Well into the 1960s, Buddhism was often presented in informed but popular circles as part of a generalized image of Asian or Oriental religions. In an earlier generation’s dharma discourse, highly permeable boundaries among traditions like Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism and the practice of yoga, Zen, and other contemplative disciplines fostered a kind of pan-Asian spirituality in the West, which has a long and complex history. Under close examination, much of this earlier dharma discourse reflects the deep influence of German, English, and American romanticism, with its emphasis on spiritual selfhood as expressed in philosophy, literature, and the visual arts.
The transformation of this dharma discourse into a mass movement undergoing rapid institutionalization significantly altered the American Buddhist landscape. The generalized Asian image began to fade as American seekers took up the practice of Buddhism in face-to-face relations with Asian teachers from different nations, schools, lineages, and cultures. Among a million and more Americans, knowledge about Buddhism rapidly increased and Zen schools, Vajrayana lineages, vipassana meditation techniques, and other Asian-based sectarian knowledge systems became increasingly differentiated in the American Buddhist imaginary. This process was well under way in 1990, even as terms like “Buddhism” and “Zen” continued to hold a powerful, but ambiguous, spiritual cachet in Western and American popular culture.
In an effort to bring the general reader up to speed on the new complexity expressed in and around practice communities, in the first edition of this book I emphasized the unique religious and social experiences of a number of discrete Buddhist traditions as they settled into the United States. The goal was to create an informative guide to major contours of the emergent Buddhist landscape suitable for a general audience and useful in undergraduate education. The categories I employed—BCA Buddhists, the Nichiren tradition, Zen, Tibet, the Theravada spectrum, and other Pacific Rim migrations—retain a basic utility, although each could be the subject of a significant update beyond the scope of this work.
In conversations with colleagues, at conferences, and in reviewing new books and manuscripts, I have, however, gleaned a sense of some noteworthy shifts within these large groups. BCA Buddhism, for instance, works to shed its older image as a Japanese enclave perpetuating an ethnic, Christianized form of the dharma, while slowly losing members. More Euro-Americans are becoming involved in BCA as a result of both intermarriage and increased interest in Pure Land Buddhism, which is better understood by Americans now than in the past to be a significant and sophisticated current in the Mahayana tradition. In 2006, Dr. Gordon Bermant became the president of the Buddhist Churches of America, the first non-Japanese American to hold this position. Innovation has also been encouraged by progressive Socho (bishop) Koshin Ogui, who has focused much attention on developing trained lay leaders called Minister’s Assistants. The Minister’s Assistant Program brings a dynamic energy to the BCA, and it gives both Japanese and a range of non-Japanese laypeople an institutional role in shaping its future. The Institute of Buddhist Studies in Berkeley, California, the BCA seminary, has increased outreach to the general public and now sponsors conferences devoted to contemporary dharma themes, such as “Buddhism Without Borders: Contemporary Developments in Buddhism in the West,” held in March 2010.
The Nichiren tradition continues to be most prominently represented by SGI-USA, whose membership has stabilized in the wake of its heady shakubuku campaigns and the 1991 schism between laity and priests. The Gakkai today is admired for being the American Buddhist group with the highest degree of racial, ethnic, and class diversity, and it has forged institutional mechanisms to augment this diversity in the future. Special groups such as Members of African Descent, non-English language groups, a GLBT association, and a variety of youth organizations meet annually at the Florida Nature and Culture Center to study Buddhism and to discuss identity issues. Linda Johnson, whom I interviewed for the first edition as representative of SGI’s dynamic African American members, became Women’s Division head in 2004 and has energized members with her conviction that peace cannot be fully realized without the passionate engagement and unique contributions of women. There is speculation that Danny Nagashima, current SGI-USA leader, may be the last of its Japanese general directors. But Japan remains important to the movement’s spirit and identity. In recent years, SGI has emphasized two complementary initiatives, both with Japanese precedents. The first is a renewed interest in culture festivals that have traditionally been used to collectively engage youth. In 2010 some 30,000 young men and women organized and performed in “Rock the Era Festivals” held in locations across the country. The second initiative, member care, is oriented to the individual and entails personalized study and reflection on the practice of Buddhism.
