The path of liberation taught by the Buddha was reshaped time and again as it spread throughout Asia, and new, indigenous forms of it are taking shape today in the vibrant Buddhist communities of the United States. The process of adapting the dharma to a new culture is highly complicated, involving the adaptation of religious practices to a new environment, the association of formerly unrelated ideas, and the recasting of received values into new ethical language. It takes many centuries for the dharma to become fully indigenized in a new setting because the immense work of cross-cultural translation requires the creativity of individuals but is at the same time essentially a collective undertaking. Buddhism has become a significant religious presence in this country only in the last few decades, so it makes more sense, strictly speaking, to talk in terms of there being many Buddhisms in America now rather than an American Buddhism per se.
However, two broad developments shed light on the current Buddhist landscape and suggest some of the forces at work in the creation of American forms of the dharma. The first development involves specific people and events that played integral roles in the introduction of Buddhism to this country. They not only helped to shape some important forms of American Buddhism but also provided convert Buddhists with both a history and a kind of indigenous spiritual lineage.
The second development sheds light on American Buddhism more indirectly. Immigration has played a powerful role in American religious history. Over the long term, it has reshaped entire communities and their religious traditions and has in the process altered the American ethnic, political, and spiritual landscape. A grasp of how immigration operated in the past provides some insight into how immigrant Buddhism may adapt to this country, even if it is too early to assess adequately how these adaptations will contribute to American forms of the dharma in the twenty-first century.
Early American Buddhist History
Many convert Buddhists see themselves as part of an alternative religious or spiritual tradition in this country that can be traced back to the decades before the Civil War. The historical accuracy of this claim is less important than the fact that it has created for converts a series of precedents and a sense of having an indigenous lineage. More generally, it also connects them to the nation’s culture and history, which enables converts to select elements from America’s past in forging new forms of the dharma. From a more strictly historical point of view, this lineage provides a glimpse of Americans’ understanding of Buddhism as it evolved from romantic, often uninformed, simplicity to the complexity found in the community today.
The source of this lineage is often traced back to the Transcendentalists and America’s early romantics such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry David Thoreau. Like romantics in Europe, they became fascinated with the religions of Asia, and their enthusiasm helped to shape the popular reception of those religions by Americans in subsequent decades. These men were among the first generation of western writers and intellectuals to have at their disposal the Hindu and Buddhist texts that scholars had been at work translating for several generations. The romantics’ exposure to Buddhism was often very limited, but what they lacked in knowledge they compensated for with ardor and creativity.
It is easy to overestimate the importance of Asian religion to Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and others in their generation. Their example as creative writers and alternative religious thinkers inspired by the East is what really places them at the head of this lineage. Their importance to American Buddhism rests primarily in the fact that they inspired another generation of American seekers about a century later, the poets and writers of the Beat generation such as Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and others. The Beat poets played critical roles by drawing Americans’ attention to Buddhism and creatively appropriating the dharma in ways that inspired many in the convert community. The Transcendentalists, Beats, and a range of other writers are responsible for helping to indigenize the dharma through literary means. Buddhist images and ideas are finding expression in a wide range of fine and popular arts today, but Buddhism, particularly Zen, has had a substantial impact on American literature, particularly poetry, for several generations.
The Theosophical Society, which was founded in New York City in the 1870s, is another important development in this American lineage. Its founders, Henry Steel Olcott, a disaffected Presbyterian, and Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a naturalized Russian immigrant, were probably America’s first convert Buddhists. They took refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and sangha in Sri Lanka after moving to south Asia from New York. Olcott later became prominent when he helped Buddhist leaders in Sri Lanka defend themselves against Christian missionaries. He also worked to create a united front among Theravada and Mahayana Buddhist leaders in south, southeast, and northern Asia in an effort to resist the encroachment of Christianity in the age of European imperialism. Olcott is now regarded as a Sri Lankan national hero. Blavatsky and Annie Besant, Blavatsky’s successor as head of the Theosophical Society, are remembered today as innovative spiritual leaders and as great sympathizers with the religious traditions of Asia.
