Month: September 2009

This I Believe

| arun

Sorting through my drafts box, I found a stranded link to Trang Tran’s This I Believe essay, recounting a stay at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas (CTTB).

Before CTTB, I had never prayed, meditated, or read a Buddhist text in my life. I distinctly remember the discomfort of being in a new and vastly different environment and the inevitable challenges it brought. Yet, upon reflection, I realize that I have absolutely no regrets about the time between entering and exiting the sacred gates of the monastery. The sentient moments of serenity and sincere connection to mind, body, and spirit that I received resonate far beyond my time spent at CTTB and always will.

It sort of makes me want to visit the next time I find myself in Northern California. Maybe after I check out Rev. Harry and Dr. Scott’s live podcast recording!

Online Non-Sanghas

| arun

I had been planning to write about “virtual sanghas” but Dogo Barry Graham beat me to the punch. Predictably, his words are much more precise than what I would have written.

So it will probably surprise no one that I think there is no such thing as a virtual sangha. A bunch of people, one of whom may be a Dharma teacher, typing on keyboards is not a sangha.

A sangha practices together. Practice means the hard, inconvenient work of getting up and getting to the sangha meeting, sitting zazen, having dokusan, doing zazenkai and sesshin, and, day-to-day and week-to-week, working with your teacher to unravel the conditioning and core beliefs that run your life. It means engaging and interacting with the sangha, doing whatever tasks you are assigned to keep things working efficiently.

I’m not suggesting that there’s no point to blogging about your practice, or that the internet isn’t the great resource it is. But it’s no sangha substitute.

Don’t Rush the Western Buddhist

| arun

Barbara O’Brien elaborates on terms such as “modernization” or “westernization” and what these terms might mean in the context of Buddhist history.

There seems to be a rising tide of westerners interested in Buddhism who demand that it be “westernized” asap, stripped of ritual and anything “Asian.” The truth is, most of us have barely scratched the surface, and already we’re making judgments about which parts of Buddhism are “essential” and which aren’t.

The more time I spend with this remarkable tradition, the more grateful I am to the Asian teachers for their care and practice through the centuries. I feel no rush to “westernize” anything. First we should be sure we can maintain the teachings with the same care that brought them to us.

These words are indeed of some comfort to me, but they fail to deal with a central concern in a couple ofprevious posts. Aside from the many issues with what “Western” means, the discussion of “Western Buddhism” is still one that marginalizes Asian Buddhists of the West in the very community where we comprise the outright majority. Apparently we may be welcome into Western Buddhism, our contributions admired, our history acknowledged—but only so long as our say is not proportional to our greater numbers. This Western Buddhist rhetoric is so offensive precisely due to its implicit suggestion that Asian Westerners and our culture do not properly belong in the West.

I have a hunch that there will never be a distinct Western Buddhism, so the very discussion of it may be in vain. We live in a world that is ever more globalized, interconnected, transnational and multicultural in ways that defy historical precedent. Imagine what the Buddhist blogosphere will be like with millions of Chinese Buddhist bloggers! What this increasing entanglement also suggests, however, is that while there may not emerge a “Western” Buddhism, Buddhism in general will appropriate more “Western” features. And perhaps the West will also become more Buddhist.

East Side/West Side

| arun

In her most recent post, Barbara O’Brien wades back into the Western vsAsian Buddhist debate. She proposes that “the big, honking issue in Western Buddhism is what parts of Asian Buddhism are essential, and what parts are not?” Her perspective however suffers from a common flaw also held by Jerry Kolber’s post on merchandizing Buddhism. Namely, it marginalizes the majority of Western Buddhists.

The majority of Western Buddhists are after all Asian Buddhists who practice various unique styles of Buddhism here in the West. By framing her thesis as she does, in one fell swoop Barbara relegates the Asian majority to the fringes of Western Buddhism and places her cultural perspective smack in the center. She almost deserves points for literary sumo, but her approach is regrettably more the norm than the exception in Western Buddhist discourse.

Then she goes on to tie our popular misconceptions to our culture.

The meat of her post is on Asian “folk” Buddhism, presented in contrast to the original teachings. The Asian “folk” Buddhism conveys karma as fate and rebirth as reincarnation of a singular soul. But there is nothing fundamentally Asian about these beliefs, as her words suggest. These ideas stem from simplistic ideas of the self, a problem not unique to Asian folk. The concepts of fate and reincarnation have ancient and enduring roots in Western culture, and self-styled Western Buddhists have already been (mis)interpreting karma and rebirth accordingly.

Buddhism in the West will likely have to deal with these misconceptions, home-grown or otherwise, in the same way that Buddhism in the East has had to: with study, practice and tolerance.

Shambhala Diversity

| arun

Given my previous criticism of the racial “diversity” of the Shambhala Sun staff, the title of this post may appear to be tongue-in-cheek. Not so this time! While fixing links on this blog, I stumbled across Shambhala’s diversity page, which has a very honest (and I might even say welcoming) feel to it:

What we share as a community is a desire to lead sane, dignified, and confident lives. Through the practice of meditation we cultivate the capacity to be fully open to our experience, and the ability to respond to everyday life situations with greater clarity and respect—respect not only for our life situations and ourselves, but for all individuals, social groups and cultures as well.

This does not mean that Shambhala is a perfect society. If you visit one of our centres, you may find that it does not mirror in every way the characteristics of the people who live in the cities or towns where our centres are located. But please note that it is the intention—and the stated policy—of our centres to welcome everyone who enters. This intention is at the very core of the Shambhala Buddhist teachings.

