Seminaries and Training in the West
by Al
One of the things that comes up a lot in the talks with my Buddhist teacher is the lack of Buddhist seminary facilities in the West. If you are on a Buddhist path towards ordination, either as a hermit or largely solitary practitioner or as one who will eventually be a leader of a sangha or one of the leaders, there is a lot of difficulty in receiving fully rounded training.
Receiving training in the ritual aspects, meditative techniques, and similar activities is difficult but can be accomplished by working with a teacher. Sometimes, as I have found, it is hard to find a place where there is a full-time teacher or one available to students on a regular basis. This seems to be more of a problem in the Tibetan lineages where there is currently a pattern of teachers doing circuits, like judges of the Wild West, from place to place during the course of a year. I know that when my teacher was originally ordained within the Drikung Kagyu lineage, he had to wait until a lama and attendants were in town to fulfill the quorum necessary to do ordination. I suspect that a similar problem exists for the Theravadan tradition in the United States. Here in California, there is at least one monastery but that is rare. For Zen practitioners, on the other hand, ordained priests are a lot more common around the country, largely because of the length of time Zen has been in the U.S. and because Zen teachers made a habit of ordaining Westerners decades ago. It is still uncommon in the Tibetan tradition to be ordained to teach, as opposed to ordination as a monk.
But leaving aside the receiving of vows and the learning of practices, Buddhism is a rich tradition with thousands of years of history. Even if one is not an intellectual, much of this needs to be understood at a level where it is integrated into one’s ability to call up the lessons or teachings of earlier eras on some level of command. It isn’t enough, sometimes, to look up what Dogen said to a particular problem. One has to have read this material, thought about and reflected on it, and integrated it with one’s own understanding. Additionally, if one is making a life path of being a Buddhist practitioner and perhaps leading a group, there are many many practicalities of working with students or groups of people, even in setting up monasteries or temples.
In Japan, a number of the Buddhist sects, such as Shingon, have their own universities to train in much of this. One can go to school at the university in Koyasan and study the traditional Shingon texts and teachings. There are professors who, as well as being ordained practitioners, are academic scholars in these areas as well.
In the United States (and, I suspect, the rest of the West), this is not the case. The division between practitioners and scholars is fairly wide and one often becomes either of these without being the other. I’ve considered a PhD program at the Graduate Theological Union in California not simply because I’m interested in Buddhism academically but because the man running the Buddhist program there is an ordained Shingon priest and has specialized in studying the ritual practices of Shingon, which are largely shared with my own lineage. If there was a way to study with him or someone similar without spending $10,000 a semester but was unaccredited, I would be more than happy to do it but the only way to become a scholar of Buddhism, often, is to join a scholastic program. I also know that many of these programs (not GTU) look rather askance at practitioner-scholars. I spoke to a couple of Tibetan translators about this in 2005 since they were both PhD’s teaching Buddhist Studies at a local University in their area. Each of them talked about the difficulties faced by practitioners as scholars because of attitudes in departments. One of them was not “out” as a Buddhist for this reason.
There is also the not uncommon practice of ordained individuals giving back their vows, going back to school or finishing studies, and becoming academics. Part of this is the issue in the West around maintaining any sort of livelihood and being ordained. As a number of people that I know have attested, it is nearly impossible to survive as a monk in America unless you are fortunate enough to be part of an established monastery because there simply isn’t the support and, at the end of the day, you have to eat. The monk vows normally preclude working for a living and, as many find, even when vows don’t get in the way of that, working full-time gets in the way of being a practitioner in a lot of ways. Part-time professional options for work are also few and far between in the current world, as I’ve often found as well. Anyone who has gone back to school full-time and tried to work has learned that one well.
We need schools in the West to train scholars of Buddhism and future (or current) monks and priests in order to have a full and well-rounded expression of Buddhism in the West. Naropa University seems to be partially oriented that way if you are a Tibetan practitioner. Non-sectarian options are not really available and the sectarian ones are almost non-existent as well. It would be nice if people got together and pondered a solution for this problem.
Comments
I couldn’t agree more – and, in fact, was just discussing this very thing with a collegue (I work at a University) this morning.
Another needed function I see a “Buddhist Seminary” providing, along with the standard doctrinal, liturgical, practice methodology studies – is the more pastoral training we in the West expect from our “clergy.” It’s not enough here to be able to quote a sutra, teach Shamatha, and perform a funeral. Until Buddhist clergy receive the same “professional training” that other clergy recieve – they simply won’t be treated as any more than deeply commited “hobby-ists.”
And as a follow-up… I’m not sure we do need schools in the West to train “scholars of Buddhism.” We *have* that already, at a lot of fine institutions of Higher Education. Many of the world’s best & brightest “scholars” of Buddhism are Westerners.
Rather, what I see us needing are professional schools to train professional “practitioners.” Seminaries.
You don’t go to a seminary to be a scholar – you go to become a “minister” – and as more and more Buddhist monks, priests, and “Dharma Teachers” are called upon to “minister” to their Sangha – this type of training will become an absolute necessity.
Combine that with the ability to have a standard level of education and training for our clergy (which right now so widely varies from place to place that even within the same “denomination”) and it seems nearly an imperitive to pursue this goal.
I would think that someone trained to be a minister would be in a sorry state if they didn’t know the ins and outs of their lineage, the way that those of generations before have approached and understood problems, and didn’t have a firm grounding in whatever sutras and tantras are important to the tradition.
Training as a Zen priest, for example, doesn’t guarantee that you will be trained extensively (and sometimes at all) in these things. Because of that, I would expect that any seminary would have a decent academic program. A Roman Catholic seminary trains its seminarians in the history and theology of the Catholic church and in the Bible, not just in how to minister.
As you mention, there is not a standard level of education for Buddhist clergy and I am not sure that expecting academic programs run by secular institutions to cover many of the basics is a good option. Working in partnership with an academic program may be an option though.
I think one of the possible “requirements” to making a Buddhist Seminary viable is Graduate level accreditation/recognition. Without that – there’s little incentive to attend/participate, unless your particular teacher (or American based lineage) made it a requirement.
Other Western seminaries are frequently only “accredited” by their denomination – but since the seminary training is made a requirement of the denomination, is expected of the clergy of that denomination by its membership, and the denominations themselves are generally of such a size – that this is largely irrelivent.
And of course, for larger denominations, their seminaries *are* accredited.
On the plus side of this – you get University credit (and possibly a full degree – M.Div) for your seminary training.
On the draw-back side – you’ll have to already have your undergraduate degree, and be ready to pay for a graduate degree with no promise (or hope, really) of getting a “job” as a priest that will then help you pay that tuition debt.
When we (Buddhists) expect this level of training and subsequent “service” from our clergy, however, I think we’re also morally obligated to be ready to -pay- them in the same manner that other professional clergy are paid.
Even Catholic priests with vows of poverty get a paycheck from the church. :-)