Theosophy is a characteristically nineteenth-century and Victorian development in this American Buddhist lineage, insofar as it was a kind of fusion between East and West at a time when there was little real communication between the two. The Theosophical Society became one of the most important points of contact and continued to function in this way for many decades. Many Theosophists claim Theosophy is a form of Buddhism, but it is best understood as a hybrid modern spirituality that draws upon occultism, scientific thought, elements of Christianity and Judaism, and both Hinduism and Buddhism. Many features of Theosophy can be found today in New Age religious movements that are quite distinct from Buddhism. Some older convert Buddhists were Theosophists before embracing more orthodox, Asian forms of Buddhism.
The World’s Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in 1893 is generally seen as a pivotal moment for this lineage. The Parliament was convened in conjunction with the World’s Columbian Exposition, and was hailed at the time as the most comprehensive interreligious gathering in history, with delegates from around the globe representing ten different religious traditions. In many respects, the Parliament was most important as a domestic American religious event. It marked the emergence of Jews and Catholics as coequals with Protestants in the American religious mainstream and the coming of age of the first wave of American religious feminists. The glory of the Parliament, however, is usually recalled in terms of its contributions to the history of the encounter between East and West, which is somewhat ironic because most Jews and Christians in attendance displayed attitudes toward the religions of Asia that were at best ill-informed and condescending. The Parliament did, however, mark the formal debut of Asian religions, particularly Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, in the United States. It was of sufficient importance that a larger, more complex assembly was convened in Chicago in 1993 to celebrate its centennial.
Although Buddhism played a somewhat secondary role at the original Parliament, there are at least four reasons why it is a significant event in American Buddhist history. First of all, Asian Buddhists presented Theravada, Zen, Nichiren, and other forms of Buddhism before a largely sympathetic audience, so that some Americans began to see Buddhism as a highly variegated complex of traditions, rather than as a monolithic entity. The Parliament also marked a point at which Buddhism was beginning to be understood within the context of modernity. Representatives such as Anagarika Dharmapala, a Theravada Buddhist and protégé of Olcott, and Shaku Soyen, a Rinzai Zen monk and priest, were important leaders of modern Asian Buddhism. They presented the dharma as a fully up-to-date, living tradition at a time when most westerners still thought of Buddhism as a mysterious form of mysticism, exotic and hoary with antiquity. These Asian leaders also asserted that Buddhism, with its nontheistic and essentially psychological orientation, could better address the growing schism between science and religion than Christianity, a point that continues to be emphasized by many Buddhists today.
Held in Chicago, Illinois in 1893, the World’s Parliament of Religions was a pivotal event in the early history of the transmission of the dharma to the United States. Delegates from the Nichiren, Zen, and Theravada traditions of Asia, seen to the right of the speaker, received an enthusiastic reception from the American audience.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN JOHN HENRY BARROWS, THE WORLD’S PARLIAMENT OF RELIGIONS (CHICAGO: PARLIAMENT PUBLISHING CO., 1893).
The Parliament is also seen as the beginning of the modern interreligious dialogue movement. A number of organizations devoted to cultivating understanding among the religions of the world date their origins from the Parliament. Such dialogue came to play an important role in the twentieth century, as globalization and intimate contacts among people of various religions increased decade by decade. Dialogue is also an essential element of the contemporary American Buddhist landscape, where converts and immigrants from a wide variety of traditions are engaged in conversation about how they differ and what they share. Dialogue among Buddhists, Christians, and Jews is also fostering greater understanding, aiding Buddhists’ efforts to enter the American religious mainstream.
