20

Dharma for All: Diversity in American Buddhism

CHARLES PREBISH      PAUL HALLER

MARLENE JONES      GUY MCCLOSKEY

 

In James Coleman’s book The New Buddhism, he indicates that the groups he researched appealed only to “a relatively small slice of the public” that was “overwhelmingly white,” from the middle to higher reaches of the middle class, and highly educated. How accurate is that description?

CHARLES PREBISH: Coleman is talking about what he calls “New Buddhism,” and for him that means almost exclusively “converts.” In the context of convert Buddhist communities, he’s probably quite accurate. But in the overall Buddhist community in the United States, it’s likely that as many at 80 percent are not converts. They’re Asian-immigrant Buddhists.

PAUL HALLER: We need to ask to what degree the way Buddhist sanghas present themselves deters people who don’t fall into the demographic you just described. In San Francisco, the overall population is quite diverse. Caucasians represent about half the population, and then we have a large Asian-American population, about a 15-percent African-American population, and a significant Hispanic population. At Zen Center, one of the things we’re trying to tackle is to what degree we deter people from this part of the demographic from feeling at home, and consequently returning on a frequent basis to our centers.

The point that Chuck makes is important to emphasize at the beginning of this discussion. Those of us who are convert Buddhists think that we are Buddhism in America. In fact, we’re a minority of Buddhists in America. That’s a very helpful perspective to keep in mind. Relating with the larger Sangha is another important form of diversity.

MARLENE JONES: What Coleman says fits with my experience. As a meditator who began in 1970, I would say that the communities I encountered left out a lot of people and continue to do so. For one thing, centers have been overwhelmingly white. Many of the centers began because people who went to Asia came back and wanted to start sitting groups or retreat environments. They were white men for the most part, and they tended to draw people to the centers who were like themselves.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: Coleman’s description does not reflect my experience in Soka Gakkai. I’ve spent the last fourteen years practicing in Chicago. If I look at the people present on a Sunday morning or at some large-scale Soka Gakkai event, the majority are African-American. We’ve also very substantially increased our Hispanic membership. At our last annual gathering in Chicago, we had about five hundred Spanish-speaking people, which was very progressive for us, because we have not been so strong among Spanish-speaking people.

Why does diversity matter? Why do communities need to reach out beyond those who already come to their doors?

GUY MCCLOSKEY: We need to start from the premise that we are interconnected. We all arise from dependent origination. Then we can recognize that if our small ego, the narrow ego contained within our skin, is the extent of our sense of selfhood, that is all we are going to experience.

As we continue to practice, we open up, and our sense of self expands. Ultimately, the Buddhist sense of self is to embrace all living beings. As we progress along the path of Vimalakīrti, who is our example of the accomplished layperson, we can come to recognize that the suffering of anyone, anywhere, is our own. As I deal with suffering, the greatest relief I can find is to share the suffering of others.

MARLENE JONES: I have found the Four Noble Truths to be extremely important in teaching people of color. Suffering is the human condition. I wouldn’t say that the suffering in communities of color is greater than anybody else’s, but because of racism, because of struggles in surviving every day in our society, the suffering is out front.

I have spent a lot of time focusing on that theme, asking, “How can we turn suffering around to liberate the world? How can we bring healing and liberation to all beings through looking at our experience of suffering, knowing that it’s true for all?” Suffering leads you to care and nurturing.

PAUL HALLER: What inspired our outreach initiative was compassion, the motivation to be of service to society at large. Diversity is one of the consequences of serving people. For example, I teach in a drug rehab center. I do that to help people, most of whom happen to be working-class people from minority groups. Inevitably, several of those people want to visit the center, and that has been a learning experience for us. The class difference stood out, so we had to devise strategies so that it wouldn’t feel so difficult for these guys.

CHARLES PREBISH: Social engagement can be a means to create an environment that facilitates people of all different backgrounds feeling comfortable. Buddhist communities might well adopt the four brahmaviharas—love, compassion, sympathetic joy, and equanimity—as a basis for a new Vinaya for the modern world.

I also think it’s helpful to emphasize precepts as practice. Once people are able to affirm a strong ethical pattern for themselves, they can manifest that ethical pattern in society in a strong way.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: Soka Gakkai is now the largest Buddhist movement in Japan, but at the end of World War II it was an organization of the poor, the sick, and the disaffected. The people we could have excluded have come to us in stages. In 1981, I first held someone in my arms while he died of AIDS. We had members at that time who refused to allow people with AIDS into their homes, where our neighborhood discussion meetings were being held. We had to confront that directly.

Nichiren said that the model of Buddhist practice is found in the Lotus Sutra, in the guise of Bodhisattva-Never-Disparaging, who said, “I deeply respect you because you are on the path and you will eventually be a buddha. How can I discriminate against you?” Even though I certainly have discriminated against people at times in my life, I could never justify that from the Buddhist perspective.

PAUL HALLER: Within the Zen tradition, we have the teaching on the merging of difference and unity, the Sandōkai. Difference and unity is the heart of diversity. We are all the same. We all come from the same human stock, and suffer under the human condition, and every one of us is also unique. Whether you want to call it form and emptiness, difference and unity, or whatever, this is an essential theme of the Ch’an and Zen approach to practice.

