Asian Buddhists

Don’t Rush the Western Buddhist

| arun

Barbara O’Brien elaborates on terms such as “modernization” or “westernization” and what these terms might mean in the context of Buddhist history.

There seems to be a rising tide of westerners interested in Buddhism who demand that it be “westernized” asap, stripped of ritual and anything “Asian.” The truth is, most of us have barely scratched the surface, and already we’re making judgments about which parts of Buddhism are “essential” and which aren’t.

The more time I spend with this remarkable tradition, the more grateful I am to the Asian teachers for their care and practice through the centuries. I feel no rush to “westernize” anything. First we should be sure we can maintain the teachings with the same care that brought them to us.

These words are indeed of some comfort to me, but they fail to deal with a central concern in a couple ofprevious posts. Aside from the many issues with what “Western” means, the discussion of “Western Buddhism” is still one that marginalizes Asian Buddhists of the West in the very community where we comprise the outright majority. Apparently we may be welcome into Western Buddhism, our contributions admired, our history acknowledged—but only so long as our say is not proportional to our greater numbers. This Western Buddhist rhetoric is so offensive precisely due to its implicit suggestion that Asian Westerners and our culture do not properly belong in the West.

I have a hunch that there will never be a distinct Western Buddhism, so the very discussion of it may be in vain. We live in a world that is ever more globalized, interconnected, transnational and multicultural in ways that defy historical precedent. Imagine what the Buddhist blogosphere will be like with millions of Chinese Buddhist bloggers! What this increasing entanglement also suggests, however, is that while there may not emerge a “Western” Buddhism, Buddhism in general will appropriate more “Western” features. And perhaps the West will also become more Buddhist.

East Side/West Side

| arun

In her most recent post, Barbara O’Brien wades back into the Western vsAsian Buddhist debate. She proposes that “the big, honking issue in Western Buddhism is what parts of Asian Buddhism are essential, and what parts are not?” Her perspective however suffers from a common flaw also held by Jerry Kolber’s post on merchandizing Buddhism. Namely, it marginalizes the majority of Western Buddhists.

The majority of Western Buddhists are after all Asian Buddhists who practice various unique styles of Buddhism here in the West. By framing her thesis as she does, in one fell swoop Barbara relegates the Asian majority to the fringes of Western Buddhism and places her cultural perspective smack in the center. She almost deserves points for literary sumo, but her approach is regrettably more the norm than the exception in Western Buddhist discourse.

Then she goes on to tie our popular misconceptions to our culture.

The meat of her post is on Asian “folk” Buddhism, presented in contrast to the original teachings. The Asian “folk” Buddhism conveys karma as fate and rebirth as reincarnation of a singular soul. But there is nothing fundamentally Asian about these beliefs, as her words suggest. These ideas stem from simplistic ideas of the self, a problem not unique to Asian folk. The concepts of fate and reincarnation have ancient and enduring roots in Western culture, and self-styled Western Buddhists have already been (mis)interpreting karma and rebirth accordingly.

Buddhism in the West will likely have to deal with these misconceptions, home-grown or otherwise, in the same way that Buddhism in the East has had to: with study, practice and tolerance.

Asian-Free Buddhism

| arun

Thanks to Barbara’s Buddhism Blog, I was pointed to a Beliefnet post by Jerry Kolber, where he explicitly argues for stripping Buddhism of its Asian features.

Image is everything, and unless we figure out a way to make the image of the Buddha hip and cool, we’d be better off figuring out some other way to present the techniques without the awesome smiling face of our Eastern inspiration.

Bless his non-soul for proposing a sincere and unequivocal argument for whitewashing Buddhism. He has no compunction whatsoever about smugly proclaiming that Buddhism in America is far better off if only we can ditch the Asian guy. And he is like a gift that keeps on giving, except that I really don’t care for this narishkeyt…

Buddhism in America is at the long end of the initial boom sparked in the 60’s among intellectuals and artists who craved that elite connection with the east.

With a single sentence, he dons the hat of a historical revisionist and wipes American Buddhist history clean of its Asian affliction. The author disregards the basic fact that Buddhism in America enjoys an unbroken history that stretches back over 100 years. For all those years, it is Asian Americans who have constituted the outright numerical majority of Buddhist Americans—even today, we are still the majority. Plain and simple, Buddhism in America wouldn’t be half of what it is without its Asian American members, and for Jerry Kolber to patently neglect our contributions with utter impunity smacks entirely of excessive hegemonic privilege.

White Privilege Isn’t a Bad Thing

| arun

I tend not to read long blog posts, but I often mark them with a star and sometimes sift through them on weekends. Over on My Buddha is Pink, a couplesuch posts from early August really resonated with me this morning. Richard Harrold writes about how as a journalist, he got involved with the local Lao Buddhist community in Michigan.

