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by Laurence O. McKinney
Director, American Institute for
Mindfulness
On March 31, performance artist
Laurie Anderson was at CyberSmith, Marshall Smith's net-wired virtual cafe
in Cambridge. She was doing a major show in Boston and previewing her new
CD-ROM Puppet Motel (Voyager). She also nearly died two summers ago from
altitude sickness during a Himalayan pilgrimage in Tibet. We share a name,
twenty years of electric music, and a Kalachakra with the Dalai Lama.
Today it was interactive data, that night it was sizzling violin. "Got a
quote for CyberSangha?" I asked, knowing that vajra-sisters tell the
truth. "Well," she said, as mindful as ever, "Buddhism is sort of digital
isn't it?"
Zero or one? Or in the middle
considering both? There is no reason for zero without a one, no one
without a zero to come from, it's sort of digital for sure. No Nirvana
without Samsara, no signal without noise, no mu without ma. Buddhism at
its basics has always sounded like science to Americans, and as we log on
and take our part in creating the interactive Dharma network, we take part
in a very distinctive Buddhist lineage. It is a Buddhism that is active,
individual, egalitarian and engaged, media friendly, synthetic, and
universalistic. What few have noticed, and some are beginning to
recognize, is that these characteristics identify a distinctly American
Buddhist lineage, one well over a century old, which has already
influenced world Dharma traditions so extensively that modern Asian
Buddhist now depends on it for both relevance and survival.
Christopher Queen lectures in
comparative religion at Harvard University. A Buddhist in action as well
as practice, both he and his teaching assistant, 25 year old Soto Zen
priest Duncan Williams, have recently published articles in Tricycle
concerned with the American Buddhist experience. One of Queen's major
interests is the cross-pollenization which occurred between American and
Asian Buddhist thinkers during the second half of the nineteenth century.
An American delegate to the recent world conference of "engaged Buddhists"
he noticed the pervasive mood of political, and even ecological activism
that characterized the event and the participants.
As Sri Lankan monks continue to
politic, as Thai monks ordain trees to save them from multinational forest
reapers, and young Tibetans post press releases and march from Dharamsala
to Delhi, we might ask where this very modern spirit of activism came
from. If Tibetan Buddhists had acted like this fifty years ago, China
would never have been able to take over. The answer is that a great deal
of what is now being referred to as Buddhist Modernism got its start not
in any Asian culture or Buddhist shastra, but developed out of the
blending of American Buddhist action with Asian Buddhist Wisdom, a
tradition that got its start in 1880.
Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese
monk who coined the phrase "engaged Buddhism," was influenced in his
activism by the works and activities of Sri Lankan Buddhist reformer
Walpola Rahula. Rahula's very un-Asian activism and individualism, his use
of the media and emphasis on human rights was not from Nikaya or
Theravadin Buddhism. This Sri Lankan tradition, nearly a hundred years
old, was propelled by the reverse missionary activities of the American
theosophists Helena Blavatsky and her companion Col. Henry Steel Olcott.
Olcott was a lawyer, a Civil War hero, and a journalist as well. He was a
typical Victorian, full of optimism, individualism, and activism which
characterized his times. When he and Blavatsky came to the aid of some
Buddhist students, and then publicly took refuge, or pansil, in 1880, they
became the toast of the island. America was where the telegraph had been
operating for years and the telephone was about to arrive, where railroads
were stretching across the land and mass dailies were common, filled with
international events. In Asia, Buddhism was where it was and had been for
fifteen hundred years, wherever it was. By 1880, there were very Japanese
Buddhists, very Tibetan Buddhists, very Sri Lankan Buddhists and so on.
The lineages were entirely local, and entirely woven into local culture.
Olcott, whose Buddhism was
measured in years rather than centuries, was thinking pan-Buddhist
thoughts from the beginning. His American notions of Buddhism were infused
with all his Victorian values from Jeffersonian democracy to love of
technology. Many Sri Lankans were straining to be Western. Between the
Colonel's Yankee salesmanship and his foreign appeal, many Sri Lankans
found the new combination of values finger-licking good and bought in. The
American-inspired Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka virtually pre-empted state
Sri Lankan Buddhism into the populist, socially active Dharma referred to
now as "Protestant Buddhism."
One young Sri Lankan who was
completely taken with their work was the young Anagarika Dharmapala, who
went on to found the Mahabodhi Society, the first world Buddhist
organization. The American teachings were already taking hold.
Buddhism was not unknown in
nineteenth century America. Few proclaimed themselves to be Buddhists, but
the extraordinary popularity of Edwin Arnold's heroic life of the Buddha,
The Light of Asia, published in 1878, made Buddhism a subject of debate
and investigation in Victorian philosophical and religious circles. In
1893, the Olcott-ized Protestant Buddhist Dharmapala became one of the
great hits of the World Congress of Religions at the Chicago World's Fair.
Another big winner was D.T. Suzuki, who came as the translator for
Japanese Zen teacher Soen Shaku. Scholar Thomas Tweed, in his recent work
The American Encounter with Buddhism, put the Victorian American Buddhists
in perspective by assigning them to three categories.
