About half an hour north of Boston, close to the New Hampshire border, lies an area of Massachusetts known as the Merrimack Valley. It’s a mix of rural areas and small cities, but what’s often overlooked is the region’s diverse, vibrant Buddhist community.

The Buddhist community has flourished here for decades, particularly after the arrival of thousands of refugees following the wars in Southeast Asia. Now, there are nearly a dozen Buddhist temples representing a variety of traditions and ethnicities—including Vietnamese, Thai, Laotian, Cambodian, Khmer, Chinese, and Japanese.

This spring, an innovative new course called “Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard” at Phillips Academy—a private boarding school in Andover, one of the towns in the Merrimack Valley—immersed high school seniors in these local Buddhist communities just miles from their own campus. Co-taught by author Chenxing Han and philosophy and religion instructor Andrew Housiaux, the class shows how embedded Buddhism is in the US, even in places where one might not expect.

“It invites anybody in the US to consider, ‘There’s Buddhism in my backyard,’” Han said.

The idea for the 10-week course came about last year when Housiaux read Han’s book, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists, in which she profiled dozens of young Asian American Buddhists. At the time, he was teaching a class on Asian religions, so he invited Han to be a guest lecturer and was struck by her approach.

“Rather than saying ‘Buddhism is about the Four Noble Truths,’ or, ‘Let’s start with Prince Siddhartha 2,600 years ago,’ she was saying, ‘Let’s listen to human beings,’” he said.

“Listening to the Buddhists in our Backyard” grew out of this concept, and Housiaux invited Han to co-teach the course with him. Another key instructor was the Buddhist community itself, as Housiaux, Han, and their six students visited nearly a dozen temples in the Merrimack Valley, plus a few others in Boston and Cambridge. The idea was to teach the high schoolers about the diversity of Buddhism in the US, but outside the classroom. So instead of starting with books about Buddhism and its history, they visited temples, observed and participated in rituals, attended youth groups, and spoke to monastics and laypeople.

“From the beginning, the students understood that American Buddhism is diverse and culturally-rooted, flipping the mainstream, white, convert-dominated narratives on their heads,” Han said. “What they modeled is a very different way of approaching American Buddhism.” 

Calling it an “inversion of the typical pedagogy,” Housiaux said the class allowed students to experience the religion without a constructed view of what Buddhism is or who Buddhists are. “Otherwise they’d take that idea and go to certain temples and say, ‘Oh, why aren’t certain people meditating?,’ or ‘Why is this so ritualistic?’” he said. This approach also meant that students quickly picked up on the internal diversity of Buddhism firsthand, rather than simply reading about regional or philosophical differences, he added.

Melissa Damasceno, a 17-year-old senior from Houston, agreed. “I was able to get a much larger picture of what Buddhism is, instead of just reading a textbook. Buddhist concepts were actively demonstrated to us in the temples,” she said. “A lot of the class for me has been seeing a full picture of Buddhism, seeing all its colors and how it changes across different ethnic and immigrant communities.”

Han said the pedagogy also helped students absorb Buddhist principles in a deeper way. “If I read an article about being generous, it wouldn’t have stuck with me,” one student told Han. “But being the recipient of generosity, and practicing it ourselves, bringing oranges to the temples, giving donations, asking how I can help and helping them at Thai New Year—we’re going to remember this for a long time,” the student shared.

While all the temples were welcoming, Han said, it wasn’t always easy to gain access to these spaces because many of the practitioners don’t speak English, and communication required a significant amount of translation for Han and members.

The culmination of the course was an online conference in which the students presented what they learned about the communities—and pedagogy—to Buddhist educators, scholars, and community leaders across the US. They also met with researchers at Harvard Divinity School and wrote profiles of two of the temples they visited, American Wisdom Association and Chùa Tường Vân Lowell, for Harvard’s Pluralism Project, which researches religious diversity in the US.

“This is what the landscape of the US looks like today, and students like those at Phillips Academy continue to contribute to a more refined understanding of our own region,” Diana Eck, professor of comparative religion at Harvard Divinity School and founder and director of the Pluralism Project said in an email.

Some of the students’ learning went beyond academics. Damasceno said she’s also been applying Buddhist concepts to her own life, particularly the idea of impermanence. “I’ve been thinking about impermanence a lot as we transition out of high school and into a new phase of our lives,” she said. “What does it mean to end something and move on, in this course and in other aspects of life? It’s been refreshing to have the opportunity to think about what impermanence looks like and how we’re always in this transitory state.” 

For Lesley Tan, a 17-year-old senior, the course has also made her think in new ways about her hometown in Southern California, where several Asian Buddhist temples have been vandalized amid the recent surge of anti-Asian hate crimes. “I was thinking about how Buddhism is so present in my community back home, and how I never really recognized that until this term,” she said. “I want to go back and explore the Buddhist temples nearby.”

Han noted this is perhaps the biggest lesson of the course, which will return next spring.

“You can find Buddhism anywhere,” she said.

♦

See here for recordings of the online conference, photos, and other resources from “Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard.”

The post Listening to the Buddhists in Our Backyard appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 1991, as a 16-year-old student, I found myself having lunch at the Spring Street Café with my Uncle Rick, Allen Ginsberg, and a few of their friends. It was my first visit to New York City, and—having read The Dharma Bums the previous summer—I was completely starstruck by the Beat royalty at the table. My “Uncle Rick” was Rick Fields, a pioneer of American Buddhist journalism and the author of How the Swans Came to the Lake: A Narrative History of Buddhism in America. During that lunch in Soho, much excited conversation revolved around another project that he was deeply involved in, the launch of a new Buddhist magazine called Tricycle. The first issue had just been released, though the discussion of its significance for the dharma in America was well over my head. One of the few details that I do remember was that someone was deeply vexed about how many copies of the magazine, with its portrait of His Holiness the Dalai Lama on the cover, would end up on floors or in trash cans rather than being properly stored in a clean, high place or carefully burned “as Tibetans would do.” Rick caught my confused look and smiled with his eyebrows raised in a way that suggested sympathy for these concerns around cultural sensitivity while also suggesting that focusing on where the physical magazine ended up after someone finished reading it was maybe missing the point of the whole endeavor.

That day, I never would have imagined that in less than ten years, Rick would be dead from lung cancer at the age of 57 or that twenty years later I would be a college professor with a PhD in Buddhist Studies or that thirty years later I would be writing in the pages of the magazine they were discussing to celebrate the fortieth anniversary edition of How the Swans Came to the Lake. I suspect that were he still able to, Rick might greet these developments with the same raised eyebrow of bemused acceptance that he offered at that lunch.

I had a number of conversations with Nikko Odiseos, the stalwart president of Shambhala Publications, about creating a significantly revised and updated version of the book, including additional chapters to address the past thirty years (a revised third edition was published in 1993, when Rick was still alive). After a year of attempts that led nowhere, I concluded that this was a misguided effort to make the book something it is not. There is simply no way to continue the story from where Rick left off. The intimate narrative style that defines the book would be impossible to replicate in describing an American Buddhism that has erupted into the mainstream in ways quite unimaginable forty years ago. The cast of characters is not yet equal to the sands of the Ganges, but it has multiplied from the dozens of prominent figures portrayed in the book to hundreds, if not thousands. Further, these more recent developments in the story of American Buddhism have been examined in a growing collection of excellent books by scholars and journalists. Letting go of the idea of a fully updated new edition, I proposed instead writing an essay that would contextualize the book as a classic of American Buddhist literature.

