Buddhism comes to main street

·期刊原文

Buddhism comes to main street

by Jan Nattier

Wilson Quarterly

Vol. 21 No. 2 Spring.1997

Pp.72-81

Copyright by Wilson Quarterly

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Buddhism is big news in America these days. Whether through a New York
Times article carrying the Dalai Lama's latest remarks or a CNN spot on a
political fund-raising scandal at a Taiwanese branch temple in Los Angeles,
whether by seeing Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha or following Tina
Turner's life story in What's Love Got to Do With It?, Americans have
become more aware than ever before of something called "Buddhism." But it
is not only as interesting bits of cultural and political exotica that
Buddhism has entered the American consciousness. Increasingly, Americans
themselves are becoming Buddhists. Though precise statistics are impossible
to come by, according to most estimates between one and two million
Americans now consider themselves practicing Buddhists.

American Buddhists are a far from homogeneous lot. The austere minimalism
of a Zen meditation hall contrasts starkly with the riot of color in a
Tibetan Buddhist center, and the mostly Caucasian crowd of baby boomers
arriving for a talk on meditation at a Vipassana center outside San
Francisco bears little resemblance to the multigenerational gathering of
Thai Buddhists assembling in Chicago for a celebration of the Buddha's
birth.

And there are conflicts, as well as contrasts, within Buddhist America.
Like many other religious groups, Buddhists frequently find themselves
divided by class, culture, or ethnicity. At an outdoor lecture by a famous
Vietnamese monk, three Asian-American friends cluster together, feeling the
not altogether friendly stares of the mostly Caucasian (and overwhelmingly
vegetarian) crowd as they try to enjoy their hot dogs and potato chips. At
a small Japanese-American Buddhist church, the parishioners chafe at the
identity of the new minister appointed to serve them: a Caucasian man in
his thirties, who converted to Buddhism only 10 years before. The
differences can be fundamental. Writing in the Buddhist journal Tricycle,
Victor Sogen Hori describes how, at the conclusion of a week-long
Chinese-style Zen retreat he attended, the white American and ethnic
Chinese Buddhists offered profoundly different views of their experience.
One Chinese woman broke down in tears as she described the deep sense of
shame and repentance she had felt over her selfishness. Her white American
coreligionists were often impatient with such sentiments. These
participants, Hori writes, "spoke uniformly of how the long hours of
meditation had helped them get in touch with themselves . . . and assisted
them in the process of self-realization."

How, then, can we get our bearings in this new and confusing territory? For
Americans, especially those raised as Christians, doctrine might seem the
obvious place to start. Yet there are relatively few propositions that
would be accepted by members of all Buddhist communities. That a person
known as the Buddha had an experience of "enlightenment," that we live not
once but many times, and that our karma (which simply means "actions") will
have an effect on us in the future, are all ideas that would be accepted by
most Buddhists. But beyond this minimal consensus, differences emerge
almost immediately, including disagreements over such fundamental matters
as which scriptures are really the word of the Buddha.

Buddhist practices are diverse as well. While one group views meditation as
essential, the next insists that Buddhahood is accessible only through
recitation of a certain mantra, and a third considers ritual empowerments
by a guru to be required. Watching elderly Buddhists reverently offering
small gifts of money or food to the Buddha in hopes of achieving a better
rebirth, one realizes that in still other groups enlightenment, at least in
this life, isn't the issue at all.

With some persistence, though, we can identify a few major fault lines
within Buddhist America that can serve as basic points of orientation.
First is the obvious distinction between those who were born into the faith
and those who have become Buddhists by conversion. That the majority of
"hereditary Buddhists" are Asian Americans is hardly surprising. Some
observers have even argued that the fundamental divide within American
Buddhism is a racial one, separating "white" and "Asian" practitioners.

