Asian American

Race and Religion in American Buddhism

| arun

For those of you who feel I should write a book, let me say that the job has already been done. Just arrived in the mail is Race and Religion in American Buddhism: White Supremacy and Immigrant Adaptation by Fr. Joseph Cheah. Below is the opening paragraph.

When the first wave of Burmese immigrant Buddhists set foot on American soil in the late 1960s, they came into contact with a variety of forms of Buddhism not found in their native Burma. One of these forms was a white or convert Buddhism, whose legacy includes the specter of an Orientalist and racist past, often hardly acknowledged, yet rarely if ever entirely absent from the discourse within Euro-American Buddhism. The legacy of Orientalism in convert Buddhism can be traced to the works of Western Orientalists in the middle and late Victorian era. Stemming in part from Orientalist racial projects, vestiges of white supremacy ideology can still be detected today in the controversy surrounding who represents “American Buddhism” and the smorgasbord of approaches in Buddhist practices that have been taken for granted in many meditation centers, hospitals, and other institutions. The prevailing ideology of white supremacy operative in these and other contexts influences the ways in which Buddhist practices have been adapted by both convert and ethnic Buddhist communities. Within the scope of Buddhism as both a religion and a practice, focusing primarily on the Theravada tradition, this book examines rearticulations of Asian Buddhist practices through the lens of race and racialization.

I can’t wait to read the whole book!

Support Lao Buddhists of Colorado

| arun

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 Pew Study Marginalizes Asian Americans

| arun

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.

This exercise uses the estimated population of the United States during the year the Pew study was conducted—301.6 million (courtesy of the U.S. Census Bureau)—in addition to three statistics from the Pew Study: 0.7%of Americans identify as Buddhist, 32% of American Buddhists identify as Asian, and 9% of Asian Americans identify as Buddhist.

Apply the first percentage to the total American population in 2007, and you end up with some 2.1 million Buddhists in America.

Now if 32% of those American Buddhists are Asian, then there are a mere 676,000 Asian American Buddhists.

The Pew study tells us that 9% percent of Asian Americans identify as Buddhist, and since we know the Pew estimates there are about 676,000 Asian American Buddhists, we can combine these two statistics to reveal the size of Asian America in the eyes of the Pew study. It’s simple algebra: if 9% of x equals 676,000 then you just need to divide 676,000 by 9% in order to find x (i.e. the number of Asian Americans). This yields 7.5 million Asian Americans, or about 2.5% of the American population.

But wait a moment! The U.S. Census estimates there were 15.2 millionAsian Americans in that year. That’s more than twice the estimate we came to from the Pew study’s numbers.

Slice the numbers another way, and you arrive at the same dilemma. When Coleman writes about a very white liberal middle-class face of Buddhism, he bases his entire understanding on a set of numbers that are irredeemably skewed against Asian Americans. Take the Pew study’s Buddhism statistics at face value, as James Coleman does, and you partake in the racial marginalization of Asians in Western Buddhism.

I just can’t say it enough. Stop using the Pew study!

Why Shouldn’t Buddhists Use the Pew Study?

| arun

“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.

Coleman paints the picture of an affluent White Buddhist America where “roughly three-quarters of American Buddhists are converts,” where “Buddhists are more likely to identify themselves as liberals,” where Buddhists “are more likely to have a higher income and better education than the average American” and where “Buddhists are the fastest-growing religious group in American today.”

The meat of this analysis comes from the U.S. Religious Landscape Surveyby the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life—a study that no self-respecting academic could use to describe American Buddhism without being guilty of racial marginalization. As I demonstrated before, the Pew forum can only come to this sort of conclusion because its survey is skewed toward White middle-class Americans.

The Pew study itself even admits that the survey deserves “caution” when looking at religious groups with large numbers of immigrants:

English-only surveys, and even English surveys with a Spanish option, are likely biased in that their samples do not sufficiently represent the full spectrum of Latinos, many of whom are recent immigrants and are unable to complete a telephone survey in English. […] This suggests that caution is also in order when estimating the number of adherents of other religious groups that are disproportionately composed of immigrants, such as Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists and members of other world religions.

