Buddhism

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Buddhism

Without doubt, the growth of American Buddhism has been enormously prolific in the past quarter century. In part as a result of a rather dramatic increase in the number of Asian immigrant Buddhists following the 1965 change in U.S. immigration laws and an ongoing expansion in the various American convert Buddhist communities, there are currently in excess of three million Buddhists residing in the United States.

It is now quite ordinary to find features on American Buddhism in popular and varied print media. In the fall of 1997, Time magazine did a comprehensive cover story of the American Buddhist movement, but much of the media interest in the current development of American Buddhism focuses on a variety of celebrity Buddhists. This focus on highly visible icons in the popular culture world, however, belies the fact that there have been Buddhists on this continent for more than a century and a half.

Historical Beginnings

The first Chinese, some of whom were Buddhists, arrived in California in 1849, shortly after the discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill, and by 1860 roughly 10 percent of Californians were Chinese. By 1870 there were more than sixty thousand Chinese in the United States.

Following the passage of the Chinese Immigration Exclusion Act of 1882, new Asian immigrant Buddhists began to appear in the United States, primarily from Japan. Following the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893, a number of the Rinzai Zen teachers began to take up residence in America. In addition, in 1899 two Pure Land missionaries settled in San Francisco as the first Buddhist clergy to become permanent American residents. Buddhism did not gain much support during the Victorian era because it appeared to be lacking two qualities especially attractive at the time: optimism and activism. Although Buddhism appealed to some aspects of the Victorian ethos, it was perceived as being largely pessimistic and passive.

Twentieth-Century Historical Developments

In the first decade of the twentieth century, U.S. census figures reveal that the Japanese population tripled (from 24,326 to 72,157). Rinzai Buddhist teachers continued to appear on the American scene, as did additional teachers in the Pure Land tradition, the latter group naming itself the Buddhist Mission of North America in 1914. Pure Land and Zen were not the only Japanese Buddhist groups to appear in America during this early period. In 1912 the Shingon sect established a temple in the "Little Tokyo" area of Los Angeles. The growth and development of all of these groups were severely truncated by the Japanese Immigration Exclusion Act of 1924.

The outbreak of World War II was a catastrophe for the development of Buddhism in the United States. By June 1942 more than a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry had been interned. During this period the Buddhist Mission of North America renamed itself the Buddhist Churches of America—a title that is preserved today.

While many of the Japanese returned to the West Coast following the war, others did not, relocating on the East Coast and in the Midwest, thus spreading the Buddhist tradition throughout America. In addition, the S? t? lineage of Zen made its first sustained emergence in about 1950. A third form of Zen appeared—known as the Sanbo Kyodan—which employed both Rinzai and S?t? practices.

Perhaps more important, new Buddhist groups, not only from the Japanese Buddhist tradition but also from other Asian Buddhist cultures, began to appear following a change in U.S. immigration laws. As a result, the S?ka Gakkai tradition from Japan appeared, as did additional Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese Buddhist groups. Tibetan Buddhist groups from each of the major sectarian lineages appeared, as did a variety of Buddhist communities from the Therav?din tradition in Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Cambodia, and Laos. By 1990 there were 500,000 to 750,000 Therav?da Buddhists living in the United States. At the close of the millennium, every Buddhist sectarian tradition, from every Asian Buddhist culture, was represented on American soil.

The Continued Growth and Popularity of American Buddhism

By the mid-1950s a variety of circumstances and events coalesced in American culture that provided the occasion for Buddhism to leap out of its appeal to primarily ethnic Asian immigrant groups and to attract substantial numbers of American converts largely, but not only, of European-American ancestry.

In the first place, America was witnessing an incipient secularization. Moreover, secularization ushered in a profoundly pluralistic situation in America's religious landscape, creating what one writer called a "market situation." Buddhism was able to capitalize on that market situation by capturing a substantial following among religiously disenchanted Americans. Influenced by both the attraction of the "Beats," who championed Buddhism, and the "consciousness explosion" of the 1960s, many Americans began to turn East in their search, eventually settling into Buddhist practice with one Buddhist teacher, or "dharmahopping" from one teacher or center to another. An added impetus to the general movement was the development of a plethora of university courses in Buddhism, providing inquirers with the potential to study Buddhism, sometimes with professors who were Buddhists themselves.

Many Asian Buddhist teachers who appeared on the American scene in the latter half of the twentieth century became popular figures as they spread their Buddhist teachings across the continent. However, as American Buddhism approaches the turn of the century, first- and second-generation Western dharma heirs of these teachers have come to dominate the picture in American Buddhism. Interestingly, a whole new literature has developed to investigate the tradition. Popular and scholarly books on American Buddhism have developed into a cottage industry, and an impressive list of Buddhist periodicals and dharma products can be found in the marketplace.

Major Issues in American Buddhism

In their 1998 edited volume The Faces of Buddhism in America, Charles S. Prebish and Kenneth K. Tanaka outline five major multifaceted issues confronting American Buddhism today: ethnicity, practice, democratization, engagement, and adaptation. Preliminary to a consideration of these issues, however, American Buddhism faces a more critical concern: How does one decide just who actually is a Buddhist? Each of the Buddhist traditions currently present on American soil offers its own unique answer—and these answers differ significantly from one another. As Jan Nattier notes in The Faces of Buddhism in America, "Is it enough merely to call oneself a Buddhist, or are other features—certain beliefs, certain ritual practices (such as meditation or chanting), or perhaps even active membership in a specific organization— required as well?" To date, the question remains unresolved.

