Ann Gleig's Articles on Lion's Roar

Ann Gleig takes a far-reaching look at how Buddhism and the conversations within it are changing in the twenty-first century. In 2011, more than 200 Buddhist teachers, mostly American, gathered at the Garrison Institute in upstate New York to discuss the state of Buddhism in the West. Organized by first-generation American baby boomer teachers such as Lama Surya Das and Jack Kornfield, as well as popular Generation X teachers such as Noah Levine and Sumi Loundon Kim, the Maha Teacher Council focused on three main themes: “the promise and the pitfalls” of the secularization of the dharma, the challenges of adapting the dharma to new contexts “without losing depth,” and passing the teaching torch “from elders to the next generation.” This invitation-only event was the subject of much commentary on Buddhist media and in the blogosphere. Some participants raised questions about the invitation process, probing the issue of which teachers had the authority to represent Buddhism in the West. Concern was expressed regarding the underrepresentation of Asian and Asian American teachers and lineages; closely related were critiques about the lack of racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity within the predominantly white, straight, male American teacher body. While many teachers enthused that such conversations were long overdue, others decried what they characterized as the conflation of Buddhism and progressive politics. Further disagreements centered around the conference’s emphasis on mindfulness. One attendee asked why the organizers had chosen “The Mindful Society” as one of the main themes rather than, for example, “The Compassionate Society” or “The Enlightened Society,” titles the questioner said would have highlighted the ethical and less secular dimensions of Buddhism. Both the 2011 Maha Teachers Council and the subsequent critiques of it reflect significant shifts in the landscape of Buddhism in America. In my forthcoming book, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2018, I examine new developments and debates in one corner of that landscape: meditation-based “convert” American Buddhist communities. These lineages represent what some scholars call “Protestant Buddhism” or “Buddhist modernism,” new forms that have emerged from the encounter between traditional Buddhism and modern Western discourses and practice. That encounter took seed in Asia in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism but flowered beginning in the 1960s, in an atmosphere of heightened cross-cultural exchange between Asia and the West. It was during this period that both Asian Buddhists and Americans who had trained with Buddhist monastic and lay teachers in Asia established some of the most prominent meditation-based centers and organizations in existence today. What is the impact of mindfulness transitioning from a countercultural religious practice to a mainstream secular one? The first wave of academic scholarship on these communities was published around the turn of the millennium, as the study of Buddhism in America emerged as a distinct academic subfield. Influential books included Charles S. Prebish’s Luminous Passage: The Practice and Study of Buddhism in America (1999), Richard Hughes Seager’s Buddhism in America (1999), and James Coleman’s The New Buddhism: The Western Transformation of an Ancient Religion (2002). One common distinction made in this early research was between the so-called “two Buddhisms” in America: “ethnic” and “convert.” According to the researchers, the ethnic or "immigrant" Buddhism of Asian Americans (what scholars now commonly refer to as heritage Buddhism) focused on communal, devotional, and merit-making activities within a traditional cosmological context, whereas the convert Buddhism of overwhelmingly white, upper-middle class practitioners was individualistic, primarily focused on meditation practice and psychological in its approach. An early challenge to the “two Buddhisms” typology came from scholar Jan Nattier, who observed that not all converts are white, and that some convert-populated communities, such as Soka Gakkai, do not privilege meditation. She proposed an alternative “three Buddhisms” typology—import, export, and baggage—that moved away from ethnicity and race and focused on the mode by which various forms of Buddhism were brought to the U.S. As Scott Mitchell and Natalie Quli note in their coedited collection Buddhism Beyond Borders: New Perspectives on Buddhism in the United States (2015), and as Mitchell unpacks in his Buddhism in America: Global Religions, Local Contexts (2016), there have been numerous dramatic changes in the social and cultural landscape of America since those studies were published over a decade ago. These changes, as evidenced by the Maha Teacher Council, have brought new questions and concerns to meditation-based convert communities: Who has the authority to define and represent “American” Buddhism? What is the impact of mindfulness transitioning from a countercultural