The gathering took place at the Franklin Street community center of Soka Gakkai International-USA, a 12 million-strong Buddhist association that promotes Buddhist chants, meditation and world peace around the globe. There are approximately 4,000 members in New Jersey.
Attendees ate barbecued food and joined in an African dance and hopscotch as they reflected on how their Buddhist beliefs related to Juneteenth.
“It’s about the dignity of every human being and the right to pursue their happiness,” said Courtenaye Lawrence of East Orange, who became a Buddhist in 1969. “You can turn a negative thing into a positive thing. People shouldn’t be deprived to seek opportunities to change.”
While most American Buddhists don’t belong to Soka Gakkai, the organization is one of the very, very few Buddhist groups that organized a Juneteenth celebration, not to mention that a member of congress belongs to SGI too. Now that’s a picture of Western Buddhism that you don’t usually see in Shambhala Sun or Tricycle.
I suspect that the first eyebrow-raising moment in Chen’s book for educated, liberal white Americans like me—who admire the Dalai Lama and regard the rigors of Zen practice with awe—will be when they read that Buddhism, at least in its traditional syncretic form, stands in low repute among Chinese immigrants. It is grandmother’s religion: rustic, ritualistic, superstitious and profoundly unmodern, a part of the immigrant baggage they are only too happy to jettison.
It is also a religion about which most have had little reason to learn anything at all. When they say they’re Buddhist to fend off their Chinese Christian neighbors’ invitations, they embrace what they had previously regarded as a stigmatized identity. It is a welcome discovery for them that a few of the sparsely distributed Chinese Buddhist temples around them (one-quarter as many as the Chinese Protestant churches) articulate a modernized humanistic Buddhism that was becoming widespread in Taiwan only as they were leaving for the U.S. in the 1980s. Eventually some of them convert to this Buddhism, which Chen calls an explicit religion (in contrast to an “embedded” religion).
These newly “explicit” Buddhists will still be lumped in with “embedded” Buddhists if we divide the community in terms of traditional/ethnic versus Western. Good food for thought. I’ll see if I can go check out this book.
I’ve flipped back and forth between here and Dharma Folk to encourage other writers to post more freely on the group site about topics other than social issues in the Buddhist community. But two important things happened: (1) the group told me to get over myself and reminded me that they weren’t posting as much as me because they had other priorities (not because of me), and (2) several individuals have since suggested I keep the Angry Asian over there, so now I have this Angry Asian Buddhist blogspot site, and I don’t know what to do with it.
Some ideas bubbled up late last night not long after I finally (gave in and) joined Twitter. I’ll keep this site for commentary on the Buddhist community, but I’ll try to keep it short. I was really surprised to see how many Buddhist Twitterers there are out there. I’m still learning my way. I’m sure that before long, I’ll be one of those annoying people who can’t spend half a heartbeat away from the internet. Hopefully I don’t go and drown in this sea of information!
So this post comes a bit late, although today I’m at at Wat Mettavanaram celebrating Vesak. There are a lot of things that Asian Americans do on Buddhist holidays, much of which includes eating, talking, blessings, performances, merit making, sometimes sitting… did I mention eating? I always imagined that going to temple for Buddhist holidays would be a really big deal for non-Asian American Buddhists. When else do you get a free-for-all of “authentic” Southeast Asian cuisine? Of course, at the same time I appreciate these temples not being overrun by clueless DSLR-laden tourists. Looking over my blog feed, I’m reminded again of how one of the largest differences between Buddhist communities in the United States is by the types of holidays celebrated. This is true both within and across “ethnic” divisions. I might not feel more in tune with non-Asian American Buddhists should they observe the same holidays that I hold dear, but the fact they don’t celebrate them makes me wonder what’s celebrated at all. Regardless, I ought to get back to the festivities…
With Tricycle‘s Summer 2009 issue currently online, I decided to take a sneak peak. There are notable articles regarding climate change, the Tibetan diaspora and an issue close to my heart: the state of the nunhood in Thailand. But in spite of all the intriguing titles and informative content, they reduced their writers of Asian heritage to a measly 6.4 percent. If you forgot why I hold the Tricycle Foundation to higher standards of inclusiveness, then simply take a look at the foundation’s own claims:
The Tricycle Foundation is dedicated to making Buddhist views, values, and practices broadly available. In 1991 the Foundation launched Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, the first magazine intended to present Buddhist perspectives to a Western readership. Tricycle soon became the leading journal of Buddhism in the West, where it continues to be the most inclusive and widely read vehicle for the dissemination of Buddhist perspectives.
Look at these words: the most inclusive. I am aghast that they can shamelessly make such claims when it turns out that Tricycle continues to devote, on average, less than 9 percent of its bylines to authors of Asian heritage. In a community where at least half of the members are Asian American, this exclusion is obscene. I wonder what they could have possibly meant by calling themselves “inclusive” — I can only imagine that these words are intended as a subtle dig against Shambhala Sun.
Following a suggestion, I went through the last 15 issues online and counted up the bylines. (Beyond Winter 2005, I started finding online articles with omitted bylines.) You can see the results in the image to the right. At least over the past four years, Tricycle has continually declined to welcome Asian American Buddhists into its ranks, with the exception of the occasional token minorities. Someday, I’ll just sit down with a stack of all the issues back to 1991, and then I’ll have some real fun.