If that is the goal, why are most convert Buddhist groups reaching only a narrow slice of the population?

CHARLES PREBISH: For one thing, the vast majority of convert Buddhists gravitate toward the meditation traditions. That’s more of an individualistic approach, whereas in the Asian immigrant communities and in Soka Gakkai, there’s a much greater emphasis on making the community a significant part of your religious life. This is appealing to people who are disenfranchised from other parts of the American community.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: The attraction of Nichiren Buddhism is human relationships. They’re attracted to someone who has made a noticeable development in their life, and they ask, “What’s different about you? What do you do?” Having never had an attraction toward the meditation practices, I don’t know what draws people to Zen and other such traditions. I would guess that it starts off on a more intellectual rather than social, emotional level.

CHARLES PREBISH: In my research, the thing that people in Soka Gakkai say repeatedly is that the sangha is nurturing for everyone.

MARLENE JONES: I started the people-of-color retreats and the diversity council because I was uncomfortable with Spirit Rock as it existed then. It attracted people who were like the people who were already there: European-American people, who like being with people who are highly educated, have a lot of money, and who have the resources to sit a long retreat without having any financial burden.

People of color usually can’t do long retreats without a scholarship. But even if you have a scholarship, you still need income to take care of your children and family. I have noticed, in fact, that many of the people of color who do come to Spirit Rock tend to be pretty educated. Some have advanced degrees; some are published authors. Many of them are similar to the European-American population here at Spirit Rock.

So there is a strong class barrier as well.

MARLENE JONES: Absolutely. That’s something we’re now spending some time talking about. We decided a long time ago that to begin with we were going to focus mostly on racial issues, as opposed to class, gender, and sexual orientation issues, just because they were so very prevalent. Now the diversity council has started looking at class issues as well, because they really seem to be popping up. Many people are feeling left out.

We will need to explore this more, just as we have with racial issues. It’s a new frontier.

PAUL HALLER: Talking to people who have had difficulty entering the community has helped to drive what we are doing. Our diversity-initiative steering committee pays a lot of attention to what people have to say. One thing we’ve done as a result is formed a people-of-color sitting group that holds weekly sittings and periodic longer sessions. Their advice and what they report to us helps us formulate what we do.

CHARLES PREBISH: Over the thirty-five years that I’ve been investigating Buddhism in North America, both as a practitioner and a scholar, I’ve seen the landscape change dramatically. In the seventies, the groups were almost completely exclusive and continued that way on into the eighties. At that point people studying American Buddhism argued heatedly in the literature about how to classify the many kinds of people who were coming together to practice Buddhism. Maybe some of the distinctions we are talking about between different types of people who practice the Dharma may be starting to dissolve in a way that could be very efficacious for the evolution of a genuinely American Buddhism, one that is inclusive of all types of Buddhism and all types of people practicing Buddhism.

MARLENE JONES: I see integration gradually growing. Originally, many people said that if it were not for a people-of-color retreat, they wouldn’t be here. That has started to change. Many of those same people are starting to go to the regular retreats, although not in huge numbers. It also depends on who the teacher is. People are concerned about racism for sure, but more than anything they need cultural inclusion, to feel part of what is represented.

We know that it works if we have teachers of color. It’s not that we’re teaching the Dharma any differently; it’s just about being with people who look like you, talk like you. But other teachers are learning to be more culturally inclusive. If Jack Kornfield is teaching, he draws more people of color. He talks about racism, he deals with cultural issues, he quotes James Baldwin, he integrates cultural information, and people recognize what he’s talking about. So he can draw people who are different from him, because he spent so much time learning about various cultures and ways of living in the world. We had a retreat where the goal was to have a mixed representation of people’s colors, and it was successful. But it takes a lot of work, and there need to be enough people of color who can trust that the process is going to work for them.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: We have deliberately applied diversity training for our leadership, but at this stage our leadership has come to reflect the demographics of our membership. We don’t have to go looking for people of color. White people are getting used to listening to black people, as opposed to the other way around.

Many people find their first experiences in a Buddhist center were far from nurturing. In fact, they were intimidating. Many people find the atmosphere of Zen, for example, austere and uninviting.

PAUL HALLER: Yes. That is often people’s experience. There is a kind of an implied austerity in the Zen attention to detail. That is the feedback we get. After all, Zen is traditionally a wisdom tradition. But one thing I have noted is that in many of the Zen communities, the Metta Sutta, a Theravādin text on loving-kindness, has been brought into the standard liturgy. As Zen finds its way in America, I think the active expression of compassion will become a more significant attribute. The traditional Zen notion that “we don’t reach out to you; in fact we make it a little bit difficult for you” is something we are working directly with these days. We are regularly asking ourselves, “Are we creating too much of a barrier?”

I would like to add, though, that I am working-class Irish from Belfast. I did get a college degree, that’s true, but my family background is working-class. So it doesn’t seem to do us much good, either, to stick too tightly to this notion that everybody is upper class and highly educated. There are people from many different backgrounds in the various sanghas I am involved with.

