This work is no exception to the general rule that all books are shaped by the experience, interest, and training of their authors. In a book for general readership, there is no call for extensive reflection on methodology or a lengthy examination of the contributions of earlier scholars. But brief attention to how the study of American Buddhism has developed in the last few decades helps to set in perspective the basic historical and interpretive questions that run throughout this book.
Two decades ago, as a graduate student in the study of religion, I became interested in the history of the encounter between the religious traditions of East and West, after having studied Hinduism and Buddhism for several years. To pursue this interest, I entered a new Ph.D. program at Harvard University devoted to the study of religion in the modern West, with an emphasis on American religious history. There were a number of us in the program in its first few years with an interest in eastern religions, particularly Buddhism, but we soon found that there was very little scholarship devoted to its history in America, a topic that was only then beginning to emerge as significant.
Early on, we relied on a few new interpretive works such as Robert S. Ellwood’s Alternative Altars: Unconventional and Eastern Spirituality in America (1979), which focuses largely on selected developments in the counterculture, and Tetsuden Kashima’s Buddhism in America (1977), which treats the history of the Jodo Shinshu tradition of old-line Japanese immigrants. More inclusive treatments of the contemporary Buddhist scene could be found in Emma Layman’s Buddhism in America (1976) and Charles Prebish’s American Buddhism (1979).
A great deal changed with the publication of Rick Fields’s How the Swans Came to the Lake in 1981. Swans combined well-understood developments in the East-West encounter in the nineteenth century, such as the interest of the Transcendentalists in Asian spirituality and the emergence of popular movements like Theosophy, with new research on pioneering Zen teachers in the early and mid-twentieth century. Fields linked these and other developments with the burgeoning interest in Buddhism in the 1960s counterculture to develop a plausible, and highly readable, historical narrative. I can still recall the excitement that the publication of Swans generated among the small clutch of Americanists who were interested in these matters. And I know for a fact that we repeatedly scoured it for new data and hints as to how to proceed with our own studies, even though we knew that, as a general readership book published by a commercial press, it did not quite meet the formal academic standards demanded by the American Historical Association.
Within several years, however, important shortcomings of Fields’s book became apparent. In particular, Fields developed his entire discussion to account for how a generation of cultural revolutionaries in search of alternative spirituality found their way to Buddhism. In effect, he gave countercultural Buddhists a sense of their own indigenous Buddhist lineage. But by the mid-1980s, the importance of changes in immigration law made in 1965 became clear to all observers as immigration from Asia soared and a wide range of Buddhist traditions began to take root in new immigrant communities. Despite revisions in subsequent editions, Fields’s story of American Buddhism never satisfactorily factored in the arrival of this new, complex Buddhist cohort.
At that stage of the game, intellectuals within countercultural Buddhist communities and scholars trained in Asian Buddhist history, many of them practicing Buddhists, more or less picked up the ball as commentators on American Buddhism. During the 1980s and into the ’90s, they explored a range of questions first raised by Prebish: What kind of commitment does it entail to call oneself an American Buddhist? What kinds of change ought to be made to Asian Buddhist traditions to adapt them to this country? Are there two American Buddhisms, one found among European Americans and another among immigrants? During these years, a number of new books were published that focused sustained attention on selected developments primarily associated with contemporary European American Buddhism, among them Jane Hurst’s Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism and the Soka Gakkai in America: The Ethos of a New Religious Movement (1992) and Helen Tworkov’s Zen in America (1989). At the same time, popular religious publishing on Buddhism flourished, with more than a hundred titles produced in quick succession, reflecting the growing interest of Americans in Buddhism.
While these developments were taking place in and around contemporary Buddhism, those of us trained as Americanists published new works on Buddhism-related topics in the more established field of American religious history, focusing primarily on the nineteenth century. For instance, Thomas Tweed published The American Encounter with Buddhism, 1844–1914 in 1992, answering important questions about how Americans at that time regarded philosophical Buddhism. I published two books on the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893, a much acclaimed but little studied event in the history of the East-West encounter in this country, one book in 1993, the other in 1995. Stephen Prothero published The White Buddhist: The Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott in 1996, the first critical study of the attitudes toward and contributions to Buddhism by a key figure in an earlier era during which Americans were fascinated with Asia. The first book-length study of current Buddhist immigration by a scholar trained in American religious history, Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples, was published by Paul Numrich in the same year.
