In the first edition of Buddhism in America, I looked at three prominent issues that cross traditions—gender equity, socially engaged Buddhism, and religious dialogue. Developments related to all three took on a heroic, trail-blazing character, as Euro-American Buddhists were beginning to define themselves and their platforms collectively and in public. Sex and alcohol scandals perpetrated by men put a spotlight on the importance of women’s practice and teaching. Bold visions of how meditation can contribute to social change challenged many who came to Buddhism seeing practice as a personal quest for enlightenment, which was assumed to entail a degree of social withdrawal. High-profile gatherings broke new ground for dialogue, whether meetings among the Dalai Lama and the emerging cadre of authoritative Western teachers or retreats by Catholic and Buddhist monks and nuns in memory of Thomas Merton. Such developments indicated something monumental was under way in American Buddhism and contributed to the excitement of the time.
Fifteen years later, most developments that had been innovative or controversial or both seem to have been widely accepted, and the ideals they represent have become part of the norm in the Euro-American Buddhist mainstream. The vogue for high-profile, formal Christian–Buddhist dialogue may have run its course, but, despite reactionary responses from Christian conservatives, there are probably more Christians practicing meditation based on Buddhism today than in the past, just as there are surely more Christians doing yoga. The progressive position on Buddhist– Christian dialogue is suggested by the example of Paul F. Knitter, a longtime Roman Catholic ecumenist and Zen practitioner, who recently published Without Buddha I Could Not Be a Christian, a personal reflection grounded in decades of theological work. Knitter explores how he, a baptized Catholic who loves Christ and the church, can be at the same time a card-carrying Buddhist who has taken triple refuge. Knitter takes up the big, foundational issues: Can the Christian God who is both person and mystery be reconciled with Buddhist views of the transcendent order? Can Jesus coexist in the hearts and minds of the faithful with Gautama Buddha? How might a Christian understand heaven and prayer in light of nirvana and meditation? As he works through these questions, Knitter comes to realize that Buddhist answers enhance, even in some sense restore, his faith in Christ and church. Knitter believes and hopes that in the future Christians will embrace a mystical approach to faith grounded in scripture, tradition, and personal experience, inclusive enough to cultivate insights from other religions.1 Recognizing that dialogue is controversial in some quarters, Knitter submits his reflections to faithful Christians in the hope that he will be seen as “the cutting edge,” not the “outer edge,” of authentic Christianity.
Around 1990, gender equity was hailed as characteristic of America’s new Buddhism, as evidenced in both the high number of women who practiced and the importance of well-recognized teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Joan Halifax, and Pema Chodron. The number of women among rank-and-file practitioners and teachers and leaders has increased substantially since then, and the central role of women in Western and American Buddhism is now taken for granted. At the same time, questions about the place of gays and lesbians in American Buddhism, which were at the cutting edge in 1990, have largely been answered: inclusivity is apparently the norm in most communities. By and large, American Buddhists across the board have been responsive to gender equity issues, evidence of the degree to which Sixties-era progressive social ideals and human rights are foundational to the communities.
Gender equity issues, however, also exemplify the complex ground on which relations among American, Western, and global Buddhist communities proceed. Recent developments in international debates about full monastic ordination for women display how gender prompts a multifaceted, cross-denominational, global conversation in which contemporary views are thrust into dialogue with Asia-based Buddhist traditions and institutions. Over the last few decades, fitful progress had been made toward full ordination for women in some traditions, despite a lack of consensus among Buddhists worldwide. Two recent events catalyzed the ongoing debate—the International Congress on Women’s Role in the Sangha held in Hamburg, Germany in 2007 and the bhiksuni ordination of four women in Perth, Australia in 2009.