religious practice to a mainstream secular one? How have technology and the digital age affected Buddhist practice? In what ways are generational and demographic shifts changing meditation-based convert communities? My research explores these questions through a series of case studies, highlighting four areas in which major changes are occurring, pushing these communities beyond their first-generation expressions. Addressing the Exclusion of Asian Americans. Central to the shifting landscape of contemporary American Buddhism is a rethinking of the distinction between “convert” and “heritage” Buddhisms as practitioners and scholars have become increasingly aware of the problematic nature of both the “two Buddhisms” and “three Buddhisms” typologies. An early challenge came from Rev. Ryo Imamura, a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist priest, in a letter to Tricycle: The Buddhist Review in 1992. That winter, magazine founder and editor Helen Tworkov had written that “The spokespeople for Buddhism in America have been, almost exclusively, educated members of the white middle class. Asian American Buddhist so far have not figured prominently in the development of something called American Buddhism.” Rev. Imamuru correctly pointed out that this statement disregarded the contributions of Asian American immigrants who had nurtured Buddhism in the U.S. since the eighteenth century and implied that Buddhism only became truly American when white Americans practiced it. Although written twenty-five years ago, Rev. Imamura’s letter was only recently published in its entirety with a commentary by Funie Hsu on the Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s website. Hsu and Arunlikhati, who has curated the blog Angry Asian Buddhist since 2011, have emerged as powerful voices in bringing long-overdue attention to the erasure of Asian Americans from Buddhism in the U.S and challenging white privilege in American meditation-based convert communities. In challenging white privilege, Asian Americans and other practitioners of color have been instrumental in recovering and building the neglected third refuge — sangha — in meditation-based convert Buddhism. Another shortcoming of the heritage/convert distinction is that it does not account for practitioners who bridge or disrupt this boundary. Where, for example, do we place second- and third-generation Asian Americans who have grown up in Asian American Buddhist communities but now practice in meditation-based lineages? What about Asian Americans who have converted to Buddhism from other religions, or from non-religious backgrounds? Chenxing Han’s promising research, featured in Buddhadharma’s Summer 2016 edition, brings the many different voices of these marginalized practitioners to the forefront. Similarly, how do we categorize “cradle Buddhists,” sometimes jokingly referred to as “dharma brats,” who were born into Buddhist “convert” communities? Millennials Lodro Rinzler and Ethan Nichtern—two of the most popular young American Buddhist teachers—fall into this category, having grown up in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition. How do such new voices affect meditation-based convert lineages? Rev. Imamura’s letter echoes the early characterization of primarily white, meditation-based convert communities, observing that “White practitioners practice intensive psychotherapy on their cushions in a life-or-death struggle with the individual ego, whereas Asian Buddhists seem to just smile and eat together.” It is of little surprise then that the theme of community appears strongly in the work of Arunlikhati, Hsu, and Han. Arunlikhati has most recently written about the need to create refuges for Buddhists of color—"spaces where people can find true comfort and well-being"—and shares that his dream “is for Western Buddhism to be like a family that accepts all of its members openly.” In challenging white privilege, Asian Americans and other practitioners of color have been instrumental in recovering and building the neglected third refuge—sangha—in meditation-based convert Buddhism. Building the Beloved Community. On July 1, 2015, a website called Buddhists for Racial Justice started circulating among Buddhists on social media. It included an open letter that spoke of the deep sadness at the murders of the nine members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, Carolina, a few weeks prior. These murders, it stated, were not only the result of an individual deluded by racial hatred and a desire to start a race war but also an outgrowth of the legacy of slavery and white supremacy that persisted in the American collective consciousness and institutional structures. Buddhists, it continued, are obliged to realize the interconnectedness of experience, to recognize the causes and conditions that perpetuate this collective suffering, and to respond compassionately by embodying the precept of non-harm through tangible actions. Alongside this open letter were two...

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