American Buddhism
by Al
One of the issues that seems to be gaining ground, at least as a point of discussion, within Buddhist circles is the question of the relationship of Buddhism to Americans and American culture. This is a question that centers on a number of points:
- What should the role of Buddhism in America be in the long term?
- What aspects of Buddhism as traditionally taught are essential to it and which aspects are culturally dependent? (This is the question of whether practice X or belief Y is actually an essential part of Buddhism or, for example, an aspect of Indian or Chinese culture.)
- What changes from the way that Buddhism is taught in Asia should occur as Buddhism becomes a part of American culture?
The longer that Buddhism and Buddhists are active in the U.S., the more that these will come into play. Buddhism has been in the United States for more than 100 years but for most of this time, it was largely limited to immigrant populations as the religion that they brought with them from their original counties and which was practiced within their communities. Since the 1950′s, and especially since the late 1960′s, Buddhism has drawn in more adherents of non-Asian ethnicity.
Zen was really the first to pave the way for this and followed a natural pattern that the initial teachers were Japanese and often taught in a very traditional manner, matching the way that they had learned. Sometimes this succeeded and sometimes this failed. Over time, Zen has adapted itself, to greater and less degrees, to American culture and attempted to work out some of these issues. Some of this came to a head as more and more teachers who were American born and of European ancestry became teachers and lineage holders.
Tibetan Buddhism has struggled with this issue and it is very unresolved in its communities. In some, such as Chogyam Trungpa’s, practices have been conducted in English since the 1970′s. Texts have been translated and teachers are often Americans. In others, the vast majority of recognized teachers or ones given permission to teach, are Tibetans who either fled Tibet or who grew up in India and Nepal. In my experience in the Tibetan Buddhist community, very few Americans were given permission to teach or made lineage holders. I can only think of a few out of dozens and dozens of Tibetan Buddhist teachers who are active in the U.S. outside of the Shambhala community of Trungpa. Practices and general liturgy are normally in Tibetan and in order to go on the three year retreats, which is a common requirement to become a teacher, a practitioner must become fluent in Tibetan, both modern and Classical (for reading). I have at least one good friend who is a very dedicated practitioner who has been trying for several years now to find a way to learn Tibetan to go on retreat. It has been made clear that he’d be allowed to attend but he has to master this language that is not commonly taught and often not by individuals trained to teach it professionally.
In the Tendai community here in the States, I know that there has been discussion at points about whether one needs to learn Japanese in order to be completely trained. This is a limitation based on the fact that much of the liturgical materials, commentaries, and other texts have not been translated into English. For myself, I’ve pretty much decided that I’m going to have to learn to at least read Japanese at some point given my scholastic bent and my involvement but I cannot say that it is something that I look completely forward to doing in my late 30′s and into my 40′s.
Some of these questions will be solved over time (decades or generations) as things develop but those of us active today need to think long and hard about our relationship to Buddhism, to the lineages that we are a part of and which come down to us, and about what aspects of the teachings we receive are an essential part of the tradition and which are cultural customs. I have heard Tibetan teachers, such as Namkhai Norbu, acknowledge this issue before. Some teachers who are not Americans are pondering this as well but this is an area where the decisions today will have a great impact. Buddhism in America is at its beginning but it will have a long future to come. We need to create the proper circumstances to midwife its birth into a full flowering of the Dharma.
Comments
Hey Al,
Two comments. First, on Tibetan Buddhism, one thing to remember is that, to really become a “lineage holder,” meaning to “hold” the entire body of teachings of one of the lineages, requires a huge amount of work, because there’s a huge amount of stuff to master. Many of the lamas started out by going into the monastic system when they were small children. That’s not likely to happen in America, where we frown on locking small kids into a restrictive lifestyle chosen by their family. So, Tibetans will continue to have a big head start on Westerners for the foreseeable future.
And second, looking at you, me and most of the other Americans involved in Buddhism I know, we tend to look around at a lot of traditions, keep our options open, and stay away from permanent attachments to a particular hierarchy or sectarian structure, whereas that kind of attachment is very common among Tibetans and other Eastern practitioners. And, looking at my experiences with Shambhala, where a lot of Westerners actually did attach themselves more or less permanently to a hierarchy, once the “glass ceiling” is removed, or at least raised to a higher level, Westerners often unconsciously adopt leadership patterns drawn from our largely corporate and ego-centered culture that aren’t always edifying in a Buddhist setting.
The Eastern traditions have always had a parallel “career path” for people who just devoted themselves to practice, neither joining nor opposing the hierarchical traditions. These people aren’t usually the ones who end up teaching in the West, but I think their example furnishes a very compatible and healthy Western alternative to big hierarchies and organizations.
