American Buddhism as a Way of Life

Description

The US seems to be becoming a Buddhist country. Celebrity converts, the popularity of the Dalai Lama, motifs in popular movies, and mala beads at the mall indicate an increasing inculcation of Buddhism into the American consciousness, even if a relatively small percentage of the population actually describe themselves as Buddhists. This book looks beyond the trendier manifestations of Buddhism in America to look at distinctly American Buddhist ways of life—ways of perceiving and understanding. John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff have organized this unique collection in accordance with the Buddhist concept of the Three Jewels: the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha. The Buddha section discusses the two key teachers who popularized Buddhism in America: Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki and the particular kinds of spirituality they proclaimed. The Dharma section deals with how Buddhism can enlighten current public debates and a consideration of our national past with explorations of bioethics, abortion, end-of-life decisions, and consciousness in late capitalism. The final section on the Sangha, or community of believers, discusses how Buddhist communities both formal and informal have affected American society with chapters on family life, Nisei Buddhists, gay liberation, and Zen gardens.
Foreword
Thomas A. Tweed

Introduction: American Buddhism as a Way of Life
Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge

Part I. Buddha: The Teacher as Immigrant

1. The Authenticity of Alan Watts
David L. Smith

2. D. T. Suzuki, “Suzuki Zen,” and the American Reception of Zen Buddhism
Carl T. Jackson

3. My Lunch with Mihoko
Ellen Pearlman

Part II. Dharma: Doctrine, Belief, and Practice in America

4. What Can Buddhist No-Self Contribute to North American Bioethics?
Michael C. Brannigan

5. A Contemporary North American Buddhist Discussion of Abortion
Rita M. Gross

6. Touched by Suffering: American Pragmatism and Engaged Buddhism
Judy D. Whipps

7. Identity Theft: Simulating Nirvana in Postmodern America
John Kitterman

Part III. Sangha: Who Is an American Buddhist?

8. Family Life and Spiritual Kinship in American Buddhist Communities
Charles S. Prebish

9. Buddha Loves Me This I Know: Nisei Buddhists in Christian America, 1889–1942
Lori Pierce

10. Analogue Consciousness Isn’t Just for Faeries: Healing the Disjunction between Theory and Practice
Roger Corless

11. “A Dharma of Place”: Evolving Aesthetics and Cultivating Community in an American Zen Garden
Jeff Wilson

List of Contributors
Index

Sujets

• Philosophie
• Philosophie de la religion
• États-Unis
• History of the Americas
• Buddhism
• 21st century
• United States of America
• USA

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 05 avril 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438430959
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

SUNY series in Buddhism and American Culture

John Whalen-Bridge and Gary Storhoff, editors

American Buddhism as a Way of Life
Edited by
Gary Storhoff
and
John Whalen-Bridge

Cover art: photo credit © Bernice Williams / iStockphoto.com
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2010 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
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For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY www.sunypress.edu
Production by Diane Ganeles Marketing by Michael Campochiaro
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
American Buddhism as a way of life / edited by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge.
p. cm. — (SUNY series in Buddhism and American culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-3093-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-3094-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Buddhism—United States. 2. Buddhism and culture—United States.
I. Storhoff, Gary, 1947–  II. Whalen-Bridge, John, 1961–
BQ732.A44 2010 294.30973—dc22 2009033231
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Gary Storhoff dedicates his work on this volume to his brother, Steve Storhoff.
John Whalen-Bridge dedicates his work on this volume to his father, Josiah Bridge.

In Memoriam, Roger Corless (1938–2007)
David L. Dupree
Meeting Roger some fifteen years ago at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting was the beginning of a major friendship. Little did I know that he was such a highly respected scholar. However, as he would remind me, he did Professor very well. Roger was born on Mercyside, England in 1938, and was brought up in the Church of England, but he told his mother at twelve that he was a Buddhist of ages past. She and his father, taking little note of this assertion, watched him earn a Bachelor of Divinity at Kings College, University of London, and a PhD at the University of Wisconsin.
Roger's as-yet-to-be-published final contribution is a novel he called Where Do We Go From Here? Buddhism, Christianity, and the Next Step . I hope to have it published within the next year and will certainly announce it on THE CORLESS website, along with other links about this remarkable man. THE CORLESS is a nonprofit foundation that provides scholarships to graduate students studying interfaith dialogue.
Roger became a part of my family, encouraging me to adopt my son when I hesitated, including me in some of his adventures as I did him mine, and generally being the older brother I never had but had always wanted. As he lay passing at 1:45 a.m. on January 12, 2007, I thought many things. But he did not look unhappy.

