Discovering the Dharma: Buddhism in America

September/October 2008 · Historically Speaking 43 Discovering the Dharma: Buddhism in America Richard Hughes Seager For decades, Buddhism has been the Asian religion Americans have most loved to love, an affection that, however sincere, is often based on vague idealizations and limited knowledge. During the past thirty years, dozens of Buddhist traditions from nations across Asia have set down roots in the US. both in convert and in immigrant communities. Americans now practice the Buddhist dharma or "teachings" by chanting nembutsu, "Homage to Amida Buddha," and daimoku, "Hail to die Lotus Sutra." They circumambulate Buddhist reliquaries, visualize bodhisattvas, and perform full-body prostrations. But most Americans continue to think about Buddhism in stock generalization *;—it is deep, meditative, and practiced by sitting in quiet contemplation. For years, I have taught episodes in die history of American Buddhism at Hamilton College in central New York State. As the course has evolved, I have come to see mat an important part of my teaching is to address such generalizations. Each year, on the first day of class, I poll students to assess their familiarity with the dharma. For those who distrust religion , Buddhism is seen as a philosophy or way of life. For pacifists, its history is thought to be devoid of military conquest. Most are familiar with Zen Buddhism but often gloss it with reference to "in-the-zone" basketball coach PhilJackson or desk-top rock gardens. Few know it to be a sectarian lineage that evolved as Buddhism moved to China, Korea, andJapan from India. For most undergraduates as for most Americans, Buddhism is a benign, highly individualized spirituality: contemplative , calming, cerebral, hip, and pacific. This take on Buddhism is an expression of a long national tradition of idealizing Asian religions, a leitmotif that goes back to die antebellum period when Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and others in the Transcendentalist generation began to make spiritual turns toward the East. Since then, Asian religions have been seeping into the American mainstream through fiction, poetry , and the visual arts, but in so doing dieir particularities tend to get strained out, leaving a cluster of vague, often highly romanticized ideas. For generations , these ideas have infused a wide range of alternative religious sensibilities from Gilded Age metaphysical movements to today's New Age spirituality . They now deeply inform American popular culture and media, so it is no great surprise that I encounter them in students. But through trial and error and out of necessity, I have found ways to use this perennial idealism to draw students into a deeper understanding of Buddhism and its movement from Asia to the West. Startingwith stock ideas, I introduce them to the nuanced vocabularies, worldviews, and traditional practices and traditions of a range of Buddhist groups that have become an important part of America's spiritual landscape. At the same time, I appeal to their idealism by focusing on die experience of earA 19th-century Tibetan Buddhist broadside. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. lier generations of American seekers. For instance, toward the beginning of the class we read an American Buddhist memoir, Eric Storlie's Nothing on My Mind, in which he discusses in frank, highly personal terms, the social and emotional complexities involved in discovering die dharma amid die Sixties cultural revolution. By reading Storlie, students get a clear picture of the earnest, if naive and sometimes harebrained intensity with which Americans can pursue alternative spiritual paths. Storlie's initial approach to Buddhism was through Timothy Leary's LSD-saturated interpretation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Only after some disastrous trips did Storlie begin to practice the dharma seriously, once he discovered Shunryu Suzuki, the Zen roshi or master/teacher who founded die San Francisco Zen Center, now one of America's premiere Buddhist institutions. Through Storlie, students get a look at die communal life at the Zen Center 's Page Street headquarters. They also visit Tassajara, the now famous Buddhist retreat near Carmel-by-the-Sea, where Storlie feels privileged to work with Suzuki, patiendy cracking rocks—a metaphor about insight transforming consciousness ^—for the roshis garden. Through Storlie, students also begin to grasp concrete issues...