American Buddhists: who are they?
by Jan Nattier
Current
No.395( Sep 1997)
Pp.6-10
COPYRIGHT 1997 Helen Dwight Reid Educational Foundation
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 Is 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.
RELIGION TRANSMISSION
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
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 "nonnegotiable 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.
EVANGELICAL BUDDHISM
Since what fuels the formation of Buddhist groups of this type is
energetic proselytizing, 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.
BAGGAGE BUDDHISTS
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 with in)
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 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 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.
Ms. Nattier is an associate professor of Buddhist studies at Indiana
University. From "Buddhism Comes To Main Street," by Jan Nattier,
The Wilson Quarterly, Spring 1997.