Above all else, however, the Parliament is a historic landmark because it set in motion the first Buddhist missions to the United States. After the Parliament, Dharmapala made a number of American tours, during which he encountered many earnest and intelligent people interested in Buddhism, although he grew weary of the self-indulgent quest for easy mysticism he also found among American seekers. Shaku Soyen made a number of tours as well, but more important, several of his Japanese colleagues and students, among them Sokei-an, Nyogen Senzaki, and D. T. Suzuki, followed in his footsteps. Their work in the first decades of this century effectively laid the foundations for American Zen Buddhism. Soyen also inspired Paul Carus, a scientific naturalist from Illinois, to become America’s first major promoter and publisher of Buddhist scripture.
At around the turn of the century, a small number of Americans, at the most a thousand or two, were engaged in a conversation, largely carried on in print, about the demands of the American environment and the viability of Buddhism in it. They asked the kind of fundamental questions that had to be posed before a conscious process of translating the dharma into an American idiom could really begin. Could the teachings of the Buddha about the nonexistence of the self be reconciled with American individualism? Could a tradition emphasizing contemplation thrive in a culture known for its extroversion and activism? Would Americans embrace a nontheistic tradition? Wasn’t a religion based on the premise that human life is characterized by suffering too negative and world-renouncing to appeal to a nation known for its optimism? Eighty years later, these questions still elicit a wide range of answers among American converts and within the Buddhist immigrant community.
The character of the lineage and the quality of Americans’ opportunities to encounter Buddhism changed significantly in the early decades of the twentieth century, when the Rinzai Zen colleagues and students of Shaku Soyen arrived in this country from Japan. Sokei-an was Soyen’s dharma brother, which meant they shared the same teacher. He arrived in the United States in 1906, eventually taking up residence in New York City, but he returned to Japan for a time to complete his Zen training and, in 1929, was authorized to teach. He was later ordained a Zen priest. After returning to New York, he founded the Buddhist Society of America in 1931, later renamed the First Zen Institute, which was among the first Buddhist institutions established to serve native-born Americans. Ruth Fuller was among the leading lights of the Buddhist Society. She later married Sokei-an, eventually studied in a monastery in Japan, and is now celebrated as one of America’s pioneering Buddhist women.
During this same period, Nyogen Senzaki, a student of Soyen, arrived on the West Coast. On the order of Soyen, he made no attempt to teach Buddhism in the United States for seventeen years, but spent this time familiarizing himself with American norms and mores. He worked for a time as a houseboy and tried his hand at farming and at the hotel business in San Francisco. In 1922, after he had fulfilled his vow to his teacher, he opened an informal group for Buddhist study and practice, which he called “the floating zendo” because it had no fixed headquarters. He first located it in San Francisco and then in Los Angeles, where he taught Zen meditation and Japanese culture to both Japanese Americans and European Americans. His poetry, such as this piece composed in 1945 on the anniversary of the death of Soyen, poignantly reflects his experience as an early immigrant Buddhist teacher.
For forty years, I have not seen
My teacher Soyen Shaku, in person.
I have carried his Zen in my empty fist,
Wandering ever since in this strange land.
...............................................................
The cold rain purifies everything on the earth
In the great city of Los Angeles, today.
I open my fist and spread the fingers
At the street corner in the evening rush hour.1
The fledgling Zen organizations founded by Sokei-an and Nyogen Senzaki became pioneering outposts for the few Americans who expressed an interest in the dharma in the early decades of this century. The approach to teaching they shared also anticipated a pattern that recurred later in the convert community. Both Sokei-an and Senzaki were trained in the rigorous regime of Zen monasticism, but they shared a critical attitude toward its institutional forms. They were also both attracted to the adventure of teaching the dharma and its practices to American laity, who were wholly oblivious to the traditionalism of Zen and its long institutional history. This combination of monastically trained Japanese teachers and American students with lay status and lifestyle was to become common in convert Buddhism in this country, even as Americans became much more sophisticated in their understanding of Japanese history and traditions.