The book is the closest we have to an American contribution to the tradition of Buddhist historiography that announces the arrival of Buddhism in a new land by telling the story of how it got there. Rick was directly involved with many of the most important Buddhist teachers in the United States from the 1960s until his death in 1999, and his book retains the fresh quality of a participant’s eyewitness account. Of course, today we would write parts of the story quite differently, and a number of more recent studies of American Buddhism do just that. Rick understood the story of Buddhism as beginning and ending with the Buddha’s awakening, and he fashioned his book to make the case that the multicultural, diverse, dynamic landscape of Buddhism in America was the perfect environment for awakening in the 20th century—and in that sense, Buddhism in America represented not just an arrival but a homecoming. Rick described early in Swans his own perception of the writing of Buddhist history:

Buddhist history is the record of lineage—of who gave what to whom—not as a dead doctrine but as living truth; it is more a matter of the freshly baked bread than of the recipe. Though lineage is chronological and linear, or seems to be, and the story has gone on for 2,500 years, Buddhism insists on the primacy of the present. Zen masters sometimes talk about locking eyebrows with the ancient patriarchs, and it is in this sense that history—or at least Buddhist history—is never out of date.

This vision of the immediacy of the transmission explored in Swans must be considered alongside a reckoning with the ways in which the story of Buddhism’s journey to the United States has shifted over the past forty years.

How the Swans Came to the Lake announces the arrival of Buddhism in a new land by telling the story of how it got there.

As I attempted to make sense of the book from the vantage point of 2020, as dramatic waves of protests against sexist and racist violence dominated the landscape, I could not ignore the ways in which the structure of How the Swans Came to the Lake reflects a version of American Buddhist history intertwined with the patriarchal and racist histories of America itself. One cannot help but notice that in the earlier editions’ three sections of photographs, only three women are pictured. Both the visual and the narrative contents of the book suggest that the story of Buddhism in America is one dominated by male Asian teachers and their white male students. The book neglects to deal in any substantial way with patriarchy as a force in both Asian and American forms of Buddhism. Beyond the simple fact of the book’s focus on men, there is the issue that a number of the teachers highlighted in the book have since come to be seen as highly controversial figures—still studied for their teachings and presences but also credibly accused of alcoholism, sexual misbehavior or outright abuse, and financial impropriety. Abuse of power in sanghas has come to be recognized as such a widespread phenomenon that the solo-leader model of sangha structure has come under sustained critique in the American context, and many communities have departed from it altogether.

After introducing the origins of Buddhism on the Indian subcontinent, the book’s narrative moves quickly to an examination of “the East” as seen through the history of encounters with “the West.” This is followed by extensive summaries of colonial scholarship and Orientalists in Europe and New England. It is not until the fifth chapter that we first read of Asian Buddhist immigrants to the United States, who fade from the story after that point. This focus on convert Buddhist communities and the marginalization of Asian American Buddhists has been investigated and critiqued by numerous scholars over the past few decades, offering a much more robust understanding of both the ongoing vitality of Asian American Buddhist communities and the racist structures that erase them from much of Swans.

Rick was aware of this problem with the book and reflected upon it in in two notable essays: “Confessions of a White Buddhist: Dharma, Diversity, and Race” (Tricycle, Fall 1994) and “Divided Dharma: White Buddhists, Ethnic Buddhists, and Racism” (The Faces of Buddhism in America, 1998). In the former, he identifies that racism has been “the nightmare squatting at the heartof the American dream since the very beginning.” His essays lay out the anti-Asian racism enacted by the United States government through examination of multiple instances: an 1854 California Supreme Court ruling that disallowed the testimony of a Chinese eyewitness to a murder on explicitly racist grounds; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; and the forced internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans in 1942. Beyond these unquestionably racist acts of American history, however, he also identifies the workings of white privilege specifically in the realm of American convert Buddhism. He writes, for example, of the ways that a convert to Buddhism might adopt a Tibetan or Japanese name or style of dress in certain contexts while always having the option of switching back when it is convenient—what we now call “cultural appropriation.” Rick emphasized this point with a hypothetical example that is rather chilling to read in 2022: “But the fact is that when and if it becomes necessary or convenient––in the event, say, of a right-wing fundamentalist Christian coup––white Buddhists could shuck it all and emerge, like Clark Kent knotting his tie as he exits his phone booth, safe and sound.”

The essays, though insightful and groundbreaking in many respects, maintained a naive view of “two Buddhisms” that more recent scholars have shown to be overly simplistic—itself based on the same structures it seeks to question. Immigrant Buddhism (or “ethnic Buddhism,” in the language of the essays) is identified primarily with the devotional, populist, communitarian ethos of Japanese Pure Land traditions, in contrast to the philosophical, meditation-focused, individualist bent of convert Buddhists. While Rick does not sufficiently critique this binary structure, he does suggest that convert Buddhists would benefit greatly by learning from the example of the non-monastic Buddhist communities, notably Japanese Pure Land traditions. “Such a Buddhism,” he writes, “would continue to provide a safe haven for ethnic Buddhist communities from a beleaguered Asia, as well as an experimental crucible for creative and effective adaptations, and would give us all the chance to create a truly liberating, multicultured, many-hued, shifting, shimmering Pure Land of American Buddhism.”

Everything that I know of Rick Fields makes me certain that this vision of an American Buddhism liberated from the karma of racism and white supremacy was a deeply and sincerely held prayer of aspiration. It is equally true that this vision of American Buddhism is not fully reflected in How the Swans Came to the Lake with its focus on Asian male teachers and their white male successors.

When we look at the history of Buddhism as it has moved around the world, we see that the tradition has been transformed through contact with each culture that has adopted it and that each of these cultures has been transformed through its contact with Buddhism. When we read Swans today, we will see reflections of the potential for transformation and liberation promised by the waves of teachers and teachings that reached the American shores between the end of the 19th century and the end of the 20th century. If we read closely, we will also see reflections of the American demons of racism, patriarchy, imperialism, and greed that today remain deeply embedded in the fabric of our nation. Forty years after its publication, How the Swans Came to the Lake is a beautifully constructed mirror through which we may lock eyebrows with our ancestors again and again.

♦

Adapted from the introduction to the fortieth anniversary edition of How the Swans Came to the Lake. Reprinted in arrangement with Shambhala Publications.

The post Reflections on the Lake appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

It’s hard to say what the future holds for Buddhism in the United States. But the nonprofit Frederick P. Lenz Foundation hopes to find out at The Future of American Buddhism conference, which will take place June 2-5 at the Garrison Institute in Garrison, New York.

Here, Lenz Foundation CEO Norman Oberstein and vice president Liz Lewinson talk with Tricycle about the four-day event, where Buddhist thinkers from across the country will gather to discuss the challenges facing the next generation of dharma students.

Can you give us an overview of The Future of American Buddhism conference coming up this summer?

Norman Oberstein (NO): After two years of the pandemic we have an opportunity to bring together the elements of the national Buddhist scene to consider the way Buddhism, meditation, the teachings, and the whole structure of the national movement has been impacted, and to contemplate what it really means. Our prior conferences have focused on the Buddhist or Buddhist-inspired charitable organizations in our own network, but to talk about the future of American Buddhism, we need to have a broader perspective. So, with the help of Naropa University, we put it in a context that cuts across all lineages and practice traditions, represents the geographic spectrum from coast to coast, and includes all types of organizations, whether it’s a big sangha or retreat center, or a small community center. We decided to create a conference that is led by different people in the community, people in different age groups, ethnicities, racial groups, and schools. The idea is to bring these elements together to contemplate the future and how these various organizations can be most relevant in that future. Let’s create conversations.

The Lenz Foundation has been doing this for a while, and you might say it has a unique insight into the American Buddhist landscape by this point. What has changed over the years?

NO: When we started out, this was strictly a white, middle-class affair. There were wonderful, talented people, but they were really from the same general backgrounds. All of this has morphed over the years, yet we’re just at the beginning of that process. Secondly, when I started out, I was so surprised that Buddhists were all in their own little camps. While they were kind and respectful, they didn’t cross over; they had their teacher, their lineage, and they did their own thing. Whether consciously or just because I had no background in it, I said, “Well, that isn’t right, let’s pull people together.” It isn’t just us. These communities are reaching out, recognizing each other, and finding a greater community out there, a different kind of Buddhist movement with people working together toward a common goal of relieving suffering and increasing awareness.

