There's a great cross-blog conversation going on about encouraging more class diversity in western Buddhism. See in particular Nathan at Dangerous Harvests and Joshua Eaton at Tricycle Blog.
These and other bloggers identify two main barriers to working-class people engaging in Buddhism. One is cost -- teachings and retreats usually require a fee -- and the other is time. It is difficult for people with jobs and families to take the time to go on retreat.
These barriers have been issues for me, also. But before some of us go on beating ourselves up about how un-diverse and elitist we are, we need to examine how these same issues have been handled in Asia and in western ethnic Asian Buddhism.
First, for what it's worth, the issue of cost as a barrier is not unknown in Asia. Just this week I read a news story about how the vendors who sell flowers, incense, and other offering items near temples in Sri Lanka can't afford to "worship" (not quite the right word, I know) in the temples themselves.
But when we focus on taking the time to go on retreats, what are we talking about here? We're talking about schools of Buddhism that are traditionally monastic, such as Zen and Theravada. Since I'm most familiar with Japanese Zen I'm going to focus on Japanese Buddhism and how Japanese schools are taking root in the West.
My understanding is that Zen has never had a big, popular, working-class following. In Japan, working people with families are far more likely to practice Jodo Shinshu or Nichiren Shu or something related. Of the long-established temples in ethnic Japanese communities in the U.S., I believe Jodo Shinshu is far and away more represented than any other school.
Jodo Shinshu doesn't emphasize retreats nearly as much as Zen does. My understanding is that Shin Buddhism came into being entirely to reach the ordinary, non-aristocratic laypeople largely being ignored by Tendai, Shingon, and the rest of establishment Buddhism in 13th-century Japan. This was a huge concern for Nichiren as well, of course.
In fact, I suspect that the issue of making Zen more accessible to laypeople is not something Japanese Zen ever has addressed to the same extent we're addressing it in the West. I'm not saying this was never addressed by Japanese Zen at all, and there have always been Zen lay practitioners. Still, the primary focus in organized Zen remained on monasticism.
Since Zen first emerged as a distinctive school in 6th-century China, my understanding is that most of those who wanted to take the Zen path but remain laypeople have been more or less on their own to figure out how to make that work. That many have been successful at making it work is a credit to them, but we still don't have much of a model to go by.
We Zen students in the West are trying to figure out how to take this monastic practice and make it work in communities of laypeople, in some cases completely disconnected from a genuine monastery. If we sometimes worry we're not doing it right, possibly we're not. But we need to consider that this may never have been done before, at least not to the extent that we are trying to do it.
It should not surprise us, then, that Nichiren Buddhism has had far more success at attracting a diverse following than other schools popular with non-ethnic-Asian westerners. Its adaptability to lay life has always been a strength of Nichiren practice.
As I already said, I believe Jodo Shinshu is the most widely practiced school of Buddhism in ethnic Japanese communities in the West. There have been Jodo Shinshu temples in California since the 19th century.
Among the first ethnic Japanese to be detained after the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 were Jodo Shinshu priests, because they were identified as community leaders. Shin Buddhists in the internment camps struggled to make their Buddhist practice look more "western."� The Honganji branch of U.S. Shinshu took to calling itself the "Buddhist Churches of America," for example. See this interview of Shinshu bishop Socho Ogui for a bit more discussion.
However, when non-ethnic-Asian westerners (can I call them NEAWs?) began to take an interest in Buddhism in the 1960s and 1970s, I think many rejected Shin Buddhism because of its superficial resemblance to Christianity. Many were refugees, so to speak, from Christianity, and they wanted something completely different. And Zen, for certain, was completely different.
However, I understand that these days some NEAWs are finally venturing into Jodo Shinshu practice, and a few NEAWs have become ordained Shin priests. It may just be a matter of time before western Shin, which has been mostly ethnic Japanese, becomes quite the racial melting pot.
Getting back to western Zen -- I think one of our weaknesses, beside the fact that Zen practice can be an awkward fit into a life of child-raising and full-time employment, is that NEAW Zen has is done a hit-and-miss job of building community. Shin is great at building community. I read about temples in California that sponsor all kinds of family activities -- cooking classes, softball leagues, Scout troops, taiko drumming squads, etc. This is the stuff community is made of.
On the other hand, in my experience, Zen monasteries and centers on the whole are not very accommodating to people raising small children. I have known active students who suddenly disappeared when the babies started showing up. I also dropped out of formal training for a long while because I was just too frustrated with "making it work" while raising children and working full time, and getting no support for that from the monastery where my teacher was abbot.
Part of the struggle with Zen is that centers can be very far apart, and many Zen communities outside of urban areas are quite small. But I would urge the larger urban centers to dialog with their working members with children to find out how the center could better support their practice. Much good could come from that.
Briefly going beyond Zen -- if we look at Theravada countries, what we mostly see are monks who meditate a lot and laypeople who don't. There's more to it than that, of course. But in NEAW Theravada Buddhism, Vipassana meditation is the primary practice of monks and laypeople alike. It may be that NEAW Theravada is having some of the same issues as NEAW Zen.
This is barely scratching the surface of this topic, but I wanted to through this perspective into the mix
No comments:
Post a Comment