W.B.
I don’t disagree but there should be a point where one’s genetic ancestry or culture of origin does not determine, in America, whether one becomes allowed to teach.
I’m a big believer in meritocracy and realization. If a teacher has knowledge that his or her student has the level of realization and the level of intellectual knowledge to be able to teach, they should consider allowing them to do so unless there is a reason not to do so.
I don’t want to get into too much dirty laundry but there are specific examples of Westerners who have done multiple three year retreats, learned Tibetan fluently, and done verbal and textual translation works for years who, after all of this, were allowed to teach and given empowerments for a few preliminary practices (one example that I’m thinking of has been doing this work for 30 years). Then the nephew of an important teacher shows up. He’s 21, just out of his three year retreat and shedra, and he’s given permission to teach the entire lineage and give empowerments and displaces the first person…
What are people going to make of that, regardless of other reasons for things to occur?
Buddhism is not embodied as a tradition that can survive in the West until Westerners can teach it. Often there are issues of training or practice. I can recognize that. Some people have much better training because they grow up in the tradition. Outside of that, there are qualified Westerners who have been monks, been through retreats, and are fully trained. What happens? Eventually, a lot of them seem to quit being monks and become professors. Why is that?
This is in Tibetan Buddhism, where I and you have the most experience.
In Zen, for better or worse, things have moved on a bit and it seems to be a pretty even mix of American teachers and visiting or resident teachers from Japan. I expect that given another 50 years, Tibetan Buddhism will be in the same boat or just functioning at a much smaller level than today. Tibetan Lamas have already discussed how few of the Tibetan disasporic children want to study Buddhism. They complain that most of the kids want to go into business and make money.
You’re right that there’s some nepotism and so forth in the Tibetan scene. I’m not sure why Western monastics throw it in and become professors, though. I’m sure there are lots of reasons, including that they weren’t as egoless as they might have thought, and monasticism turned out not to be as conducive to practice as they thought. I’ve met some Western monastics/lamas who seemed as good or better than the average visiting or residential Tibetans, but none who have seemed as good as the top-end of the Tibetans, most of whom were lamas before the Chinese takeover, and got their training in Tibet.
Zen, and to a large extent Dzogchen, are in a somewhat different category from Tantra, because there isn’t as much stuff to learn, and it isn’t as culturally specific. I don’t think Western Dzogchen has been as disciplined and systematic as some Western Zen yet, but I’ve met some of the Namkhai Norbu students who, if things in that scene hadn’t been so wild and CNR had started earlier to train the next generation of teachers, could easily have ended up like some of the better Western Zen masters. The other thing about Zen and Dzogchen is that they get one out of having to “believe in” the whole body of Buddhist dogma, some of which can seem awfully counter to our usual life experiences. We don’t do well with doctrine that isn’t consistent with experience, and I think it’s a good thing that we don’t.
What I really wonder about Westerners and Tantra is whether we might not do better with our own deities than with weird-ass Hindu deities partially translated into Tibetan ones. I don’t have an answer, because it would take a lot of time to become good enough at Tantra to be able to make a real experiment, but if the philosophical and intellectual rigor of the Tibetan schools could be applied to practices with more of a cultural connection for us, there might be some worthwhile results.
W.B.
Bill, you write:
What I really wonder about Westerners and Tantra is whether we might not do better with our own deities than with weird-ass Hindu deities partially translated into Tibetan ones. I don’t have an answer, because it would take a lot of time to become good enough at Tantra to be able to make a real experiment, but if the philosophical and intellectual rigor of the Tibetan schools could be applied to practices with more of a cultural connection for us, there might be some worthwhile results.
I have wondered the same before but, at the end, I figure that we don’t have enough people that are in a place to do that kind of work as it is. Part of the draw of Buddhism versus western practices that I’ve been involved in is that it is a living tradition passed from mouth to ear for thousands of years. In that circumstance, there has to be a benefit to learning the system as it is before people starting taking it apart.
On the other hand, they have to be given the means or access to do so. One of the things that I found frustrating about Tibetan practice, as you well know from conversation, is the lack of ability to really find a teacher to work with one on it. So many of the Tibetan teachers, since there are so few, spend their time travelling from center to center and then go back to India or what-not to spend the other six months of the year. There are only a handful of places with both a resident teacher and the willingness or ability to train new individuals.
I was lucky in making the connections that I have now in having an accessible teacher to work with in my practice. I do think working with a teacher is essential to longterm practice and improvement, if only to force one to examine one’s own neuroses if nothing else.