The Hamburg conference was convened in response to a call by the Dalai Lama in 2005 for Buddhists to come to a decision about full ordination for women, after the release of an extensive study of the question by the Tibetan Department of Religion and Culture (India). “We Tibetans can’t decide this alone,” the Dalai Lama stated. “It needs to be decided in collaboration with Buddhists worldwide.”2 The conference presenters included representatives of Buddhist organizations, prominent monks and nuns expert in monastic law and discipline, and a broad range of other academics. Their papers explored topics from the status of women and ordination procedures to the prospect of restructuring Buddhism around gender equity issues. The outcome was ambiguous: concrete proposals stalled, even as momentum seemed to grow for the full ordination of women.
Two years later, however, four nuns in the Thai forest tradition received full ordination in Perth, evoking a powerful reaction as monastic authorities refused to recognize the ceremony’s validity. Shortly thereafter, Ajahn Brahm, a Western bhikkhu among the officiants at the ordination, was excommunicated and his Australian monastery was delisted as a branch of the Thai head temple. This prompted a quick response from shocked Buddhists around the world. Their outrage was sharpened by the fact that these events had taken place in the lineage of Ajahn Chah, a famous meditation master who was highly influential in establishing the Thai forest tradition in the West before his death in 1992.
Most Western observers support full ordination for women, but the issues that come into play are complex. Both traditionalists and progressives ground their arguments in ancient sutta literature and monastic law, which are then refracted through popular custom, changing gender norms, and patriarchal intransigence. Discussions take place among monastics and laity within both Theravada and Mahayana lineages that have branches around the world. Western and American Buddhist women are deeply involved in the debate, but their positions defy simple notions about traditionalist East and progressive West, reflecting the ongoing impact of globalization. Whatever the outcome, gender equity debates are important to mainstream American Buddhists today in a number of ways. They function to connect American Buddhists to the global community in learned, if sometimes tense, conversations about an issue that has the potential to reshape Buddhism in the twenty-first century. It is a leadership opportunity for American and Western Buddhists who can speak with strong voices about how gender equity and dharma work together in their communities. It may also be useful for American Buddhists to learn that to be part of the global process they must speak in traditionalist language, even as they seek to bring new perspectives into play with the procedures and perspectives of ancient institutions.
Social engagement permeates American Buddhism so thoroughly today that it is hard to recall it was once a source of some controversy. Two decades ago, Thich Nhat Hanh, Bernard Glassman, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, and others developed new ideas about the fit between social activism and meditation. Many Buddhists began to work for nonviolence and gun control or to teach in prisons, while scholars reported on more ambitious projects led by Buddhists in Asia. Social engagement was once seen as fresh and important, and it quickly became central to the mainstream dharma discourse. Socially engaged Buddhists today operate in a lower key than in the past, but they have a clearer, more pragmatic vision of ways to implement the dharma in American society. A good deal of this energy is channeled through major American institutions, a testimony to how far the community as a whole has moved from its countercultural orientation.
