The Shifting Landscape of Buddhism in America
IN 2011, MORE THAN two hundred Buddhist teachers, mostly American, gathered at the Garrison Institute in upstate New York to discuss the state of Buddhism in the West. Organized by firstgeneration American baby boomer teachers such as Lama Surya Das and Jack Kornfield, as well as popular Generation X teachers such as Noah Levine and Sumi Loundon Kim, the Maha Teacher Council focused on three main themes: “the promise and the pitfalls” of the secularization of the dharma, the challenges of adapting the dharma to new contexts “without losing depth,” and passing the teaching torch “from elders to the next generation.”
This invitation-only event was the subject of much commentary on Buddhist media and in the blogosphere. Some participants raised questions about the invitation process, probing the issue of which teachers had the authority to represent Buddhism in the West. Concern was expressed regarding the underrepresentation of Asian and Asian American teachers and lineages; closely related were critiques about the lack of racial, gender, and sexual orientation diversity within the predominantly white, straight, male American teacher body. While many teachers enthused that such conversations were long overdue, others decried what they characterized as the conflation of Buddhism and progressive politics. Further disagreements centered around the conference’s emphasis on mindfulness. One attendee asked why the organizers had chosen “The Mindful Society” as one of the main themes rather than, for example, “The Compassionate Society” or “The Enlightened Society,” titles the questioner said would have highlighted the ethical and less secular dimensions of Buddhism.
Both the 2011 Maha Teachers Council and the subsequent critiques of it reflect significant shifts in the landscape of Buddhism in America. In my forthcoming book, which will be published by Yale University Press in 2018, I examine new developments and debates in one corner of that landscape: meditation-based “convert” American Buddhist communities. These lineages represent what some scholars call “Protestant Buddhism” or “Buddhist modernism,” new forms that have emerged from the encounter between traditional Buddhism and modern Western discourses and practice. That encounter took seed in Asia in the context of nineteenth-century colonialism but flowered beginning in the 1960s, in an atmosphere of heightened cross-cultural exchange between Asia and the West. It was during this period that both Asian Buddhists and Americans who had trained with Buddhist monastic and lay teachers in Asia established some of the most prominent meditation-based centers and organizations in existence today.
The first wave of academic scholarship on these communities was published around the turn of the millennium, as the study of Buddhism in America emerged as a distinct academic subfield. Influential books included Charles S. (1999), Richard Hughes Seager’s (1999), and James Coleman’s (2002). One common distinction made in this early research was between the so-called “two Buddhisms” in America: “ethnic” and “convert.” According to the researchers, the ethnic or “immigrant” Buddhism of Asian Americans (what scholars now commonly refer to as heritage Buddhism) focused on communal, devotional, and meritmaking activities within a traditional cosmological context, whereas the convert Buddhism of overwhelmingly white, upper-middle class practitioners was individualistic, primarily focused on meditation practice, and psychological in its approach.
