American Buddhism as a Way of Life

Introduction: American Buddhism as a Way of Life

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 benefit of the many, for the joy of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, for the benefit 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 film, and the popularity of the Dalai Lama, most Americans would find it dif- ficult 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 transforming 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, film, and other religious traditions. Our first volume in this series on American Buddhism, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature, demonstrated the profound influence of this very decidedly immigrant faith in American culture since the beginning of the twentieth century; the essays in that volume revealed the pervasive influence of Buddhism in contemporary American literature as well. Indeed, The Emergence of Buddhist American Literature represents the most complete 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 Buddhism culture by examining in wide-ranging essays how Buddhism has been transmitted to America spiritually and materially in the late twentieth and early twenty-first 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. For real wisdom does not merely cause us to know: it makes us ‘be’ in a different way.”2 Americans typically search for new religious expression, as public opinion surveys repeatedly show. Released in February 2008, the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum demonstrates conclusively the strength of American religion;3 however , the Americans surveyed very much desire, using Hadot’s formulation , to “ ‘be’ in a different way” from the living styles offered by conventional religions: According to the Pew Report, 44 percent of the Americans surveyed have left their original religious home for another—Buddhism being one of those new residences.4 Yet Buddhism’s appeal to contemporary American society is ambiguous and sometimes contradictory: Where does a fashionable and trendy practice of Buddhism end, and where does a serious, committed , and devotional focus on Buddhism begin? In a visit to the local bookstore, one can purchase such titles as Zen and the Art of Poker or (perhaps aiming at a more ambitious audience) Zen and the Art of Anything. Also, this ancient religion has predictably invaded the Internet; for example, MSN.com offers a site called the Zen Guide 3 Introduction to American Cities, describing primarily vegetarian restaurants, sushi takeouts, health food stores, and massage centers. Part of the success of The Matrix films were their presumed basis in Buddhist epistemological principles. To many Americans, Buddhism has become the primary gateway to a meaningful life, an all-encompassing “Way.” To a great degree, then, Buddhism may have been superficially absorbed by segments of American popular culture, and the problem of deciding what is “serious” and what is a passing New Age fad may detract from the importance of the fact that at least a million Americans have indeed borrowed liberally from a wide variety of ancient Buddhist traditions, usually...