The idea of a Theravada spectrum remains a useful way to describe the unique complexity of South Asian Buddhism in the United States. A great portion of Theravada Buddhists remain in immigrant communities, practicing in temples associated with monastic orders, while a second large group grounded in Theravada practice flourishes within the convert community and is institutionally independent. A relatively small cadre of ordained Asian and Euro-American monks who serve as leaders and teachers form a kind of link between them. Scholarship published since the first edition suggests that, despite substantial differences between the two communities in terms of worldview, demographics, and institutional history, there is movement toward each other as their respective Americanization processes proceed. For instance, some converts have begun to adopt paraliturgical rituals to enhance seated mediation, while some immigrants now incorporate meditation into their congregational practice. Both communities tend to appeal to an educated clientele, emphasize the leadership role of laypeople, and conduct the religious and administrative business of the community in English.
In the mid 1990s, Zen held center stage in the American Buddhist world while Tibetan practice was hitting the mainstream, in no small part because of the effective public relations work of the Dalai Lama and Hollywood’s interest in the plight of Tibet. Today the Zen tradition continues to flourish through the many affiliates of its flagship institutions, but concern is also expressed about the “graying of Zen Buddhism” as the Beat and Hip generations that form its main constituency enter their sixties. Tibet is no longer in the limelight, even though the necessity of preserving its traditions continues to inform much of the religious and political life of the community. The controversies surrounding Chogyam Trungpa’s trailblazing work within the counterculture have faded, and I am told that his brilliance at reinterpreting Tibetan traditions is increasingly appreciated by a new generation of lamas teaching in the West. At this writing, the most prominent, public face of American Buddhism is “the mindfulness movement,” a broad and variegated Westernizing and secularizing development with roots in the Buddhist mass movement of the 1970s, a topic we will return to shortly.
“Other Pacific Rim Migrations” is the least satisfactory category in the first edition, its use a tacit acknowledgment that the number of immigrant Buddhist groups in the United States by 1990 presented too complex a picture to capture satisfactorily. Since that time, new studies have limned this terrain in a fragmentary way, with scattered but insightful accounts of both richly diverse religious institutions and widely diverging social and class experiences among Buddhists coming West. Reading this literature is a foray into the complexity of global Buddhism, the intricacy of its networks, and the many nuanced ways the dharma functions in diaspora or immigrant communities.
For example, we now have a much more informed understanding of the Tzu Chi Foundation, a group briefly noted in a kind of grab bag of organizations I intended to represent the complexity of Chinese American Buddhism. One recent ethnographic study describes in rich detail how Tzu Chi Buddhism combines traditional elements of sutra chanting, prostration, and pilgrimage with innovative practice such as sign-language singing and a modernist emphasis on social activism. Tzu Chi is grounded in devotion to the Venerable Cheng Yen, an energetic Taiwanese nun whom devotees lovingly refer to as “the supreme person,” a bodhisattva figure both associated with Kuan Yin and likened to Mother Theresa. Since its inception, Tzu Chi has focused on medical ministries to the poor and, over the course of several decades, developed into a powerful NGO deeply involved in Taiwan’s democratization. Due to its service orientation, Tzu Chi takes on the guise of a secular organization in the United States, its members in New York often associating themselves with other Chinese Buddhist groups for practice and socialization. Links to the global movement and Taiwanese headquarters remain strong through movement media, pilgrimage to Taiwan, and a shared devotion to Cheng Yen. Another study reveals the way religion functions within American Taiwanese communities, where becoming religious is seen as a way to express one’s Americanness. Some Taiwanese turn to Christianity while others revitalize their ancestral associations with Buddhism by affiliating with modernist dharma organizations such as Tzu Chi.
