having any effect.” And then there are other times where I can tell, “OK, my power of self-observation or being able to disengage is a little better than it would have been if I hadn’t taken the course.” Sometimes my thoughts are grabbed and they’re off, and at least I can see it. But it’s still a challenge to slow them down.

Sarah Robertson
Age: 40 | Stay-at-home mother to four children, former journalist

I had already been meditating through Transcendental Meditation. And then mindfulness took me to a whole other level. I love it. I meditate every day and use the practices that I learned there. And I’m sharing them with others and my own family. I’ve meditated with my oldest son; I do the body scan with him a lot. I get all my kids to try to breathe mindfully, and I do walking meditations with them.

I went into the class with two goals: one was to be less attached to technology, and the other was to be less reactive to my children. And I am not perfect by any means, but I’ve definitely gotten better, and it’s made such a huge difference in my life. I’m able to roll through negative or stressful situations in a calmer way and realize that they’re going to pass and that they’re not that big a deal in the grand scheme of things. I’m much more present at home. I’m not attending events or meetings that I don’t need to or don’t want to attend. Instead I’m at home, reading, cooking, listening to my children. I’m just aware of being a more present listener and a more thoughtful responder. 

The post On Mindfulness appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Buddhist same-sex marriage was born in the USA. That’s a little known but significant fact to reflect on now, just after the Supreme Court has declared legal marriage equality throughout the country. Appropriately enough, it all started in San Francisco, and was conceived as an act of love, not activism.

The first known Buddhist same-sex marriages took place in the early 1970s, at the Buddhist Church of San Francisco. Founded in 1899, it’s the oldest surviving temple in the mainland United States. It’s also part of the oldest Buddhist organization outside Hawaii: the Buddhist Churches of America (BCA), part of the Shin tradition of Pure Land Buddhism.

During the Nixon years, the LGBTQ rights movement was picking up, and San Francisco was one of the primary centers of both activism and community building. Located not far from the famously gay Castro District, the Buddhist Church of San Francisco (BCSF) was attended by singles and couples, gay and straight. As consciousness rose, people began to seek the same services that heterosexuals already enjoyed in American society.

A male couple in the congregation eventually asked Rev. Koshin Ogui, then assigned to BCSF, to perform their marriage. He readily agreed, and the ceremony was held in the main hall—identical to other marriages at the temple, except for the dropping of gender-based pronouns in the service. Without fanfare, history was made.

Soon other BCA temples were also conducting same-sex marriages, and by the time of my research into the subject in the early 2010s, I couldn’t find a single minister in the scores of BCA temples who was unwilling to preside over same-sex weddings. Indeed, BCA ministers had already performed marriages for gay and lesbian couples, bisexuals, transgender people, and polyamorous groups. Many of these were interracial marriages, or carried out for non-Buddhists who had nowhere else to go, though most were for members of local BCA temples.

The BCA and its sister organization in Hawaii had gone on record years earlier in support of marriage equality, and even lobbied the government to change the law. This support for LGBTQ rights has been recognized by the Smithsonian, which collected a rainbow-patterned robe worn by the BCSF’s current minister for the museum’s permanent collection.

Related: Becoming Jivaka 

I’m ordained in the Shin tradition, so I was already aware of Shin inclusivity. (Indeed, though I’m not gay myself, I would not have joined any organization that failed to support LGBTQ rights.) But the historian in me itched to explain this phenomenon more comprehensively. Why was the BCA the first Buddhist organization to move toward marriage equality, and why hadn’t this movement provoked rancor and conservative resistance, as we’ve seen in so many other American religious denominations?

In searching for answers, I came to several interrelated conclusions. First, the history of racial and religious discrimination that the originally Japanese-American BCA faced (everything from mob violence to WWII internment camps) instilled revulsion for discrimination in Shin circles. Second, since Shin ministers are not celibate (the tradition was founded by a married monk in 13th-century Japan), they share lifestyles similar to their parishioners, and thus readily empathize with them on matters of sexuality and social relationships, which may be more abstract to celibate monks and nuns.