All this is to say that American Buddhism has grown immensely over the last few decades and critical reflection on it has grown as well, but in a very uneven fashion. At this writing, there is a good deal of scholarly commentary on European American Buddhism, particularly on Zen and Soka Gakkai International, but little on Tibetan Buddhism in America and on a range of Pacific Rim immigrant traditions. There are no wholly reliable statistics on how many Buddhists are in America. Most issues have been defined by European Americans who have been engaged in running debates over the future of American Buddhism since the early 1980s. But these debates are largely framed in terms derived from the politics of the 1960s and are carried on with little reference to immigrant Buddhists, who clearly comprise the largest part of the community. This gives the debates an unreal quality at times, as important issues such as gender equity and the role of monastics and laity become swept up into programmatic agendas that are both ideological and visionary. Many of these questions have yet to be examined systematically by dispassionate observers.
To some degree, this situation is about to change, as a series of new studies are published at the same time that many American Buddhist communities have achieved a degree of stability. Tweed and Prothero are publishing Asian Religions in America: A Documentary History, an anthology of texts drawn from sources from the antebellum era to the present. This will help to correct the chronology developed by Rick Fields by setting the current burgeoning of Buddhism within a more complex American historical context. Prebish is publishing two new books. One is The Faces of Buddhism in America with Kenneth Tanaka, an edited collection of essays by a number of authors that survey a wide range of Buddhist traditions in this country. The other, Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America, is Prebish’s own interpretation of major developments in American Buddhism in the last three decades. The latter is framed by the kind of questions asked by scholars in Buddhist Studies and will further efforts to understand how an American tradition of Buddhism is taking shape and place it in a comparative Buddhist perspective. Chris Queen, a scholar with a publishing record in modern Asian Buddhism, and Duncan Williams, a younger Buddhist scholar, have coedited American Buddhism: Methods and Findings in Recent Scholarship. These essays offer the kind of fine-grained studies of selected developments that are sorely needed to add depth and complexity to the study of American Buddhism.
These and other new works promise to advance the study of American Buddhism considerably. A reader who examines them together, however, will find them often running at cross-purposes because they come out of different disciplines and lack a set of clearly defined, common questions. But they mark an important step in the emergence of American Buddhism as a new field of academic study, one at the intersection of American religious history and the global history of Buddhism. The emergence of this new field mirrors in many respects the growth of American Buddhism as a vital and vibrant part of the multicultural and religiously pluralistic United States, at a time when the economic, political, and religious consequences of globalization have seized the attention of numerous scholars and commentators.
Several years ago, I was commissioned to write this book with a mandate to design it for the general reader, a task I have found alternatively rewarding, challenging, and frustrating. My primary goal has been to fashion an engaging and informative text to introduce interested people to the fascinating world created by Buddhists in the United States in the last half century. I have come to think of it as a road map to the American Buddhist landscape, in which histories, communities, institutions, and individuals are set in meaningful relationship to each other in order to make sense of developments that are often baffling in their complexity. To develop a richly textured discussion, I have drawn upon documentary films, newspaper articles, academic sources, contemporary commentary, and the vast amount of information bearing on contemporary Buddhism that is now found on the World Wide Web.
In an effort to sweep many disparate parts into a reasonably coherent whole, I have emphasized large-scale developments such as immigration, exile, conversion, and schism that have structured the introduction of Buddhism to this country. This has required that I include pertinent historical background information on modern Buddhism in Asia. Most Buddhists tend to express their religious convictions with reference to general ideas about liberation, enlightenment, or realization; the importance of transcending egotism; the cultivation of nonattachment; and the importance of compassion. One major way to bring out the substantial differences among them is to look at how they practice Buddhism, so I have also attended closely to the practice vocabulary taken for granted in most communities.
I have not taken up philosophical questions under debate in American Buddhism or explored the very important question of the relationship between Buddhism and psychotherapy, except in occasional and descriptive ways. Nor have I taken sides with one or another party in the multifaceted discussion about how Americanization ought to proceed. Due to the unique circumstances of Buddhism in Hawaii, I have more or less restricted my observations to developments in the continental United States. There are a number of topics I originally hoped to address but have not, such as Buddhism in popular culture; in literature, painting, and sculpture; and in the martial arts. As my research progressed, I found that it was challenging enough to develop a sustained discussion of America’s many practice communities.
The discussion is structured to bring out the dynamic tension between tradition and innovation that is expressed in many different ways in America’s Buddhist communities. But the general idea I develop throughout the book is that there are so many forms of Buddhism and so many different roads to Americanization that it is too early to announce the emergence of a distinct form that can be said to be typically American. Some forms of Buddhism have been overtly retailored to fit with one or another American ideal, often in very pronounced ways. But this in itself is not evidence that they are more authentically American or are more likely to become permanent parts of the long-term development of Buddhism in the United States.