Additional portraits have been drawn of Buddhism in other American immigrant communities by social scientific studies that focus on the function of religion in the process of adaptation. But there is little synoptic understanding of how these highly varied traditions are together contributing to the religious formation of a native Buddhism in the United States, a task beyond both the scope of this essay and my own expertise. The fact remains, much as at the time this book was first published, that the religious or spiritual understanding of “American Buddhism” or “Western Buddhism” is still overwhelmingly defined by the Euro-American community. This is a variegated group itself, but largely comprises people who came to Buddhism by way of the Beat/Hip dharma discourse forged in the cultural revolutions now identified with the 1960s.
In the first edition, my description of the landscape of emergent American Buddhism in terms of major traditions tended to obscure an important development—the ongoing coalescence of elements drawn from disparate Asian traditions into what is now a convert Buddhist establishment or American Buddhist mainstream. Its demographic base is overwhelmingly white, usually college- or university-educated Euro-Americans drawn from the cohort of seekers who turned east in the 1960s. Its classic, founding narrative is Rick Fields’s How the Swans Came to the Lake, which describes the often obscure channels through which Asian teachers came to the United States, written from a countercultural perspective. Its practice of choice is seated meditation as drawn primarily from the Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, and Theravada traditions, three of the four Buddhist dharma worlds into which most Beat/Hip-era seekers were eventually drawn. The fourth was Soka Gakkai, which, despite its early core of countercultural adherents, socially engaged orientation, and diversity, is not generally seen to be a part of this mainstream due, apparently, to its Nichiren chanting practice and its political engagement in postwar Japan.
In addition to shared demographics, countercultural history, and style of practice, there are a number of broad tendencies grounded in the West that give a loose unity to the Zen–Tibetan–Theravada troika at the heart of this Euro-American Buddhist establishment. The first is a historical and textual orientation that recalls the Protestant Reformation, insofar as the recovery of a historical Buddha and what appear to be his earliest teachings are often seen as central to a revitalization of tradition. Like Protestant reformers, many American Buddhist teachers and leaders are engaged in fostering a repristinization movement, an effort to restore the religion to its original spirit before there was an institution or “ism,” in order to gain access to the vitality of the founder’s true teachings.
The second is a political left-liberal, socially activist ethic that, while drawing from various sources, seems to owe a great deal to American Jews, many of whom came to Buddhism with a secular, psychotherapeutic orientation. During the writing of the first edition, Jewish Buddhists and the high number of Jews among teachers and leaders were much discussed, but there appears to have been little new academic commentary on this phenomenon since. Nevertheless, it is safe to assert the importance of Judaism to American Buddhism even if we are not in a position to define it precisely. Certainly “mitzvah,” the injunction to perform compassionate acts, and “tikkun,” the healing of the world, are familiar concepts in many mainstream Buddhist communities. Both have been assimilated into Buddhism, the first to the precepts, the second to the bodhisattva mission of engaged Buddhists to transform the world.
A third strand is more broadly American—a pragmatic, this-worldly, future orientation grounded in liberal Protestantism, which has long infused America’s mainstream culture. Pragmatism gains expression in general assertions about the empirical foundation of Buddhism, the verifiability of meditation as an effective tool or technique, and the need both to follow the teachings of the Buddha and to test them personally to see if they work. This worldliness is taken to be the thrust of the Buddha’s teaching. Traditional convictions about reincarnation are muted, and social engagement is at the heart of the community. Euro-American Buddhism is pro-body and proscience but antimaterialistic in regard to consumer culture. It is environmentally sensitive, implicitly optimistic, and holistic, and its social vision runs the gamut from mystical-spiritual to hard-edged secularism. Future orientation is implicit in programmatic discussions about the interplay between spiritual practice and social transformation, but this is strongly cross-cut by a focus on being present in the now, fostered by the practice of seated meditation.