The distinction is real, reflecting the perennial gap between the
enthusiasm of the recent convert and the calm assurance of the hereditary
believer as well as differences in cultural heritage. Yet recent converts
to Buddhism are by no means all Caucasians. The membership rolls include
African Americans and Latinos, as well as a few Asian-American
"re-converts" who were raised in Christian or in nonreligious homes. To
make sense of the landscape of Buddhist America, one must go beyond race
and ethnicity to consider an entirely different factor: the ways in which
these various forms of American Buddhism were transmitted to the United
States.

Religions--not just Buddhism--travel in three major ways: as import, as
export, and as "baggage." (They may also be imposed by conquest, which,
happily, is not a factor in this case.) Religions transmitted according to
the "import" model are, so to speak, demand driven: the consumer (i.e. the
potential convert) actively seeks out the faith. "Export" religions are
disseminated through missionary activity, while "baggage" religions are
transmitted whenever individuals or families bring their beliefs along when
they move to a new place. It is these divergent styles of transmission, not
matters of doctrine, practice, or national origin, that have shaped the
most crucial differences within American Buddhism.

To begin with the import type, consider a hypothetical example: a college
student living in the Midwest in the 1950s finds a book on Zen Buddhism in
the public library and thinks it's the greatest thing he's ever heard of.
So he buys a plane ticket, heads off to Japan, and begins to study
meditation in a Zen temple. After several years of practice and some
firsthand experience of Buddhist "awakening," he returns to the United
States and establishes a Zen center, where he begins to teach this form of
Buddhism to other Americans.

The important point to note here is that the importer (in this case, the
college student) deliberately seeks out the product and takes the
initiative to bring it home. But for this to happen, two crucial resources
are required: money and leisure time. Buddhist groups of the import
variety, in other words, can be launched only by those who have a certain
degree of economic privilege. And not surprisingly, in these groups (as in
other voluntary associations), like attracts like. Thus, the
upper-middle-class status of the founders tends to be reflected in their
followers, with such communities drawing a mostly well-educated,
financially comfortable, and overwhelmingly European-American constituency.

A convenient label for the groups formed by the import process, then, would
be "Elite Buddhism." But this kind of Buddhism is more than a matter of
socioeconomic background. At first glance, the groups belonging to this
category would seem to span the full spectrum of Buddhist traditions: there
are a number of schools of Tibetan Buddhism, various centers teaching
meditation practices known as Vipassana (drawn primarily from Southeast
Asia), and Japanese, Korean, and Chinese varieties of Zen. Yet a closer
look reveals that what these groups all have in common is far more
significant than the divergence in the sources of their inspiration. For
the very names of two of these three types (Vipassana and Zen) mean
"meditation." On the level of practice, then, the most striking feature of
Elite Buddhism in America is its emphasis on meditation.

Meditation is, of course, part of the traditional repertoire of most
(though not all) Asian Buddhist schools, at least for those who have
undertaken a full-time monastic practice. What is distinctive about Elite
Buddhism, however, is not its heavy emphasis on meditation but its scanting
of other aspects of traditional Buddhism. For example, though monasticism
has been the central Buddhist institution (and monastic life considered an
essential prerequisite to enlightenment) in the vast majority of Buddhist
countries, Elite Buddhists have been largely uninterested in becoming monks
or nuns, preferring to see their Buddhist practice as a way of enhancing
the quality of their lives as laypeople. While traditional Buddhists have
spent a great deal of energy on activities that are best described as
"devotional," Elite Buddhists, many of them still fleeing the theistic
traditions of their youth, have little patience with such practices. And
while codes of ethics have played a central role in traditional Buddhist
societies, they have had little appeal for Elite Buddhists, many of whom
were drawn to Buddhism by what they saw as its promise of a more
spontaneous life. Indeed, until fairly recently, when scandals involving
sexual affairs and financial mismanagement in several American Tibetan and
Zen communities forced some serious rethinking, ethical codes were given
almost no attention in Elite Buddhist circles.