Now I have to give major props to their very impressive diversity resources page. If you’re interested in diversity, please check it out and let me know what you think. I haven’t even begun to read through it, but you can be sure I will follow through on every one of those links. Thanks Shambhala!

Just Another Monk’s Story

| arun

Bhante Yuttadhammo’s case is over. Charges dismissed. (Congrats!) He writes:

At this point, I have to express my appreciation for the people who have supported me over the past five, six months. There’ve been a lot of people upset or at least unsupportive of my choices in life, but in the end, when the chips are down, it’s amazing how people can just come together and pitch in to help a guy out of a jam… even a monk-guy. Thanks everybody, you know who you are.

You can read his entire account on his blog. If you want an American Buddhist story, then look no further!

Asian-Free Buddhism

| arun

Thanks to Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, I was pointed to a Beliefnet post by Jerry Kolber, where he explicitly argues for stripping Buddhism of its Asian features.

Image is everything, and unless we figure out a way to make the image of the Buddha hip and cool, we’d be better off figuring out some other way to present the techniques without the awesome smiling face of our Eastern inspiration.

Bless his non-soul for proposing a sincere and unequivocal argument for whitewashing Buddhism. He has no compunction whatsoever about smugly proclaiming that Buddhism in America is far better off if only we can ditch the Asian guy. And he is like a gift that keeps on giving, except that I really don’t care for this narishkeyt…

Buddhism in America is at the long end of the initial boom sparked in the 60’s among intellectuals and artists who craved that elite connection with the east.

With a single sentence, he dons the hat of a historical revisionist and wipes American Buddhist history clean of its Asian affliction. The author disregards the basic fact that Buddhism in America enjoys an unbroken history that stretches back over 100 years. For all those years, it is Asian Americans who have constituted the outright numerical majority of Buddhist Americans—even today, we are still the majority. Plain and simple, Buddhism in America wouldn’t be half of what it is without its Asian American members, and for Jerry Kolber to patently neglect our contributions with utter impunity smacks entirely of excessive hegemonic privilege.

Are Only Asians in the Pure Land?

| arun

Perusing a paragraph brimming with parochial perspectives on Buddhist Asian Americans, my attention was drawn to a single question pointed at those of Japanese heritage:

So would a Jodo Shinshu sangha in a Japanese neighborhood alter their appearance or layout easily because a few White folk (or any person of color) don’t feel comfortable?

A general problem with rhetorical questions, such as the title of this post, is that in practice they are often more fatuous than illuminating. This homespun musing suffers from several questionable premises. For example, there is the tacit lumping of Japanese American cultural groups, regardless of the stark cultural differences, say, from issei all the way down through yonsei. This point is pertinent as the mores of yonsei+ are often characterized as more in tune with the average non-Japanese American. And exactly which hypothetical Japanese neighborhood are we talking about? Keep in mind I live in one of the most Japanese neighborhoods in North America, and there really aren’t that many Japanese here. As for what the Shin temples here would do—they have done what just about every Shin temple in America has done. They have brought up the issue of accepting more non-Japanese into their congregations and wrestled with what that entails. In fact, I’d love to know if there’s any American Shin temple that’s managed through the past ten years without confronting the issue of expanding membership diversity. I won’t deny that there are individuals who have resisted Shin Buddhism becoming less “Japanese”—but they still have taken on the issue of diversity, albeit reluctantly. And there aren’t just “a few” white folk involved or interested in Shin Buddhism. That’s a whole ’nother post. Underneath all my nitpicking with the terminological inexactitude, my real gripe is with an even more troubling premise: that the comparison between Asian and white American sanghas is even a fair one. I’m talking about white privilege. When we start making the claim that white sanghas and white Buddhist publications are no more segregated than Asian temples and Asian-language Buddhist newsletters, we are jumping straight into the camp of separate-but-equal. You might as well have your white Buddhist country club while you’re at it.

Practice Past Authenticity

| arun

Karen Maezen Miller writes of her Japanese garden as an analogy to the discussion of authenticity and context of American Buddhism:

Shortly after my husband and I moved into our house with its old garden, we invited the experts and academics over tell us what to do. Some would say that our backyard is Southern California’s oldest private Japanese garden, dating from 1916. Some would say that it isn’t; that by virtue of geography, topography, plant selection, and cultural anthropology, it can’t ever be Japanese. We were twisted into a fit by these and other debates about the right way to care for the place. Heaven forbid we make a fraudulent move when we were already paralyzed by ignorance from the get go!

She makes a worthy point that we shouldn’t let ourselves be paralyzed into inaction while we fret over the authenticity of our practice. It’s worth noting that this very same discussion occurs frequently in the Buddhist Asian American community, as I was regretfully honored to be reminded of the other weekend. As Miller writes: Practice is practice. Debates, however, are debates.

Teachers of Imperfect Reputation

| arun

A few lines from Nathan on Dangerous Harvests caught my eye.

I’ve been reading Sogyal Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying before my bedtime meditation. I’m aware that Rinpoche was the subject of multiple scandals during the 1990’s, so his reputation isn’t so good I suppose. But regardless of reputation, and issues with his “in the flesh” teaching, this book is filled with practice gems, and it’s illumination of the Bardo teachings for modern practitioners is extremely important.

He didn’t dwell on this thought, so I’m expanding on it from my own perspective. Words are not necessarily false because the speaker is imperfect, but likewise nor do wise and truthful words imply the speaker’s perfection. In building new Buddhist institutions, we often have to wrestle with teachers of less-than-desirable reputations and even contradictory teachings; this dilemma applies almost everywhere. Regardless, I tend to believe that if you have well-fitted teachers, they will help guide you to be a better person, and those close to you will notice this change.