None of this detracts, however, from the fact that this is a deeply Buddhist movement in which elements of Theravada, Tibetan, and East Asian Mahayana are being recombined, even as they are infused with broad cultural patterns with deep Western roots. Concepts such as “dependent origination,” “impermanence,” and “emptiness,” which have immense Asian literatures, are at the core of the mainstream American Buddhist worldview. The Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and the precepts permeate interpretations of the American experience and arguments about why and how Buddhism can address individual and national crises. The selective fusion of Buddhist worldview and American spirit has been in progress for over a century, picking up significant speed in the Fifties and Sixties and becoming institutionalized in a serious way during the following two decades. The deepening of Americans’ knowledge of Buddhism was soon intelligently and artfully deployed by native-born Euro-Americans who produced a substantial body of literature reinterpreting the dharma and its practice in an American grain. As a result, over the last few decades there has emerged a fairly large, loosely jointed American Buddhist clerical class that consists of scholars, psychologists, apologists, and, most importantly, dharma teachers, the majority laypeople trained in a range of Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada traditions. These mostly baby-boomer men and women are widely recognized in print and online media as influential spiritual leaders and leading theorists for the community.
Toward the end of the 2000s, “mindfulness” emerged as a significant buzzword in and around mainstream Buddhist communities, its multifaceted expression suggesting to some the emergence of a full-blown “mindfulness movement.” In general, the term “mindfulness” in American Buddhism signifies an awareness of the interconnectedness of mind, body, and environment and the meditative techniques to cultivate it in spiritual practice and social action. Mindfulness is encouraged in most Buddhist schools but received an early, influential elaboration as both systematic philosophy and practice in Theravada Buddhism; this approach came to the United States through dharma centers such as Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock. Thich Nhat Hanh made important, Zen-inflected contributions to its ethics and practice with his teachings on social engagement, the mindfulness bell, and Communities of Mindful Living. The popular Buddhist concept of mindfulness rests largely on these Theravada and Mahayana foundations today but draws freely from other schools and traditions, a preference for mixed practice that was identified two decades ago as characteristic of emergent Western and American Buddhism.
Explicitly Buddhist ideas about mindfulness are now widely disseminated in American culture and surface frequently in discussions of social and ethical issues. They influence foundations like the Fetzer Institute and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, which promote contemplative practice for social change on spiritually eclectic or nonsectarian bases. Secularized expressions of mindfulness have also found a home in the medical community, and the neurobiology of mindfulness has become a subject both for research and for speculation. Popular publishing has further broadened the movement with books devoted to the application of mindfulness principles to social issues, dysfunctional personal behaviors, and even lifestyle questions such as design, cuisine, and grooming.
By 2010 mindfulness had emerged as a prominent value and practice both within and outside the Euro-American Buddhism community. In effect, mindfulness has become a central trope in a new dharma discourse that functions quite differently. An earlier, free-floating discourse anchored primarily in books, art, and other cultural artifacts became transformed as Americans deepened their knowledge of Buddhism under Asian teachers and proceeded to ground it in newly founded institutions. The situation changed considerably in only two decades. Today’s mindfulness discourse radiates from these new Buddhist institutions, which play a central role in disseminating the dharma and dharma-inspired ideas into the culture at large. This new dynamic is evidence of both the success of efforts to build a case for an American dharma and the way Buddhists have begun to exercise social influence.
Buddhist ideas about mindfulness are disseminated on CDs, in audio downloads, and in books written by monks, nuns, and lay teachers, Euro-American and Asian, which are further spread through YouTube, Buddhist blogs, and discussion lists on Web sites maintained by dedicated individuals, publishers, and practice centers. There are far too many mindfulness texts to sample here, but they include older IMS/Spirit Rock classics like Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness and Jack Kornfield’s A Path with Heart, both published in the 1990s. Susan L. Smalley and Diana Winston’s Fully Present represents current texts in which practice and activism are integrated with insights gleaned from the recent interest in mindfulness expressed in the empirical sciences.