But most importantly, what minister after minister told me was that the fundamental point of Shin Buddhism is that Amida Buddha embraces all beings without any exceptions, without any judgments, without any discrimination. Amida opens the way to the Pure Land (and thus liberation) to the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the good and the bad, the black and the white. Therefore, Amida Buddha also embraces the gay and the straight, the gender-conforming and everyone else, without any hesitation. It is this spirit that led Shin ministers to open their doors to same-sex couples, led Shin temples to march in Pride parades across the country, to pass proclamations affirming same-sex rights and marriage in particular, and to carry out education programs in their own communities.

The Shin community hasn’t been alone in supporting LGBTQ communities in American Buddhist circles. Though not as quickly or comprehensively, many other Buddhist groups have also moved toward performing same-sex marriages and affirming the value of their LGBTQ members. In the 1980s, a handful of same-sex marriages were performed by non-BCA teachers, including Sarika Dharma of the International Buddhist Meditation Center in Los Angeles. By the end of the 1990s, American Tibetan, Theravada, and Zen teachers had all performed the first same-sex marriages in those respective traditions as well, and Soka Gakkai had gone from seeing homosexuality as a condition to be cured through Buddhist practice to performing large numbers of same-sex marriages for its members.

All of this was taking place in a country without legal recognition for married same-sex couples. They performed those ceremonies even though they knew the state would not recognize them, because it was the right thing to do.

Today those marriages are equal to everyone else’s, and there are signs that marriage equality is gaining acceptance in parts of Buddhist Asia. Taiwan held its first Buddhist same-sex marriage in 2012, with two brides in white dresses and veils presided over by a traditional shaven-headed nun. In Kyoto, Japan, Rev. Kawakami Taka of Shunkoin temple not only performs same-sex marriages at his historic Rinzai Zen temple, but has also partnered with local hotel, flower, and similar vendors to provide wedding packages for same-sex couples arriving from around the world. Step by step, the movement continues.

Related: Working Through the Strong Emotions of Sexual Identity 

On Saturday morning, June 27, I gave keynote address for a seminar at the New York Buddhist Church, “Embraced by the Heart of Amida Buddha: The LGBTQ Community and Shin Buddhism.” It’s part of an educational campaign that the BCA’s Center for Buddhist Education carries out every year in late June. Speakers talked about their experiences as gay, lesbian, and transgender Buddhists, and on Sunday we’ll walk in the New York Pride parade with members of the temple. We had no idea that our event would occur at such a historic moment, but now we know that we’ll be marching as an act of pure celebration, rather than hope and defiance.

Despite the positive record of many sanghas and individuals, discrimination and ignorance remain widespread in American Buddhism. That isn’t something that will change overnight with a single Supreme Court decision, no matter how momentous. But we can genuinely take heart that American Buddhists have been working for marriage equality for more than 40 years, and that Buddhists of many traditions spoke out for equality and contributed to the movement that led to today’s ruling.

[This story was first published in 2015]

The post A Big Gay History of Same-sex Marriage in the Sangha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

“Use mindfulness to overcome stress, anger, anxiety, depression and more,” counsels the cover of Mindfulness for Dummies ($24.99). If you find that suggestion compelling, perhaps you’ll want to investigate other books written or coauthored by Shamash Alidina. There’s the Mindfulness Workbook for Dummies ($19.99), which will help you experiment with different mindfulness techniques; Mindfulness at Work for Dummies ($24.99) promises mastery of your mind in the office; or maybe you’d prefer Relaxation for Dummies ($24.99). Short on time? There’s good news: the Kindle edition of Become More Mindful in a Day for Dummies is just $3.99. If you’re in London, or willing to work with Alidina online or via the phone, you can attend seminars, participate in retreats, take courses, and even be trained yourself as a mindfulness teacher.

Alidina is an example of a new figure on the economic landscape: the professional mindfulness instructor. Non-monks like Alidina who earn much or all of their income through teaching mindfulness in secular settings now number in the many hundreds, perhaps thousands, and can be found in every Western country. The existence of such instructors attests to the mass-marketing and commercial diversification of mindfulness, and to the fact that it has become a big business. According to federal data, Americans spend billions every year on mindfulness courses, books, and related products.