Richard reached out to help and get involved in the community, even though he didn’t share a common ethnic or cultural background. He helped teach English, and offered to assist with challenges involving the local township board. Even when his overtures were declined, he still managed to publish articles highlighting the local Buddhist Asian community. He spoke directly with the township attorney about specific issues that may have underlain miscommunication with the Lao temple board. I imagine none of this was smooth riding. Indeed, Richard expresses his personal ambivalence with regards to the linguistic and cultural differences, especially on the topic of sexuality.

Some of what Richard was able to accomplish was due to resources available to him by virtue of his white privilege. Importantly, he was able to bend his privilege to the benefit of others who were relatively disadvantaged. Being white gives you an edge when talking with white administrators, when writing to a majority white audience, and even to the extent of being involved in the publishing industry.

In a sense, I have nothing against white privilege. I’d just like all of us to share these privileges. One way to move past institutional racism bias is by making use of our privilege—be it of gender, culture, sexuality, race, etc.—for the benefit of others with less privilege. You might want to see what you can do to help bridge cultural chasms in your local Buddhist community. Or say, if you happen to be a regular contributor to Shambhala Sun or Tricycle, then the next time you talk with the editors you might ask them if they’d considered offering more articles to be written by People of Color. Think of it as a democratization of noblesse oblige.

Kathina Time is (Almost) Here

| arun

Abhayagiri Buddhist Monastery has announced its celebration of the Kathina holiday this fall. Click on the link and you’ll find a description of the festival itself.

If you haven’t attended a Kathina celebration before, you’re in for a treat. I’ve come to think of it as the equivalent of all our lay holidays rolled into one. There is the abundance of Thanksgiving with gratitude for the completion of a long retreat and for having monastics in this country. The chance to gather together with gifts resembles the winter holidays of Hanukkah and Christmas, combined with a kind of birthday anniversary marking another year of monastic life. It’s a particularly joyous time to show appreciation for those who have gone forth into the homeless life and who provide support and inspiration to lay practitioners. It’s especially timely as fall and winter draw nearer, when visitors become less frequent and a full storeroom of supplies is so valuable.

Some close friends and I have for several years now been recontextualizing Kathina in the giving spirit of Hanukkah or Christmas as another opportunity to bestow gifts on friends, temples and 501(c)(3)s. Since this degeneration of Kathina into a Christmas-clone is (so far as I know) practiced only within small and isolated circles, I’m not too worried about the potential dilution and commercialization of what was once a mighty and precisely meaningful Buddhist holiday. I can’t shake the guilt though—I’m an Asian Buddhist kid whitewashing a perfectly fine and ancient Buddhist tradition with commercialized Western cultural values. But I like it this way.

Customary Perspective

| arun

On a topical note, I ran across a couple of articles on nokanshi(“encoffineers”), a central theme in the Oscar-winning movie Departures. One perspective presents the nokanshi as a traditional practice that preserves the spirit of Japan’s cultural artistry—a practice that may seem irrelevant in modern times.

Such an “art” of preparing the dead body seems unnecessary in today’s modern Japan: by law, the body will soon to be cremated, so pragmatism dictates only the minimum preparation. In Departures, even the grief-numbed family of the deceased cannot fully comprehend why this art is taking place. Other funeral directors do not really acknowledge that the occupation of nokanshi even exists in modern Japan.

In contrast, a post on the Wall Street Journal describes the popularity of this specific funeral custom in light of recent commercial development.

In the past, encoffination was often a matter-of-fact procedure performed by family members, neighbors and doctors to prepare the body for the wake, funeral and cremation. It wasn’t performed as a formal ceremony or even considered a part of the proper funeral … Two decades ago, a 40-year-old company called Sapporo Nokan Kyokai, based in the northern city of Sapporo, started promoting encoffination as a formal ceremony, for an additional charge. The company had long been performing the ceremony in Sapporo, but it had begun to receive inquiries from people in other parts of Japan, where the ritual was less common. Some of these people had attended funerals in the Sapporo area and liked the proper, personal attention given to the deceased.

These two articles aren’t written in opposing terms, but they offer different perspectives on a “foreign” custom. On one hand, the nokanshi profession stems from a primal artistic urge that is an inseparable part of Japanese culture. On the other hand, the fully ritualized nokanshi is a contemporary phenomenon in its widespread form. Again, these descriptions aren’t mutually-exclusive. They remind us that foreign customs and rituals are not necessarily “traditions” that date back centuries, and yet can still be just as meaningful as traditional customs that do.