Originally published in 2002, Joseph Goldstein’s One Dharma: The Emerging Western Buddhism can be taken as representative of the kind of mature reflection on mindfulness by establishment teachers in the American Buddhist mainstream today. Goldstein states the core of his vision succinctly: mindfulness is the method, compassion the expression, wisdom the essence. Wisdom is the awareness of the impermanence of all things and the attitude of nonattachment that liberates one from suffering. Compassion is the natural response to suffering seen in the world and the impetus to relieve it. Mindfulness is the ability to inhabit the present without judgment in order to grasp things as they really are, a quality cultivated through practice that fosters awareness of impermanence and serves as the mode of entry into compassion and wisdom. One Dharma is not explicitly socially engaged, but Goldstein sees the intersection of mindfulness, compassion, and wisdom as the foundation for both personal and social transformation.
One Dharma is also a representative text in a number of other ways. It is marked throughout by the kind of back-to-the-origins historicism noted above; its twin criteria for authenticity are what the Buddha taught and an “if it works” pragmatism. A reflection of the author’s own personal journey, the book indirectly suggests mainstream American Buddhists’ sectarian and demographic base, insofar as Goldstein draws his material only from the Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada camps into which many in the Beat/Hip generations migrated. His purpose in writing the book was, moreover, to confirm and deftly negotiate the pitfalls of mainstream mixed practice, his central goal to forge an ecumenism among Western Buddhists by reconciling or suppressing sectarian differences inherited from Asia.
Finally, Goldstein also unintentionally contributes new material to the old, persistent discussions about America’s two Buddhisms. In One Dharma, he speaks as and addresses Euro-American Buddhists who sit in meditation, and he claims for them and their practice normative status as the emergent Western Buddhism. This is a familiar claim made also by other commentators, often with a good deal of justification. But by making it, Goldstein also resurrects lingering questions about who exercises cultural authority and has a public voice in American Buddhism and who does not. In other words, his argument for one dharma is also a reminder that the map in the head of the Euro-American Buddhist mainstream is only partly descriptive of the complex Buddhist territory in the United States, a limitation yet to be adequately addressed in our thinking about the dharma coming West.
During the first decade of the twenty-first century, a picture began to emerge of a new, rising generation of young dharma teachers, some raised in Euro-American communities, others having become Buddhist more recently. These young teachers express their generational perspective in a variety of ways, from mildly distancing themselves from baby-boomer teachers to self-conscious efforts to talk dharma in new, less formal, sometimes street-oriented language. Among them the term “hippie” is often used as an amusing pejorative, a ready foil against which they can define themselves and their agendas, which run the gamut from edgy to highly programmatic. These young teachers mount no frontal assaults on fundamental boomer Buddhist canons such as sitting practice, mindfulness, and convictions about the convergence of Buddhism and science. They often speak highly of older teachers whose dedication they appreciate and influence they recognize in their own teaching, even as they may criticize them for being too hung up on tradition or too countercultural—in any case, lacking a strong voice suited to addressing the needs and aspirations of a new generation.
