Dixie Dharma: Inside a Buddhist Temple in the American South

4. There’s No Such Thing as “Not My Buddhism”: Hybridity, Boundary-Crossing, and the Practice of Pluralistic Buddhism

A task that confronts those who do fieldwork with local religion is to discover routes from the particular gestures enacted by members of a religious group to the worlds of meaning manifested by such actions. —Ruel Tyson, James Peacock, and Daniel Patterson, Diversities of Gifts: Field Studies in Southern Religion, 1988 Chapter Four THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “NOT MY BUDDHISM” Hybridity, Boundary-Crossing, and the Practice of Pluralistic Buddhism It is a bright, chilly January afternoon outside, but it is warm inside at Ekoji as I sit on the floor enjoying a casual after-service discussion with the Pure Land group. Their plan was to study a booklet about bodhisattvas, but as we have spent the time sipping tea and passing a plastic baggie full of pistachios , the subject has drifted to the unusual nature of Ekoji. “Is this really one temple?” I wonder aloud. “Or is it more of a bunch of different groups that happen to share a space out of convenience?” Li Chen, a member of the temple since before the Zen, Tibetan, Vipassana , and Meditative Inquiry groups arrived, shakes his head. “We don’t differentiate between groups so much.” Martin Boyd, who first arrived at the temple on the same day as Li, pushes the point further. For instance, even though the gathering this afternoon is a Pure Land group, they do not just stick to Pure Land texts. “We spent a year discussing the Vimalakirti Sutra, and then we did two Zen works. We only recently began the Smaller Pure Land Sutra.” George Zheng, a thin, elderly Chinese American man who has been attending Ekoji for many years, agrees. Maybe there might be Buddhists who 121 THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “NOT MY BUDDHISM” think that you should only stick with one tradition, but that seems strange to him. “Chinese Buddhism is more liberal, there is more freedom than in Japanese,” he asserts. He tells us about his grandmother and his greatgrandmother , both of whom were Buddhists in China. People from other Ekoji groups visit this one all the time, he claims. “Fred often joins us, even though he’s deeplycommitted to theTibetan sangha.” Li says that he sometimes attends guest lectures put on by the Tibetan group. George says he does, too. “I visited the Vipassana group in October,” Martin adds. “And I’ve been to the Zen services.” He has also driven to upstate New York with the Tibetan group in order to visit the monastery of their guiding lama. “In that case, why do you think people choose one group over another?” I ask. George thinks for a minute, absently plucking at his white hair. “Time of services is important—this group’s timing is more convenient,” he finally replies. Li is even more adamant. “I think most people choose the time and style, not so much the content of the service. Especially this group. If I go to the Zen or Tibetan group, so what? They still have Amida [Amitabha], Guanyin too. It isn’t important.” George nods. “Buddhism is Buddhism. There’s no such thing as ‘not my Buddhism.’”1 This universalistic approach to Buddhism is shared to some degree by nearly all the participants at Ekoji, regardless of which groups they prefer to primarilyattend. Not all are so expansive—for some, there are types of Buddhism that do indeed seem strange, though they commonly assert that such traditions are perfectly legitimate, just not appealing to them as individual practitioners. And George’s ecumenical comment has to be juxtaposed with his implication moments earlier that Chinese Buddhism is superior to Japanese Buddhism, precisely because it is more open to multiplicity.While timing and convenience, as my informants speculated, were indeed often reasons that people attended one group oranotherat Ekoji, manyof the people I talked with also cited other reasons—often they had read a book from one tradition (such as Zen) and decided to try that type of Buddhism specifically . In chapter 3, we saw how the various Buddhists at Ekoji make efforts to distinguish their groups from each other. So there are significant sectarian undercurrents at this multidenominational temple. But at the same time, the conversation that opens this chapter demonstrates that there is another important, opposing dimension to the life of Ekoji. As much as members tend to align themselves with particular forms of Buddhism, they THERE’S NO SUCH THING AS “NOT...