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. He 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 familie 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 code
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.
Let 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
Buddhism is 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 an 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.
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.
Reprinted from the Spring 1997 Wilson Quarterly -
This article may not be resold, reprinted, or redistributed
for compensation of any kind without prior written permission
from the author. For further reprint information, please
contact Permissions, The Wilson Quarterly, One Woodrow
Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW, Washington,
D.C. 20004-3027 (202-691-4200).