According to U.S. Census surveys, there were 14.9 million Asian Americans in 2007. If you follow the Pew study’s numbers, there were only 7.5 million. (You can do the math.) That’s a big difference and ample grounds to question any of the study’s findings on Buddhist America.

Honestly, people. Stop using the Pew study.

Taste of Chicago Buddhism

| arun

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?

| arun

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.

Another good example of our marginalization comes from the 2010 election, when the highest profile of the American Buddhist media swarmed around White candidates who didn’t identify as Buddhist, while ignoring the non-White candidates who did. It may have been twenty years ago that Tricycle founder Helen Tworkov wrote that Asian Americans “have not figured prominently in the development of something called American Buddhism,” but for many White Buddhists today, Asian Americans are still little more than an afterthought when “American Buddhism” comes to mind.

More subtle forms of marginalization include the ways that Asians are caged into stereotypes by the types of topics that Western Buddhist media choose to discuss with us. I recently demonstrated that while Buddhadharma typically allots just one or two spots for Asians on feature discussion panels, they make an exception for stereotypically Asian topics. The editors clearly know how to reach out to Asian Buddhists when they want to, but it seems that most of the time they are content with their almost exclusively White lineup of feature panelists.

Examples of our denigration are less frequent in published media these days, but abound online. During the firestorm over the Australian bhikkhuni ordination, Bhante Shravasti Dhammika lambasted Theravada Buddhists in Asia as “spiritually moribund, tradition-bound and retrograde.” I am still endlessly grateful to Bhante Sujato for standing upagainst accusations that misogyny in Western Buddhism is some by-product of Asian influence.

You need not dig too deep into the Buddhist blogosphere to find White-savior rhetoric or proposals to whitewash the face of Buddhism or White Buddhists who poke fun at Asian names. Beyond blogs, online forums host much franker assessments of “ethnic” Buddhists. (“They’re not really in the business of spreading the dharma.”) These words are far from the usual statements from Western Buddhist institutions, but they are part and parcel of the Western Buddhism that we Asians in the West must deal with.

When we complain about our marginalization, our complaints are repeatedly dismissed as invalid, divisive or even thrown back at us as examples of how we are lesser Buddhists. When the blogger Tassja wrote about White privilege in Western Buddhism, she was ripped apart with abusive language that I will not copy here. When my partner-in-crime Liriel wrote to Tassja’s defense by sharing her own personal story of growing up Buddhist in the West, she was called a racist and told that “it might be better to be a convert to Buddhism than to be born in to it.”

The examples here speak to the way that self-styled Western Buddhists use both online and print publications to craft a narrative of Buddhism in the West that marginalizes the voices of Asian Buddhists, who continue to constitute Western Buddhism’s largest demographic. Often, Asian voices are omitted altogether. The marginalization of our stories and perspectives results in a Western Buddhist media landscape where we are deprived of an effective rhetorical counterweight to the denigration of our communities, culture and Buddhist practice.

Our community is broad, including everyone from recent refugees to fifth-generation practitioners, from monastic teachers to social activists, and I would like to think that our lives are not so alien to those of Western Buddhism’s non-Asian practitioners that their publications are better off when we are pushed to the side.

The Buddha in the Attic

| arun

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.

And from the Amazon book description…

In eight incantatory sections, The Buddha in the Attic traces their extraordinary lives, from their arduous journey by boat, where they exchange photographs of their husbands, imagining uncertain futures in an unknown land; to their arrival in San Francisco and their tremulous first nights as new wives; to their backbreaking work picking fruit in the fields and scrubbing the floors of white women; to their struggles to master a new language and a new culture; to their experiences in childbirth, and then as mothers, raising children who will ultimately reject their heritage and their history; to the deracinating arrival of war.