At first blush, mindfulness may seem like the ultimate anti-product, immune to the capitalist impulse. Indeed, the origin of mindfulness as a practice in Asian monastic communities seeking transcendence of the worldly makes it an unlikely candidate for adoption by non-Buddhist urban fashionistas, suburban hockey dads, and tech cognoscenti. But it’s never a good idea to bet against the ingenuity of late capitalism to find a way to make a buck off anything and everything. To make mindfulness saleable, it has been submitted to processes of recontextualization, adaptation, and creative application to meet the desires of new consumers.

Not surprisingly, the claimed benefits of mindfulness practice tend to mirror the anxieties of society at large. Feeling overwhelmed? Try Mindfulness: An Eight-Week Plan for Finding Peace in a Frantic World ($15.99). Kids running you ragged? Buy Mindful Parenting: Simple and Powerful Solutions for Raising Creative, Engaged, Happy Kids in Today’s Hectic World ($15.99). Got food issues? Pick up Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life ($15.99). Bored in the sack? Take a peek at The Joy of Mindful Sex: Be in the Moment and Enrich Your Lovemaking ($18.95). Relationship issues? Read Mindful Loving: 10 Practices for Creating Deeper Connections ($17). Difficulty at work? Maybe you need Inner Productivity: A Mindful Path to Efficiency and Enjoyment in Your Work ($14.95). And this is just the tip of the mindful iceberg.

In the transition from monastery to marketplace, there is no dearth of creative adaptations. If the seller doesn’t have particularly strong practice credentials, or is trying to reach an audience for whom Buddhism or religion in general may not be a selling point, he or she will downplay the Asian origins of the practice. Instead, the mindfulness professional will usually try to draw on secular sources of authority: Buy my book because I am a medical doctor and know what is best for your body (mindfulness); become my client because I am a counselor and know what your mind needs (mindfulness); follow my tips for managing your home life because I too am a parent and know what it takes to get your kids to eat their veggies (mindfulness); attend my seminar because I’m an expert consultant and know what your business needs to be competitive in a weak economy (mindfulness). The ability to present mindfulness as either spiritual or, in this case, secular, depending on circumstance, greatly extends the seller’s reach.

Beyond selling one’s expertise in mindfulness and touting the benefits of its practice, a further way to make money on mindfulness is by selling paraphernalia alleged to support or enhance meditation practice. At first, this mostly consisted of cushions and benches for use during extended periods of formal seated mindfulness meditation. These days, many mobile apps are available that draw on mindful activities. Some are electronic variations on earlier meditation aids, such as timers, meditation instructions, music designed to calm the mind, or collections of Buddhist quotations. For example, Mindfulness Bell from Spotlight Six Software ($0.99) sounds a chime at predetermined intervals. Others are more ambitious: Mindfulness Academy ($69.95) utilizes biofeedback via special Iom Active Feedback devices ($279.95) fitted onto the user’s fingertips to run a computer game that, according to its creators, will help the user achieve success and cultivate a balanced life.

None of these entrepreneurial adaptations should surprise us. Buddhism still exists today after 2,500 years because it has always adapted to new cultures, very often through new applications that meet the concerns of each society it encounters. We find that Buddhism spread across Asia through attempts to provide better funeral rituals to honor ancestors, enhanced methods of faith healing, and new strategies for avoiding a painful afterlife, to name just a few benefits sought by different cultures. New host cultures even developed their own Buddhist scriptures that described how to acquire supernatural protection for the ruling class and the country as a whole. Since the West and the modern world in general have very different desires and fears, Buddhism is once again repackaged to meet new circumstances—work stress, relationship issues, health problems, and other concerns. The quest to sell mindfulness as a universal panacea is then not a wholly crass enterprise: what would we expect compassionate Buddhist teachers to do other than seek ways to alleviate the stresses, low self-esteem, family conflicts, and other common afflictions of the people around them?