Does it make more sense to put emphasis on integration or should the emphasis be on specific programs to meet the needs of particular groups of people?

MARLENE JONES: All of the above. But the first and most important is program for separate groups, because they draw new people who are not familiar with the Dharma.

When I first came to Spirit Rock in 1991, I felt like I had to leave myself outside. I had to assimilate or I wouldn’t fit in. Over and again I watched people of color walk in the door and not come back. Or maybe they would come back once, and then never again. That’s when it occurred to me that we needed to create an environment where they could feel safe and welcome, and be able to access the Dharma without facing cultural exclusion—without, in a word, being ignored.

Separate events give people an opportunity to enter comfortably and access the resources of a center like Spirit Rock, which should belong to everyone. Once people have entered, I try to encourage them to integrate into what is already established. So now we are trying to create more environments that are mixed, where there is some confluence.

PAUL HALLER: The strategy accords with our experience. Someone must feel safe enough and connected enough before their participation becomes full. Until that point, they have a guarded and qualified connection. That is just the human condition.

It is not a one-shot deal. It’s a process. Maybe fifteen years ago, the notion of being gay or lesbian was a little problematic within our community. Since then, gays and lesbians have been completely integrated and hold all sorts of positions of authority and prestige. That’s happened, to a large extent, because the level of safety and acceptance has grown. It’s a very small issue for us now.

That would be my hope for people who are marginalized because of race or class. That over the next decade or two—through familiarity, exposure, and growing diversity in our demographics—the boundaries and separations that now require active strategies will no longer be a major concern. We will end up with a similar kind of integration as we have had with gays and lesbians.

What advice would you offer to communities that are just starting to pay attention to diversity?

PAUL HALLER: The first thing I would say is “Don’t be afraid.” Our whole Dharma tradition is based on the inevitability of change. We can embrace change. Diversity is not a problem to be solved. It offers riches, it offers explorations, and it offers a new way of seeing and feeling the world. My advice would be to embrace diversity, not out of a sense of duty or guilt, but out of a sense of appreciating your life.

MARLENE JONES: I’ve challenged all-white groups to look at themselves and wonder why there are no people of color in the room, or why people of color show up once and don’t come back. During one question-and-answer period, someone asked, “What can we do? How do we recognize the people? How do we talk to them? What do we say when they come in?” I repeated to them what the Dalai Lama says: “Greet people as an old friend.”

So my advice is to first get beyond fear, and greet people as if they’re part of your sangha, as if they belong. We simply need to see people for who they really are—to see their true self, their buddha nature.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: My advice is to teach everyone basic elements of Buddhist philosophy, including the fact that we are indistinguishable from our environment. We are all related. We need to discover that. Paul talked about a different way of seeing the world. I think that means seeing the world as it actually is.

Also, I would advise expanding the cultural orientation of what we present for the benefit of everyone, no matter what audience we are addressing. That is something that is quite natural. We should feel awkward when we avoid it.

CHARLES PREBISH: Alan Senauke said that passivity means white supremacy. We have to remind ourselves continually not to be passive. One of the pāramitās is vigor. We have to take that vigor out into the world with us. Maybe it needs to be tempered by patience, so that we can do the work of bodhisattvas, but we can never be satisfied just sitting on our cushion. We have to take what we learn out into the world and share it.

How do you think the Western Buddhist Sangha will evolve over the long term as it works with issues of race and class and inclusiveness?

MARLENE JONES: There will be more sanghas and centers in urban settings, in the communities where people of color live. Also, hopefully, we’ll see much more integration in the traditional white sanghas. I don’t know how long that’s going to take, but in the last ten or fifteen years I’ve seen change in that direction. It took us a long time to come up with the money to hire a full-time diversity coordinator, but we’ve done that and we’ve started a whole diversity movement as a result of that commitment. Hopefully we’ll see a lot more of that kind of work going on.

CHARLES PREBISH: Perhaps we’ve seduced ourselves to think it will happen faster, because we’re Americans and because we have better communication, and we have the Internet, and so forth. But we’re still just people. I imagine that I will not see a complete integration during my lifetime, but that it will happen more gradually over time.

PAUL HALLER: I don’t agree entirely. We create the future. I hope we will continue to approach it with the commitment we’re taking on right now. That’s essential. It might be possible, then, that in twenty to thirty years, in just the same way that issues regarding sexual preference or orientation have diminished as divisive issues within groups like ours, issues of ethnicity and race will also diminish. We will have integrated communities.

GUY MCCLOSKEY: We will need to learn more and more from each other about how to translate Buddhism in a way that communicates to Americans generally. I have no doubt that if we apply the values of Buddhism, integrated groups will form. Chicago has been described as the most segregated city in America, and yet we developed many racially diverse groups. When people in those groups get together, they share similar experiences about how to apply the values and the practice of Buddhism to their daily lives. That is what brings them together, and I see that continuing to develop.

I think Buddhism definitely can be a strong force in decreasing racism and discrimination. It has the ability to lead people into the future, as a way of life, as a way of living harmoniously with their environment and all living beings.