Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South

1. Bringing a Regional Perspective to American Buddhism

Geographical diversity is the hallmark of religion in the United States. —Mark Silk and Andrew Walsh, One Nation, Divisible, 2008 Chapter One BRINGING A REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE TO AMERICAN BUDDHISM Before proceeding to a discussion of Buddhism in the South—primarily taken up in the later chapters of this book—it is necessary to lay the groundwork for a regional approach to the subject of American Buddhism. Fortunately, there is a long and fruitful history of regional analysis in the study of American religious history. But why has Buddhism not been a part of this analysis? American Buddhist Historiography: The Lack of a Regional Awareness American religious history is in some senses inherently a regional project: it looks at religious phenomena within a certain geographic and national area: the United States of America. As long as people have been describing the religious history of the New World, they have noted the importance of place, and furthermore, they have often singled out specific places for investigation . Perhaps the first true work in this area was Cotton Mather’s 1702 tome Magnalia Christi Americana, or, The Ecclesiastical History of NewEngland .1 Nearly a century and a half later, regionalism as an interpretive motif was still considered relevant, as seen in Robert Baird’s 1844 Religion in America. Published just before the entrance of Buddhism onto the American scene, Baird’s examination paid attention to the major geographic areas BRINGING A REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE 18 of America, to the ethnic and religious origins of the settlers of various places, and noted distribution patterns for an already diverse America’s different denominations.2 And when American religious history began to coalesce as an academic field in the early twentieth century, regionalism was a majoranalytical key, whether it was the contrasts between North and South or East and West, or the influence of Frederick Turner’s frontier thesis and the development of new forms of American Christianity.3 A perusal of current introductory textbooks on American religious history quickly reveals that regionalism remains an ongoing strategy for discussing the historical interaction between various religious groups and the wider culture.4 And yet, regionalism is an interpretative approach that has been applied haphazardly, with many religious traditions and issues never receiving adequate regional attention. Regionalism has never been applied robustly to my own primary field of research: Buddhism in North America, especially the United States. American Buddhism has been an occasional object of scholarly study since the mid-twentieth century, began to produce important foundational works in the 1970s, and since the late 1990s has emerged as an increasingly coherent subfield. It has developed various topics of intense academic discussion, such as the contrasts and continuities between Asian and American Buddhisms, the number of Buddhists in the United States, how to determine whether one is or is not Buddhist, Buddhist contributions to the wider American culture, and issues of race and ethnicity. Yet in 2012 we find that major forms of interpretation such as regionalism from one primary related discipline—American religious history—remain nonetheless widely neglected. Among the implications of this inattention to regional phenomena is the possibility that we may know less about “American Buddhism” than we think we do—we may, rather, know mainly about West Coast, Northeastern, or Midwestern Buddhism, not American Buddhism per se. Among the various important studies that have appeared in the past fifteen years, nearly all have been based on work in a few restricted areas that are nonetheless held up as representative of American Buddhism on a national scale. In American Buddhist studies, California, the urban Midwest , and the Northeast are somehow transformed into the entirety of the United States. Consider our major book-length ethnographies. The first of these was Paul Numrich’s 1996 Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples. Numrich’s pioneering study was carried out at sites in Chicago and Los Angeles.5 In 2001 Eve Mullen published The American Occupation of Tibetan Buddhism: Tibetans 19 BRINGING A REGIONAL PERSPECTIVE and Their American Hosts in New York City.6 In 2004 Wendy Cadge’s excellent Heartwood: The First Generation of Theravada Buddhism in America and Sharon Suh’s Being Buddhist in a ChristianWorld: Genderand Community in a Korean AmericanTemple appeared. Cadge’s work was done in Boston and Philadelphia; Suh’s ethnography was carried out in Los Angeles.7 More recently , Carolyn Chen looked at both Buddhists...