In the context of Buddhist Asian customs, it’s easy to get caught up in a romantic notion of a timeless and unchanging tradition. This often mistaken assumption provides the foundation for unskillful conclusions. For example, the false assumption that tradition equals authenticity, or that ancient means irrelevant. Some of these foreign customs have developed to address modern concerns in an urban and industrialized context. It’s a point to keep in mind when we wrestle with terms such as “modern” and “traditional” Buddhist practice.

Say It Like It Is

| arun

A couple of recentposts talked about Western Buddhism without any reference to Asians… or did they? On Progressive Buddhism, Kyle discusses “urban white liberal converts”, “rural converts, who tend to be white or black” and the “traditional” Buddhists. Provided in context:

the traditional Buddhists, who have been somewhat marginalized in the mainstream community

the local traditional population, which obviously only offers its one tradition

Over on Sweep the dust, Push the dirt, Jack Daw remarks:

Western Convert Buddhists insist that they are not taken seriously by other culture-based traditions and those Culture-Based Buddhists (I have no better term) insist that they are not well-represented in the mainstream media.

The authors of both articles frame the terms traditional and culture-basedwith regard to representation within the mainstream. Perhaps coincidentally, I have only read complaints of a lack of representation within the mainstream Buddhist media specifically in terms of Asian (American) Buddhists. Indeed, I wrote most of them. Are Kyle and Jack Daw euphemistically avoiding using the word Asian to talk about Asians?

To be clear, not all Asians identify as “traditional” or “culture-based”—but how many of those “traditional” or “culture-based” Buddhists who “insist that they are not well-represented in the mainstream media” are not Asian? When it comes to the cultural affinities of their Asian writers, The BigThree prefer to publish those who are more “traditional” and “culture-based” (and dead). It is precisely the less “traditional” and “culture-based” of the Asian American Buddhist community who are speaking out on this issue.

I’m well aware that, ironically, when race is obvious, white people will go out of their way to avoid explicitly mentioning race so that they don’t appear to take race into account. This inanity only highlights their racialized judgment. Let me be explicit: I prefer to be identified as Asianthan by some inept euphemism for it.

Update: I deleted a comment I reposted here from Kyle on Progressive Buddhism. He explains more in his comments at the bottom of this post. Someone or some people have identified themselves as myself and another blogger, and harassed Kyle with personally abusive emails. His furious reaction is little different than I would have reacted in the same shoes (and probably even more restrained than I would have been). It is a very sad state when others stoop to this level of depravity—apparently some people enjoy nothing more than watching the world burn.

Raise the Profile

| arun

Amid my incessant complaining about the marginalization of Asian Americans in the mainstream Buddhist media, various bloggers will pepper me with questions along the lines of: “So what do you suggest?” It’s a valid question. There are a number of “structural” actions we can do to raise the profile of Asian American Buddhists, who are largely sidelined in the dominant media of the very community where we constitute the outright majority. I’ve already mentioned my favorite one: Educate yourself. I’m appalled by the Buddhist Americans who might freely discuss “Chinese Buddhism” and yet who couldn’t tell Teochew from Toisan or Hakka from Hokkien. But here’s the thought for today: include us in your vision of the Buddhist community. If you’re going to make a flier with faces of Buddhists, then maybe you’ll put in more Asian Americans. And while you’re at it, if you run a major Buddhist publication, you might want to set aside more bylines for Asian Americans too.

Buddhist Demographics of the Future

| arun

I’m taking off my P.C. gloves, so beware! This post at the New York Timesgot me thinking about the demographics of Buddhist America. It’s currently taken for granted that Asian Americans constitute the majority of Buddhist Americans. But there are some who quietly anticipate the scales tipping, when white Buddhists become a solid demographic majority. If this shift should occur, the increase will come almost exclusively from converts. White Buddhists generally don’t have that many kids. In two generations, Asian Americans will more than double their share of the national population – much of it not due to immigration – while the proportion of white Americans will steadily decrease. If we were to base the size of the Buddhist community solely on the kids of people who today identify as Buddhist, then the future numbers of white Buddhist Americans would likely halve before long. A future white majority would have a much larger contingent of second and third generation white Buddhists, but these “Dharma brats” would still be vastly outnumbered by white converts. Asian American Buddhists will ever increasingly consist of native-born Americans – for example, the kids of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Buddhist refugees are getting married and raising their own kids right now, just to mention one group. Add to that the ranks of all the other Buddhists of color, parent and young alike. Will the future of Buddhist America be one where white converts dominate Buddhist minorities both culturally and numerically? If so, I wonder whether this white Buddhist majority (who come with white privilege) would have any greater urge for diversity (say, in TheBigThree) than they do now as a distinct minority.