Part 1 deals with background material related to Asian and American religious history. Chapter 1 is a brief introduction to a few of the general contours of the American Buddhist landscape—an opportunity to get one’s feet wet before plunging into the subject at a greater depth. Chapters 2 and 3 are brief sketches of key ideas and historical developments in Buddhist history. Their chief purpose is to orient readers to the basic vocabulary and general geography of Buddhism in Asia, a grasp of which is essential to any understanding of Buddhism in the United States. At various points I draw analogies to Christianity, not to suggest that Buddhism and Christianity are reducible to each other, but as aids to the reader. Chapter 4 outlines major developments in the early history of the transmission of Buddhism to this country, to set its burgeoning in the last half century in historical perspective. It includes a few reflections on how immigration has functioned in American religious history in the past as a way to begin to think about the current Buddhist immigration and its possible long-term impact.
Part 2, the heart of the book, consists of six chapters that are interpretive accounts of selected forms of Buddhism and some of the unique forces at work in their introduction to this country. The first three chapters are devoted to traditions from Japan, and they all deal, to varying degrees, with background considerations related to modern Japanese Buddhist history. But I have placed an emphasis on key developments that shaped each tradition in this country. Chapter 5 is devoted to the Jodo Shinshu tradition of the Buddhist Churches of America and the way it became a part of the fabric of American religion through dynamics at work in immigration. Chapter 6 deals with the Nichiren tradition, most particularly with Soka Gakkai International and its emergence as an independent, lay-based form of humanistic Buddhism quite in tune with the values and ethos of the American mainstream. Chapter 7 addresses the development of Zen, one of the most highly differentiated forms of American Buddhism. I have emphasized how Zen was introduced as a set of ideas divorced from institutions in the 1950s and ’60s, but subsequently developed a range of institutional forms that give it the adaptability and flexibility that have helped it to become the most popular form of Buddhism in this country.
The next three chapters examine selected developments in a number of other Asian traditions. Chapter 8 deals with Tibetan Buddhism in the United States and how its introduction and reception here have been informed not only by the Chinese occupation of Tibet and the creation of a community in exile but also by political concerns, efforts to preserve Tibetan culture and religion, and support from America’s popular culture and entertainment industry. Chapter 9 deals with the uniquely complex landscape of the Theravada Buddhist traditions of south and southeast Asia. More than any other form of Buddhism, Theravada is being reshaped by both conversion and immigration. I have highlighted a spectrum of developments within that community that run from highly traditional to self-consciously innovative. Chapter 10 is devoted to developments related to Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese immigration, most of which occurred only in the last three decades. In order to give a sense of how these traditions are undergoing Americanization, these developments are set in the context of adaptive patterns related to immigration. But I have also indicated ways in which selected leaders and teachers in each tradition have made an impact within the broader American Buddhist community.
Part 3 takes up Americanization more thematically by looking at the ways in which three important developments have played themselves out in recent decades. To a large degree, the focus of this discussion is on European American Buddhists, who emerged from the ’60s with a fairly clear set of political ideals that have informed the process of Americanization since the 1980s. Regrettably, I have not been able to give adequate attention to comparable developments among immigrants, largely due to my lack of Asian language skills and the absence of secondary literature that addresses these issues across a range of immigrant communities. Chapter 11 describes how the ideal of gender equity has gained expression in American Buddhism in a way that parallels developments in liberal Judaism and Christianity. Chapter 12 deals with how a number of prominent people and organizations have been attempting to create forms of American Buddhism devoted to progressive social change. Chapter 13 describes current intra-Buddhist and interreligious dialogues in the American Buddhist community. The concluding chapter contains a general assessment of the state of American Buddhism at the end of the 1990s, together with a few suggestions about what might be expected in the coming century.
A Note on Historical Perspective
There is a great deal of cooperation among American Buddhists in different traditions, but there is also much controversy about issues that range from the future of monasticism in the West to appropriate forms of sexual expression for American Buddhist laity. Some commentators in the convert communities talk as if these questions had been answered and American Buddhism were now more or less a known entity. Others stress the degree to which distinctly American forms of Buddhism are now only in the making. But most Buddhists have hardly begun to express their hopes and aspirations publicly in the English language, a fact that suggests it may be premature to assume too much about what Buddhism is and is going to become in this country.
How one thinks about Americanization has a great deal to do with how one frames the question in a historical perspective. Rick Fields’s book, How the Swans Came to the Lake, played an important role in opening American Buddhism up to historical inquiry. In an early edition of Swans, Fields recounted a conversation he had in the course of his research with Professor Mas Nagatomi at Harvard University, to whom he turned for advice and assistance. Fields recalled Nagatomi saying he doubted there were sufficient documents available for a critical history of American Buddhism, which Fields must have found disheartening. Surely much to his relief, he went on to discover many pertinent documents, some of them related to developments between 1930 and 1950, which at the time was uncharted territory in American Buddhist history.