Most American converts today have not, in any formal and traditional sense of the term, become Buddhist monastics. By and large, they have not been willing to submit themselves to the kind of institutional rigor found in Asian monasteries. Most are not celibate and need to balance practice with the demands of the nuclear family. But most have also not adopted the Asian lay role of providing support for monastics as a form of religious activity. As a result, most convert Buddhists are not quite monks and nuns and yet not quite typical laypeople, and convert Buddhism has yet to develop a strong, traditional monastic community. Many converts today applaud the absence of a Buddhist monastic tradition in this country and see mostly positive results from reshaping Buddhist practice to suit the needs of laypeople. Others, however, express concern that over the long term the lack of a strong American monastic tradition will hamper the growth of the dharma and undermine the integrity of the Buddha’s teachings.
The issue was anticipated by a third figure during this early period, a native-born American named Dwight Goddard, a Protestant missionary first drawn to the dharma in the 1920s, when he lived and practiced for a time in a Kyoto monastery. Goddard was convinced the lay approach was inadequate for forging an American dharma. “The weakness of this method seems to be that coming under the influence of Buddhism for only two or three hours a week,” he wrote, “and then returning to the cares and distractions of the worldly life, they [laity] fall back into the conventional life of the world.”2 Goddard sought to remedy this by founding the Followers of Buddha in 1934, which he intended to be an American monastic movement. He envisioned two monasteries, one in Vermont and another in California, to serve as homes for celibate renunciates who would devote their lives to the dharma with the support of American lay Buddhists. Goddard’s vision did not materialize, but in 1932 he published The Buddhist Bible, an anthology of Theravada and Mahayana material, which several decades later introduced Jack Kerouac and others in the Beat generation to important Buddhist sutras.
The “Zen boom” of the 1950s is considered a major watershed in this American Buddhist history and lineage. Two individuals, D. T. Suzuki, a lay student of Shaku Soyen, and Alan Watts, an Episcopalian priest and popularizer of eastern religions, were instrumental in introducing Buddhism, and the Zen tradition in particular, to the United States. Together with the Beats, they helped to thrust Buddhism into the American mainstream. Prior to and through the 1950s, the dharma had remained more or less confined to bohemian quarters and was the preoccupation of a small handful of spiritual seekers. In the course of the next decade, however, Buddhism began to turn into something that resembled a mass religious movement.
D. T. Suzuki first came to the United States in 1897 as a young man, and for eleven years worked as a translator of Buddhist material for Open Court Publishing, a press run by Paul Carus. In the early decades of the twentieth century, Suzuki moved between Japan and the Sokei-an circle in New York. During the 1950s, however, he taught Buddhism for six years at Columbia University, where his lectures caught the attention of many literary and academic figures, as well as younger New York poets and bohemians at the core of the Beat movement. Suzuki’s Columbia lectures also caught the attention of publications such as Vogue and Time magazine, which helped to move Zen toward the mainstream. The Columbia lectures, Time reported, “are drawing a wide variety as well as a large number of students since the war. Painters and psychiatrists seem especially interested in Zen, he finds. Psychoanalysts, says Dr. Suzuki, his tiny eyes twinkling under wing-like eyebrows, have a lot to learn from Zen.”3 Suzuki became the outstanding figure in American Buddhism at mid-century. He also helped to inaugurate a dialogue between psychotherapy and Buddhism, which has played an increasingly important, sometimes controversial, role in the Americanization of the dharma.
Four years later, in 1958, Time charted the Zen boom by devoting an article to Alan Watts, noting that “Zen Buddhism is growing more chic by the minute.”4 Watts, an Englishman, had explored Buddhism for years, first in England, then in New York, and later in California. In the 1950s and early ’60s, he became a widely read author on Buddhism, Christian mysticism, psychotherapy, and spirituality. His book Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen, published in 1959, remains a valuable glimpse into American Buddhism on the eve of the 1960s. Watts tended to dismiss Beat Buddhists like Jack Kerouac as self-indulgent dabblers. He was only slightly less critical of Square Zen, by which he meant the Buddhism of Japanese immigrants and of monastic establishments of Japan and their small circle of American followers. However, Watts praised what he saw as the true spirit of Zen, which he presented as a kind of free-form, humanistic spirituality infused with creative potential. His effort to popularize the dharma was immensely successful. The individualistic, upbeat, and humanistic quality of his version of Buddhism and its emphasis on creative self-expression fit well with the expansive idealism of the early 1960s.
