Welcome home! Please contact lincoln@icrontic.com if you have any difficulty logging in or using the site. New registrations must be manually approved which may take several days. Can't log in? Try clearing your browser's cookies.
Are Asian traditions helpful or holding Americans back?
I have been attending a Zen center to learn a bit about their traditions. Frequently the chants are in phonetic Chinese or Korean. The robes people wear are obviously Asian. Their isn't one Asian member in the center. I don't even recall seeing an Asian American.
If one looks around at other centers, regardless of linage, even if its a western person leading the center, they take great pains to spell out their connection to an Asian monk of some flavor.
Whats the point? This all seems absurd, and counter productive. No disrespect to Asian traditions, but I don't recall anything in Buddhas teaching about national boundaries or language. More over, I have read a few comments from Tibetan leaders that seem quite arrogant regarding Americans. As my Indian wife likes to remind me, Buddhism did not come about in any of these countries, it came about in India!
What do you think?
If one looks around at other centers, regardless of linage, even if its a western person leading the center, they take great pains to spell out their connection to an Asian monk of some flavor.
Whats the point? This all seems absurd, and counter productive. No disrespect to Asian traditions, but I don't recall anything in Buddhas teaching about national boundaries or language. More over, I have read a few comments from Tibetan leaders that seem quite arrogant regarding Americans. As my Indian wife likes to remind me, Buddhism did not come about in any of these countries, it came about in India!
What do you think?
0
Comments
It can go either way:
Some Americans are attracted to tradition, mysticism and exoticism/orientalism.
Other Americans are attracted to more accessible, practical and scientific versions of Buddhism.
If Buddhism could only take one flavor in the U.S., I would say that an Americanized Theravadan tradition with a touch of tradition (Buddha statues, singing bowls, zafus, no shoes, etc) would catch on the most since it appeals to both groups.
However, perhaps the best solution is what we have now: A wide range of choices for people to choose from; from Pure Land and Chan temples, to Theravada-American meditation centers run by White lay people, to mindfulness-based stress reduction courses that often has its connection to Buddhism deliberately hidden.
On American "culture"..... may seem to some as an oxymoron. I've only been over once, to Tennessee and I was generally unsettled. Much of what I saw was based either on greed or god!
But just because you do not know the reason for something doesn't eliminate it's value.
For example, you can go to a retreat and be forced to wear robes along with everyone else. It could be that no one there knows why people are wearing robes. However, the use of robes will still have an effect (weakening the sense of self, less distractions, etc). Actually, it's possible for the effect to be LARGER if the purpose is not known to the practitioners.
This plays into the larger topic/debate on the role of traditions in society. I highly recommend Friedrich Hayek's "Fatal Conceit" for a rational argument in support of tradition (as a criticism of Communist attacks on tradition, culture and religion). Prior to Hayek, Edmund Burke did something similar (criticizing the French Revolution, as well as the British disruption of culture in India and the non-application of common law in the American colonies).
What SHOULD everything look like? Tibetan, Asian, Indian, "American" (no such thing, really, as we're such a melting pot)? Maybe you shouldn't be in a ZEN center if you don't care for the Asian influence. It seems kind of like going to a chinese restaurant, where most of the diners are not chinese, but wondering why it's decorated in Chinese decor. Maybe I'm missing something...
Josh, are you with us?
...so damn comfortable.
Zen teaching came to America from Japan barely 60 years ago.
Give it time.
Namaste
You prefer American tradition.
Tradition is just the packaging.
What is the quality of the product inside?
The teacher/monk, is he kind, wise?
What is the mark of a good buddhist?
Is culture holding us back or advancing us either when it comes to Buddhist practice? Is there a practice that is pure and untainted -- something that doesn't make us chafe and grumble or praise and applaud? My own view is that we learn from those who came before. The only way we can rid ourselves of the baloney is to eat the baloney. The alternative is to imagine (out of our own cultural leanings) that there is a Buddhism without culture or trappings. And that bit of imagining brings with it its own version of culture and trappings.
Of course culture is an add-on and a snare. So what? Our determined practice teaches us how to set aside such things ... in reality as opposed to an intellectual or emotional whine. My thought -- just practice and the snares fall away all by themselves.
FWIW
Then again, when I went to the local TB sangha and they were reciting sadhanas in Tibetan, it was just not very comprehensible to me and was not something I could connect with because it seemed foreign to me.
I grew up in the old Roman Catholic Church in which people recited prayers in a foreign language (Latin). So reciting sadhanas in Tibetan felt foreign too. I find many printed and PDF sadhanas in English, Tibetan script, and Tibetan phonetic transliterations. I pass them over because it seems too hard to get to the actual meaning of the sadhana.
This doesn't have anything to do with liking your own culture either. Attachment is attachment. The issue is one of effectively helping people toward greater insight, tranquility, compassion, and bliss, and to bring the eightfold path to light. To do that, it is important to address the whole person as they really are.
When an abbot is told that the monks have to wear traditional robe garb (designed for 100 degree temps in the jungle) even though it makes no sense given a much colder climate, then the local Abbot has to use intelligence and common sense to disobey the command from an out of touch elder monk from the "Theravada Homeland."
Isn't this a perfectly "American" thing for me to say?
As the Budda himself said 'He who seeks me in form Or in sound Walks the heterodox path And cannot perceive the Tathagata'
All traditions and forms are there for one reason: to help you. To emulate what cannot be emulated and to guide you in what is beyond form and voice and yet gives life to form and voice.
In other words, don't get caught up in the cultural trappings. Respect the form as it is presented. If you are angry about it, watch yourself, that is our practice after all.
Best wishes,
Abu
Who is wearing jeans?
Who is chanting Japanese?
Who is Asian?
Who is American?
Who is getting upset about it?
Who is wise and non-dualistic about it?
As you may have noticed I am heavily into asking this “who is” type of question at the moment.
Who is asking “who is” ?
…
And so on.
Thus Shen-hsiu had written to impress his teacher:
"The body is the core of enlightenment,
The mind is like a clear mirror stand
Polish it diligently time and again,
Not letting it gather dust."
...to which the master Hui Neng corrected him thus:
"Enlightenment originally has no tree,
And a clear mirror is not a stand.
Originally there is not a single thing-
Where can dust be attracted?"
I am told the Hui Neng original work in Chinese is sublime both its written structure and in its sound when read aloud.
Buddhism is both a series of cultural importations AND an opportunity for discovery anew--right here; right now. Insight is beyond culture, but its development (the development along the eightfold path) is necessarily linked with the context of language and culture. There is no other way.
Why just Americans ?
The world isn't made up of Americans and Asians.
.
Interesting enough, I am now considering that aside from Suzuki, one of the biggest early post-war influences in America re: Buddhism and Taoism was Alan Watts!
It was a small and unimportant give-and-take, but it seemed to me to point out gently that those who study Buddhism generally need props of one kind or another. If they didn't need them, then why bother with Buddhism in the first place?
And if this is the case with Buddhism, then the question becomes, "Who likes which props?" Obviously the objective of Buddhism is not to spend your life relying on props (even Buddhism), but for starters, props are necessary in any line of endeavor. Pretending we can race ahead to a time without support mechanisms is self-serving and imaginative, but it hardly advances the destination Buddhism points to.
My take is relax, learn the useful lessons no matter what the trappings and ... go to the beach.