"Esoteric" Buddhists, which
included Col. Olcott, tended to synthesize their Dharma and blend it
thoroughly with theosophy, spiritualism, or the teachings of Emmanuel
Swedenborg. These Buddhists were concerned with seeking inner knowledge
and spiritual power through practice and study, and were not overly
concerned with the purity of any specific lineage. They were the first to
mix up the American curry and serve it abroad through writings and other
activities.
In the 1890's, Ernest Fennellosa
and William Sturgis Bigelow, two Boston Brahmins, were among the most
prominent of the "romantic Buddhists", attracted to many aspects of
Japanese culture. These American Buddhists rejected many of the Victorian
impulses found in Protestant Buddhism, and attempted to adopt stricter
Japanese practices. They often felt out of place in America. Fennellosa
and writer Lafcadio Herne both lived for extended periods of time in Japan
and felt most comfortable, like Ruth Fuller Sasaki, practicing in Japanese
monasteries. They never really caught on as they had no local teachers to
popularize their schools.
The third Victorian category was
"rationalists". Many of these Buddhists and Buddhist sympathizers were
converts from the popular schools of social Darwinism promoted by works of
Herbert Spencer. Even Fennellosa said to the end that it was Spencerian
aspects of the Buddha Dharma which formed the mainstays of his own belief,
if not his Japanese practice. Other rationalists include the first
American to proclaim himself to be a Buddhist, Dyer Daniel Lum, writer
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and others who congregated at Harvard Divinity
School at the turn of the last century. The ascendance of scientific
method had infused and invigorated the entire Victorian religious scene,
and Buddhism offered what seemed a much more logical way of looking at
things.
Rationalist Paul Carus discovered
his Dharma at the 1893 World Council of Religions. Founding the Open Court
Press, the first consistent American Buddhist media, he imported D.T.
Suzuki, thus establishing a teacher in the United States who provided his
consistent, if Westernized, Zen teachings to two generations of American
thinkers. Suzuki's Zen was considerably influenced by Kyoto school
philosophers such as Nishima Kitaro, heavily influenced themselves by
concepts of transcendent mind states borrowed from Heidegger, some
nihilism from Nietzsche, and even the mindful American William James.
Carus, an activist, media-creating, networking egalitarian who tended to
be synthetic in his own thinking, was clearly of the pure American
lineage. D.T. Suzuki's Westernized Kyotized Zen was actually more a
mixture than his patron's simple but straightforward American Buddhist
traditional values.
If Suzuki was influenced by
Nietzsche and James, if Thich Nhat Hanh borrows much from the political
and engaged "Protestant Buddhist" model, if the Tibetan freedom movement
has little to do with classic Tibetan Buddhist/Chinese relations and more
to do with media and social activism borrowed from American Buddhist
traditions, what are we really seeing? As popular American figures such as
Tina Turner, Cindy Crawford, Richard Gere, and others profess their
Buddhist inclinations, it could be said that the aspects of Buddhism
attractive to them are actually familiar Western traditions emerging
through Asian teachers influenced by our own ancestors. In another, and
perhaps more honest appraisal, the American Buddhist lineage is not only
unique and consistent, it has become the method behind Buddhist Modernism
and its engaged stance on a worldwide basis.
Carus hailed the Buddha as "the
first prophet of the religion of science." Many other Victorians echoed
Bostonian John Ogden Gorden, who in 1875 wrote to a friend "We have heard
so much about the beauty of this system." As Buddha Dharma is basically a
systematic philosophy, it fits computers, communications, technology,
ecology, and now world networking like source code to a chip. Dharma
parallel processes, while top-down hierarchical theologies are like the
earlier computers.
The entire idea of everything
turning into ones and zeroes and being instantly music or video or
information or anything else, anywhere else is hard for most people to
understand who are not familiar with deep Abhidharma. Otherwise, they
would have to be scientists or American Buddhists of the late twentieth
century, projecting that same active, individualistic, media-friendly and
ever-networking value system of our ancestral lineage, our 125 years of
high tech, activist American Style Buddha Dharma.
In the fall 1994 issue of
Tricycle, Japanese-Canadian religion professor Victor Sogen Hori charged
that American Buddhists have overturned beliefs basic to most Asian
Buddhist sects with their ideas of autonomy, Western morality, and
psychotherapy. In Christopher Queen's class, Japanese American Duncan
Williams lectures on the various aspects of American Buddhism. At Harvard,
he has no problem combining his Soto Zen work with scholarship and
eco-activism in the Pacific Northwest. Hori is correct that American
Buddhists aren't Asian Buddhists, but that doesn't mean they aren't
Buddhists. Most Americans are, at the heart, classic American Buddhists.
We synthesize everything from nylon to neptunium and we see all the
schools as basically created equal in a way no Asian could imagine.
We came clean to the Dharma, we
didn't have our minds wrapped in the robes of any particular cultural
religious hierarchy and we don't like hierarchies very much. American
Buddhism has always been a synthesis, something that could never have
happened in Asia where each country had its culture stamped all over the
teachings. Americans are idea people, pioneers, experimenters by nature.