This book sounds like one to definitely consider adding to your reading list. And congrats to Julie Otsuka!

The Future of American Buddhsim

| arun

While searching for inspiration for our temple’s summer camp next year, I came across some videos of other temples’ summer programs. These compositions reminded me that our “traditional Asian enclaves” are doing lots of work to nurture the next generation of American Buddhism. Much of what you read about Buddhist Asian America online comes from members of the Buddhist commentariat who are not part of these communities, and so I thought it would be good for you to see our backward, retrograde, traditional and insulated communities speak for themselves.

My favorite clip comes from the Sacramento Obon festival, where Socho Ogui, Bishop of the Buddhist Churches of America, danced to Taio Cruzalong with other Buddhist ministers and youth leaders.

The next generation of American Buddhism will come from many quarters, but it looks like some temples are already giving their kids a head start in community involvement.

Lessons from Our Elders

| arun

Here’s another piece that’s been sitting in my draft box, waiting to be published. I was happy to see an interview by Jeff Wilson with Rev. Patti Usuki in this summer’s issue of Tricycle.

Rev. Usuki is a well-known Shin writer, and I was personally impressed by her book Currents of Change: American Buddhist Women Speak Out on Jodo Shinshu, which documents the attitudes of Shin Buddhist women who don’t quite fit the stereotypes of “insular ethnic Buddhists.” You can get a taste of her writing with this excerpt from the Tricycle interview.

Converts and newcomers to Buddhism outside of Asia sometimes have a tendency to dismiss Asian-Americans as “ethnic Buddhists” or “baggage Buddhists”—as people who do not seriously practice Buddhism. However, we have much to learn from many of these women who still reflect a generations-long internalization of the buddhadharma through their thoughts, words, and deeds. They themselves are often the first to humbly profess that they know nothing about the dharma, and yet many of them display an innate understanding of such tenets as dana [the practice of cultivating generosity] and interdependence in all that they do—and many show, through their outlook, a profound grasp of the spirit of the nembutsu. They have often made huge sacrifices so that the temples will prosper, enabling others to experience the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. And yet they have embraced change without stridency. We have to remember that through their life experiences—such as racial and religious discrimination and being put into internment camps during World War II—they understand suffering and impermanence, and they know the value of finding joy in whatever life dishes out. They keep moving forward, and their positive perspectives alone are a lesson to us all. Certainly, they know what it is to be marginalized by those with dualistic minds, but they know that the light of immeasurable wisdom and compassion shines on all without discrimination.

If you have a copy of the summer issue, you can find this paragraph tucked away in the back, across pages 105–106. I am a big fan of Rev. Patti’s writing, and I hope to be able to post more from her here in the future.

Diversity at the Buddhist Teachers Council

| arun

A recent Tricycle blog post on diversity caught my attention. The magazine asked some participants of the recent 2011 Buddhist Teachers Council the following question about unity amid diversity:

Buddhism is very diverse—some would even say that the different traditions represent different religions. What was the common Buddhist thread that brought you all together?”

And here are the responses of two Asian American participants.

I came seeking unity in the Three Treasures. I was disappointed to find that the “mindful” community remains unable to bridge the gap of diversity; and further, that this vital necessity is not a primary concern.
—Myokei Caine-Barrett, Shonin, Myoken Temple

What brought us together probably has something to do with the Buddha’s saying “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” It has such a universal calling. However, while “Buddhism” may be diverse, “Buddhist” communities in the West do not yet reflect the diversity of our multicultural experiences. 
—Larry Yang, East Bay Meditation Center

I am very glad that Tricycle included us in their list, and that these thoughts were shared. For all my grumblings over diversity at the Buddhist Teachers Council, I’m inclined to think of the conference as a positive success. Diversity was certainly not prominent, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say the conference was an abject failure on this front. More on that thought in another post.

You can read other responses to this question in the current issue of Tricycle. Bhikkhu Bodhi’s is one of my favorites.