Older generations came to Buddhism with radically alternative, even revolutionary aspirations during decades of social turmoil, which gave a strong countercultural, sometimes utopian, cast to mainstream Buddhism. Younger ones seem to have inherited much of this legacy, which they selectively perpetuate even as they frame their own questions. A nuanced portrait of their concerns is found in Blue Jean Buddha (2001) and The Buddha’s Apprentices (2005) by Sumi Loundon Kim, who was herself raised in a Euro-American, Soto Zen community. Kim is now married to a Korean Zen monk, has two children, and serves as chaplain for the Buddhist community at Duke University, where she ministers to young people, Buddhist and non-Buddhist. In a recent interview, she noted that young people today tend to come to the dharma asking questions about truth, God, and meaning, while baby-boomer Buddhists now ask, “‘How do I deal with my failing body? What do I do with the financial losses of the past year? I’m entering menopause. How do I relate to that?’” Kim sees the sangha—the community aspects of American Buddhism—as underdeveloped, with dharma centers offering few informal occasions for people to get together, for example, to see movies or go bowling. She notes that the prominence of older people in dharma centers doesn’t mean young people aren’t involved. But “finding them takes a little bit of searching.”1
The work of four young men in and around the mindfulness mainstream suggest ways the boomer Buddhist legacy is being recast as a new generation explores new styles and methods for practice and propagation. Founded in 2007, Buddhist Geeks, an online project with a digital magazine and weekly podcasts, exemplifies how technological, rhetorical, and intellectual strategies are being deployed at the generational edge of American Buddhism. Buddhist Geeks speaks in an intellectual voice that is informal, informed, and college educated, with a heft that owes more to Wikipedia than Britannica. As its name implies, it aspires to a postboomer style inspired by the figure of the smart, tech-savvy, socially misfit geek, reclaimed as a badge of identity. Hosted and cofounded by twenty-something Vince Horn, Buddhist Geeks is a community resource and cultural clearinghouse that showcases dharma teachings from both older and younger teachers, which Horn brings into play with contemporary theorizing about business, science, philosophy, and technology. Its tenor is suggested in the recent shift from its old tagline, “Seriously Buddhist and Seriously Geeky,” to its new one, “Discover the Emerging Face of Buddhism.”
Originally inspired by nondenominational print magazines like Tricycle and Shambhala Sun, Horn’s interests today are increasingly post-traditional, with a focus on the dharma in the West and its ongoing developments in the twenty-first century. His philosophy and practice are grounded in mindfulness as taught by Jack Kornfield and infused with historicism and pragmatism. Horn favors fairly hard-edged ideas about enlightenment, however, a rebellion of sorts against the soft-core, psychologized language of “realization,” “awareness,” and “openness” preferred by many older teachers. A knowledgeable interviewer and engaging speaker who only recently went public as a teacher, Horn expresses some of his convictions in the casual, amusingly irreverent idiom used by many other young teachers in “Pragmatic Dharma,” an audio recording in which he lays out his position. Having discussed William James and pragmatist theory, Horn brings home an argument about dharma both on point and engagingly naïve: “I like to think of Siddhartha Gautama Buddha as kind of the original pragmatist, the O.P., if you will [laughter all around], in some ways because he had the balls to after his awakening experience actually call himself the awakened one, which is what ‘Buddha’ means. So he was kind of going around saying, ‘Hey, even in the title of the Buddha I am telling the world that I have realized something of real importance.’”2
The work of Ethan Nichtern and Daniel Ingram resonates with that of Horn—both are Buddhist Geeks interviewees—but on very different wavelengths. Founded in 2005, Nichtern’s online Interdependence Project (IDP) is a large operation with the tag “change your mind to change the world,” run out of offices in Manhattan. A secularized approach to Buddhism, IDP seeks to bridge the gap between personal development and social engagement. Nichtern was raised in the Shambhala community founded by Chogyam Trungpa, whose use of both Tibetan Buddhism and Zen and vision of an enlightened society inform IDP’s approach to mindfulness practice and its social program. A yoga practitioner and Shastri (a senior teacher in the Shambhala tradition), Nichtern wrote recently that as a practicing teen he was both isolated from non-Buddhist peers and immersed in a community with little age diversity, his teachers and fellow practitioners at least twenty years his senior. “This experience was very different from my own father’s experience getting involved in the same community, when he was 22 in 1970,” he writes; then Shambhala was still largely a movement among young people. In 2007, Nichtern began a weekly under-thirty night at the Shambhala Center of New York. It grew into a model for generational fora that give young Buddhists and other teen-to-twenty-something seekers a social space in which to explore the connections among meditation, philosophy, and everyday life in their own language.3