Elite Buddhism thus represents not simply an Asian religion transplanted to
a new environment but a curious amalgamation of traditional Buddhist ideas
and certain upper-middle-class American values--above all individualism,
freedom of choice, and personal fulfillment. These "non-negotiable cultural
demands" have reshaped Buddhist ideas and practices in significant ways,
yielding a genuinely new religious "product" uniquely adapted to certain
segments of the American "market."

The "export" process of transmission has produced American Buddhist groups
of a strikingly different type. Because the transmission itself is
underwritten by the home church, the potential convert does not need money,
power, or time to come into contact with Buddhism of this sort, only a
willingness to listen. Encounters with a missionary may take place on a
street corner, in the subway, or even in one's home. Export religion is
thus something of a wild card: it can attract a wide range of adherents, or
it may appeal to no one at all.

Since what fuels the formation of Buddhist groups of this type is energetic
proseletyzing, an appropriate label for such groups is "Evangelical
Buddhism." And one Buddhist organization in America, above all, fits this
category: the Soka Gakkai International. This group (whose name means
Value-Creating Study Association) began its life in Japan in the 1930s as a
lay association devoted to spreading the teachings of the Nichiren Shoshu
school. According to this school (one of the many strands of Mahayana
Buddhism), all beings have the potential for Buddhahood, but this inherent
Buddha-nature can only be made manifest through chanting of the mantra
"namu myoho renge kyo." These words--which literally mean "homage to the
Lotus Sutra," one of the most popular Buddhist scriptures in Japan--are
believed to be powerful enough not just to change the practitioner's
spiritual state but to improve his or her material circumstances as well.
The Soka Gakkai, in other words, teaches a form of Buddhism in which both
material and spiritual happiness can be attained not through many lifetimes
of strenuous practice, or even weeks or months of meditation retreats, but
through the daily recitation of a simple phrase.

Both the simplicity of the practice and the fact that this form of Buddhism
addresses economic as well as spiritual needs has meant that the Soka
Gakkai, from the time of its arrival in the United States during the 1950s,
has had the potential to appeal to a very different, and far less
privileged, audience than the Elite Buddhist traditions. Unlike the
latter--most of whose members are college educated, with many holding
graduate degrees--only about half of Soka Gakkai members have attended
college, and barely a quarter hold bachelor's degrees. Statistics compiled
by the Soka Gakkai itself show a wide range of educational levels and
occupations; my own observations suggest a center of gravity in the
lower-middle class.

But it is in the ethnicity of its members that the distinctiveness of the
Soka Gakkai is most obvious, for it has attracted a following that includes
large numbers of Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans (not all
of Japanese ancestry). According to a 1983 survey compiled by the
organization itself, fully 55 percent of its members had non-European
ethnic backgrounds.

The fact that Evangelical Buddhism has undergone fewer changes in America
than Elite Buddhism is the direct result of its mode of transmission.
Because the Soka Gakkai was established by missionaries accountable to the
home organization, its Japanese leadership has been able to limit the
extent of its adaptation to American values. Indeed, one former member
remarked that the only real difference between the American and the
Japanese Soka Gakkai is that members in America usually sit on chairs.

Yet the remarkable success of the Soka Gakkai in the United States--at one
point the organization claimed a membership of 500,000, though even Soka
Gakkai officials now admit this figure was far too high--would not have
been possible if its values had not harmonized with the aspirations of the
audience it addressed. In particular, the Soka Gakkai has been able to tap
into the "American dream" of upward mobility, a dream that has often been
difficult to realize for those who find the obstacles of racism and
exclusion in their path.

Finally we come to the category of "Baggage Buddhism"--though perhaps we
should have begun with this type, for here at last we meet with Buddhists
who were simply born into the faith of their ancestors. Like Export
Buddhism, this type involves travel to America by Buddhists from Asian
countries, but the migration is not for religious purposes. Instead, these
Buddhists (or their ancestors) came as immigrants to the United States to
pursue economic opportunity, or, especially in the case of recent refugees
from Southeast Asia, to escape persecution at home.

