A colleague recently took me to task for consulting Jews and Christians on how to keep American Buddhism alive. He didn’t agree with either premise–that Jews and Christians could offer advice to Buddhists, or that Buddhism was in any danger of decline. But he was wrong on both counts. American Buddhism, which swelled its ranks to accommodate the spiritual enthusiasms of baby boomers in the late 20th century, is now aging. One estimate puts the average age of Buddhist converts (about a third of the American Buddhist population) at upwards of 50. This means that the religion is almost certain to see its numbers reduced over the next generation as boomer Buddhists begin to die off without having passed their faith along to their children. And Jewish and Christian models offer the most logical solution for reversing that decline.
The basic problem is that non-Asian converts tend not to regard what they practice as a religion. From the beginning, Buddhism has been seen in its American incarnation not as an alternative religion, but as an alternative to religion. American converts have long held Buddhism apart from what they see as the inherent messiness of Western religious discourse on such issues as faith and belief, and from the violence that has so often accompanied it.
Some of the confusion is inherent in Buddhism itself and the typical American definition of “religion.” Whether they will admit it or not, most Westerners assume that a religion must be theistic in some sense (poly-, heno-, or mono-). By that standard, Buddhists aren’t religious. Their scriptures talk about “gods,” but they are really just finite, mortal (even if extremely powerful and long-lived) creatures of a different species from humanity, and–like dogs, demons, and other nonhuman animate creatures–may in fact have been men or women in a prior life.
There is no Buddhist belief in a God in the Western sense of a Creator or of “an immortal spiritual person than which no greater could exist.” The Buddha was quite explicitly agnostic on those questions, because they were irrelevant to his program of analyzing the cause of suffering (clinging to illusion) and the cure for suffering (eliminating the illusion through a life dedicated to the abandonment of clinging). With this agnosticism and its emphasis on the techniques of meditation and right living, Buddhism was easy for Westerners to adopt as an alternative to religion, rather than as a religion itself.
Most of the works that introduced the West to Buddhism focused exclusively on the Buddha and the Dhamma (his teaching) and pretty much ignored the Sangha (a Pali word equivalent to “assembly,” “[i]ecclesia[/i],” or “church”). More authentic Buddhism, as practiced in Asia, begins with the vow “I take refuge in the Sangha,” as well as the Buddha and the Dhamma.
Divorced from the community of Buddhist practitioners, the third of the Three Jewels of Buddhism, Western Buddhism became an individualized quest for salvation. Like the forms of pietistic Christianity that emphasize the individual over the Church, this has done well in America. The bloom may be as short-lived as the plants in the Parable of the Sower that lacked soil to root in.
The real tragedy for us Christians is that we did such a poor job of presenting our faith as the real answer to the existential problem addressed by Buddhism that many seekers were forced to go East. Our meditative tradition is certainly as deep as Buddhism (deeper, since it posits a real source of Being rather than a Void), but it just has not had the marketing success that Buddhists have enjoyed. Thomas Merton is perhaps the only mystical Christian writer in the last century who had a sizable reading public, in part because he took seriously the questions Buddhism seeks to answer. His death at a joint conference of Christian and Buddhist monastics in 1968 was a huge tragedy both for the Christian understanding of Buddhism, and–far more importantly–for Christianity’s understanding of itself.
Dale,
[i]Our meditative tradition is certainly as deep as Buddhism (deeper, since it posits a real source of Being rather than a Void), but it just has not had the marketing success that Buddhists have enjoyed.[/i]
I think it’s not just a matter of “marketing success” that factors into the spread of Buddhism in America. Marketing meditation is all and good, but if there is no living and vibrant demonstration of the practice of meditation, then the marketing won’t go very far. Most Buddhists in Asia don’t meditate (in terms of formal periods of sitting contemplation), and even in the traditional lineage of monks (and nuns) meditation is not necessarily central. However, Tibetan Buddhists can point to many examples of “spiritual athletes”, exemplars of meditation, just within recent memory; and the Thai Forest Tradition in Thailand, and the Japanese Zen lineages give the Tibetans a run for their money. For people who are really interested in such intensive meditation, it would be very difficult to find it in your local Protestant ecclesia. Of course, there’s always the Catholic Church, and if the distinctively Catholic hurdles are overcome, then progress might be made in that context; but I think the real “hidden jewel” lies in Orthodoxy, which has generally avoided the more “outwardly” focused Catholic monastic tendency, and stayed true to [i]ascesis[/i], [i]nepsis[/i], and [i]theosis[/i] starting in this body, in this life.
Give you dollars to donuts that they don’t seek advice from ECUSA/TEC.
#1 may not be aware that there are indeed several U.S. Zen Buddhist sanghas which maintain the traditional lineage, including ceremonial trappings. Christians will be deeply mislead if they think of “salvation” in the way that they usually think of it, since there is no immortal soul to be saved in Zen (this idea is delusion). I agree that a great tragedy of the catholic churches (Anglican among them) was to treat as ancillary its meditative practices. See Fr. Thomas Merton’s “Zen and the Birds of Appetite”. In this vacuum, there are several Roman Catholic priests who have actually received transmission (inka) as zen masters.