Liz Lewinson: I will add here that what has surprised and really delighted me is that the topic of meditation and mindfulness has become so mainstream. COVID-19, if anything, accelerated that even more. We subscribe to something that our founder, Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz said: “Anyone who meditates is a Buddhist.” It’s a very broad definition. What he meant is that if you meditate and experience more levels of awareness, you’re a seeker of some type. It goes with the territory. So we do give grants to a number of other religious or secular organizations that have embraced mindfulness and meditation.

The conference will also feature free webinars in advance of the event date. See more at the Frederick P. Lenz Foundation.

The post The Dharma in the New Normal appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

30 years of Tricycle

• Percentage of Americans who identified as Buddhist in 1990: 0.2%
• Percentage of Americans who identified as Buddhist in 2016: 1%
• Full-time Tricycle employees in 1991: 3
• Full-time Tricycle employees in 2021: 17
• Number of writers published by Tricycle in 1991 who were also published by Tricycle in 2021: 4
• Number of books by the Dalai Lama published as of 1991: 25
• Number of books by the Dalai Lama published as of 2021: 127
• Percentage of Americans who called religion “very important” to their life in 1992: 58%
• Percentage of Americans who called religion “very important” to their life in 2020: 48%

View past installments of Buddhism by the Numbers: Climate Change and Pilgrimage Sites, COVID-19, The Economics of Mindfulness, New York, Armenia, Hawaii, California, Virginia, Kentucky, South Korea, and the African Great Lakes Region.

♦

Data from Gallup poll, Office of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, Barry A. Kosmin, The National Survey of Religious Identification (NSRI) 1990, Pew Research Forum, and Tricycle archives

The post Buddhism by the Numbers: 30 Years appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

For me, growing up Buddhist in Northern California in the early 1960s was sometimes difficult. There were very few Buddhists around, and many Americans looked at Buddhism as some kind of weird Asian cult. Fortunately, things have changed enormously since then. Buddhism is today much better known and more widely practiced. As the Harvard professor Diana Eck, an expert on contemporary American religions, declared in 1993, “Buddhism is now an American religion.”

Professor Eck observed that Buddhists have been in America since around 1850, and their numbers have increased greatly over time. Surveys indicate that today over 30 million people, or close to one-tenth of the US population, identify themselves as Buddhist; read and engage in Buddhist spirituality but don’t identify themselves as members of a religion; or have been strongly influenced by Buddhism. Which taken together means that Buddhism is, whether in numbers or influence, one of the fastest-growing religions in America.

While the vast majority of the approximately 500 million Buddhists in the world live in Asia, one fascinating aspect of Buddhism in America is that, for the first time in nearly the entire 2,600 years of Buddhism’s history, all the major Buddhist denominations in the world today coexist in one country. In many large American (and Canadian) cities there are more different kinds of Buddhism than are found anywhere in Asia, including Bangkok, Taipei, Seoul, and Kyoto. In the Los Angeles area, for example, close to 100 different Buddhist traditions—representing virtually all the world’s main denominations—find a home. Whereas in Asia, Buddhists from different countries have rarely known, or even known of, each other, in Los Angeles you may find temples with roots in Thailand, Korea, and Vietnam located near each other, sometimes even on the same street. For me, this trend provides a new and exciting opportunity for all Buddhists to learn from and better understand each other.

Despite the promising demographics, and despite Buddhism’s high level of cultural visibility and accessibility, few introductory books seem to address youths and young adults. Having been myself an American Buddhist youth, and having raised three young Buddhists as well, I had long felt there was a need for easy-to-understand introductory books for this audience. And so a few years ago I set about writing one. The book, Jewels, was published in the spring of 2020. After its release, a friend pointed out that because American Buddhism includes so many different communities, the book might also be of value to Buddhists who know a great deal about their particular corner of American Buddhism but not much about its full range. It is with this in mind that I’ve adapted sections of the book for this article.

In America, for the first time in nearly 2,600 years, all the major Buddhist denominations in the world today coexist in one country.

I chose Jewels as the title of the book because in Buddhism jewels are used as a metaphor for something of immense spiritual preciousness. A person is considered to have become a Buddhist when they accept as the basic foundation of their life the “three jewels,” referring to the Buddha (the fully awakened person), the dharma (the Buddhist teachings), and the sangha (the community of fellow Buddhists). For Buddhists of all schools, the three jewels are the object of ultimate reliance and respect. This imagery of jewels also can help explain how these divergent schools can live in harmony.

Buddhist teachings tell us to see all living beings as precious jewels. You and I, along with all beings, are like jewels that are linked together in the vast web of the universe, each jewel reflecting all the others. Each jewel has an outer and inner aspect.

The outer jewels are talked about through the metaphor of Indra’s Net of Jewels. Indra’s net is known in East Asia through the teachings of the Huayen school of Buddhism, which is based on the Flower Garland Sutra and related writings. The metaphor is now often cited by Buddhists in North America and beyond.

Picture an expansive net extending endlessly in all directions throughout the universe. At each of its nodes hangs a shimmering jewel. Each jewel is connected to all the other jewels, even to those so distant that they are not even visible from one location.No jewel shines by itself. Each one needs the light from the other jewels to shine. At the same time, a jewel does not just receive light; it also gives out light. Although each jewel may illuminate nearby jewels with greater intensity than it does distant ones, each shines on all the others, no matter how faintly. They need each other and help each other. They are mutually linked, interconnected, and interdependent.

No two jewels are exactly the same. Despite being countless in number, each jewel is unique in its shape, size, color, and texture. Each of us is one of these jewels. We are dependent on others, yet we also contribute to others. Such is the nature of our existence, which includes our relationships with our family, our friends, our community, the nation, the international community, and the natural world. Each jewel has worth and value simply for existing and for being a part of this net of jewels.

As one of the jewels in the web, I am connected to the countless other jewels that illuminate and support me. This is the outer jewel. At the same time, there lies within each one of us an inner jewel, waiting to shine forth to help us realize Buddhism’s aim of awakening, overcoming suffering and manifesting joy, satisfaction, peace of mind, and gratitude—its aim, in other words, of achieving happiness.

To understand the inner aspect of the jewels, we can turn to a famous parable from another important Buddhist scripture,the Lotus Sutra. The parable tells of a poor man who visited the house of a rich friend, where he was wined and dined. The poor man got drunk and fell asleep. While his friend slept, the rich man sewed a priceless jewel into the lining of his poor friend’s clothes. The poor man awoke and set out on a long journey, unaware of the jewel he now carried. One day, by chance, the poor man ran into his rich friend, who saw that his friend’s life continued to be so hard and realized he hadn’t discovered the jewel. When the rich man told his friend, the poor man was overjoyed. He had discovered at last that precious something that had all along been in his possession.

The jewel, of course, symbolizes our spiritual potential to become happier and wiser. We all have that inner jewel, and the teachings of the Buddha are meant to help us discover that for ourselves. Our task is to take hold of that jewel, polish it, and let it shine forth.

All Buddhist schools teach the path to awakening, seeing that we are all jewels. But different traditions present the teachings differently. In America, where there are so many denominations, it can be hard to gain a full picture of what American Buddhism even looks like. To help understand this, I find it useful to categorize the various kinds of Buddhism into four main groups.

The first group consists of older Asian American Buddhist communities. They started their temples in the mid to late 1800s and are mostly of Chinese and Japanese origin. Today, because they are mostly third-, fourth- and fifth-generation Americans, their temple activities and services are held in English.

Since the mid 1960s, newer Asian American Buddhist communities have formed in the United States as more people have immigrated from Cambodia, Korea, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, and elsewhere. Because these communities still have a large percentage of first-generation members, temple activities and services are often held in their respective native languages. However, English is being used with increasing frequency as the second and third generations come of age. For newer and older Asian American Buddhist communities alike, temples serve as hubs for both religious and cultural life.

The next group consists of those who were for the most part not born into Buddhist families but converted to Buddhism as adults and whose main practice is sitting meditation. They are predominately of European descent, though there is a substantial and increasing membership of people of color. In general terms, members of this third group belong to Zen, Theravada (particularly vipassana, or insight lineages), or Tibetan traditions, which are centered on meditation practices. The immense popularity over the past decade or so of mindfulness practices has definitely increased the numbers belonging to this group.