The idea of anybody freeing Tibet by meditating in a cave for a few years
may be fine for an Asian contemplative, but American Buddhists do it with
media, just as we have since the days of Olcott Roshi, Lama Lum, Wisdom
Woman Blavatsky and Khenpo Carus.
American Buddhists have always
blended current science with the Dharma teachings of different Asian
schools to create our unique and individualistic Dharma. We certainly have
a string of teachers. Olcott may have been the first, but the American
lineage right now includes roshis like poet and activist Gary Snyder,
Geshe Joanna Macy and her systematic cybernetic shastras, EcoDharma Sister
Joan Halifax, Tantra Teacher Miranda Shaw and the entire neurotheology
movement at the Harvard Divinity School.
Each of these teachers and works
are individualistic, synthetic, universalistic, and media friendly. Each
has taken from many teachers, each is basically Buddhist, and each is
completely sincere. We even have a lineage of American Buddhist yogis,
anarchists like Lum, our poets and wanderers like Jack Kerouac, and our
fiery virtual vajra sister Laurie Anderson. There are many more.
We needn't feel so new, either.
Starting with our first Sri Lankan missionary activity, American Buddhism
predates the Sokka Gakkai, the Kyoto School, and is older than some of the
Tibetan Dzog-Chen lineages. It's a fact that the 5th Dzog-Chen Rinpoche
was alive and well in 1935, which means his particular monastery, featured
in Sogyal Rinpoche's recent works, couldn't be older than some large
American corporations.
In the last decades of the
twentieth century, as multiple Asian lineages expanded their teachings to
the West, the Westernized East has been taking to heart the American style
of mindfulness. In the broadly based, activist, ecological Buddhist trends
that are now forcing the Asian Buddhist establishment to change in every
country, we are witnessing the result of the seeds we planted with the
synthesis we started 115 years ago. As Asian monks and leaders move into
the mainstream and encounter the new world of Buddhism, the occasional
scandal, and more than occasional debates are bound to occur. Still, this
is a movement that will change the face of Asian Dharma, and we had a part
in it. Thomas Tweed's classification still holds at the end of the
twentieth century. Neo-esoterics are with us, reminding us that all the
great masters attained their powers in prescribed ways, and that we must
practice, sit, and chant for serenity, fortitude and insight. Some
neo-Romantics build beautiful Zen temples or stupas, preserving and
maintaining a rich cultural archive. Others organize to free Tibet, filled
with visions of meditating monks, wise lamas, and Himalayan peaks. Some
chant only in Tibetan, Japanese, or Pali, or wear the robes of Eastern
priests, comfortable in oriental traditions and preserve the past of
another people in another time. They remind us in their individuality how
many roots a tree can have, all supporting the same trunk. Each was, after
all, the only style of Buddhism that a people had ever known. In their
consistency, they provide a refuge for anyone disenchanted or disheartened
with the American cultural style.
Perhaps the fastest growing
community of American Buddhists would be the Neo-rationalists. The reason
they are growing is that this group alone can lay claim to the American
Buddhist lineage and be proud of a type of Buddhism only a bunch of
Americans would have come up with. As those who left their practice or
became disillusioned by the Dharma because they could not be Asian realize
there is a real American Dharma, there will be many more. In the
neo-rationalist digital Buddhist world, as we connect up in closer and
closer contact with data Dharma brothers and sisters on the Internet, we
begin to see something independent arising. While those seeking peace or
power turn inwards and others immerse in foreign cultures, American
CyberBuddhists are going online and checking it out world-wide. What do we
find in Thailand? What sort of Buddhists Are the leading thinkers in
Malaysia? They are all preaching the active, involved, universal, engaged,
autonomous Dharma of the fine old American lineage. They are all
political, active, networking, and media friendly.
"They seemed very set on the idea
that small was beautiful," recounts Queen, I often found myself the only
Westerner in the group trying to convince them that big wasn't always bad.
It's clear that American Buddhists have a job of convincing to do. The
Dharma was and always will be systematic, but it was the U.S. Army that
brought water to the Rwandans, not any Asian charity. These are the sorts
of powerful systems that are now more than ever open to direction towards
humanitarian causes. As the threat of global conflict recedes, the threat
of global cooperation rears its head, which tends to frighten those wedded
to a culture. Hopefully, good minded women and men will be able to use
their minds and their hearts to use these powerful systems, to engage
them, network them, and direct them for the benefit of all sentient
beings.
There is one traditional lineage
these days that is prepared to take wisdom to the max, effort to the
extreme, and compassion to the world. American Buddhism is young, but it
is strong, and as Thais squabble as to how to save their forests, as
disenchanted Japanese are lured into strange cults and Koreans become
swooning Pentacostals by the millions, we American Buddhists have
something for the world that just might help. Heck, we've been doing this
sort of thing since our revolution back in 1776. We communicate, we
disseminate, and we activate.
This is our Dana, the gift we
started exporting over a century ago. It's internetworking, it's
universalistic, it's synthetic and it's engaged. It never was Asian, it's
our own Victorian- Protestant-Mystic-Spencerian-Yankee-Doodle-Dharma and
it has lit a light in Asia we can all be proud of. Yo, Asian Dharma dudes!
We be with you!
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