The Beat movement also played an important, and at times highly controversial, role in the popularization of Buddhism. Early Beats such as Kerouac, Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder helped to Americanize the dharma through their creative use of Buddhism in poetry and other literature. Kerouac became the archetypal spiritual rebel; Ginsberg, the ecstatic and ironic holy man. Gary Snyder, who served as the inspiration for Japhy Ryder, a central character in Kerouac’s seminal novel, The Dharma Bums, is now the most highly regarded of all of them. Unlike many others in the Beat generation, Snyder made an early decision to cultivate Zen in a sustained way, and he spent much of the 1960s practicing in a Japanese monastery. While in Japan, he also married and began to raise a family, and published his first two books of poetry. In his later poetry and essays, Snyder was a pioneer in linking Buddhism to broadly American themes such as Native American myths, nature, and ecology.
The publication of Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums in 1958 marked the emergence of Beat Zen, one important development during the Zen boom of the 1950s. The book subsequently played a key role in introducing Americanized ideas about Buddhism to the generation that came of age in the 1960s, and continues to interest young people in the dharma.
VIKING PRESS
The Beats selectively identified themselves with the Transcendentalist generation and, as with their role models, much of their writing was the expression of a spiritual revolt with political overtones. To the degree that they cast this revolt in Buddhist terms, they paved the way for identifying the dharma with social and political criticism, a trend that would become more pronounced in some quarters in the following decades. For instance, Kerouac, who was by and large not a political thinker, saw Buddhism as a vehicle to protest conformity, as when he wrote around 1954:
Self be your lantern/self be your guide—
Thus Spake Tathagata
Warning of radios
That would come
Some day
And make people
Listen to automatic
Snyder was more outspoken, libertarian, and utopian in some of his writing about the social implications of the dharma moving West. “The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been the individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both,” he wrote in 1961. For Snyder, Buddhist morality implied
supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest, pacifism, voluntary poverty and even gentle violence if it comes to a matter of restraining some impetuous redneck. It means affirming the widest possible spectrum of non-harmful individual behavior—defending the right of individuals to smoke hemp, eat peyote, be polygynous, polyandrous or homosexual. Worlds of behavior and custom long banned by the Judeo-Capitalist-Christian-Marxist West.6
As Snyder’s remarks suggest, the Beats also forged a link between the pursuit of enlightenment and the use of drugs, an association not wholly without Asian precedents that became widespread in the counterculture in the 1960s. This left an indelible impression on many, but by no means all, who are now in the older generation in the convert community. Tricycle, a highly regarded Buddhist review associated with a Beat-hip strand in convert Buddhism, conducted a poll among its readers in 1996 regarding the relationship between Buddhism and the use of psychedelics. Of 1,454 people who replied, 89 percent stated they engaged in Buddhist practice, and 83 percent said they had also taken psychedelics. Over 40 percent said that their interest in Buddhism had been sparked by taking LSD or mescaline. While statistics indicated that most respondents no longer took drugs, 71 percent believed that “psychedelics are not a path but they can provide a glimpse of reality to which Buddhist practice points”; 51 percent saw no fundamental conflict between Buddhism and psychedelics, while 49 percent expressed the conviction that drug use and Buddhism do not mix.7
Suzuki, Watts, and the Beats helped to create a distinctive American approach to Buddhism, which many regard in hindsight as both highly creative and deeply problematic. But it influenced many converts in the baby-boom generation. Their introduction to the dharma was largely through books, and they easily drew from them the conclusion that the pursuit of enlightenment could be highly individualized and personalized, filtered through humanistic psychology, augmented through the use of mind-altering substances, pursued without sustained discipline, and divorced from institutions. Many Americans who became involved in Buddhism in the 1960s had little idea what they were getting themselves into. Most who stayed and developed deep commitments to Buddhist practice eventually distanced themselves from the more extreme expressions of free-form spirit promoted in the 1950s.
