I had lunch yesterday with David and Elizabeth, and we were talking about (what else) the New Dharma Center. David is uncertain about the notion; specifically, he is concerned that we will fall into the trap that caught Buddhists in Sri Lanka who tried to borrow methods and practices from the Protestant missionaries who were making heavy inroads on the island, successfully proselytizing the native Buddhist population. The result was what the authors Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere call “Protestant Buddhism“. For those of us attracted to the rationality and clarity of the Buddha’s teachings, the absence of dogmatic doctrine, and the strong focus on ethical action, Protestant Buddhism is not a welcome prospect; essentially, the native Buddhists, in an attempt to stave off the Christian Protestant missionaries, made their temples over in the form of Christian churches; there was a tendency to deify the Buddha, a borrowing of additional gods and goddesses from the Tamil Hindu traditions and the incorporation of Hindu puja ceremony into Buddhist practice; a shift in emphasis away from ethical practice and toward belief in the Buddha as a source of temporal success, and a new emphasis on intercessory prayer.

Another possibly cautionary example is The Buddhist Churches of America, a U.S. branch of the Japanese Jodo Shinshu variant of Pure Land Buddhism; in addition to their use of the word “church” to define their gathering places, the BCA uses the terms “Reverend”, “Minister” and “Bishop” to refer to members of the Church hierarchy. While meditation is not typically part of their practice, and while they do have a relatively straightforward focus on the Buddhadharma, they are very much targeted to Japanese-Americans; there’s a lot of chanting, and that is almost entirely in Japanese. And there is, for me, an uncomfortable mysticism about the basic Pure Land doctrine, that chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha over and over will guarantee rebirth in the “Pure Land”, in which one is promised virtually certain Enlightenment. For those looking for salvation through ritual, faith, and supplicatory prayer, but who no longer identify themselves as Christians or Jews, the BCA may offer an alternative. But that is not, I believe, what we are about.

I think that it’s very important, early on, to articulate a set of guiding principles that will fix the grounding of our Center and of the Dharma that we practice in the Buddha’s teachings. We are not trying to assimilate into a foreign culture, as were the Japanese immigrants who founded BCA in 1944. And we are not trying to resist proselytizing Christians, as were the “Protestant Buddhists” in Sri Lanka. Rather, we are trying to arrange a setting for the Dharma that will make it most easily accessible to those who are ready for it and who need it most.

In many of the suttas, in the formula statement which describes the Buddha’s reputation, one of the items is that he is “the only one able to tame those ready to be tamed.” I believe that many Americans today are ready to be tamed, and that they need to be tamed, not by Buddhism, of one lineage or another, but by the Buddha, through the words he left with us.

David Loy passed this article on to me from the Wall Street Journal’s OpinionJournal. In the article, Clark Strand offers some thoughts about the direction that American Buddhism must take if it is to realize the promise that many see in it as a possible alternative to the dogmatic theistic religions in which they were indoctrinated. Strand’s thinking mirrors, in many ways, the thinking that evoked the New Dharma Center. Here’s a quote:

Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large–from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, “Well, if I had to be something, I guess I’d be a Buddhist.” The object of that experiment is not to import some “authentic” version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether–one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.

In that case, all the more reason to keep Buddhism in America alive. But to keep that experiment running (as it must if it is ever to yield practical results for the broader religious culture), it has to get itself grounded in the realities of American family life. That is why I tell every Buddhist I meet these days to make friends with a local priest or rabbi and ask what kinds of programs he (or she) is offering for children and families. For if Buddhism has much to offer the West, it surely has much to receive as well. Whatever new religious model is going to emerge over the next 100 years as the result of the inevitable cross-pollination of religious cultures in America, one can only hope that it will preserve the best of East and West.

Read the article; I’d be interested in your comments.

I taught a class last quarter at UC’s Osher Livelong Learning Institute in “The Teachings of the Buddha”. The class attracted more than 30 students, which is quite large by OLLI standards; it’s clear that there’s a lot of interest in Buddhism. The students were sharp, attentive, and involved with the teachings that we covered. They found the Buddha’s Dharma comprehensible, for the most part, and, again for the most part, they recognized the relevance of the teachings to the conditions of their lives and of our culture. Many of them, it was clear, were attracted to the Dharma and were looking for ways to integrate it into their lives.

The sticking point for many of them, it turned out, was not what I expected it to be. They were cool with the non-theistic nature of the discourses, and they understood that the Buddha’s demand that we confront the harsh reality of our circumstances did not, therefore, mean that Buddhism was somehow gloomy or “pessimistic”; they understood how accepting responsibility for the consequences of our actions could provide a foundation for morality and could bring meaning to our lives. Even kamma and rebirth didn’t dim their enthusiasm (although that might have had something to do with the relatively naturalistic slant I gave to our discussion of those doctrines). What disturbed them about Buddhism, and what, for almost all of them, was a deal-breaker for their acceptance of the Dharma as their personal path, was the failure of contemporary Buddhism to provide the kind of communal experience, the sense of fellowship, that they received from their participation in church or temple services.

“Do Buddhists have a church?” “Do they have regular meetings?” “What do they do when they get together?” Those were the questions I got, and the answers I was able to give were clearly not answers that satisfied whatever felt need it was that had stimulated the questions.

Now I’m quite ready to believe that my own growing dissatisfaction with the modes of practice that dominate Buddhism meetings and the dominance of communal meditation in those practices probably affected the answers I gave. Someone who was more enthusiastic about communal meditation than I am might have responded to those questions with an explanation and a defense of meditative practice that might have given the students the assurance they were looking for and given them also more encouragement than I gave them to attend meditative sessions and take up the practice. But I understood their questions to be revealing of a need that, again as I understand it, contemporary Buddhist practice is not fulfilling.

It was that experience with my OLLI class that stimulated me to begin thinking more deeply about an idea that I’d been noodling for several years – the idea of a Dharma Center that would focus more on exploring the teachings and less on the practice of group meditation. As I talked to various people about that, the idea began to assume a more distinct outline. That outline is what I’ve written as The Concept, and I’ve set this site up to explore that concept in more detail and, if there proves to be enough interest, to begin working on the very difficult task of bringing real shape to the outline, to actually start a New Dharma Center.