The Buddha Abides in Mississippi

I am a southern Buddhist. No, I don’t mean Sri Lanka’s Theravada Buddhist tradition. I live in Mississippi, the deepest of the Deep South, and I practice Zen Buddhism with a sizeable “Sangha” (congregation) of fellow practitioners across the state.

Among the South’s many fascinations is the extent to which we both exceed but also defy our many stereotypes. Even here within the belly of the Bible Belt, a wide variety of spiritual practices—influenced from traditions around the globe—abide in an atmosphere of relative tolerance and mutual respect.

A few years ago, I resolved to attend a teaching by Thích Nhất Hạnh, Vietnamese Zen Master and prolific author. As of this writing, Nhất Hạnh is age 87. I found his travel schedule on the website for Plum Village: the “Engaged Buddhism” center he founded in France after his forced exile from Vietnam. (Nhất Hạnh and his followers were too “engaged” in human rights advocacy for the comfort of his home country; Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in Vietnam.)

As I expected, Nhất Hạnh’s travels that year took him to the usual intellectual centers of the world: Paris, London, Tokyo, San Francisco, New York City, monasteries his followers had founded in California and New York state . . . and Batesville, Mississippi.

Batesville, Mississippi? The small, un-remarkable industrial city on the edge of the Mississippi River Delta? As I learned, Nhất Hạnh’s followers had recently established a new monastery and meditation center, named Magnolia Grove, just outside town. Admirers from the greater Memphis region donated 120 acres of rolling, wooded land, which has since become home for monks and nuns from monasteries in Vietnam and France. The cover photo shows the Magnolia Grove lotus pond, in the heart of the growing campus.

Along with hundreds of others in 2011, I helped welcome Thầy (Vietnamese for teacher, as he is commonly addressed) on his first visit to Mississippi: a three-day meditation and teaching retreat. This tradition of Zen is intended to be relatively accessible to a Western practitioner: emphasizing affirmation-like chants and engagement with real-world problems, both personal and social. Thầy returned again two years later for another retreat—again attended by hundreds—and today more than thirty monks and nuns reside and practice at Magnolia Grove, Mississippi.

At about the same time, a geography graduate student—a Mississippi native and ex-Marine—organized a Zen practice group at a local yoga studio. (This is the same Hattiesburg studio where I have also attended workshops on Hindu philosophy). This particular lineage of Soto Zen managed to spatially-diffuse its way from Japan to France to New Orleans to four different cities across Mississippi today.

We meet twice a week simply to sit together in silent meditation, followed by a chant of the Heart Sutra in Japanese. That’s about it, but the practice has resonated deeply with me and several of my fellow Mississippians; three of us recently took our precepts with a Zen monk (also a native Mississippian) as “Bodhisattvas,” or committed lay practitioners. About once a month we also meet at a center in Starkville, Mississippi or the New Orleans Zen Temple for weekend retreats called “sesshins.” (I believe there is some other university based in Starkville; we tolerate religious diversity here in the South much more readily than intercollegiate football rivalries.)

Meanwhile, Mississippi’s devout Muslims meet in perhaps a dozen mosques in large cities and small towns statewide, together with the New Medina African-American Muslim community near Hattiesburg and Jackson’s International Museum of Muslim Cultures. Add into the mix the Hindu Temple in suburban Jackson, the Krishna New Talavana Community in rural south Mississippi, and the Châu Văn Đức Vietnamese Buddhist Temple in Biloxi. Synagogues in Mississippi date to the early 1800s, with active congregations continuing in Jackson, Hattiesburg, and even some smaller communities. Following my Sunday Zen practice, I attend a low-profile, non-denominational Christian church which prioritizes outreach to Hattiesburg...