Foreword
Thomas A. Tweed
“Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.” That's how William Carlos Williams introduced American readers to Allen Ginsberg's 1956 volume, Howl and Other Poems . 1 That was an appropriate herald for Ginsberg's poetic rant, but readers of this collection of scholarly essays, American Buddhism as a Way of Life , require a different sort of introduction. Few of you are wearing gowns—or so I assume. Not all of you are Ladies. And the editors, Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge, are not leading you to hell—or so they hope. At the same time—you should be warned—you're also not headed to a distant Pure Land, a land of bliss removed from the messy realities of everyday life.
Some of the essays profile the transmitters and popularizers of Buddhism in the United States, like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, but even in those portraits the everyday is always near, as when Ellen Pearlman recalls dining with D. T. Suzuki's former secretary and remembers holding Ginsberg's hand on his death bed. Other authors ascend to doctrinal heights to consider complex Buddhist ideas—like no-self, dependent co-origination, and nonduality—but they always move back to the ordinary: to work out an engaged Buddhism, to imagine our obligations as we face the living, the dying, and the unborn. From an enlightened perspective, the world of suffering is identical to the world of bliss—in Buddhist terms, samsara is nirvana . Suffering, however, seems real enough. And the contributors don't flinch as they offer historical, sociological, and ethical analyses of the personal and collective suffering that Americans have faced, from agonizing decisions about abortion and euthanasia to brutal encounters with homophobia and racism.
But the Buddhists described in these essays are not solitary travelers. They journey together toward the here and now, as part of the sangha . And they invite you along. They ponder Buddhist life in the home and beyond those domestic spaces—in Rochester Zen Center's garden and a Nisei Buddhist temple in Hawai'i. As with those Japanese Buddhists, however, the gaze also seems focused on the wider national landscape. For it's in the political, social, and cultural landscape of America, not some distant hell or heaven, that these U.S. Buddhists have made their way.
So hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we're staying right here in the messy bliss of the everyday.
Notes
1. Allen Ginsberg, Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1956).
Introduction
American Buddhism as a Way of Life
Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge
There is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.
—Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
Go forth on your journey, for the benefit of the many, for the joy of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, for the benefit and joy of mankind.
—Shakyamuni Buddha, Vinaya I, 21
America today is one of the most vital Buddhist countries in the world.
—Rick Fields, How the Swans Came to the Lake
Because of the focus of media, celebrity converts, popular film, and the popularity of the Dalai Lama, most Americans would find it difficult to overlook the prominence of Buddhism in American culture today, even though fewer than 1 percent of Americans are Buddhists. 1 It is clear that non-Western religions, especially Buddhism, are transforming the American religious perspective. Buddhism has expanded through a wide spectrum of American culture, including literature, art, psychology, film, and other religious traditions. Our first volume in this series on American Buddhism, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature , demonstrated the profound influence of this very decidedly immigrant faith in American culture since the beginning of the twentieth century; the essays in that volume revealed the pervasive influence of Buddhism in contemporary American literature as well. Indeed, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature represents the most complete treatment to date of Buddhism in American literature, including discussions of seminal writers of High Modernism such as Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound; innovative treatment of the Beats such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; and—perhaps groundbreaking for contemporary studies of American Buddhism—analyses of Buddhist principles in literary works by contemporary writers of color, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, Lan Cao, and Charles Johnson.
American Buddhism as a Way of Life continues the series on Buddhism culture by examining in wide-ranging essays how Buddhism has been transmitted to America spiritually and materially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Rather than focus in this volume on cultural practices such as literature, however, we have decided to emphasize how American Buddhism has indeed become a “way of life”—to paraphrase Pierre Hadot, whose title Philosophy as a Way of Life inspired our own: American Buddhism is, to draw on Hadot's eloquence, “a way of life, both in its exercise and effort to achieve wisdom, and in its goal, wisdom itself. For real wisdom does not merely cause us to know: it makes us ‘be’ in a different way.” 2 Americans typically search for new religious expression, as public opinion surveys repeatedly show. Released in February 2008, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum demonstrates conclusively the strength of American religion; 3 however, the Americans surveyed very much desire, using Hadot's formulation, to “ ‘be’ in a different way” from the living styles offered by conventional religions: According to the Pew Report, 44 percent of the Americans surveyed have left their original religious home for another—Buddhism being one of those new residences. 4
Yet Buddhism's appeal to contemporary American society is ambiguous and sometimes contradictory: Where does a fashionable and trendy practice of Buddhism end, and where does a serious, committed, and devotional focus on Buddhism begin? In a visit to the local bookstore, one can purchase such titles as Zen and the Art of Poker or (perhaps aiming at a more ambitious audience) Zen and the Art of Anything . Also, this ancient religion has predictably invaded the Internet; for example, MSN.com offers a site called the Zen Guide to American Cities, describing primarily vegetarian restaurants, sushi takeouts, health food stores, and massage centers. Part of the success of The Matrix films were their presumed basis in Buddhist epistemological principles. To many Americans, Buddhism has become the primary gateway to a meaningful life, an all-encompassing “Way.”
To a great degree, then, Buddhism may have been superficially absorbed by segments of American popular culture, and the problem of deciding what is “serious” and what is a passing New Age fad may detract from the importance of the fact that at least a million Americans have indeed borrowed liberally