American Buddhism As a Way of Life

American Buddhism as a Way of Life Edited by Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge American Buddhism as a Way of Life 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 No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. 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. II. Whalen-Bridge, John. 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. Contents Foreword xi Thomas A. Tweed Introduction: American Buddhism as a Way of Life 1 Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge Part I. Buddha: The Teacher as Immigrant 1. The Authenticity of Alan Watts 13 David L. Smith 2. D. T. Suzuki, “Suzuki Zen,” and the American Reception 39 of Zen Buddhism Carl T. Jackson 3. My Lunch with Mihoko 57 Ellen Pearlman Part II. Dharma: Doctrine, Belief, and Practice in America 4. What Can Buddhist No-Self Contribute to North American Bioethics? 69 Michael C. Brannigan 5. A Contemporary North American Buddhist Discussion of Abortion 83 Rita M. Gross 6. Touched by Suffering: American Pragmatism and Engaged Buddhism 101 Judy D. Whipps viii Contents 7. Identity Theft: Simulating Nirvana in Postmodern America 125 John Kitterman Part III. Sangha: Who Is an American Buddhist? 8. Family Life and Spiritual Kinship in American Buddhist Communities 151 Charles S. Prebish 9. Buddha Loves Me This I Know: Nisei Buddhists in Christian America, 1889–1942 167 Lori Pierce 10. Analogue Consciousness Isn’t Just for Faeries: Healing the Disjunction between Theory and Practice 183 Roger Corless 11. “A Dharma of Place”: Evolving Aesthetics and Cultivating Community in an American Zen Garden 195 Jeff Wilson List of Contributors 209 Index 213 In Memoriam, Roger Corless (1938–2007) David L. Dupree Meeting Roger some fi fteen 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 fi nal 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 cer- tainly announce it on THE CORLESS website, along with other links about this remarkable man. THE CORLESS is a nonprofi t 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. ix 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 profi le 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 fl inch 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 encoun- ters with homophobia and racism. xi xii Foreword But the Buddhists described in these essays are not solitary trav- elers. 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 Japa- nese 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 benefi t of the many, for the joy of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, for the benefi t 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 fi lm, and the popularity of the Dalai Lama, most Americans would fi nd it dif- fi cult 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 trans- forming the American religious perspective. Buddhism has expanded through a wide spectrum of American culture, including literature, art, 1 2 Gary Storhoff and John Whalen-Bridge psychology, fi lm, and other religious traditions. Our fi rst volume in this series on American Buddhism, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, demonstrated the profound infl uence of this very decidedly immigrant faith in American culture since the beginning of the twentieth century; the essays in that volume revealed the pervasive infl uence of Buddhism in contemporary American literature as well. Indeed, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature represents the most com- plete 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 Bud- dhism culture by examining in wide-ranging essays how Buddhism has been transmitted to America spiritually and materially in the late twentieth and early twenty-fi rst 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.

Load more