Buddhism in North America

For more than forty years—inspired by the pioneering dialogues of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, and the Zen master Daisetz T. Suzuki—Buddhist and Christian monastics have been engaged in interfaith colloquies about the similarities and differences between these two great spiritual traditions. In 1996 and 2002, practitioners from Catholicism and various Buddhist traditions met at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, the home of Thomas Merton, to discuss spiritual practice and the nature of suffering, respectively.

Green Monasticism is a collection of articles and talks from the third Gethesemani Encounter, which took place in 2008. The theme was the Buddhist and Catholic response to the environmental crisis. In addition to covering a wide range of Catholic thought, the essays come from both the Theravadan and Mahayana traditions and cover both North American and international monastic orders.

In "Saffron & Green in the Clear Forest Pool: The Environmental Practices of American Buddhist Monastic Communities", Ven Tathaloka Bhikkhuni shares what she termed "A Reflection on the Four Noble Truths & Right Effort for Revealing, Clarifying and Righting Bad Practices of the Buddhist Monastic Communities in North America that are Hidden or Justified by Ideology".

In this autobiographical essay, I take a personal approach to some of the issues that relate to the intersections of academic life and studious engagement with Buddhism. The essay traces how a boy from the (former) Yugoslavia ended up being a scholar of Buddhism and a professor at a large research university in the US. This unfolding story, presented below in a short outline, spans half a century, and includes sojourns—short and long—in many countries on three continents: Europe, Asia, and North America.

This paper engages the perspectives of thirty young adult Asian American Buddhists (YAAABs) raised in non-Buddhist households. Grounded in semi-structured, one-on-one in-person and email interviews, my research reveals the family tensions and challenges of belonging faced by a group straddling multiple religious and cultural worlds. These young adults articulate their alienation from both predominantly white and predominantly Asian Buddhist communities in America. On the one hand, they express ambivalence over adopting the label of "convert" because of its Christian connotations as well as its associations with whiteness in the American Buddhist context. On the other hand, they lack the familiarity with Asian Buddhist cultures experienced by second-or multi-generation YAAABs who grew up in Buddhist families. In their nuanced responses to arguments that (1) American convert Buddhism is a non-Asian phenomenon, and (2) Asians in the West can only "revert" to Buddhism, these young adults assert the plurality and hybridity of their lived experiences as representative of all American Buddhists, rather than incidental characteristics of a fringe group within a white-dominated category.

The increasingly criticized " two Buddhisms " dichotomy in scholarly and popular literature bifurcates American Buddhism into two separate groups: white converts who are focused on meditation, and Asian immigrants who engage in devotional practices. This paper builds on critiques of the " two Buddhisms " model by demonstrating the importance of attending to generation as a factor of analysis when studying American Buddhists. Specifically, this study analyzes the diverse practices and nuanced beliefs of twenty-six young adult Asian American Buddhists from a diverse range of ethnic and sectarian backgrounds. In their open-minded attitudes toward a wide range of Buddhist practices and multivalent interpretations of various Buddhist beliefs, these young adults challenge simplistic representations of Asian American Buddhists and present an inclusive vision of Buddhism that embraces nuance, ambiguity, and change.

This paper outlines the globalization, localization, and standardization processes of Fo Guang Shan as they pertain to establishing Humanistic Buddhism in Southern California. The major audiences addressed by Fo Guang Shan, their cultural characteristics and needs, and the tensions these create are summarized. Suggestions to further localize Fo Guang Shan in Southern California (and America) are discussed, including localization of ways of life and localization of education, in relation to major trends in the wide variety of emerging American Buddhisms including democratization, pragmatism, de-traditionalization, and social activism. The purpose of this paper to highlight underlying currents that affect the localization of Fo Guang Shan in Southern California that may have previously gone unacknowledged, including a pervasive worry or feeling among American Buddhists that they are getting it ‘wrong.’