Since the value of “mindfulness,” with its associated concepts, has become recognized by a segment of the consumer populace, a new trend has developed. Now mindfulness is no longer simply being sold itself as a commodity; mindfulness is put to use selling other, possibly unrelated products. The hard work of previous promoters to convince us of mindfulness’s spiritual, medicinal, and practical value has associated mindfulness with good health, beauty, ecological awareness, peace of mind, and the power to get what you want. Sellers of new products can use the word “mindful” to cast the glow of such qualities upon their own goods and services.

For example, Mindful Minerals sells a line of beauty products that use ingredients collected from the Dead Sea. The company claims that their soaps ($6), creams ($30), and other offerings are naturally effective for treating skin conditions, lack preservatives, and are nondamaging to the environment. All well and good. But they don’t call themselves “Healthy Minerals” or “Eco Minerals.” Instead, they use the word “mindful” to imply these qualities. Likewise, Earth Balance sells a vegan, preservative-free mayonnaise that it labels Mindful Mayo ($4.99). Mindful Clothing sells hemp and organic fiber hoodies ($55), t-shirts ($25), and other comfy apparel. There’s no implication that buying their clothes makes you meditative; rather, “mindful” has become synonymous with being aware, with “awareness” understood in a particular way that supports progressive values, alternative lifestyles, environmentalism, and a left-leaning political orientation.

Consider Tranquilista: Mastering the Art of Enlightened Work and Mindful Play ($15.95). The author invites her young female readers to identify with her in the pursuit of “mindful extravagance”: “We’re forgoing spreadsheets and stodgy office politics to forge ahead with a new way of designing our lives as self-defined entrepreneurs who care about blending balance, bliss, and beauty.” This blend involves fashion, tech-savvy self-promotion, philanthropy, and meditation. Mindfulness is a key component in this mix, “an important trait to adorn yourself with at all times.” The result will be an empowered, self-branded woman who sparkles.

Such applications become possible because mindfulness is no longer just a form of meditation, it is a type of lifestyle. Mindfulness becomes the symbol of a way of moving through the world, a way of building a self-image even as an opposing identity is inevitably projected onto the unmindful masses.

Naturally, a mindful lifestyle requires appropriate accessories (yoga pants, hybrid vehicles, organic foods) that can be bought and sold, so the wheel of mindful commodities rolls on and on. Where will it all end? There are those who fear that the commercialization of mindfulness is a grave threat to the dharma, and others who feel that it is the way that Buddhism will ultimately penetrate and transform Western society from within. Others see little relation to Buddhism at all. Perhaps the popularized version of mindfulness is simply a fad that will fade with time, becoming a footnote in cultural history alongside Cabbage Patch dolls and twerking. But one thing remains certain: as long as there is money to be made from mindfulness, there will be someone willing to sell it.

The post From Monastery to Marketplace appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Scholars have known for some time that Buddhism is the largest religion in Hawaii after Christianity, the majority religion in all US states. Now—according to an article in last week’s Washington Post—Buddhism has also attained second-place status in a dozen Western states.

The Washington Post makes its case with a colorful map that indicates the number of adherents to the second-largest religion in each state. It shows Buddhism taking second-place honors in Hawaii, Alaska, Washington, Oregon, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

When you look at the map by county, however, the data isn’t as clear as the first state-by-state map suggests. The solid swath of Buddhist saffron that covers nearly the entire western side of America in the state map becomes a fractured mess of color in the county map. It reveals that Buddhism is sometimes only popular in a handful of the Western states’ small counties, with many other surrounding counties colored to indicate that Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or Baha’i are the dominant minority. Buddhists dominate only a single county in both Nevada and Oklahoma, for example, but because those counties are so populous, the whole state gets awarded to the Buddhists. The opposite also happens: there are places where Buddhists are clearly numerous, yet the state is claimed for some other religion. (The informative value of these kinds of maps in general was recently critiqued in an article in Jacobin titled “Infotainment Journalism.”)

