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633 l Buddhism ORIGINS OF BUDDHISM IN NORTH AMERICA Lori Pierce BUDDHISM IN NORTH America emerged from two distinct but not unrelated streams. Buddhism was first brought to the United States beginning in the midnineteenth century as the natal faith of immigrants from China and Japan. Asian workers also were recruited as laborers to build railroads, dig mines, and plant and harvest crops. They often lived and worked in filthy, dangerous, and dehumanizing conditions. Like many immigrants from Europe, they anticipated earning enough money to help support their families and return home. And like many immigrants from Europe, many found that after many years away they could not afford, or no long desired, to return home. But unlike European immigrants, Asian immigrants were barred from citizenship. It was for their own comfort and for their American-born sons and daughters that they built and established permanent Buddhist institutions in order to retain a sense of their ethnic and cultural identity in a foreign land. Even as Asian Buddhists were migrating to the West, Westerners—Europeans and North Americans—were gradually becoming aware of Asian religions, especially the religions of India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), China, and Japan. It would take several generations of scholars to fully and clearly understand the many forms of Buddhist worship and belief that developed in Asian countries and cultures. Driven by intellectual curiosity, European and American scholars began to translate Buddhist texts into Western languages. The first Buddhist text printed in the United States appeared in the Transcendentalist periodical The Dial in 1844. By the time Asian Buddhists spoke at the World’s Parliament of Religions, which took place at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, many upper-middle-class Americans were well aware of and curious about Buddhism. A very few converted, but many more read books and magazines, joined study groups, and developed a sympathy of Buddhism as a philosophy, if not as a style of devotional worship and practice. Women made significant and long-lasting contributions to the effort to establish Buddhism in North America in the years before World War II. As scholars, seekers , and women of faith, they were instrumental in establishing institutions and forging the network of relationships that facilitated the transmission of Buddhism as a faith and as religious institutions from Asia to North America. 634 l ASIAN RELIGIONS—BUDDHISM Asian Buddhist Communities from China and Japan Chinese immigrants were the first to bring Buddhism to North America. Driven from home by the effects of poverty, famine, and war, Chinese migrants were lured to North America during the gold rush. Once the rush for wealth abated, Chinese workers were recruited to work on railroad building projects across the continent. They also settled into small towns and established businesses and farms. Attracted by the promise of high wages on sugar plantations, Chinese workers migrated to Hawaii, beginning in the 1850s. They, too, quickly established a beachhead in Honolulu, Lahaina, and Hilo and became small businessmen, rice and taro farmers, and merchants. Between 1860 and 1880 the Chinese community in the United States grew from 35,000 to nearly 110,000. This rate of growth frightened many Euro-American workers and politicians. Chinese workers in the United States and Canada were illegally taxed, barred from speci fic professions, and excluded from public places. This bigotry culminated in the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which, for the first time, placed a racial barrier to immigration on a specific ethnic group. Chinese communities in rural and urban areas built small temples and shrines dedicated to a wide variety of gods and goddesses, including Buddhist deities such as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion. These temples were the site of community celebration and individual devotion. Our knowledge of women’s roles in these temples is limited by two factors: Women were a minority in Chinese communities during the earliest decades of Chinese immigration (less than 10 percent of Chinese migrants), and the roles of those women who did migrate to North America were circumscribed by the patriarchal social structure of Chinese society. Women migrants were wives of wealthy merchants, family servants, or prostitutes. Prostitutes who were lured or sold into service were virtual slaves having little to no freedom of movement. Without status, they had few opportunities to contribute to or participate in community worship. Family servants would have had greater access to temples and opportunities for home and family religious observance. The wives of merchants and other...

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