In Memory of Bana Bhante, 1920–2012

I just learned from the Daily Star that the Venerable Sadhanananda Mahathera has died. He was the most revered Buddhist monk in Bangladesh, commonly considered to be an arahant. Like many others, I always referred to him as Bono Bhante, his nickname in the local Chittagonian dialect, a name which translates literally as “Forest Monk.”

If you remember Luangta Maha Bua, you can probably get a sense of how important Bana Bhante was to Bangladeshi Buddhists. He was of the Chakma people, an ethnic minority, and had a reputation for clear, incisive and straightforward speaking. Many of his years in the monkhood were spent practicing in the forest. He lived into his nineties, having witnessed his native Chittagong occupied under British colonialism, partitioned into Pakistan, and thrown into turmoil following Bangladesh’s liberation. He was ordained for 63 years, and he was a widely-respected living Buddhist institution in a majority Muslim nation.

How can you be angry? You're a Buddhist!

This entry was written by Dolma, an Angry Asian Buddhist who works for an interfaith organization.

In an interview with Time Magazine, His Holiness the Dalai Lama was asked, “Do you ever feel angry or outraged?” His Holiness laughed as he replied, “Oh, yes, of course. I’m a human being. Generally speaking, if a human being never shows anger, then I think something’s wrong. He’s not right in the brain.” While I enjoyed His Holiness’ initially confused expression, I also appreciated his answer. Because really, it’s a silly question, especially when you consider the obstacles and difficulties that His Holiness has faced throughout his life. However, many Buddhists are asked this same question. I’m often asked, “Do you get angry?” or worse, “How can you be angry? You’re a Buddhist.”

From the looks of shock I receive, it seems like I’m confessing to some debilitating habit or addiction. But it’s simply my truth, one aspect of my humble experience. I’m an angry, South Asian, Buddhist woman. And sometimes, it isn’t easy being an angry Buddhist. It isn’t easy when someone trivialises your ability and need to be angry.

Happy Lunar New Year!

It’s that time of year again.

Buddhist Holidays 2012

I am going to try to continue last year’s experiment and interview people about how they celebrate Buddhist holidays. Many holidays went without interviews last year; I’m hoping this year will be more productive.

• Lunar New Year · January 23
• Losar · February 22
• Magha Puja · March 7
• Hanamatsuri · April 8
• Thingyan · April 13–17
• Songkran · April 13–15
• Gotan-e · May 20–21
• Vesak · June 4
• Obon · July & August
• Asalha Puja · August 2
• Vu Lan · August 31
• Ohigan · September 22
• Kathina · November
• Rohatsu · December 8

This list is by no means an exhaustive catalogue of Buddhist holidays. It’s more of a map (and reminder) for future holiday posts. You can find another partial list at About.com’s Buddhism page. If there are other Buddhist festivals you’d like for me to cover, just drop a note below in the comments (links would be useful too), and I will consider them.

Corrections are also most welcome.

Why is American Buddhism so White?

Shambhala Sun Foundation Staff

The provocative title of this post comes not from one of my sleep deprivation induced paroxysms of self-righteous indignation, but rather from a beautifully selected forum discussion in the current issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly.

You can read the forward by Charles Johnson online, but you’ll have to buy a copy of Buddhadharma to read the entire discussion with Larry Yang, Amanda Rivera, angel Kyodo Williams and Bob Agoglia. You’ll also find a great piece by Jan Willis, “Yes, We’re Buddhists Too!” I couldn’t recommend this issue enough.

The forum discussion is one that readers of this blog really shouldn’t ingore. Read it and let me know: what did you think?

Support Lao Buddhists of Colorado

There is a huge backlog of Angry Asian Buddhist posts that I haven’t quite gotten around to, but some issues are more important than others. This is one of them. Gil Asakawa writes from Colorado:

The Laotians epitomize the ability of recent immigrant communities to hang together and promote their traditional culture and values while they (especially the younger generation) embrace American culture and values. That sense of unity will serve them well in the months to come, as they rebuild “their heart and soul,” as one tearful women described the temple.