Baggage Buddhists span the full range of schools and national origins,
ranging from Theravadins from Cambodia to Mahayanists from Korea to Kalmyck
Mongols of the Vajrayana school. But to the outsider, these organizations
display remarkable similarities. Above all, they tend to be deliberately
monoethnic in membership at the outset, for they serve not only religious
purposes but operate as supportive community centers as well. Such temples
may provide language lessons, a place to network for jobs, and above all a
place to relax with others who share one's own cultural assumptions and to
whom nothing needs to be explained. Though all Buddhists (of course) have
their own ethnicity, it is only in Buddhist groups of this type that
ethnicity serves as the primary defining feature. This type can therefore
be labeled "Ethnic Buddhism."

Buddhism in America, at this stage in its history, thus includes
participants of three quite different sorts. But though all would call
themselves Buddhists, communication across (or even within) these three
categories is often difficult, even nonexistent. Within the Elite category
we do find considerable exchange; it is not at all unusual for participants
to move easily from Vipassana practice to Tibetan Buddhism to Zen. Yet
Elite Buddhists do not accord the same acceptance to members of Evangelical
and Ethnic Buddhist groups. Since they do not practice meditation--so the
reasoning goes--members of these two latter groups cannot be considered
"genuine" Buddhists.

Such exclusion-by-definition has not, needless to say, been viewed kindly
by those who are excluded--especially the Ethnic Buddhists, whose roots in
the faith usually are many generations deep. But it is not only Elite
Buddhists whose map of the Buddhist world renders other practitioners
invisible. Evangelical Buddhists, too, operate on the basis of a narrow
definition of "true Buddhism" (their expression), considering both Elite
and Ethnic Buddhists to have missed something essential since they do not
practice the chant taught by the Soka Gakkai. Ethnic Buddhists tend, in
general, to be less critical of their coreligionists, in large part because
they have not abbreviated the spectrum of "real" Buddhism so severely,
retaining as they do a broad range of the moral, meditative, and ritual
practices that were current in their homelands. Ironically, though, these
Buddhists have little incentive to communicate with other Ethnic Buddhist
groups, precisely because part of their mission is to preserve their own
distinctive culture.

Even when attempts to cross the boundaries dividing these groups are made,
the results can be discouraging. When Americans of non-Asian descent are
drawn to Ethnic Buddhist temples, for example, the result is often what
Paul Numrich of the University of Illinois calls, in Old Wisdom in the New
World (1996), "parallel congregations": rather than merging to form a
single organization, Asian and non-Asian American Buddhists have often
found their visions of Buddhism to be so incompatible that they simply meet
at separate times in the same building.

Given these deep rifts within American Buddhism, we might well ask whether
any of these subgroups will succeed in becoming a permanent part of the
American religious landscape. For Ethnic Buddhists, the question is the one
faced by all immigrants: will our children follow in our footsteps? For
earlier generations of Asian immigrants, the value of remaining members of
a religion viewed as "deviant" by mainstream society was not at all
self-evident. Of the roughly 500,000 Japanese Americans in the United
States today, for example, fewer than 20,000 are registered as members of
the Buddhist Churches of America, the largest Japanese-American Buddhist
organization in the country. The vast majority of Japanese Americans have
either become Christians (virtually all of them Protestant) or claim no
religious affiliation at all.

Things may be different today. Though Buddhists, especially Asian-American
Buddhists, still encounter hostility and even violence in some parts of the
country, the very fact that now relatively well known in the United
States--and even carries, in some circles, significant prestige--may mean
that more recent Asian Buddhist immigrants will view their ancestral
religion as an asset, not a liability. So far, though, the evidence
suggests that this may not be enough to stem the tide of religious
assimilation. Ironically, recent Asian immigrants seem to be converting to
Christianity (and increasingly its evangelical forms, as Stanford
University religion professor Rudy Busto observed in Amerasia Journal last
year) as rapidly as European Americans are becoming Buddhists.

