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I see NASCAR through the lens of Buddhism and Buddhism through the lens of NASCAR because it is my makeup as a southerner and a Buddhist to do so. It is as simple as that. Being a Buddhist helps me understand NASCAR on a deeper, more profound level, and being a NASCAR fan helps bring to vivid life Buddhism’s sometimes academic theories. —Arlynda Lee Boyer, Buddha on the Backstretch, 2009 Conclusion BUDDHAS ON THE BACKSTRETCH It is as simple as that: people in different parts of America experience Buddhism through lenses and circumstances supplied by the surrounding culture , and Buddhism impacts how those people navigate their regional culture . At root, that is this book’s primaryargument. Furthermore, Buddhism is not an abstract philosophy but a fluid set of practices and attitudes enacted in specific places through the media of bodies and physical objects, which can be used to produce new, multiple, and even competing Buddhisms . Values such as pluralism are instantiated in particular ways related to the specificities of each situation and location, subject to the idiosyncrasies of individuals, the dynamics of groups, and the pressures of outside forces. The unifying substrate to this book’s twin themes of pluralism and regionalism is the call for fine-grained attention to place (body, artifact, room, building, neighborhood, region) as well as movement in the study of American Buddhism. And it is my hope that those scholars who do know the value of places—especially the southern historians—will see fit to explore more enthusiastically how the pluralizing changes in their favorite regions are not the death knell of their specialties but valuable new resources for study. I close therefore by providing additional details for how regionalism can be explored in American Buddhism, including some suggestions for possible future research. American Buddhism can be studied by looking at regional distribution patterns. In chapter 1, I highlighted ethnicity as one possible factor for in- 219 CONCLUSION vestigation. We can also look specifically at race rather than ethnicity. For example, we might find it worth pondering that a large percentage of the well-known African American public faces of Buddhism—such as Jan Willis, Ralph Steele, Joseph Jarman, AliceWalker, bell hooks,Thulani Davis, Gaylon Ferguson, and Tina Turner—originally come from the South. Perhaps equally noteworthy, few of these individuals have chosen to remain in the South, and it typically was not in the South that they initially encountered Buddhism. Indeed, the South today is almost bare of African American Buddhist monks and priests.1 Yet it would be foolhardy to dismiss the possibility that African American Buddhism (wherever it is actually found) carries more traces of southern cultural influence than does most Asian American or white Buddhism. And perhaps it is not coincidental that the South has produced the country’s only African American Buddhist memberof Congress: Hank Johnson, representative for Georgia’s 4th District at the time of this writing. There are many other potential forms of regional distribution to examine . Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, headquartered in Manhattan and one of the major American Buddhist periodicals, is sometimes characterized as an “East Coast” Buddhist magazine. Meanwhile Tricycle’s major competitors , Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma, are both based even further east in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but are rarely accused of being Canadian or East Coast in nature. Why the distinction? Perhaps an analysis of the subscription lists forall three periodicals could provide a clue, revealing a larger East Coast audience for Tricycle and more Western or simply more dispersed home addresses for Shambhala Sun and Buddhadharma readers. Or perhaps it is simply a misperception shaped by anti–New York City sentiment, which might be clarified by such a study. Are nightstand Buddhists (who read books on Buddhism and perhaps meditate occasionally but are not affiliated with any Buddhist institution) uniformly distributed throughout the country, and does their ratio to “card-carrying Buddhists” differ from region to region?2 Perhaps there are more such nightstand Buddhists in the central and southern states, where there are fewer local Buddhist groups and greater physical distances between temples and meditation centers (and this in regions that often lack effective public transportation). Similar factors might drive up online use of Buddhist resources or even membership in “cybersanghas” by solo Buddhists in the states with few options for contact with nearby Buddhist communities, such that online American Buddhism may be disproportionately southern and central in nature.3 Where have American Buddhist pilgrimage routes been established? In [18.224...

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