The fourth group is made up of convert Buddhists whose main practice is chanting. The majority of this group are affiliated with Soka Gakkai International, or SGI, which is a denomination of Nichiren Buddhism. Like that of other Nichiren Buddhists, the main practice is reciting the Odaimoku, “the great sacred title” of the Lotus Sutra, which in SGI is pronounced “Nam-myoho-renge-kyo.” One of the largest Buddhist organizations in America today, SGI is also the most racially diverse organization, with a membership that includes large numbers of Asian American, Latino, African American, and white participants.

We might understand the rapid growth of American Buddhism by borrowing from economics the concept of supply and demand. “Demand” here refers to those factors that “pulled” or “welcomed” Buddhism. Several stand out: First, Americans value religion to a much greater degree than do people in most other developed countries. Religion tends to be seen as a “good thing,” providing a spiritual and ethical foundation for living. This is especially apparent in the raising of children. Also, Americans tend to hold pastors, priests, rabbis, and other religious professionals in high regard. Religious leaders often serve as leaders in the general community beyond their particular churches, mosques, temples, or synagogues. The value we place on religion is so much a part of American society that we often take it for granted and scarcely notice it.

A second “demand” factor is societal openness. In the 1960s, American society’s attitude began to shift toward greater openness toward religions other than Protestantism. For example, when John F. Kennedy campaigned for president in 1960, suspicion about his being Catholic was the cause of significant opposition. But in 2020, President Joe Biden’s Catholicism was most often seen as a strength because it signaled that he is a person of sincere religious conviction, regardless of sect.

Changes in immigration laws in 1965 further fostered religious diversity, and thus openness, because of the arrival of more people from non-Western countries, including Buddhist immigrants from Asia.

Within this atmosphere of openness, Buddhism has come to be seen less as a weird “Oriental” cult, as it was when I was growing up. In fact, as the number of people interested in spiritual matters increased, it was often thought, however naively, that “spiritual Asia” was superior to the “materialistic West.” Many such people were attracted to Buddhism because they found in it a response to the spiritual needs of an industrialized culture.

The third factor follows on this, and it has to do with change in the very nature of religion in America. Surveys have shown that Americans have in increasing numbers become more attracted to spirituality than to what is often called “organized religion,” meaning religion as centered on membership in institutions such as synagogues, temples, and mosques. The phrase “spiritual but not religious” is often used to describe such people.

In addressing the spiritual needs of so many, Buddhism has become a diverse and multifaceted part of the American religious landscape.

Turning to the supply side of Buddhism, we can identify certain qualities that have appealed to the spiritual and religious needs of Americans. In particular, Buddhism fits in with the trend of valuing a spirituality that stresses personal experience. That is, you could say, Buddhist teachings show us that we have been carrying around a precious jewel all along.

One such quality that Buddhism offers is its attitude toward the suffering we all deal with in facing life’s difficulties. Buddhism sees difficulties such as sickness, loss, disappointment, and death as a natural part of life and not something to try to deny. Suffering is something that needs to be understood, accepted, and turned into a springboard for living a fuller and more meaningful life.

Second, Buddhism seeks to speak to the unique experience of each individual. (After all, no two jewels are the same.) Because of this, it can be a valuable path to self-understanding. Many Americans like to feel that they are free to question religious teachings and to make up their own minds about them, and Buddhism not only allows for this but even encourages it. This is the reason for the popularity of the Kalama Sutta, in which the Buddha says:

Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, “This contemplative is our teacher.” When you know for yourselves that, “These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness”—then you should enter and remain in them.
–Anguttara Nikaya 3.66, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Probably the number one reason for the growth of American Buddhism is found in the popularity of meditation. This third aspect offered by Buddhism includes practices that many find easy to learn, mentally therapeutic, and spiritually empowering and liberating. Sitting meditation as taught in the Zen, Theravada, and Tibetan schools has been especially attractive to converts.

The American sociologist of religion Wade Clark Roof describes spirituality as “personal experience tailored to the individual’s own quests.” Spirituality, he writes, is associated with five key terms: connectedness, unity, peace, harmony, and centeredness. Buddhism as presented in America attracts people looking to experience these qualities in their lives. In addressing the spiritual needs of so many, Buddhism has become a demographically diverse and multifaceted part of the American religious landscape. To me, this is very exciting.

Like the jewels in Indra’s net, each community, each lineage shines a light on the rest, each helping and being helped by the others to glow brighter.

The post The Land of Many Dharmas appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Chenxing Han is a young Asian American Buddhist who never intended to write a book on young Asian American Buddhists. Han, who describes herself as a “1.75-generation Chinese American immigrant,” grew up in a nonreligious household and with few Asian American peers. As a young adult, she adopted Buddhist practice and even pursued a master’s in Buddhist studies from the Graduate Theological Union but was hesitant to talk openly about her racial and religious identity, for fears of being stereotyped as either an “inauthentic” practitioner as a convert or a “superstitious immigrant” as an Asian American.

In 2012, while beginning research for her M.A. thesis, Han decided to let go of her ambivalence about the terms “young,” “Asian American,” and “Buddhist,” in order to get to the bottom of the “two Buddhisms” dichotomy that seemed to thwart nuanced conversations about representation and race in American Buddhism. She set out to ask her fellow Asian American Buddhists directly about their experiences. Casting “as wide a net as possible,” she spoke to any “young adult” of full or partial Asian heritage who responded to a call for interviews, regardless of immigration status or English ability. As Han suspected, these interviews disturbed the perceived divide between “heritage” and “convert” Buddhists, but they also gave many young Buddhists an opportunity to reflect on their racial and religious identities on their own terms for the first time.

Drawing from her academic research, Han’s first book, Be the Refuge: Raising the Voices of Asian American Buddhists (North Atlantic; January 26 , 2021) continues to complicate “two Buddhisms” through its use of memoir, ethnography, and critique. Presenting the voices of her interviewees, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and Buddhisms, the book paints a complicated picture of Asian American Buddhists, who make up two thirds of Buddhists in the United States. Ann Gleig, Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Central Florida and the author of American Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Modernity, spoke to Han about the making of the book, and the importance of letting Asian American Buddhists speak for themselves. 

Be the Refuge is partially a memoir, but it’s not just about your journey. Can you say more about how you came to write this book? Back in 2012, I needed a topic for my master’s thesis in Buddhist chaplaincy. Part of my attraction to this topic was born out of a sense of loneliness and confusion. I’d read that among American Buddhists, who are only about 1 percent of the nation’s population, more than two thirds are of Asian heritage. So it confused me why I rarely saw Asian American voices or faces represented in a lot of scholarship that I read or in more mainstream depictions in Western media. 

There was that piece, and I was also lonely as a young Asian American Buddhist, because I didn’t grow up in a Buddhist tradition. A lot of the people I met through this project grew up in predominantly Asian Buddhist temple communities or families. That wasn’t a privilege that I had growing up. That got me started on interviewing people, and I thought, “Maybe a few people will talk to me, and then it’ll be enough for an M.A. thesis.” I wasn’t even thinking about writing a book at that point. By the time I talked to 26 people in person, and 63 more people wanted to do email interviews, I realized my motivation had shifted. I felt inspired by respect for these voices. Although I didn’t agree with everyone I talked to, it felt important to put them together on the page and allow other people to hear their voices too. 

I would be remiss to not mention Aaron Lee, who is deeply woven into this project from beginning to end. He started a blog back in 2009 called the Angry Asian Buddhist. People who knew Aaron knew that if he was angry, it was an anger that came out of his deep love for Buddhist communities. He was one of the first people to talk about the importance of Asian American Buddhists. He initiated conversations around race and representation in American Buddhism at a time when that was still, unlike now, very much avoided. 