For Evangelical Buddhists, the greatest challenge may arise not from
circumstances in the United States but from events in Japan. In 1991, after
years of wrangling between the Soka Gakkai and the Nichiren Shoshu
priesthood, the Soka Gakkai was formally excommunicated by its parent
organization. The real sources of the conflict appear to lie in a struggle
between the priesthood and the lay organization for financial and political
control, but each side has portrayed the dispute as resulting from the
religious heresy and moral corruption of the other. The Soka Gakkai has
attempted to take the rhetorical high road, likening its separation from
the priesthood to the Protestant Reformation, but it remains to be seen
whether its membership will find this representation convincing. While the
American organization still seems viable, a serious decline in the number
of subscribers to the organization's weekly newspaper (which in recent
years has dipped below 40,000) suggests that the schism may have dealt it a
painful blow.

The Elite Buddhist groups, by contrast, would seem at first glance to be in
good health: major bookstores offer entire shelves of publications on
Tibetan Buddhism, Vipassana, and Zen, and mainstream newspapers and
magazines frequently carry articles on the subject. So thoroughly do Elite
Buddhist concerns (such as "engaged Buddhism," much of it the result of
Western social activism exported to Asia and subsequently re-exported to
the West) dominate the media's picture of Buddhism that these groups often
appear to be the only game in town.

Yet Elite Buddhist groups have one striking demographic peculiarity:
virtually all of the communities now in existence were formed by people who
came of age during the late 1960s and early '70s, and members of succeeding
age cohorts have joined in much smaller numbers. If such communities do not
succeed in attracting younger members (and in retaining the children of the
first-generation converts), they will soon fade from the American religious
scene.

History offers American Buddhists a chastening lesson. During the 1890s,
the United States experienced a "Buddhism boom" not unlike that of today.
The New York Journal reported that "it is no uncommon thing to hear a New
Yorker say he is a Buddhist nowadays," the historian Thomas Tweed writes in
The American Encounter with Buddhism (1992). A number of Protestant
ministers worried in print that their congregations might be attracted to
this strange faith. Public interest was strong enough to provoke the
Atlantic Monthly to run a feature article titled "The Religion of Gotama
Buddha." Yet by the early 1920s the boom was over, and Buddhism became all
but invisible in American life save for a handful of Asian-American
congregations.

If today's American Buddhists are to avoid the fate of their predecessors
of a century ago, they must accomplish two things. First, they must move
beyond the concept of Buddhism as a matter of individual "religious
preference," grounding it instead in the everyday practice of families and
larger social networks. Second, they must create sturdy institutions to
take the place of today's informal associations of like-minded
practitioners. In dealing with the first necessity, Ethnic Buddhists, who
have always seen their religion as a family affair, are clearly in the
lead. The Evangelical Buddhists, with their ready-made organizational
structures imported from Japan, may well have the edge in establishing
institutions.

Ironically, it is the Buddhists we hear the most about in the American
media--the Elite Buddhists--who have so far attracted the least diverse
membership, and thus have the greatest challenges to overcome if they are
to survive into the next generation. Yet each of the main branches of
American Buddhism clearly has much to learn from the others if all three
hope to continue to flourish on American soil.

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Homeless Buddha (1992), by Nam June Paik]

Homeless Buddha (1992), by Nam June Paik

PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): BUDDHISM

[PHOTO (BLACK & WHITE): Members of the Soka Gakkai attend a regular gathering ... ]

Members of the Soka Gakkai attend a regular gathering in Philadelphia.

by Jan Nattier

JAN NATTIER is associate professor of Buddhist studies at Indiana
University. She is the author of Once upon a Future Time: Studies in a
Buddhist Prophecy of Decline (1991) and the editor of Buddhist Literature,
a journal of texts in translation. Copyright (c) 1997 by Jan Nattier.