“The Sixties,” a phrase that generally refers to a period from about 1963 to the mid-’70s, are likely to be looked back upon for some time as the most important turning point in American Buddhist history. At around that time, convert Buddhism in this country grew from a small community of seekers preoccupied primarily with Zen to a far larger and more differentiated community, as people in the burgeoning counterculture went in search of spiritual alternatives and found them in Zen, Nichiren, Tibetan, Theravada, and other kinds of Buddhism, whose teachers they discovered among immigrants to this country and overseas. The thin line of historical precedents that ran from the antebellum period to the 1950s dramatically broadened in the course of those years, creating the foundation for what is today the vibrant complexity of American convert Buddhism.
The ’60s also had a dramatic impact on immigrant Buddhism, because migration from Asia soared after changes in immigration law in 1965, a result not apparent to most observers until the 1980s. Immigration had helped to shape American Buddhism in the past, when Chinese and Japanese Buddhists arrived on the West Coast as early as the 1840s. But the far larger post-1965 wave of Asian immigration introduced a wide range of traditions into American Buddhism, with a long-term impact that is undeniable but is at present extremely difficult to gauge.
A Note on Immigration
The importance of immigration to American Buddhism cannot be overstated. America’s first Zen teachers, Sokei-an and Nyogen Senzaki, were immigrants, as were a good many of the Theravada bhikkhus, Zen masters, and Tibetan lamas who taught some of the most prominent leaders in the convert community today. In most Buddhist quarters in this country, there are lively channels of exchange between the United States and Asia maintained by immigrants, refugees, and exiles and by teachers and practitioners within the convert communities. Buddhist immigrants from Asia, both teachers and the rank and file, continue to arrive in this country, adding fresh blood and ideas. To put the impact of immigration on American Buddhism into perspective, it is helpful to have a sense of how immigration influenced other American religions in the past.
Immigration is not always a mass phenomenon with dramatic consequences. It sometimes entails just a handful of newcomers having only a subtle effect on the religious lives of a limited number of individuals. For instance, the Catholic community in the late colonial period was relatively small and confined, more or less, to Maryland. These English Catholics maintained a low religious profile due to legal and religious restrictions imposed by Protestants. Mass was often said at home, and Catholics cultivated forms of piety that were unadorned and simple. They practiced their religion in a style informed by the rationalism of the British Enlightenment and the aristocratic character of their English-speaking community. This began to change in the 1790s, when a number of priests arrived fleeing the chaos of the revolution in France. Once in this country, they taught American Catholics different, more baroque forms of continental observance. This did not result in American Catholics building baroque churches or taking up French Catholicism as a whole, but it did subtly reshape their religious lives. As a result, an Anglo-French form of piety became prominent in American Catholicism in the early decades of the nineteenth century, one that virtually disappeared only when a much larger wave of Catholic migration began from Ireland and Germany in subsequent decades.
Immigration is having this kind of small-scale effect throughout the American Buddhist community, where Chinese, Tibetans, Thai, Japanese, and practitioners of other national forms of Buddhism are influencing Americans’ and each other’s modes of practice in numerous ways. For instance, several years ago, in a Zen center in the mountains of southern California, young students asked their American teachers to allow them to construct a weight room and fitness center, expressing their need for more strenuous activities than sitting zazen or doing t’ai chi, a form of martial art. After due consideration, the teachers turned down their request, thinking that StairMasters and Nautilus machines were not appropriate to a contemplative setting. Shortly thereafter, however, the center was visited by a group of young Korean monks who had recently arrived in this country. They spent an hour or more each morning engaged in a rigorous practice regime that involved the repeated performance of full-body prostrations. Their prostration regime was soon incorporated by the Zen students into their daily practice as a way to vent energy and get physical stimulation while cultivating discipline. This kind of cross-fertilization between Buddhist traditions is at work across the country, even if commentators have not yet given it sustained attention because it is often difficult to see. In time, however, this mixing of traditions is likely to lead to the emergence of new forms of practice that are distinctly American.