Today the vast majority of Buddhists in the United States are Asian Americans. There has been much discussion about whether there are two Buddhisms in America (Asian American and European American Buddhism); three Buddhisms (elite Buddhism, evangelical Buddhism, and ethnic Buddhism); or some other designation. There seem to be as many theories as there are theorists. Perhaps the best solution is that of Paul D. Numrich, who simply divides American Buddhists into "Asian immigrants" and "American converts." This delineation has an added bonus. The category of American converts includes all Americans who might adopt the Buddhist tradition, including African Americans and Hispanic Americans, among others. Numrich also shows that the "Asian immigrants" and "American converts" are not as disparate as one might think, using to term "parallel congregations" to describe a growing movement in some Buddhist centers to include both groups in the overall community.

There seems little disagreement that Asian immigrant communities and American convert communities engage in significantly different Buddhist practices. The American community tends to gravitate toward the meditational traditions, while the Asian community generally maintains practices consistent with ritual activity or Pure Land observance. The single exception is S?ka Gakkai, a mostly convert tradition that engages in ritual chanting of a Buddhist text. Various aspects of Buddhist practice have also been utilized in psychotherapy, stress reduction, and similar enterprises.

Unfortunately, beginning in the 1980s some American Buddhist communities began to experience the fallout of a variety of scandalous behaviors by some of their Asian and Western Buddhist teachers. As a reaction against this, many American Buddhist communities—probably even the majority—have begun to undergo a process of democratization that encompasses changing patterns of authority, changing gender roles, and an acceptance of nontraditional lifestyles. This has included creative consideration of the largely nonmonastic preference of the American Buddhist community, its profoundly city-based membership, the decision-making process within communities, regulation of behavior within both monastic and lay communities, the equality of women in American Buddhism, and sanction for homosexual Buddhists.

Only a century after Buddhism in America was criticized as being socially passive and perhaps even world-rejecting, a form of profoundly active "socially engaged Buddhism" has developed on the American landscape. Utilizing Buddhist values and American forms of protest and active social involvement, socially engaged Buddhists have aggressively undertaken hospice work, ecological programs, prison reforms, and other techniques in an attempt to infuse sanity into our dialogue with the planet and with each other. While a large portion of this work has been coordinated by an organization known as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, founded in Hawaii in 1978, a huge number of other communities, from virtually all the American Buddhist traditions, have taken up the cause.

Nearly all of the early researchers in American Buddhism focused much attention on the issue of adaptation—the degree to which Buddhist groups acculturated to the American religious environment. The question continues to occur in the literature. Almost uniformly, each writer suggests that Buddhism must develop some distinctive Americanization process to become an integral part of the fabric of America's religious heritage. Lately a few voices of dissent are beginning to appear. Victor Hori, a Canadian Rinzai priest and academic professor, suggested in The Faces of Buddhism in America that "The call for an Americanization process is unnecessary. . . . What Americans have been practicing for the last several decades is already Americanized Zen. Pouring wine into a new bottle immediately made it a different wine, although it is an ongoing process." In a chapter of the same book, Jan Nattier pointed out that American Buddhism may eventually remove some of the distinctly American elements in the developing American Buddhism.

If one of the bookends of the five issues facing American Buddhism is the question "Who is a Buddhist?" the other is the equally important question of whether American Buddhism will develop an ecumenical sense of itself. To date there have been few attempts. Although a few ecumenical organizations have formed, there seems little certainty that these have been successful efforts in assisting American Buddhists to talk across cultural, racial, ethical, doctrinal, and social lines.

Conclusion

It would not be incorrect to assert that virtually all of the earliest conclusions about the future of Buddhism on this continent have been mostly wrong. The first inkling of sane and accurate conclusions emerged from two small and often overlooked articles appearing near the end of the 1980s. The first, Rick Fields's "Future of American Buddhism," was published in a 1987 issue of the Vajradhatu Sun. The second, written by Jack Kornfield, was called "Is Buddhism Changing North America?" and was published in Don Morreale's Buddhist America: Centers, Retreats, Practices (1988). Each focused on the issues discussed above, offering insightful perspectives on how to infuse a powerfully sane application of Buddhist ethics into all aspects of the concerns embraced by ethnicity, practice, democratization, engagement, and adaptation.

About a decade later, in a conference on Buddhism in America held in Boston, Lama Surya Das, a leading figure in American Buddhism, delivered the closing keynote address, titled "Emergent Trends in Western Dharma." He identified ten items that he believed would characterize the American Buddhism of the future: (1) dharma without dogma; (2) a lay-oriented sangha; (3) a meditation-based and experiential tradition; (4) gender equality; (5) a nonsectarian tradition; (6) an essentialized and simplified tradition; (7) an egalitarian, democratic, and nonhierarchical tradition; (8) a psychologically astute and rational tradition; (9) an experimental, innovating, inquirybased tradition; and (10) a socially informed and engaged tradition. Although there are very many variables, both internal and external, it is quite likely that Surya Das's vision reflects an accurate picture of the American Buddhism that will develop in the next millennium.