Three developments suggest the range of social engagement today. The first is Buddhist pastoral education, a field that has grown dramatically over the course of the last decade. Some pastoral education programs are run by Buddhist organizations like the Upaya Zen Center of Santa Fe, under the direction of Joan Halifax. Grounded in Mahayana teachings about skillful means and compassionate action, Upaya’s two-year Chaplaincy Training focuses on serving and healing both individuals and environmental and social systems. Part of Bernard Glassman’s Zen Peacemaker Order, the Upaya program draws upon Buddhist philosophy, secular systems theory, and the sciences and is open to lay practitioners, Zen priests, and others seeking to learn about Buddhist perspectives on service. Internationalist in outlook, it is associated with the Trauma Resource Institute, a global organization dedicated to training frontline social service providers, and the International Women’s Partnership for Peace and Justice, an organization that integrates feminism, spirituality, and social action in projects in Asia. “Our work is, as Roshi Joan says, ‘warm hand to warm hand,’” Kosu Boudreau, a recent graduate, reflects. “It is a model grounded in transparency towards self, from the other, and back out into the greater world. This is the great trinity of contemporary spiritual care—self awareness, other centeredness and a vision of ‘the greater good.’”3
Buddhist pastoral education is also taking shape in some of America’s major theological institutions, such as Harvard Divinity School, where Buddhist perspectives are being integrated into a program that has been historically liberal but Protestant Christian in content and tone. Forty-something Willa Miller sees Buddhist pastoral education as a quiet revolution taking place as rising generations discover new ways of social engagement. A longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Miller has completed two Kagyu seminary programs and was authorized to teach as a lama in 1999. She is coeditor of the book Buddhist Pastoral Care (Wisdom, 2012) and author of Everyday Dharma: Seven Weeks to Finding the Buddha in You (2009) and is working toward a Harvard Ph.D. “Pastoral education is one of the cutting-edge places within American Buddhism now,” she says. “It is happening in a number of Buddhist places—Naropa Institute, The University of the West. But Buddhists are also blazing a path through the Judeo-Christian chaplaincy.” Fifteen years ago, no divinity schools offered Buddhist pastoral education and, even if they had, few Buddhists in the baby boom generation would have aspired to a divinity degree. “Now Buddhists are being hired into conventional ministerial positions as pastoral counselors in prisons, hospitals, hospices, and universities. They are doing amazing work and this is an amazing development.”4
A second development in socially engaged Buddhism is a multifaceted effort to promote mindfulness meditation as a means to foster personal and social well-being in society at large, an approach that sees practice primarily as a tool that can relieve pain and suffering. Fifteen years ago, observers referred to such stripped-down dharma as “stealth Buddhism” to suggest how Buddhism or Buddhist-like practices and values could be promulgated in secular forms acceptable to major American institutions. At that time, Jon Kabat-Zinn pioneered the use of meditation as a means to reduce stress in a medical setting at his Stress Reduction Clinic at the University of Massachusetts Medical School. Originally a student of Sueng Sahn, a Korean Zen teacher with a prominent center in Rhode Island, Kabat-Zinn now integrates mindfulness meditation techniques and hatha yoga to aid patients to cope with stress, pain, and anxiety in an eight-week program that has served almost 20,000 clients. In 1995, he founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society to advance research on the use of mindfulness meditation in patient care and to promote its practice in medical, educational, and other professional settings.
Today Kabat-Zinn’s pragmatic approach to practice is only one among a growing number of secular and nonsectarian initiatives aimed at fostering contemplation. The Fetzer Institute and The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society work to integrate contemplative awareness into American social life through a wide range of programs. These draw upon techniques from various traditions as tools for social change. The Mind and Life Institute and the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center (MARC) have more direct links to Buddhism but promote meditation in a secular vein in the Kabat-Zinn tradition. All four (and other) organizations can be said to participate in the mindfulness discourse central to the Euro-American Buddhist community. They are all engaged in bringing meditation out of monastic settings into the American mainstream. “A Powerful Silence,” a 2004 report published by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, maps the burgeoning interest in contemplation in the United States today and suggests the sentiments shared by many involved in the movement. “We are in the midst of a massive demystification and democratization of contemplative practices. We are witnessing a period of time when resources … allow people to explore their own spirituality.… These conditions have allowed contemplative practices to become untethered from religious traditions and monastic settings and have created fertile ground for their application in secular society.”5
The path followed by forty-something Diana Winston, Director of Mindfulness Education at MARC, may be representative of the shift from an explicit emphasis on Buddhism to the promotion of Buddhist-inspired practices in secular society. A long-term mindfulness practitioner and teacher associated with Jack Kornfield’s Spirit Rock, Winston recalls her passionate interest in Buddhist practice in a monastic vein when she was a young woman, seeing it primarily as a means to attain nirvana. Eventually, she shifted emphasis to cultivate mindfulness in everyday life, in order to develop other aspects of her personality through practice. Around this time, she worked with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, one of the early flagship organizations devoted to socially engaged Buddhism. She now sees enlightenment and practice for everyday life as “a both/and situation,” a seamless approach to the dharma characteristic of the Euro-American Buddhist mainstream. Her interest in transforming institutions fits well with her current job description as Director of Mindfulness Education. “That such a job description even exists, and at UCLA—that’s an indication of how the situation has changed in American Buddhism. Mindfulness is entering public discourse in a new way. The language of mindfulness is all over the place.”6
The mainstreaming of mindfulness meditation is intimately related to a third, somewhat different kind of engagement in which Buddhism has joined forces with the modern sciences. Speculative arguments about the relationship between Buddhism and science have been part of the rhetorical strategy of Buddhist modernists for well over a century. They have been central to the East–West encounter since the World’s Parliament of Religions of 1893, when Asians announced in Chicago that Buddhism (and Hinduism) are more in tune with modern science than the West’s theistic traditions. Around that time, apologists began to argue that Buddhism was in accord with the Copernican revolution, with Newtonian physics, or with mesmerism or hypnotism or evolutionary science. By the 1950s and ’60s, Buddhism was said to anticipate Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics, psychotherapy, and psychology.