My reaction to these maps, especially the primary state-by-state one, is conflicted. The data on Buddhism may be broadly correct, but a closer look reveals many flaws. The Religious Congregations and Membership Study, which provides the data for these maps, pulls its statistics on Buddhism from a significant but problematic study conducted in 2009. I was present when the results of that study were announced at the American Academy of Religion, and like many other experts, I came away troubled by the conceptual flaws in the data collection. My own understanding of the numbers, based on field site visits to many hundreds of Buddhist groups in every tradition and every part of America, differed significantly from theirs. Some groups I knew to be much smaller than they were being represented, while others were certainly larger than the study claimed. And there were some key groups that seemed to be flat out missing. I happened to be seated next to a high-ranking insider for one of the (allegedly) biggest groups included in the study, and as the number of adherents in his organization was rattled off by the presenter, he sharply drew in his breath, shook his head, and turned to whisper to me that the study’s number was way off: his group had at best a third of the number of members that the study was claiming.

Why is it so hard to get the numbers right on Buddhists in America, despite the best efforts of highly trained and experienced social scientists? To save space (and the reader’s patience), I’ll just focus on the largest factors that cause under- and overestimation of Buddhist populations in the US. The data for the maps is based on a study that counted affiliations with organized religious groups—a method, like nearly all studies of American religion, derived from a Protestant Christian model. This model fundamentally assumes that all religious persons gather together into exclusive public bodies with which they maintain a unique personal identification. But that just isn’t true of most religions, and it certainly isn’t true for most people who practice Buddhism, in Asia or in the United States.

For the average Buddhist practitioner, there has never been an expectation of regular visitation to a site like Sunday morning church service. Nor has there been an expectation of formal membership in a specific group, such as belonging to a congregation. The average person in Buddhist Asia hasn’t claimed personal identification with a particular sect—indeed, in many cultures historically influenced by Buddhism, regular participants in Buddhist activities won’t even admit to belonging to any religion, let alone claiming identity as a Buddhist.

The Buddhist pattern of non-attendance and non-affiliation holds fairly well in the United States, too. Here, religious incorporation laws based on Protestant congregationalism and dominant cultural expectations have led some Buddhists to create formal institutions that hold weekly meetings and maintain membership lists (or at least mailing lists). But the simple fact is that great masses of people practicing Buddhism—including self-identified Buddhists— don’t profess affiliation with any particular institution. This means that even generally reliable data collection methods, such as large-scale phone surveys that ask individuals to list their religious identifications, do not capture a fully accurate picture of Buddhist numbers.

When you collect data by contacting Buddhist groups in the phonebook (so to speak—the study’s attempts to identify formal Buddhist groups were actually more wide-ranging and sophisticated), you miss crucial pieces of the puzzle. Not only do you neglect the sizable numbers of people who rarely or never attend a public group; you also overlook the many grassroots gatherings and loose networks that aren’t registered as formal tax-exempt organizations. These missing Buddhists almost certainly comprise the majority of people practicing Buddhism in America. So at the very best, these maps represent the relative sizes of minority religious institutions in each state rather than the actual relative number of Buddhists, Muslims, and so forth.

On the other hand, approaching the groups you can find and asking them how many adherents they have is also a recipe for problems. Religious groups often have little incentive to report accurate numbers. Many lack the ability—or interest—to collect reliable data. Minority religious groups have even less incentive: when you’re heavily outnumbered in a historically racist and at times religiously intolerant society, you’ve got compelling reasons to exaggerate your size and strength. Projecting a larger image of small organizations can help dissuade those who might be inclined to harass those groups they think can’t fight back.

Among other things, projecting a larger image of your organization can make it seem less marginal. The issue is compounded by the sense of competition that many religious groups—including some Buddhists—feel with outside groups. Numbers come to be seen as a measure of the effectiveness, even the correctness, of one’s doctrines and practices. It can be embarrassing or humiliating to report the low number of people who agree with your conviction of how the universe operates. Many misrepresent their groups’ sizes as much to avoid their own anxieties as to brag to outsiders.

The numbers that the Washington Post maps utilize thus cannot be accurate in any strict sense of the word, since they’ve missed many Buddhists on the one hand and received dubious information from some of the groups on the other. But does this mean that the study, and the maps derived from it, are useless to us? Not necessarily so.