[…]

I visited the temple yesterday afternoon and felt an indescribable sadness for their loss. Firefighters were still milling about, sifting through debris, probably investigating the cause of the fire. Police blocked the street (the temple faces a side street, not Wadsworth Blvd., which is a major thoroughfare). But a steady stream of Laotians kept coming by, parking their cars down the block and walking to the temple to pay their respects and offering their help.

One young man sitting in his car with his baseball cap askew rolled down the window and turned down the hip-hop on stereo to ask me details about the fire. I told him what I knew. He told me he’d helped the head monk for several years and considered him a mentor. A woman who parked her car and began walking began sobbing when she got her first look at the burned-out skeleton of the temple. She said she left work early when she first heard about the fire. Many of the visitors had just heard about the tragedy through the community grapevine while at work.

The community has established the Lao Buddhist Temple Fire Relief Fund at 1stBank, a Colorado-based bank chain, and is accepting donations to help rebuild the temple. You can find the nearest 1stBank location here, or call Sy Pong at 720-210-7555 or Maly at 720-217-6142.

It’ll help the Laotians bring back to life the heart—and soul—of their community.

Please support Colorado’s Lao Buddhists. You can learn more about the situation at the links below.

• Congregation gathers at Buddhist temple lost in Westminster fire [Nina Sparano, KWGN]
• Community rallies to rebuild Buddhist temple destroyed by fire in Colorado [Buddhist News]
• Lao Buddhist Temple of Colorado Needs Help to Rebuild After Devastating Fire [Gil Asakawa, Huffington Post]
• Buddhist Monks Hoping To Recover Temple Artifacts After Fire [Deb Stanley, ABC7News]
• Blaze destroys Buddhist temple [CNN]

If you donate more than $250, I’ll send you a thank you card. More importantly, you’ll be providing enormous help to a Buddhist community that dearly needs it.

Update: In response to a question on Twitter, the fire occurred in Westminster, a suburb northwest of Denver. You can also get more information about donations at the temple’s website: laobuddhisttempleofcolorado.com.

The White Face of Buddhism: Now at Patheos

Danny Fisher just announced that he’ll be maintaining a new Patheos blog, which was mention enough to spark my smoldering curiosity and get me to check out the Patheos Buddhism Portal. So I visited and saw a landing page covered with the work of White people.

I really worked hard to find the Buddhist Asian folk, but Patheos seems to have created an almost perfect showcase for the stereotype online Buddhist: the White Buddhist American man.

Well okay, I managed to sniff out some diversity in that collection of essays on the “Future of Buddhism” in the United States. Among those 22 essays, you can find four written by Asian authors—namely Mushim Ikeda-Nash, Venerable Sheng Yen, Chade-Meng Tan and George Tanabe. With about 18% of those essays by Asians, this Patheos collection ranks at about the same level of Asianness as the general Western Buddhist publication—perhaps a noteworthy trend?

Yes I know that Justin Whitaker has publicly vowed to make the effort to try to be “more representative of American/Western Buddhism.” He even followed through by posting about an African American Buddhist! I can’t wait till he writes about another Person of Color!

So at least you know that the Patheos Buddhism Portal isn’t the exclusive preserve of White Buddhists. The Portal is not all White—it’s just overwhelmingly dominated by White American Buddhists. And that’s a problem.

Chocolate Chicago Buddha

I spotted this confection at the Chicago French Market.

I assume that this pâtissier only intended that a chocolate Buddha confection would sell well; I doubt any deliberate offense to Buddhists. Even so, this is perhaps too fine an example of Buddhism consumerized and ingested as such. Not quite the traditional Dharma Burger, but I would still put it in the same category.

The Pew study marginalizes Asian Americans

At the heart of my exhortations that Buddhists should ignore the Pew Forum’s U.S. Religious Landscape Survey is that the study tragically misrepresents Asian America. Past critiques, such as those cited by Rev. Danny Fisher, focus on the Pew study’s methodological problems of potentially undercounting immigrants or omitting the state of Hawai‘i.