In this paper I will argue that the VBC in Houston could be considered the centrifugal node of transnational sentiment among Vietnamese Buddhists in the U.S. in that it is one of the central locations where Vietnamese Buddhists in diaspora make sense not only of their Vietnamese Buddhist identity, but also their journey across the waters and their new home in the U.S. They do this primarily in reference to, and in veneration of, Quan Âm. To make this argument, I will briefly trace Vietnamese Buddhist devotion to Quan Âm from its locus in Southeast Asia across the waters to the United States and eventually to Houston. Furthermore, I will describe the VBC Quan Âm festival and highlight those elements that contribute to a shared Vietnamese Buddhist transnational identity that moves and flows with the movement of the people and in relation to its multicultural milieu in Houston. Along the way I will compare this location and festival to other centers of Vietnamese Buddhist religious revival in the U.S. and integrate notes concerning the second generation of Vietnamese Buddhists and integrate theory from other works on diasporic religion and American Buddhism to make a salient point of how the VBC and its festival help Vietnamese Buddhists in the U.S. “make homes and cross boundaries” all the while maintaining a bifocal emphasis on the homeland. (THIS IS AN UNPUBLISHED PAPER WRITTEN FOR A COURSE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA and SHOULD BE USED AS SUCH)

Jack Kerouac's study of Buddhism started in earnest in 1953 and is traditionally believed to have ended in 1958. This paper considers the relationship between Kerouac's Buddhist practice and his multi-layered nostalgia. Based on a close reading of his unpublished diaries from the mid-1950s through mid-1960s, I argue that Buddhism was a means of coping with his suffering and spiritual uncertainty. Kerouac's nostalgic Buddhism was a product of orientalist interpretations of the religion that allowed him to replace his idealized version of his past with an idealized form of Buddhism.

Buddhism in America provides the most comprehensive and up to date survey of the diverse landscape of US Buddhist traditions, their history and development, and current methodological trends in the study of Buddhism in the West, located within the translocal flow of global Buddhist culture.

Divided into three parts (Histories; Traditions; Frames), this introduction traces Buddhism's history and encounter with North American culture, charts the landscape of US Buddhist communities, and engages current methodological and theoretical developments in the field.

The volume includes:

- A short introduction to Buddhism
- A historical survey from the 19th century to the present
- Coverage of contemporary US Buddhist communities, including Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana

Theoretical and methodological issues and debates covered include:

- Social, political and environmental engagement
- Race, feminist, and queer theories of Buddhism
- Secular Buddhism, digital Buddhism, and modernity
- Popular culture, media, and the arts

Jeff Wilson begins this book with the juxtaposition of his experience of both Pure Land and Zen Buddhist practice, revealing that they occurred in the same physical space only a day apart. This is an intriguing introduction to the issues this book addresses: singularity and plurality in the Ekoji Buddhist Sangha of Richmond, located in Virginia, United States. Ekoji houses five Buddhist groups of different lineages (Pure Land, Zen, Tibetan, Vipassana, and Meditative Inquiry); Wilson explores how this came about in this particular geographic area and how this relates to regional identity. Thus Wilson’s methodological approach is grounded in regionalism. After defining the latter and concluding that the majority of studies on Buddhism in the United States lack regional awareness (16–24), he suggests five specific modes of investigation to analyse regionalism in the context of Buddhism in the United States: 1) regional distribution patterns within American Buddhism, 2) the impact of regions on Buddhism, 3) the Buddhist impact on regions, 4) regional differences within the same Buddhist lineage, and 5) the differences between built environments (26–33).

The planned expansion of the human presence on our moon demands that we reconsider our relationships with our planet's partner. Threats to the moon such as those engendered by mining encourage the preservation of various precious areas of our moon's surface through the emplacement of international multiuse land reserves. These reserves, arising from tested environmental science strategies as well as values drawn from the ethnographic field, allow concurrent pursuits of industry, science, environmental preservation, respect for human cultural landscapes, as well as future recreation. By protecting the near side patterns in the moon, the Hertzsprung and Von Kármán Craters on the far side, and polar regions at Malapert, Peary, and Florey, we leave room for industry while also avoiding pointless losses of the moon's own majesty or damage to ourselves in our interactions with the moon. In creating these reserves in line with the Outer Space Treaty, we move closer to the desirable environmental justice outcome in which each human theoretically has a say in the fate of our moon, which is the cultural heritage of every one of us.

More than two thirds of American Buddhists are of Asian heritage, yet Asian American Buddhists are too often ignored, misrepresented, and looked down upon. Chenxing Han offers five ways to shift these dynamics and advocates for intersectional Buddhism over "two Buddhisms."

Chenxing Han examines the stereotypes that have marginalized Asian American Buddhists and reports on the rich diversity and depth of a new generation of practitioners.

-Originally published in Buddhadharma magazine (summer 2016)
-Published online on Lion's Roar (May 15, 2017)
-Excerpted in Buddhadharma’s “The Best of 15 Years” special anniversary issue (Fall 2017).
-Reprinted in the Asian American Policy Review (2019)