At the Vancouver Sun, Douglas Todd asks, "Why does Thich Nhat Nanh appeal mostly to whites?" The venerable Vietnamese teacher recently held a six-day retreat in Vancouver, and Todd notes that 95 percent of attendees were white. Exploring this issue makes a good follow up to the recent post, "Making Working-Class Buddhism Work."
For those of you new to Buddhism -- Thich Nhat Hanh is a Vietnamese Zen master who first began traveling in the West in the 1960s to urge the U.S. to withdraw its military from Vietnam. In 1973 the Vietnamese government refused to let him return to Vietnam. Since then he has spent his life engaged in humanitarian activism and teaching Buddhism in the West.
Called "Thay" (master teacher) by his followers, he has a real gift for explaining the basics of Buddhist doctrine in a clear and simple way. Many of us, me included, were inspired by his books to learn more about Buddhism. And this accounts for much of his following among non-ethnic Asian Westerners (NEAWs). Thay is possibly the best-known Buddhist teacher in the world after His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Thay does have Vietnamese followers, but it isn't easy for them. Last year the government of Vietnam forced nearly 400 of his monastic followers from a monastery in Vietnam, after Thay made some statements sympathetic to the Dalai Lama on Italian television.
However, my understanding is that the majority of Buddhist laypeople in Vietnam, and ethnic Vietnamese Buddhists in the West, practice a variation of Pure Land Buddhism. This is true of most ethnic Japanese and, I believe, many ethnic Chinese in the West as well. A six-day meditation retreat is not a Pure Land "thing."
And since Thay is a Zen teacher that makes him a Mahayana Buddhist, and much of what he teaches is out of synch with the Theravada Buddhism of southeast Asia. All in all, it's not a mystery why his appearances may not draw large numbers of ethnic Asians. Expecting otherwise would be something like expecting NEAW Catholics living in China to turn out for, say, a Franklin Graham crusade.
There's another part of Todd's column that I want to address, but I believe I will save that for the next post.
No comments:
Post a Comment