Fair points, but the impact of these methodological errors is hard to gauge. In other words, we can rail against the study’s methodological flaws until we’re red in the face, but in order to demonstrate (rather than speculate) that the outcome of the study is flawed, we have to look at the numbers. I’ve done this before, but given James Coleman’s ingenuous reading of the study, I feel obliged to do so again.

Why shouldn't Buddhists use the Pew study?

“The Face of Western Buddhism” (Buddhadharma Fall 2011) is a perfect case study of how to marginalize Asian American Buddhists in print. Sociologist James Coleman depicts Buddhist America using the effectively racist dichotomy of immigrants versus converts and he whitewashes American Buddhist history by ignoring several decades of Asian American Buddhist pioneers. Most problematic is that the author presents his case as one based on sound empiricism.

Taste of Chicago Buddhism

When I began blogging about Buddhism on Dharma Folk, there weren’t many Asian American Buddhists in the blogosphere. Now it seems as though every month I’m encountering a new blog written by an Asian American Buddhist. Taste of Chicago Buddhism is one such blog, written by Rev. Patti Nakai of the Buddhist Temple of Chicago.

The blog discusses topical issues on everything from Buddhism to Rev. Nakai’s community in ways that make me ever so slightly nostalgic for the Windy City. I particularly enjoyed her recent opinions on what students read about Buddhism. Her blog also paints another picture of “Chicago Buddhism” that’s quite a bit different from Stephen Asma’s red meat and whiskey version.

I hope you’ll have the chance to check out Taste of Chicago Buddhism and even enjoy it enough to add it to your blog list.

What Marginalization?

After reviewing my interview with Maia Duerr, I noticed in the comment section an unanswered question, which I hadn’t read before.

Arun: can you provide specific examples of the marginalization and denigration of which you speak — and I don’t mean examples from 30 years ago, but current. I am partly wondering if there’s a mis-attribution occurring. Having spent quite a bit of time with Korean American Buddhists, it strikes me that their form of Buddhism really is very, very different than that which Westerners have been in the process of adapting for themselves, but just because each is different and each are drawn to different forms, doesn’t necessarily mean there’s marginalization or denigration.

The most prominent examples of the marginalization of Asian Americans from the Western Buddhist narrative are found in high-profile Western Buddhist magazines, namely Shambhala Sun, Tricycle and Buddhadharma (the three largest by distribution). The paucity of Asian writers in these publications is well documented. A perfect recent example is Buddhadharma’s winter 2010 issue on women in Buddhism, “Our Way”, which completely left out the voices of Asian Buddhist women.

Q&A with Jizo Chronicles

I am very honored that Maia Duerr reached out to interview me for the Jizo Chronicles blog, not to mention that she includes me in the group of “socially engaged Buddhists”! I have advocated for a long time that one of the best ways to reach out to Asian American Buddhists is to raise our profile in the magazines and blogs dominated by White Buddhist discourse. And Maia decided to do just that.

Ever wondered what’s up with my whole Angry shtick? Who inspires me? You can read the full interview here.

The Buddha in the Attic

I’m too time-crunched this morning to write my own thought-out post on this, so I’ll just quote the Angry Asian Man (to whom I owe a hat tip).

This week, finalists were announced for the 60th annual National Book Awards, the prestigious literary prize presented to exceptional American books written and published in the last year: Finalists Named for National Book Awards.

There are five finalists in four categories: fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature. What’s noteworthy is that the short list for fiction includes Julie Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, a fictional retelling of the postwar Japanese American experience.

Happy Columbus Day!

Don’t forget to celebrate this holiday by traveling to your local Indian reservation and claiming it as your own. Of course, should you have none in congenial proximity, an Asian Buddhist temple will do. Or even just the home of your dark-skinned neighbors. Happy Columbus Day!