Although not completely accurate, the study is suggestive and intriguing. Leaving aside the specific numbers, we can focus on overall patterns. Regardless of whether or not Buddhism is indeed the second-largest religion in all 13 listed states—and none of the other 37—we can be relatively confident that Buddhism tends to represent a higher percentage of adherents compared to other non-Christian groups in the West than in other parts of the country.

In my book Dixie Dharma, I argue that we need to take a regional view in examining Buddhism in America, and the West is one of the most important of America’s Buddhist regions. Western states have received the highest share of Buddhist immigrants since the 1840s, and the region’s spirit of religious experimentation has encouraged many others to explore Buddhism. Buddhism on the Left Coast has had a long time to establish an institutional presence, and has also had a great mass of likely adherents from which to draw. It thus makes a good showing in a study based on a survey of religious institutions.

These differences between places, such as that between the West and the rest of America, give reason to take a regional lens rather than blithely talking about “American Buddhism” as a whole. To practice Buddhism in California may be a different thing than to practice it in South Carolina. Beyond the obvious differences of climate and terrain, the Buddhist experience is impacted by whether one has access to local institutions and a variety of traditions—something most Americans can’t take for granted. It matters if Buddhism is acknowledged as a relatively large presence in one’s area or exists among a variety of different minority religions and a significant population of non-religious (or at least non-committed) people. It’s quite a different Buddhist experience to practice in a place where religious diversity is low and not necessarily celebrated than in much of California.

Even if some survey one day suggests more reliably that Buddhism is the second-largest religion in every state, we’ll still need to keep these sorts of maps in perspective. The truth is that Christians outnumber members of non-Christian religions 15 to 1. And Christianity’s massive dominance is unlikely to change within our lifetimes or those of our grandchildren, no matter how multicultural the country becomes in the meantime. As sociologist Mark Silk points out in his own reaction to the Washington Post article, even the religiously unaffiliated outnumber all minority religions put together by a factor of 4 to 1. In light of this, being the second largest religion just doesn’t amount to much.

Further reading: The World is Places

The post Painting the West Saffron appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In case you haven’t noticed, the English-language Buddhist mediasphere has become vast. It encompasses countless books in various genres, magazines for practitioners, blogs and websites, various forms of social media, academic journals, podcasts, films and television programs, and more. It isn’t possible to stay abreast of all these sources, and so of course choices have to be made. Often people select sources based on their particular orientations toward Buddhism: Perhaps the reader is a casual practitioner interested in meditation for better health and well-being, or a full-time monk training in a traditional lineage, or a professor of Buddhist studies trying to teach iPhone-addicted undergraduates about emptiness and dependent co-origination. The result, naturally enough, is that communities of conversation form around different concerns and approaches, which are stimulating but also limiting. The tendency toward one sort of division—between academic scholars of Buddhism, potentially locked in their ivory towers, and the public at large with an interest in Buddhist matters—is one that can be easily observed.

It hasn’t always been this way. Knowledge of Buddhism was initially brought to the West as much through the efforts of scholars as through the migration of Buddhists. Through the years, Buddhist scholars have contributed tremendously to the development of Western Buddhist practice, as well as to the understanding of Buddhism in the larger non-Buddhist public. Today, even though many (perhaps most) scholars of Buddhism are also interested in Buddhism as a personal spiritual path, the pressure to speak to an academic community and the weight of training in specialist modes of investigation and expression tend to cut off the ability of many scholars to reach a wider audience with their work. But as Rita Gross pointed out in her online retreat for Tricycle, “Buddhist History for Buddhist Practitioners,” it can be deeply enriching for practitioners to learn about new findings in Buddhist history and development.

The biannual Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, which debuted in 2011, hopes to lower the walls between the academy and the average Buddhist practitioner. As founder Richard Gombrich—himself one of the most respected senior figures in Buddhist Studies—wrote in his 2012 editorial for the journal: “We felt that there was a need for a publication which, without any drop in intellectual quality, would in some ways be a bit more like a magazine. By this we meant that it should be more accessible to non-specialists, and more varied, with a wide range of contributions, a wide range of subject matter (in terms of both topic and approach), and—we hoped—a correspondingly wider audience.” This is a new extension of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies’ mandate, which supports the teaching of Buddhist Studies and conferences at Oxford University. The advent of the journal, therefore, brings the scope of the Centre beyond the campus, out into the general community and onto the international Buddhist Studies stage.

The Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies falls clearly within the parameters of rigorous academic discourse, and any scholar should be proud to place an essay in it. But there are some subtle ways in which the journal bucks the usual trends in its quest to reach a more mainstream reading audience. The range of contributors is noticeably broad: there are graduate students and professors from all levels of the academy, but also journalists, monks, and independent scholars, including some with no formal higher education in Buddhism but plenty of insight on display. The tone of articles in the journal differs from others in the field as well. There is more overt “opinionating,” with comments on the state of Buddhist studies and the publishing world, and even recommendations for proper Buddhist practice. Though some other journals, such as Contemporary Buddhism and Buddhist-Christian Studies are willing to publish research essays that include some moderately prescriptive material, no other journal matches the range of contributors that the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies regularly presents, and some of the editorials and articles seem especially frank.

What sort of benefits can skeptical practitioners get from reading scholarly research? Beyond the obvious usefulness of knowing Buddhist history for its own sake, new research often sheds unexpected, sometimes very helpful light on issues of importance to contemporary Buddhists. For example, in an article in volume 3 of the journal, Paisarn Likhitpreechakul examines the textual evidence for the Buddha’s banning of “pandakas” from receiving ordination. The exact meaning of the term pandaka has always been unclear. It has usually been interpreted as referring to someone of indeterminate gender, which in turn has been used as a justification for refusing monastic ordination to homosexuals, hermaphrodites, eunuchs, and transgender persons, and sometimes for holding wider social stigma against such people as well. But Likhitpreechakul calls attention to an overlooked commentarial tradition that suggests that the term pandaka refers to a man who cannot emit semen: i.e. that the issue is impotence, not gender. This would have clear implications for the LBGTQ communities of traditional Buddhist nations, and perhaps for Buddhists in the West as well.

In another issue, Peter Roberts discusses the Karandavyuha Sutra—you’ve probably never heard of it, but you do know the practice that this sutra introduced: the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum. Roberts discusses why this is one of the most famous practices in all of Buddhism, yet the actual sermon of the Buddha that describes the mantra is widely unfamiliar to Buddhists, East and West. This is interesting in its own right, and also potentially suggests some of the forces at work behind what Buddhist practices survive over time, and why. These are concerns that practitioners have too, and learning about the Buddhist past from specialist scholars can provide clues to how modern Buddhists might choose to deal with the circumstances that face them today.

One particular benefit that academic journals provide, especially if they are written with an eye to both insiders and interested nonspecialists, is their review of books. In this age of information overload, even scholars don’t have enough time to read all the new work being done in Buddhist studies. Frankly, book review sections do much of that work for us. A well-written review conveys the essential points of a new academic work without hours of personal investment, and assesses whether the author’s points seem to be accurate and noteworthy. The book review section of the Oxford Centre’s journal is noticeably lively, and has a tendency to cast a wider net than most academic journals. For example, the second issue of the journal reviews The Ego Trick: What Does It Mean to Be You? by Julian Baggini, the founder of The Philosophers’ Magazine. This is not a work of Buddhist studies—it is a wide-ranging investigation by a modern philosopher on a search to understand the ego. But its relevance to Buddhists and those who study them should be immediately obvious, and the reviewer digs into the book with gusto, noting where Baggini’s intellectual perambulations bring him in line with classic Buddhist thought and where he wanders far from views that accord with traditional dharma.

It’s too early to tell whether the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies will succeed in its mission to bring Buddhist Studies to the average reader. That will depend on whether significant numbers of such readers do indeed begin to read and debate the journal’s contents. Certainly the journal won’t be for everyone: even a relatively publicly-oriented journal takes effort on the part of the reader. But the potential rewards are real, and the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies is more accessible than most other academic journals. Those who wish to pursue their curiosity can find the journal via the website of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies (www.ocbs.org).

The post Over the Wall appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.