Mass immigration also has had very dramatic effects on American religious history. It has reshaped the religious contours of entire communities, as in the case of American Judaism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the liberal Reform movement was on the rise among German American Jews, who at the time formed the bulk of the nation’s Jewish community. While its origins were in Germany, the Reform movement became particularly strong in America as its leaders dropped many traditional forms of piety and practice in an effort to give Judaism a religious style resembling that of the Protestant mainstream. Rabbis adopted hymn singing and began to give sermons. Some moved their services from Friday night to Sunday morning. Many leaders soft-pedaled the traditional idea that Jews had a special relationship with God and abandoned their hope of being able to return to Israel.
This kind of innovation was called into question around the turn of the century, when a vast new wave of Jewish immigrants, more traditionally religious than Reform, began to arrive in this country from Russia and eastern Europe. For several decades, there was acute tension between the two communities, not unlike that which today separates convert and immigrant Buddhists. In the early twentieth century, however, these tensions began to abate as the two communities mingled and began to influence each other. Eventually, American Judaism was reshaped into the Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, and Reconstructionist traditions that accommodated the religious and political differences within a greatly enlarged Jewish community.
This kind of large-scale reshaping has already occurred in American Buddhism in the case of the Jodo Shinshu tradition, where ongoing migration from Japan has continually introduced traditional elements into an Americanized group. But it is likely to recur as further waves of immigration influence both particular ethnic and national groups and the entire American Buddhist community. This process is observable, however, only in the long term, and it is difficult to discern at present how such large-scale processes are shaping indigenous forms of the dharma. But barring any curtailing of Asian immigration, a constant stream of newly arriving Buddhists is certain to have an impact on the first generation of immigrants and their highly Americanized children.
Immigration has also changed America in ways that can only suggest how Buddhism might one day have a powerful impact on the entire nation. Over the course of a century or more, both Jews and Catholics, representing a wide range of ethnic and national groups, moved from the margins of American society into its mainstream. The many legal, political, and cultural developments resulting from this process are the substance of a great deal of American religious history. Most of the consequences are today largely taken for granted. But one need only think about the complex role played by the papacy in American Catholicism, or by Israel in American Judaism, or by ethnic identity in both groups to grasp how immigration forges living links between the United States and communities overseas.
This kind of link is being forged in American Buddhism both in convert and in immigrant communities, although they tend to operate quite differently. While there is a good deal of interaction among and between converts, most take their primary inspiration from a single tradition, whether Theravada, Zen, Nichiren, Vajrayana, or another. These traditions tend to operate as points of contact with Asia in what can be called “communities of discourse.” All Buddhist traditions have unique literary and philosophical heritages, distinct ways of practicing the dharma, and different Asian vocabularies. They have been introduced into this country in different ways, which have in turn affected the histories, institutional expressions, and ongoing relations to Asia of particular groups in a wide variety of ways. In contrast, immigrant (and refugee) Buddhists are forging these links to Asia within “diaspora communities,” nationally, culturally, and religiously distinct groups in this country that maintain ties to their homelands including familial relations, religious institutions, political convictions, and an enduring sense of cultural and ethnic identity. As in the case of Catholics and Jews, the strength of these ties may wax and wane over generations but they are rarely entirely severed, even when groups have been thoroughly Americanized.
The next six chapters explore historical and contemporary developments within selected American Buddhist communities. Each chapter is meant to stand alone and is shaped somewhat differently because there have been unique developments and issues in each community. While it is my intention to provide a kind of road map for American Buddhism, readers should understand at the outset that this account is far from comprehensive. There are numerous Buddhist traditions and groups in this country that do not appear in this book. But my hope is that this account is sufficiently rich to enable readers to grasp some of the drama and complexity of a momentous event going on all around them—the transmission of the dharma from Asia to the United States.