One thing that’s occurred to me is that I would like to make a difference. My writing is about as influential as Free Burma activists trying to take on the Burmese junta. So how can we get Tricycle to represent? I know a few of the contributors to Tricycle, and there are a few more contributors who keep an eye on my blog. If they truly care about Asian American voices, then maybe the next time they have an opportunity to write a piece for Tricycle, they might ask the publisher whether any consideration had been given towards extending more opportunity to Asian Americans. And don’t forget other minorities too! Would anyone care? I’ll ask around.
Thanks to helpful comments over at Dharma Folk, I was alerted to two issues that I overlooked. I’ve since changed my number yet again. The new adjusted figure is still 1.9 million Asian American Buddhists (current estimate: 1.862m; previously: 1.902m) out of 3.3 million Buddhists nationally.
First, I’ve been using the word “count” interchangeably with “sample”, and this practice is misleading. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey wasn’t a census. A sample of the American demographic was taken and then weighted according to national parameters using a type of regression. Proper samples often get a pretty good look at demographics, but sometimes the sample is skewed in favor of one demographic over another, as is the case with the Pew’s Survey. My goal has been to adjust the Pew numbers to compensate for this skewedness. When I said “undercounted” what I meant to say was “the underestimated population of a certain demographic.”
Second, in at least one of my adjustments, I made an assumption I’d like to take back. I assumed that the underestimated number of Buddhists in Hawai‘i (106,021) were all Asian American. I’d like to be a little more conservative and assume that this underestimated number be proportioned according to Hawai‘is racial/ethnic makeup, leaving 61,693 in the Asian American box (that includes multiethnic individuals). The end result doesn’t change much, but I hope it’s some comfort to know that I made the effort to take these issues into account.
Back to blogger I am. I couldn’t understand how to use the “Compose” option on Blogger and quickly went back to blogging on Dharma Folk. Every time I added/changed text or a photo, everything else changed in a way I hadn’t anticipated, and I decided to throw it all out the window. But after Dogo Barry Graham’s comment, I realized I decided to try again with HTML…
I previously provided what I felt was a reasonable estimate of Asian American Buddhists. But thanks to some comments from Rev. Danny Fisher, I decided to rerun the numbers. The new figure points to a total of 3.3 million Buddhists in the United States, 57% of whom are Asian American.
Rev. Danny Fisher pointed out that at least one figure was highly suspect. So, upon reading even more closely than before, I noticed that the Pew Forum found that in a purely bilingual survey, 65% of Latinos identified as Catholic, but in an English-only survey, a mere 43% of Latinos identified as Catholic. The graphic above illustrates what happens if we add to the Pew Forum the missing numbers for Hawai‘i (106,000), expand the number of Asian American Buddhists by the proportion by which Asian Americans in general were undersampled (76%) and also by the proportion by which Latino Catholics were undercounted in an English-only survey (51%). This brings the size of the Asian American Buddhist community to the sizable number of 1.9 million.
Oy, I’m having so much trouble blogging with blogger. Especially when it comes to posting photos. It was so much easier on WordPress. I have a number of posts that I’d like to publish, but everything goes crazy when I start trying to put in graphics. For now, I’ll just keep on posting on Dharma Folk…
Last year, I began a blog called Dharma Folk with a friend who goes by the online nom de plume John. I’ve had a great time writing on that blog and exploring issues in the Buddhist community. But Dharma Folk is a group blog, and I get the feeling that my posts have been drowning out the voices of my cobloggers, notably John, Oz and kudos. A couple of them would likely be much more happy to write on the blog if they knew their words weren’t going to be hidden between posts by the Angry Asian Buddhist. So I’m moving all that rubbish over here. As of today, I’ve got 27 Angry Asian Buddhist posts over at Dharma Folk. It all started when I was trying to find resources for Asian American Buddhists, followed by two periods when I lashed out against the hegemony of white Buddhists, first in the blogosphere and then in print. Most recently, a rant that began about the exclusion of Asian American Buddhists in a Buddhadharma piece has developed into Asian Meter, an analysis of the under-representation of Asian American Buddhists in high profile Buddhist publications, which in turn has sent me reviewing the statistics in the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. The idea for “Angry Asian Buddhist” comes from Phil Yu’s Angry Asian Man blog. The name combines the irony of “Angry Asian” and “Angry Buddhist”, which are terms meant to counter the notion that all Asians are polite and submissive or that all Buddhists are calm and detached. As the Man himself explains it:
I’m not as angry as you think. Yes, racism angers me. But I’m not here sitting in front of the computer, hating whitey and plotting revolution. This is just a subject that has always interested me — pointing out racism and noting any and all appearances of Asians in mass media and popular culture (the good and the bad). It’s something I care about. So I’ve created a little space on the web for it all… I suppose the angry part sometimes scares people, but rest assured, I’m a pretty civil, reasonable guy. Just don’t cross me.
The main difference is that Phil Yu is funny, while I can get pretty snarky. I’m not doing this for money or for fame, I just want to share my thoughts and my occasional research.