What were some of the methods guiding your research? I don’t think of the book as a work of sociology. I wasn’t setting out to be representative; I wanted to find people to talk to and explore what it means to be doubly marginalized as Asian American and Buddhist. I noticed that people often spoke about Asian American Buddhists as a category, especially in contrast to white convert Buddhists. There were so few of us speaking for ourselves or on our own terms. For these interviews, a lot of it meant creating a space to build trust and rapport. These topics of religion and race can be really challenging to talk about, so I did my best to create the space to invite people to simply share what came up for them.

Can you unpack the title Be the Refuge? “Be the Refuge” is actually the title of the last blog post that Aaron ever wrote. What I really like about the title is that it’s a challenge. It’s an invitation. It’s a koan. It’s a chant. It’s what you want it to be, right? I wanted to invite the reader into the realization that Buddhism is vast and multifaceted. Someone’s refuge may look like making vegetarian food for the Lunar New Year feast at their temple. Or it may look like bowing at the altar. It may look like donating their money and time to environmental justice or social justice causes, and so on. In the US, Buddhism is predominantly depicted as and reduced to certain forms of seated meditation. I hoped that “refuge” would make people think more broadly about what American Buddhism looks like. 

One of the main targets of your book is the “two Buddhisms” typology. Can you explain the limits of this idea? On the surface, there are these Asian immigrant temples and there are these primarily white meditation communities, each with their distinct histories, with limited crossover and interaction between the two. I never explicitly asked my interviewees about the “two Buddhisms”—often referred to as “heritage” and “convert.” I asked people, “How would you categorize American Buddhism?” And I just listened to what they had to say. It felt it was important, at least at first, not to center or mention the two Buddhisms dichotomy.

Interestingly enough, the two Buddhism typology didn’t need to be a target of the book, because my interviewees were already living an intersectional Buddhism. Again and again, my interviewees would bring up ideas that immediately complicated the typology. They would ask, “What about our friends who are mixed race? What about our Black and Latinx and Indigenous Buddhist friends? What about Asian American converts? Where do they fit?” There was a natural desire, too, to think more intersectionally and to bring in not only race, but also sexuality, gender, and class. 

Asian American Buddhists are not monolithic. They don’t always look at the same topics in agreement. There are some people who cannot disentangle their social justice commitments from their Buddhist practice. Others do not feel aligned with the label Asian American, or may not be comfortable publicly identifying as Buddhist. I think there’s a way in which second generation Buddhists in particular have had to think more transnationally about Buddhism, and see the connections between their religion and their parents’ and grandparents’ home countries in surprising ways. Another interviewee, who identified as working class, was particularly worried about the dangers of “the upper middle path.” 

Recently, I was reading an article by religious studies professor Hsiao-Lan Hu on queering identities. Dr. Hu was using queering as a verb in the sense of disrupting our notions of attaching to identity as a stable, fixed entity. I’ve found it really powerful to see this kind of queering as a resource and a richness, and as a source of resilience, rather than a deficit or source of shame. 

I was glad to see that people were comfortable enough to share these intersections of their Buddhist experience. There’s a beautiful way in which my interviewees modeled what it looks like to be curious and listen very deeply to other perspectives, and to have humility about the limits of one’s own perspective. 

The final section of the book, “Refuge Makers,” draws from the voices of your interviewees “to explore the possibilities of a pan-ethnic, pan-sectarian, Asian American Buddhist identity.” You quote an interviewee named Andy who states, “Blogs are not enough. We need to have conferences. We need to have podcasts. We need to be at parades. We need to be talking to other faiths. That’s what building a space is.” Do you see these refuge spaces for Asian American Buddhists emerging? For some, these spaces have been around for a long time. We can look to our Shin Buddhist friends to see how generation after generation they have made Buddhism relevant for the newest generation—how to keep adapting it. But I think there’s still a long way to go. In terms of representation in mainstream Buddhist publications and spaces, I’m still thinking about who holds these platforms of power and where we’re allowed to share our message of what American Buddhism’s true diversity really looks like. One interviewee in the book, Noel, said, “It’s really important for Asian Americans of all faiths, or of no faith, to be in all sectors of society. At all levels. That’s what will help eliminate a lot of these stereotypes and assumptions.” I reflect on that a lot. I know there are efforts to create some broader Asian American retreats and conferences, and that’s really exciting. Aaron dreamed of bringing in people from different Asian heritage backgrounds and from different Buddhist backgrounds. It can be hard to bridge those boundaries and those gaps, and this book is such a tiny part of that larger picture. I hope we can spark more of these conversations and encourage people to create these spaces of refuge. 

One of the striking features of the book is how it functions on so many levels: as scholarship, as activism, as memoir, as a sutra. How did writing this book impact you? I think the journey is still continuing. Before this book, I feared that the label of Asian American Buddhist would ostracize me. I was very uncomfortable with that label. But through the process of writing and talking to so many people, it’s become a source of profound connection. And connection with not just other Asian American Buddhists but also across racial boundaries. That sense of loneliness and confusion I started with has transformed into a sense of expansive possibility. 

♦

This interview has been adapted from a live online discussion between Chenxing Han and Ann Gleig presented by Books & Books and Miami Book Fair. 

The post Young. Asian. American. Buddhist: What These Words Cannot Say appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have often been asked over the years—by friends as well as colleagues—whether or not I feel a “gap,” a kind of disjuncture, between what I do and who I am. By this, I take it that they mean a disjuncture between the facts of my being an African American and my being someone who has studied and taught Tibetan Buddhism for many years. I admit that I may be somewhat of an anomaly. But it hasn’t seemed anomalous to me; it is, after all, my life. It is me and it is what I do.

Only recently have I begun contemplating what particular benefit might come from my making a point of this “unusual” or “anomalous” combination of circumstances. But a benefit for whom? One obvious answer, I have come to believe, is that my doing so might be of some benefit for other African Americans and other people of color generally. Moreover, in adding my voice to such discussions, it might well be the case that there is some benefit for “American Buddhists” and for Western Buddhists more broadly.

Over the years, it has certainly been the case that other persons of color have come up to me in various Buddhist gatherings and told me, “I was so glad to look around and see you here!” It is a way of validating their own choice to be there, a way of not being pulled under or dismissed by being “the other,” a way of finding sanity in the scene. White Americans don’t yet seem to get the point that, given the history of societally marginalized people in this country, whenever we find ourselves in spaces where we are clearly in the minority, we have a natural tendency to be fearful, guarded, and mistrusting.

That Buddhist centers in this country have not exactly had an “open-door policy” toward people of color is a fact so well known that it is almost taken for granted. Some people have been noting the absence of people of color for some years now. In 1988, Sandy Boucher put the matter quite bluntly when, in Turning the Wheel, she characterized the number of North American-born people committed to Buddhism as being “overwhelmingly white and middle or upper middle class.” Yet there seems to be little open discussion of why this is so or of how the situation might be changed.

Again, after noting that the only school of Buddhism in America able to boast comparatively large numbers of people of color is Nichiren Shoshu of America (NSA), Boucher stated:

Many people in the world of American Buddhists are leery of Nichiren Shoshu, seeing it as a pseudoreligion in which people “chant to get a Cadillac,” and they are repelled by Nichiren’s aggressive recruiting tactics. It is also said that Nichiren is “political” in some ill-defined but presumably sinister way … People in Nichiren do chant to get a car, a house, a job, a better life. It is also true that the majority of people in this country practicing the other forms of Buddhism already have access to those things and so can comfortably choose to renounce them.

I am neither a member of nor an advocate for NSA Buddhism. I do, however, think that their success in attracting people of color into their groups makes them worthy of study, and in some respects, perhaps even worthy models. NSA organizations have done two things in particular that impact on their having a more diverse community of members: (1) NSA centers are located in large urban areas, and they draw a more diverse following; and (2) the ritual practices that are enjoined on members are simple. Apart from the mandatory recitation of the Nam-myoho-renge-kyo mantra, the scriptures and prayers are recited in English.

More recently, the Korean Zen master Samu Sunim remarked in an interview:

We Buddhist teachers—those of us who came from Asia—are like transplanted lotuses. Many of us are refugees. Here we find ourselves in the marketplace—as dharma peddlers, you might say. I am concerned with the Zen movement becoming more accessible to ordinary common people.