Having studied under Nagatomi and with a long-standing interest in the history of the East-West encounter, I have thought about that story many times, particularly once I began research for this book and found myself immersed in reams of material about the current American Buddhist scene. In the course of my reflection, I have come to wonder if Nagatomi’s remarks were not more about a lack of historical perspective on Buddhism in this country than about a lack of documents per se.
Nagatomi used to teach a two-semester sequence on the history of Buddhism in Asia. It was a brilliant course in which he took students from the teachings of the Buddha through their development in India to Sri Lanka, Tibet, China, Japan, and Korea. He managed to place in historical context the way Buddhist philosophy and practice developed over centuries, attending closely at every turn to both innovations and long-term continuities. He was extremely skilled at what I thought of at the time as “playing the pipe organ of Asian Buddhist history.” Students came away from the two semesters with a dizzying but indelible impression of how Buddhism began, evolved, differentiated, and was recast over and over again as it moved from region to region during more than two thousand years of Asian history.
I now think Nagatomi may have been saying to Fields that there was not yet enough American Buddhist history to create the kind of magisterial interpretation that was his stock-in-trade, a situation I think is still more or less the case. Buddhism has been in this country for over a century, but only in the past few decades has it blossomed into what might be called a mass movement, expressed in a wide range of American institutions. There are now a great many things to study, but it is premature, even if one were talented enough to give it a try, to write the kind of history Nagatomi used to teach. It is possible to talk about many developments in contemporary American Buddhism, but impossible to assess which of these “has legs” and will pass the tests of time required to become a living Buddhist tradition in the United States. It is my conviction, however, that in the future both Buddhists and historians of Buddhism will look back to the last half century and find the origins of uniquely American forms of Buddhism that will bear comparison with the great traditions of Asia.
Numerous individuals have helped me develop this book, only some of whom I am able to thank here. Charles Prebish, Chris Queen, Paul Numrich, and Stephen Prothero gave me invaluable assistance by prodding me to see issues from the perspective of their expertise and disciplines. Others have also read portions of it and offered helpful criticism; they include Kenneth Tanaka, Rob Eppsteiner, John Daido Loori, Judith Simmer-Brown, Peter Gregory, and Arnold Kottler. After an afternoon’s conversation with Helen Tworkov, I first began to see issues in a way that enabled me to put pen to paper and get started on the manuscript. People at The Pluralism Project at Harvard University have assisted by providing me with access to their archives, photo collection, and student research, of which that of Stuart Chandler was particularly helpful. Thanks also go to Thanissaro Bhikkhu, who as a host, critic, and friend has been especially patient in helping me balance the need to confront substantive issues with the unique demands of writing a survey for a general readership.
A number of individuals in the Buddhist publishing world, in Tibet support groups, and in various Buddhist communities have provided me with a great deal of information in the course of lengthy phone conversations. Among them are Larry Gerstein, Ron Kidd, Virginia Strauss, Asayo Horibe, Dennis Genpo Merzel, Nicolee Jikyo Miller, and Therese Fitzgerald. Others have generously given of their time in the course of my visits to their communities, including Masao Kodani in Los Angeles; Joanna Fagin at Shambhala Rocky Mountain Center; Mark Elliott in Crestone, Colorado; Seisen and Tenshin in Mountain View, California; Marty Verhoeven and Bhikkhu Heng Sure in the San Francisco area; Sarah Smith in Woodstock, New York; and Al Albergate and others at SGI-USA’s Santa Monica headquarters. Thanks also go to Dave Nyogen of the Vietnamese Chamber of Commerce, who proved to be a very informative guide to many Buddhist sites across Orange Country, California. I am also indebted to Julia Hardy, Wendy Kapner, and Pamela Montgomery for their support and assistance.
I also thank Hamilton College and the Emerson Foundation, whose support for research and travel was substantial. I owe deep gratitude to Hamilton students who, over the course of three years, have waded with me through the material in this book and have contributed a great deal to its development. In particular, I want to thank Jaime Tackett and Matthew Berman. At Columbia University Press, Leslie Kriesel has been keenly insightful with her editorial assistance, and Elyse Rieder creative in her role as photo researcher. My wife, Ann Castle, deserves a great deal of credit not only for her patience but also for her many contributions: reading the manuscript in progress, offering advice and comments, and clipping articles from numerous publications to keep me abreast of fast-breaking developments in the world of Buddhism.