As evidenced in the audio download “Composting Desire,” Nichtern teaches in a colloquial voice, following students’ leads by illustrating the Buddhist understanding of mind with reference to guilt, chocolate, and attractive people seen in the aisles of Whole Foods. His style is informal but authoritative, and he speaks in a flat, easy, conversational tone as he explicates Buddhist terms and contrasts approaches to desire in Theravada and Mahayana Buddhism. Using Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of “composting,” Nichtern illustrates the bodhisattva’s need to seek transformation in the muck of the world with a story about the “gross beauty” of worm composting in a small apartment with roommates. In its incidental details—the Union Square ecology center where one buys worms; funky Tupperware bins; overripe spinach and avocado skins; worm poop and its tending; working in community gardens—Nichtern also gives us a glimpse into the lifestyle preoccupations of a young Buddhist in New York City. “The possibility of transformation is what the Mahayana is all about,” he states, driving the point of one stage of his argument home. “There is a seed, or really a potential, in the worm poop of our experience.” Nichtern has been teaching for eight years in both the community and the academy, where he holds several part-time faculty positions. He has been interviewed on CNN and published in the Huffington Post, and recently released his first book, One City: A Declaration of Interdependence.4
In contrast to the Mahayana-inflected IDP, Daniel Ingram’s Dharma Overground (DhO), a small group of some 400 online members, displays a primitivistic devotion to Theravada origins. Ingram sees his teachings as straight, old-time mindfulness practices laid out in a forthright, rigorously technical, pragmatic manner for those interested in “hardcore meditation practice.” With an experiential emphasis on spiritual states attained in the pursuit of enlightenment, Ingram’s teachings suggest “a young man’s practice,” an outlook considered naïve, deluded, maybe even dangerous by some seasoned dharma veterans. Ingram sees himself, however, as simply following the systematic guide to mindfulness practice found in the Theravada suttas, in which stages on the path are recognized through the discernment of attainments. In his view, mainstream dharma centers suppress discussions of such states and experiences, so he lists among DhO’s guiding attitudes “a lack of taboos surrounding talking about attainments.”5
The DhO spirit is suggested by the title of Ingram’s free online book: Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha, An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book authored by The Arhat Daniel M. Ingram. Despite his stated preference for combat boots over sandals and Sex Pistols over Moody Blues, it is hard to know whether Ingram writes with supreme confidence or self-deprecating wit or both. But in his “Preface and Warning,” he cautions that this is unlike the many hundreds of dharma books found on the shelves because it is “an unrestrained voice of one whose practice has been dedicated to complete and unexcelled mastery of the traditional and hardcore stages of the path rather than some sort of vapid New Age fluff or pop psychological head-trip. If that ain’t you,” he writes, “consider reading something else.”6
Noah Levine is probably the best known, most widely respected bad boy in the mindfulness mainstream. Like Nichtern, who is a friend, Levine was raised in the Euro-American Buddhist community. His father is Stephen Levine, whose A Gradual Awakening is considered a mindfulness classic. Like Zen teacher Brad Warner and a number of other young teachers, Levine came of age identifying with punk. His first book, Dharma Punx, recounts a dysfunctional childhood, harrowing adolescent experiences with alcohol, drugs, violence, and prison, and his eventual rediscovery of the mindfulness practice of his father, which led him first into recovery and then into teaching. In the course of his journey, Levine has met many influential Buddhists whom he counts as teachers. But his core practice is mindfulness as taught by Jack Kornfield, which Levine grounds in punk aesthetics to enable him to speak from his own experience and to that of his peers. There are around a dozen practice groups in the country inspired by Levine’s style and teachings, collectively called DPunx, Dharma Punk Nation. But Levine currently teaches at dharma centers in Santa Monica and Hollywood, California, with a social outreach that includes feeding the homeless, working with gang and prison populations, and serving recovery communities. Older, DPunx Nation–style practice groups are currently a kind of subculture within Levine’s larger organization, now called Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. This is also the name of his recent book, which continues to convey a spirit of rebellion but with a greater sense of inclusivity.