It is worth noting that, as far as I know, it has always been either women or “ethnic,” that is, Asian, Buddhists who have noted the non-inclusiveness of the various Buddhisms in Western societies. Western men haven’t seemed to notice. That, in itself, may say something. Whenever I’ve brought up the subject, I’ve been told: “But Buddhists don’t proselytize! They never have.” Historically, though, this isn’t exactly true. Except for during the three-month “rainy season,” the earliest Buddhist mendicants were told to travel continuously and spread the faith.

When certain people ask me whether I feel a “gap” between who I am and what I do, it seems to me that they are really asking, “What does Buddhism offer to any African American?” That is a legitimate question, and one that I feel is worthy of real consideration. To answer most simply, I believe that Buddhism offers us a methodology for enhancing our confidence. This is especially true of the various forms of tantric Buddhism, since tantric Buddhism aims at nothing less than the complete transformation of our ordinary and limited perception of who we are as human beings.

Buddhism offers us a methodology for enhancing our confidence.

I was very fortunate to have been a close student of Lama Thubten Yeshe. We met in Nepal in fall 1969. Lama Yeshe kindly accepted me as his student, and I was honored that he chose to call me his “daughter.” When I look back on the fifteen years that Lama Yeshe was my teacher, I see confidence as his main teaching—not only to me but to countless others who over the years came to him for guidance. Indeed, when Lama Yeshe discussed the essential teachings of tantric Buddhism—as he did so simply, so eloquently, and so profoundly in his Introduction to Tantra—he stated this idea quite explicitly. Here I provide only a few examples:

According to Buddhist tantra, we remain trapped within a circle of dissatisfaction because our view of reality is narrow and suffocating. We hold onto a very limited and limiting view of who we are and what we can become, with the result that our self-image remains oppressively low and negative, and we feel quite inadequate and hopeless. As long as our opinion of ourselves is so miserable, our life will remain meaningless.

One of the essential practices at all levels of tantra is to dissolve our ordinary conceptions of ourselves and then, from the empty space into which these concepts have disappeared, arise in the glorious light body of a deity: a manifestation of the essential clarity of our deepest being. The more we train to see ourselves as such a meditational deity, the less bound we feel by life’s ordinary disappointments and frustrations. This divine self-visualization empowers us to take control of our life and create for ourselves a pure environment in which our deepest nature can be expressed. . . . It is a simple truth that if we identify ourselves as being fundamentally pure, strong, and capable we will actually develop these qualities, but if we continue to think of ourselves as dull and foolish, that is what we will become.

The health of body and mind is primarily a question of our self-image. Those people who think badly of themselves, for whatever reasons, become and then remain miserable, while those who can recognize and draw on their inner resources can overcome even the most difficult situations. Deity-yoga is one of the most profound ways of lifting our self-image, and that is why tantra is such a quick and powerful method for achieving the fulfillment of our tremendous potential.

This is not just my interpretation of Lama Yeshe’s view. Once, when Lama Yeshe was visiting California, I took him to hear a lecture given by Angela Davis. She spoke one afternoon in the quarry on the University of California, Santa Cruz, campus. Lama Yeshe was visibly excited to see and to listen to Davis speak. Several times during her talk, with clenched fist, he said aloud, “This is how one ought to be: strong and confident like this lady!”

Divine self-visualization empowers us to take control of our life.

Still, none of the great benefits that tantric meditative practice offers can be experienced and realized by “ordinary, common people” if those people don’t hear about it and don’t have a chance to try it for themselves—in short, if the teachings are not accessible. And as long as Buddhist practice is viewed and packaged as a commodity—like so many other commodities in the West—it will remain inaccessible to a great many people. And here, it seems clear that the question of accessibility is one of class, not—at least not necessarily—one of race. In order to study and to practice Buddhism in America, two requisites are absolutely essential: money and leisure time.

I met Tibetan lamas because I was able to travel to India (on a fully paid scholarship) for my junior year of college. I was part of that late 1960s phenomenon of Western students traveling to the mysterious East; part of the infamous ’60s counterculture. I would not have met the Tibetans had I not been able to travel East. Neither would I now be able to attend or to afford Buddhist meditation retreats were it not that I have the kind of job I do, in terms of both the financial security and the ample vacation time and break periods it affords.

The Tibetans took me in instantly, and I saw in them a welcoming family of compassionate and skilled people who, as I viewed myself, were refugees. I soon learned that the Tibetans possessed the type of knowledge and wisdom I longed for—knowledge of methods for dealing with frustrations, disappointments, and anger, and of developing genuine compassion. Indeed, their very beings reflected this. They had suffered untold hardships, had even been forced to flee their country. We shared, it seemed to me, the experience of a profound historical trauma. Yet they coped quite well, seeming to possess a sort of spiritual armor that I felt lacking in myself. Lama Yeshe’s personal example inspired me, and his compassion led him to entrust some of the tantric teachings to me. Having come personally to see the benefits of such teachings, I would like to see them disseminated much more widely than they are at present.

Once Lama Yeshe looked at me piercingly and then remarked, “Living with pride and humility in equal proportion is very difficult!” In that moment, it seemed to me, he had put his finger on one of the deepest issues confronting all African Americans: the great difficulty of having gone through the experience of 250 years of slavery, during which one’s very humanness was challenged and degraded at every turn, and yet through it all, to have maintained a strong sense of humanness and the desire to stand tall, with dignity and love of self, to count oneself a human being equal with all others.

It is the trauma of slavery that haunts African Americans in the deepest recesses of their souls. This is the chief issue for us. It needs to be dealt with, head-on—not denied, not forgotten, not suppressed. Indeed, its suppression and denial only hurts us more deeply, causing us to accept a limited, disparaging, and even repugnant view of ourselves. We cannot move forward until we have grappled in a serious way with all the negative effects of this trauma. Tantric Buddhism offers us some tools to help accomplish this task, since it shows us both how to get at those deep inner wounds and how to heal them.

But again, none of Buddhist tantra’s benefits can be recognized if more African Americans and more people of color generally don’t have access to it. So the question remains: How do we remedy this situation? As international Buddhist leaders and their American counterparts continue to mount extensive dialogues and conferences that focus on “Buddhism and Science,” “Buddhism and Psychology,” “Buddhism and Christianity,” and so on, they would do well, it seems to me, to devote efforts toward trying to make Buddhism in all its forms more readily available and accessible to a wider cross section of the American population. Indeed, such efforts would go a long way toward helping a truly “American” Buddhism to emerge.

In the end, the question of what Buddhism has to offer African Americans and other people of color may not be as important as what such people have to offer Buddhism in America. For even when African Americans deny, out of shame and embarrassment, the horrors of slavery, they carry the deep knowledge of that experience in their very bones. Amiri Baraka, in his classic text on African American blues and jazz, Blues People, expressed this well, I think, when he wrote:

The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle-class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.

This deep knowledge of trying to hold on to humanness in a world firmly committed to destroying it adds a kind of spiritual reservoir of strength at the same time that it is so burdensome. The spiritual resilience of black folk has something to offer us all.

The first noble truth of Buddhism asks us to “understand” the noble truth of suffering. Apart from the newness, exoticism, and aesthetic attractiveness of the various traditions of Buddhism now existent on American soil, in the end, it is the sobering and realistic recognition of our individual and collective suffering that marks the true beginning of the Buddhist path. The physical presence of more dark faces in Buddhist centers will serve to both focus the issue of what makes us all “Americans” and, hopefully, allow a freer American expression of Buddhism to emerge.

Genuine Buddhists are all about, in a word, openness.

