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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
A few months ago I visited the headquarters of the Buddhist Churches of America in San Francisco. In its gift shop (yes, almost all American Buddhist centers have gift shops) sat a rock carved with the words "What Would Buddha Do?" If the Buddha were alive today, would he be a "new Buddhist"? Would he write bestsellers for Doubleday? Direct films?
Call me old-fashioned, but I think the Buddha would march his ass (mindfully of course) to an American Buddhist monastery. Like immigrants and chanters, monks are almost entirely ignored in Coleman's book, but they are now dug in all across America, doing decidedly old Buddhist things like wearing robes, conducting rituals and even chanting. At places from the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association and Shasta Abbey in California to Zen Mountain Monastery and Dai Bosatsu Monastery in New York, ordained monks devote themselves full time not to improving Buddhism but to preserving it. Some of these monasteries focus on translating and publishing ancient Buddhist texts. Most host laypeople for intensive retreats. But many also shutter their doors for long periods to allow monks to pursue the hard work of what the Buddha described as waking up from a long, bad dream.
Many of the monks at these monasteries are foreign born, but a surprising number are people born in America who have, for one reason or another, decided to scuttle the easy answers of boomer Buddhism for something closer to the real thing. Thanissaro Bhikkhu began life as Geoffrey DeGraff. After graduating from Oberlin, he went to Thailand, where he studied in the Thai forest tradition under a Thai teacher for more than a decade. In 1991, he joined with another Thai teacher to found Metta Forest Monastery in the mountains north of San Diego. Thanissaro, who became abbot of that monastery in 1993, describes the "new Buddhism" as a grand game of telephone in which "things get passed on from person to person, from one generation of teachers to the next, until the message gets garbled beyond recognition." One of the key Buddhist ideas lost in that grand game of telephone is sacrifice ("renunciation" in sutra-speak), which he calls the "huge blind spot in American Buddhism."
Thanks to Thanissaro Bhikkhu and hundreds of monks like him, an authentically Buddhist form of American monasticism is alive and well. These monks are not above adapting Buddhism to American circumstances. They struggle with questions like whether to wear winter coats instead of cotton robes in Chicago, and whether to drive cars in Los Angeles. But they adopt American ways grudgingly rather than gleefully. Unfortunately, as "The New Buddhism" indicates, boomer Buddhists now have the stage. Lama Surya Das sells his books by the gross. Thanissaro Bhikkhu sells his by the unit. Only he doesn't actually sell them. They are available for free on the Web -- a gift from the old Buddhism to the new.
