The Surface of Buddhism: Introduction
I have fond memories of the Mission. The land was beautiful. Even the dust struck me as having a beautiful color to it. I wandered around anywhere I wanted. The monks were always nice and smiled at me. Sometimes they gave me fun, important jobs like squeezing behind the statues to give them a dusting.
My mother valued her time there and the opportunity to hear Bhante speak. He was an important guide for her. But the living conditions were rough. Every night, she would wrap up our provisions and hang them from the ceiling in an increasingly complicated network of ropes. Every night, the rats would sneak in, perform unbelievable acrobatic feats and grab some of the food anyway. We were used to rough living, but according to my mother’s complaints, the rats were a minor annoyance compared to the heroin addicts. The Mission did not turn people away, and many of those people were hippies who’d fallen as low as you can go in a city where you could buy a fix for a nickel. The stress of shielding children from the sight of drooling passed-out junkies became too much for my mother to put up with. She did a good job, though… when I think back over my time there, I don’t remember seeing anything traumatic.
My father is a Japanese Buddhist in much the same way as my mother’s parents were white American Christians. You’re born into a faith, it’s your heritage, it’s an important part of transitions, such as death, but other than that, it tends to fade into the background of your life.
My first real introduction to a different way of living a religion came around the second grade, in public school in the United States. I was one of those kids that loved dinosaurs. I met another kid in my class that loved dinosaurs too… and he was also the only other Asian kid I knew! His family was from the Philippines. I was so happy to meet him. I was sure we would be great friends. We had so much in common. One day, as we were going through lists of our favorite dinosaurs, I mentioned something about the dinosaurs evolving. My friend was horrified. “God created dinosaurs on the sixth day,” he said. I disagreed. He never spoke to me again. The next day, as I rode my bike up to school, I was suddenly surrounded by a ring of classmates who all pointed their finger at me and chanted “you’re going to HE-ELL, you’re going to HE-ELL.”
My mother’s belief had faded somewhat in favor of an agnostic skepticism. She never joined a Buddhist community again after leaving India. She grew to believe that all religions were wrong, but that Buddhism was the least wrong. However, she still retained a strong attachment to Bhante and continued to follow his career. At the age of 90, he moved to Stockton, California to minister to a large group of Cambodian refugees who had been resettled there. Many were suffering terribly from cultural alienation and PTSD. My mother attended Bhante’s funeral when he died at the age of 110 after decades of service to the refugee community.
Steven Seagal had lately become a student of Bhante, and the funeral was actually delayed for a little bit in order for Seagal to attend, because his flight was late. Bhante’s Cambodian relatives put a good face on it, but one of them did end up snarking to my mother, “couldn’t he just jump out of the plane, like in one of his movies?”
These rambling anecdotes of my family history contain the seeds of what I want to discuss when it comes to Buddhism. First of all, Buddhism stakes its claim as a universal religion. Many (not all) strands of Buddhism don’t proselytize aggressively, but Buddhism is supposed to be for everyone. No one should be turned away, no matter how obnoxious. Not even heroin addicts abusing their American privilege in a poverty-stricken but generous country. Not even (ugh) Steven Seagal. Second, Buddhism is a worldly religion. It’s highly interwoven with race, class, ethnicity, politics and economics. Third, Buddhism is highly variable, and contains huge internal conflicts that rarely come to the attention of outsiders. Fourth, Buddhists in America have had to evolve unique ways of surviving in this culturally Christian nation.
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