The atmosphere of a lot of Buddhist centers may be peaceful to most of their regular followers, but it is off-putting to some “outsiders” who find the sweetness and tender voices of the pujas and other ceremonies disingenuous. It’s as though certain center members have just exchanged one pretense for another. I remember well the admonition from the great Kalu Rinpoche never to engage in such pretense. And I will never forget hearing Alice “Turiya” Coltrane at a birthday celebration for her teacher, the venerable Hindu guru Satchidananda. She began a hymn to Krishna by striking up her harmonium and singing, “I said, ah, Om Bhagawata . . .” with all the strength and power of an African American Baptist choir! My own heart rejoiced as I thought, Now, this is truly the dharma coming West! There is clearly a sense in which more diverse membership in centers will stir changes in ritual and, perhaps, more straightforward and honest behavior.

I do not intend any of what I’ve discussed here either to glorify victimization or to vilify current Buddhist practitioners in America. My intention was to make needed suggestions about how changes might be begun. There is the perception that there is a disjuncture between what Buddhists in America preach and what they practice. One of these perceived disjunctures revolves around the issue of the non-inclusion of persons of color in the events and memberships of Buddhist organizations in this country. Clearly, if centers act as though people of color are anomalies within their precincts, then people of color will certainly become so. It would seem to me that changing such perceptions (and the actions that foster them) ought to lie at the heart of what genuine Buddhists are all about: in a word, openness. In other words, equanimity and compassion toward all.

Just as Buddhism in America has begun to undergo transformations to find its American identity—which is really a way of saying “find itself ” in this social and geographic space—to the extent that it has seen the disproportionately greater number of women teachers of the dharma emerge here, so it will change for the better and become more itself when its overall audience is more representative of all Americans. That is, when the various forms of Buddhism are offered freely to Americans of all racial and economic backgrounds.

♦

From Dharma Matters: Women, Race, and Tantra, collected essays by Jan Willis © 2020. Reprinted with permission of Wisdom Publications.

The post A Vision of What Could Be appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Did you know that Tricycle was part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Buddhism? No? Neither did I, until someone forwarded me a link from a blogger who made the claim. I was offended. I work at Tricycle, and I’m Jewish. So why didn’t anyone tell me about the secret plot?

Of course, there isn’t one. Such conspiracy theories have not gained much traction in Buddhist circles, but I worry that they speak to a more widespread confusion around the history of Jews in American Buddhism. It is no secret that among converts in the US there are a lot of Jews. Yet although this fact has been a topic of conversation for many years, there has not been a comprehensive analysis that deals with all of the issue’s complexities. Ignorance alone does not explain anti-Semitism, but conspiracy theories seem to take root in that murkiness.

Fortunately, a new book can shed some light on the topic: American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change (Princeton, November 2019) by Emily Sigalow, a sociologist of contemporary Jewish life and postdoctoral fellow at the Duke Center of Jewish Studies.

American JewBu  is not a sentimental book about the author’s personal experience. For the most part, Sigalow leaves herself out of it, except to discuss research methods and to act as an impartial interviewer and observer. Yet in the simple laying out of fact, Sigalow outlines a heritage and history that situate the Jewish Buddhist experience within a distinct subculture. She does not claim to have a definitive answer for the apparent affinity for Buddhism among Jews. Instead, she explores a different and perhaps more fruitful line of inquiry: What is the history of the Jewish-Buddhist encounter in America, and what does it look like today?

That encounter has been complicated. Even the term “JewBu” is contentious. As Sigalow notes, Jewish Buddhists under 30 tend to identify as JewBus, while many baby boomers “dislike the label and view it as a form of disparagement or condescension.” But American JewBu attempts to clarify this complication without resorting to oversimplifications.

Sigalow comes to a few important conclusions. Her most emphatic claims are that the Jewish adoption of Buddhist practices amounts to more than a “salad bar religion” whereby dabblers “pick and choose among religious options in highly individualistic and idiosyncratic ways.” Rather, she argues that “distinct historical and social conditions shape religious mixing in the United States, from modernization to anticapitalism to counterculturalism.” She borrows this view of religious mixing from sociological discussions about syncretism. The conversation about syncretism has traditionally looked at how minority groups assimilate to the majority, but Sigalow asserts that two minority traditions can have the same type of influence on each other.

The study is divided into two parts. The first section traces the wide range of Jewish encounters with Buddhism dating back to the public conversion of Charles T. Strauss in 1893, which marked the first American Buddhist “initiation ceremony” (a rite that was created for the occasion in order to make a statement to Western audiences). In the second section, Sigalow draws from her historical analysis, as well as dozens of interviews she conducted with Jewish Buddhists, to explore the various ways that Judaism and Buddhism have blended in a country where they are both religious minorities.

She examines how Jews have been prominent American Buddhist leaders from the early days of Buddhism’s journey to the US. She looks at figures such as Strauss; Buddhist sympathizer and Ethical Culture founder Felix Adler (1851–1933); Pure Land priest and World War II anti-internment activist Reverend Julius Goldwater (1908–2001); Rinzai Zen master and Sufi murshid Samuel Lewis (1896–1971); and magazine publisher and D. T. Suzuki student William Segal (1904–2000). In each chapter of this encounter, Jews took part in the modernization of Buddhism into a religion largely compatible with scientific values and American liberal ideals of pluralism and equality. Jews were far from the only modernizers—many of the Asian teachers who first taught American converts had already begun to place greater emphasis on meditation and Buddhism’s compatibility with science—but there were Jews in each generation of interpreters.

Sigalow’s best explanation for the early trend of Jews turning to Buddhism (although she does not suggest it is a complete explanation) is that Jews were disproportionately represented in the “social location” where Buddhism took root in American communities of European descent—namely, among educated people in major cosmopolitan areas. (It’s worth noting that throughout the history of Buddhism the dharma has tended to enter new cultures first through the merchant and aristocratic classes.) But her more significant insight is the recognition that later generations of Jews were drawn to a Buddhism that was already translated and adapted to be palatable to a Jewish audience. At this point Jewish Buddhists begin to emerge as neither entirely Jewish nor entirely Buddhist.

That distinct identity becomes even more apparent as Sigalow begins to discuss the rise of Jewish meditation after books like Rodger Kamenetz’s The Jew in the Lotus in 1994 and Sylvia Boorstein’s That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist in 1997 opened up the conversation about JewBus. In looking at Jewish meditation, Sigalow shifts from talking about the influence of Jewish values on Buddhism to an analysis of how American Judaism has incorporated Buddhist influences.

These Jewish meditation practices take a few different forms. Some Jewish meditation involves incorporating certain Buddhist practices to add an embodied dimension to Jewish spirituality, which often means omitting practices that are seen as incompatible. (No idol worshipping!) The issue of compatibility is not as much of a concern for Buddhists and other traditions in Asia, where it is far more common for people to belong to multiple religious groups than it is for them to hold exclusivist beliefs. Sigalow notes that some American JewBus, such as Boorstein, likewise do not see any problem with identifying as a member of multiple religions.

But plenty of Jewish meditators are concerned with whether or not their practice is kosher, Sigalow found. Many of these practitioners left their religion for Buddhism but returned to Judaism later in life. Other groups see themselves as reviving forgotten practices within Jewish mystical traditions; occasionally they describe their goal as defending Judaism from being taken over by Buddhist influences. Some meditators speak explicitly about taking practices from Buddhism, while others erase the Buddhist roots and claim that the practice is entirely Jewish. (Rabbi Alan Lew, who cofounded the Jewish meditation center Makor Or with Jewish Zen Buddhist priest Norman Fischer, refers to some of the latter attempts as “dubious re-creations of Kabalistic meditation practices that may or may not have ever existed.”) Meanwhile, movements like Reconstructionist Judaism and Jewish Renewal have tried to enrich Jewish religious life by including a wide range of resonant influences, Buddhism being just one of many.

Questions of cultural imperialism abound in this interaction. Jews are not uniquely guilty of appropriation—a concept that has entered the mainstream only in the past few years and would have been unknown to the Jewish Buddhists of the 20th century—but are guilty of it nonetheless. However, Sigalow’s account suggests that Buddhism has influenced Judaism in America at least as much as Judaism has influenced Buddhism (or as much as Protestant Christian and American liberal values have influenced both). Of course, the same can be said of Zen Buddhists in Japan, Vajrayana Buddhists in Tibet, or literally any form that Buddhism took after the teachings left the Buddha’s lips. The issue of appropriation is further complicated by Buddhism’s missionary imperative.