Over the past decade, however, such speculative and theoretical concerns have given way to sustained interest in mindfulness meditation among researchers in the field of neurobiology. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that mindfulness meditation has a measurable effect on the structure and function of those areas of the brain thought to foster empathy, self-reflection, and positive states of mind that counter depression. These findings seem to give a scientific sanction to reports by practitioners about how mindfulness practice can improve one’s outlook on life by transforming self-understanding. The neuroscience of mindfulness remains in its infancy, and responsible observers are cautious about drawing speculative conclusions. But there is a palpable sense of excitement about the discovery of an empirical basis for the efficacy of mindfulness practice in and around Buddhist communities.
A number of implications are frequently drawn from the apparent convergence of neuroscience and mindfulness. One is that the cultivation of awareness and compassion in a conventional spiritual or ethical sense may translate into the restructuring of the brain itself. This lends credence to those who argue that Buddhism is itself a science of the mind, not a religion. This convergence also gives a new kind of credibility to social engagement insofar as the capacity of meditation to reshape individual and therefore collective behavior in beneficial ways is given a physiological basis. These conclusions have brought a new energy and legitimacy to the vision of social transformation that has been a powerful element in American Buddhism at least since the 1960s. One can sense this energy in Buddhist-friendly popular publications such as Sharon Begley’s Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves, and it informs MARC’s programmatic vision of bringing mindfulness meditation into professional communities. It also underscores efforts of the Dalai Lama to foster the integration of the dharma, science, and social transformation through gatherings such as the 2010 Mind and Life Conference in Zurich, at which Buddhists, neuroscientists, and economists gathered to discuss ways altruism and compassion can be mobilized through practice to transform the global economy.
The tenor of Buddhist social engagement today captures the current character of a broad swath of the Euro-American Buddhist community in a number of ways. It suggests the degree to which American Buddhists have been successful in promoting a low-key form of social engagement in which the dharma or dharma-inspired ideas are able to penetrate American institutions in the name of personal and social transformation. It epitomizes the pragmatic current in American Buddhism in which the dharma is understood in instrumental terms, its efficacy and utility made apparent by positive outcomes in both individual and social realms. It represents a continuing interest in the fit between Buddhism and humanistic psychology and psychotherapy, but with a new physiological, behavioral twist. Over the course of several decades, Buddhists have shed revolutionary countercultural excesses and romantic notions of Asian spirituality to bring the dharma successfully into play with normative procedures and expectations. However, they have retained a passionate commitment to Buddhist values and practice and the conviction that their profundity and efficacy will survive and thrive, even as they accommodate and are accommodated by the much larger institutional forces at work in American society.