Part of Levine’s appeal rests in his appearance—elaborate body art, cigarettes, a shaved head that evokes the boxing ring rather than asceticism. The look seems simultaneously authentic and cultivated, suggesting a brand of Buddhist attitude, style, and practice. Another part is his creative recasting of the dharma, which we spoke about over the phone; his soft, mid-range voice and intellectual quickness give an unexpected sensitivity and depth to the image.
The dharma–punk synthesis seems to operate in a numbers of ways. Punk brings to dharma a spirit of radical nonconformity, an approach to experience that finds thrashing in “the pit” a doorway to silent seated meditation, a streetwise, hard-ass take on what it means to be reality-orientated.7 The dharma in Levine’s Dharma Punx is a back-to-the-suttas spirit he sees at the center of American Buddhism. He is convinced that American Buddhists can proceed in forging a New World dharma, secure that basic mindfulness practice works always and everywhere because it is an empirical, pragmatic method of inner transformation. By going directly to antique sources, Americans are set free to make their own mistakes rather than to tinker with old Tibetan or Zen ones. Given these premises, punk and dharma work very well together. Both punks and early Buddhists are seen as nonconformists resisting establishments. Both ground authentic selfhood in intense, transformative experiences. Both share a kind of bare-bones understanding of the real in reality. Levine’s synthesis snaps into place when he suggests that Stephen Batchelor, author of Buddhism Beyond Beliefs and Confession of a Buddhist Atheist, speaks more powerfully to him today than any of the other older teachers. Batchelor’s modernist-existentialist dharma adds a sharp, intellectual edge to the Dharma Punx–Against the Stream gestalt and critical depth to the sensitive but still punk persona Levine continues to project.8
Levine divides his book Against the Stream into sections like “Basic Training,” “Boot Camp,” and “Field Guide,” military metaphors I filter through my own twenty-something experience of spiritual questing in the harsh shadow of the draft, boot camp, and the Vietnam War. But Horn, Nichtern, Ingram, and Levine are different kinds of American men who took their formative cultural cues from events around the turn into the twenty-first century. Whatever their own associations, all four surely see Levine’s military metaphors as signaling the Buddhist struggle against anger, violence, ignorance, and greed endemic in American society. In one way or another, all four young men practice mindfulness, are engaged with society, and take their role as second-generation Euro-American Buddhists seriously. They are representative of the larger rising generation that is beginning to make its presence felt in the vibrant communities of Western, American Buddhism, which are themselves hardly fifty years old.
A number of generations—Beat, Hip, punk, and in between and beyond—have for decades been laying down strong philosophical and institutional foundations for an authentic Western Buddhist movement with a highly articulated vision for engagement with the world. The community’s concern for human rights, diversity and inclusivity, and people of color at home and abroad reflects both its origins in liberal and left social movements of the mid-twentieth century and its orientation to globalization. All this is very much to the good, even as it again sheds light on the two Buddhisms issue. Aside from a cadre of well-recognized Zen, Tibetan, and Theravada teachers, Asian American Buddhists seem to hold little to no place in the mainstream Euro-American Buddhist imaginary. There may be good reasons for this. Rank and file in the two communities often practice differently and for different reasons. There are language barriers. Everybody everywhere is too busy with issues directly before them to take time out to dialogue with strangers. On some theoretical level, however, this persisting gap remains important. It may indicate a myopia on the part of Euro-American Buddhists, a kind of shadow side to the group, at a time when rapidly growing Asian communities are increasing as part of the Western dharma mix. It may just be a natural expression of how communities grow following lines of their own self-interest. But even as one must question its normative character, the Euro-American Buddhist mainstream deserves to be taken seriously as a powerful voice of a new Western Buddhism, recognized to be the wave of the immediate future.