Sigalow neither apologizes for appropriation nor condemns it; her tendency is to remain an objective observer.

As Sigalow writes in her final pages: “Flux and mixing, not stasis or uniformity, have been the norms in Jewish and Buddhist history. That these two traditions have been altered and reconfigured as a result of their encounter is inevitable and unavoidable.”

The dharma has always accommodated the needs of a given culture. And after generations of living in diaspora, Jews have also learned the delicate craft of holding onto one’s cultural identity while adapting to the surrounding society. While this can be said of nearly any religion, Judaism and Buddhism in 20th-century America were more open than many of their contemporaries to this particular marriage of teachings.

Sigalow, however, neither apologizes for appropriation nor condemns it. “It is not my charge as a scholar to make a normative judgment about the new reconfigurations [of Judaism and Buddhism], thus assigning them a certain worth, good or bad,” she writes, in keeping with her tendency to remain an objective observer.

Her reserving of judgment is at times frustrating or comes off as a dodge. But ultimately, in not answering those questions, she reserves space for more facts and analysis to better help the reader come to their own conclusion.

I recognized the value of this approach while I was reading American JewBu on the subway and found myself doing something peculiar: slipping a notebook in front of the cover to hide the title from fellow passengers. I felt silly when I realized what I was doing. Being just a little over five feet tall with curly black hair and a nose that would look offensive in a sketch, I was not going to have much success concealing my Ashkenazi ethnicity. (Twice in my life, complete strangers have asked me if I am a lawyer.) Moreover, I should have nothing to hide. But perhaps I was not embarrassed about the Jew in the title. At a recent doctor’s visit, a medical clerk asked about my religious affiliation, and I answered “none.”  The person I was with cocked her head and gave me a quizzical look. “Actually,” I conceded to the clerk, “I’m Buddhist.”  The reason I hesitated when asked about my religion was that I knew the answer would not fit neatly into the space on a
hospital form.

Throughout the book, Sigalow acknowledges this complexity and that there is neither one Judaism nor one Buddhism. Even narrowing the scope down to the encounter between Judaism and Buddhism in America leaves us with a variety of traditions on both sides of the equation. Sigalow divides JewBus into three categories: practicing Buddhists who are culturally Jewish, practicing Jews who turn to Buddhism for spirit­ual enrichment, and those who see no distinction between their Jewish and Buddhist practice. From this perspective, the term “JewBu” is not a box that limits one’s identity but a way of labeling a shared history of messy interactions.

American JewBu does not make an impassioned plea for understanding and acceptance of Jewish Buddhists in America. It does not claim that there is anything special about the encounter of these two religions. It does not attempt to give definitive explanations for many of the concurrences between the groups, nor does it determine whether they benefited from or were harmed by this encounter. It does not even take a stance on the theological compatibility of Buddhism and Judaism.

Instead, Sigalow sticks to a descriptive method and leaves the rest for us—for Jews to think about their place in recent Buddhist history, for non-Jews to better understand their Jewish teachers or dharma friends, or for any curious person to consider how cultures and religions interact. The book leaves the reader with something that Jews and Buddhists alike may find familiar: more questions than answers, but a feeling that getting further from a solution has somehow made you wiser.

The post Jewish Buddhists, an American Tradition appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Give me your tired, your poor, 
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . . 
— From “The New Colossus” by poet Emma Lazarus, inscribed on the Statue of Liberty 

At the same time the news was showing festive celebrations on July 4 this year, it was broadcasting reports about the worsening humanitarian crisis at some of the migrant detention centers along the United States border with Mexico. Some commentators and interviewees were expressing the view that if the detained migrants were unhappy with the reportedly unacceptable conditions at the centers, then they should go back to where they came from, or not come at all. Those reports saddened me and seemed to contradict the welcoming message inscribed on the bronze plaque on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. It made me wonder, on a very personal level, what it means to be an American today. As a nation, do we still hold close to our hearts some of the basic tenets expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the famous poem by Emma Lazarus? Do we continue to believe that everyone is created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

Do we take our democracy and the five basic freedoms protected by the First Amendment— freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and freedom to petition the government—for granted? Have we forgotten what we represent to the rest of the world, and more importantly, to ourselves?

To me, there are many similarities between being an American and being a Buddhist. Both call upon us to take responsibility for our thoughts, our speech, and our actions. Being an American or a Buddhist means treating everyone equally, with respect and understanding. It means being inclusive and welcoming. Ideally, it means being able to see one’s own self in the conditions of all other human beings, and having compassion for their suffering. All of these principles and values help me to transcend the simple and foolish mind that I have, the one that discriminates, the one that suggests why should I care. As a Pure Land Buddhist, I practice by entrusting myself to Amida Buddha’s vow of unconditional salvation. One of the basic aspects of this vow is that all of us who are seeking clarity in life have the ability to change and to work toward achieving our highest potential. We do this by seeking refuge in the Buddha, the dharma (the teachings), and the sangha (our community). As I awaken to the vow, I begin to realize my shortcomings, my lack of wisdom and compassion, and the universal suffering of all beings. 

Related: Buddhists protest the detention of migrant children at a former Japanese internment camp

The whole point of Buddhism is to awaken the sleeping mind, allowing us to realize that our existence is not centered around ourselves, and to understand and accept our deep connections and interdependence with all other beings and things. When I suffer, others suffer, and when others suffer, such as individuals seeking refuge, then I suffer as well. 

We need to wake up to our own roles and responsibilities and thoughtfully to reflect on how for every action, there is a consequence. 

Recently, some friends and I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian located in the old Customs House down in Bowling Green park by the New York Harbor. On the cover of one of their brochures was a photograph of Cup’ik Eskimo doll maker Rosalie Paniyak’s 1987 soft sculpture of the Statue of Liberty, which was on display in an exhibit titled “My Love, Miss Liberty.” It reminded me that, as we contemplate what it means to be an American today, we must be cognizant of how America and one of its most beloved symbols, the Statue of Liberty, belong to all of us. We need to recognize that “We the People” refers to all peoples and all generations of Americans, past, present, and future. 

The Statue of Liberty, originally named the “Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World” (Statue de la Liberté Éclairant le Monde), with her glowing and welcoming torch is a universal symbol of freedom that we celebrate with pride every Fourth of July. We must always remember not to take that freedom for granted, and to be mindful of the sacrifices and struggles of those seeking opportunity in America. 

In Jodo Shinshu (Pure Land Buddhism), Amida Buddha’s unhindered light is always illuminating us, embracing and comforting us in its warmth. This light awakens me to my own foolishness, enabling me to perceive the suffering of others. How grateful I am that Amida Buddha—who understands the sufferings of all beings, in particular the ones who need it the most, and who would never forsake me or shut doors leading to hope to anyone—is in my life. 

Namo Amida Butsu. 

The post The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Since the emergence of Buddhism in the first millennium BCE, many of the tradition’s central texts and most famous practitioners have had much to say about well-being. The health benefits of practices such as meditation, healing rituals, and moral cultivation are detailed in countless sutras, narratives, and other historical documents from around the Buddhist world. Indeed, they played an important role in the spread of Buddhism to new cultures in Asia, where the tradition was often taken up by converts precisely because it promised new solutions to disease, epidemics, longevity, and other health concerns.

As Buddhism has gained increasing popularity in the West over the last century, many are once again paying close attention to its potential health benefits. American popular media have been particularly fixated on the salubrious effects of mindfulness meditation, which medical researchers have been studying intensively since the early 2000s. But in the last few years a growing number of scholars of Buddhism have been raising notes of caution, critiquing the mindfulness movement and other forms of “medicalized meditation” on various historical and ethical grounds. Three new books provide particularly thoughtful analyses of the intersection of Buddhism, meditation, and health. Written by academics who are both scholars and practitioners of meditation, these books detail the complex historical processes that have led to meditation’s role as a mainstream mental health intervention in the United States. They also point out what has been lost in translation.

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