To highlight a streamlined version of Theravada meditation informed by science in an update of Euro-American Buddhism is not to suggest that older interests in ritual, symbol, and tradition play no role in practice communities today. I am told that in Tibetan Buddhism an emphasis is currently placed on Dzogchen and Mahamudra, two forms of practice that resemble mindfulness meditation. But these are practiced in the context of a community that continues to value ancient forms of ritual, architecture, and art because of a deeply felt concern to preserve Tibetan traditions. Tradition also remains a source of inspiration in Zen, where practitioners are adapting Japanese rituals to address the spiritual sensibilities of Euro-Americans. Bernard Glassman has reworked the ancient practice of feeding hungry ghosts to create a community ritual in which mudras and dharani are used to express a vision of social engagement in liturgical celebration. Women in the Zen community have adapted devotion to the bodhisattva Jizo, who in Japan is affectionately regarded as guide and protector during death and rebirth, to mediate the grief, confusion, and sense of loss caused by abortion and miscarriage. In the absence of American rituals to address this emotional and spiritual need, devotion to Jizo has begun to move beyond Buddhism into the broader community.
Buddhism also continues to be a source of inspiration in the creative arts, much as it was in the free-floating dharma discourse among Euro-Americans in the 1950s and ’60s. For example, between 2001 and 2003 an ad hoc consortium of visual artists, scholars, museum curators, cultural critics, and Buddhist meditators met for a series of consultations to consider the relationships among perception, meditation, and creativity. The outcome was two publications helpful in charting the evolution of American Buddhism over the last century. The first, Jacquelynn Baas’s Smile of the Buddha, updates the canon of Western artists who can be said to have been influenced by Asian religions to include figures such as abstract expressionist Wassily Kandinsky, sculptor Isamu Noguchi, and performance artist Laurie Anderson. It also shifts the historic center of this canon from modernists like Claude Monet and Frank Lloyd Wright to postmodernists such as Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The second, Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art, coedited by Baas and Mary Jane Jacob, explores the work of a dozen or so installation and performance artists and examines their links to Buddhism. Some are committed practitioners, while others do not practice but have had creative collaborations with Asian monastic communities. Still others are simply inspired by the power of dharma images and by the philosophies that inform Buddhist aesthetic traditions.
Baas’s and Jacob’s works are reminders that the movement of Buddhism to the West has been a multivalent enterprise that first influenced many Europeans and Americans by way of its cultural expressions. Some sixty years ago, Buddhism was represented in the United States mostly by literature and art and a relatively small number of Buddhist texts in translation. All that began to change when Americans turned east en masse and encountered Asian Buddhist teachers who had both the commitment and the formal training to teach them how to practice the dharma authentically and with grace. It was only some forty years ago that Euro-American Buddhism as a discrete phenomenon began to take shape in fledgling institutions and to define its goals and aspirations. Looking back, it is possible to discern the emerging outline of something that can be called a Western and American Buddhist tradition that now informs the practice of several generations.
To evoke the concept of tradition at this juncture, however, is a reminder that there are many other traditions flourishing in and around the numerous Asian immigrant communities, which have yet to be factored into an American Buddhism still very much in the making. During the 1980s, when Euro-American Buddhists first began to promote their take on the dharma in public, a distinction was frequently made between American Buddhists and Buddhists in America. The implication was that the former consisted of 1960s people creating a new and innovative expression of the dharma uniquely suited to this culture and country, while the latter were Asian Buddhists who just happened to live in the United States. Now, with second and third generations in both communities, such semantic shell games obscure more than they reveal about the nature and composition of American Buddhism. In the material I have prepared for this revised edition of Buddhism in America, I have focused primarily on developments within the public mainstream in Euro-American Buddhism, both to correct my earlier emphasis on different traditions and to do some justice to the intelligence and vibrant spirit of that community. But it remains my conviction that neither American Buddhists nor scholars of American Buddhism can begin to imagine what might come next without a more synoptic understanding of how the new American dharma is also being fashioned within Asian American communities.