RELIGION / JOHN DART : Leader Sees ‘Generation Gap’ in the U.S. Buddhist Movement

If Buddhism is ever to gain a national voice on social and ethical issues, it will have to look to U.S.-born converts and a younger generation of Asian immigrants, say leaders of a movement for an American version of the 2,500-year-old religion.

“There is a generation gap,” said the Venerable Havanpola Ratanasara of Los Angeles, who was reelected executive president of the American Buddhist Congress at the group’s convention last weekend in Koreatown.

“The older Asian Buddhist communities like to perpetuate the old type of cultural norms and practices,” said Ratanasara. These Buddhist groups often have leaders with limited command of English and they serve ethnic communities that are generally uninterested in American public issues or propagating Buddhist values through mass media, he said.

By contrast, Ratanasara said, the second and third generations of Asian Buddhist immigrants tend to reflect the broader, public-affairs interests of their college classmates and work colleagues as well as those of many U.S converts to the Eastern religion.

The American Buddhist Congress, which has members in Thai, Chinese, Korean, Sri Lankan, Tibetan, Vietnamese, Cambodian and Japanese national traditions in addition to U.S.-born converts, has struggled since its founding in Los Angeles eight years ago to bring together significant numbers of monks, masters and laity who support pan-Buddhist goals.

At the recent congress meeting, keynote speaker Ananda W. P. Guruge may have been “preaching to the choir” when he told nearly 100 registrants that avoiding evil, doing good, keeping a pure mind and avoiding extremes by taking the middle path are Buddhist ideals with ethical applications to racism, welfare, family values, abortion and other public issues.

“Joining in the ongoing dialogue is an obligation which ‘ethnic Buddhists’ owe their host country,” said Guruge, a vice president of the World Fellowship of Buddhists who lives in Huntington Beach.

Some frustration was expressed at the two-day meeting, held at Kwan Um Sa Temple in Koreatown, over nagging problems of money, no-shows from certain regions of the country and under-representation of ethnic groups, such as Japanese Buddhism.

“Being the oldest and strongest established group in America, [Japanese groups] have not felt much need to participate in current Buddhist movements,” contended Chrys Thorsen, one of the convention organizers. Delegates came mostly from California, Oregon, Washington and the Great Lakes area, she said.

Congress leaders at times talked bluntly and impatiently about the need for fund-raising campaigns--”a concept that is still very foreign to Buddhist thinking in general,” Thorsen said.

The Venerable Do Ahen Kim of the host temple summed it up succinctly: “For a hundred years we’ve been talking, talking. It does nothing.”

Not long after those remarks, a collection was taken among registrants for money to create a home page for the American Buddhist Congress on the Internet and establish a computer Web site.

Ratanasara, one of three monks and two lay persons elected presidents of the congress, said that they will meet with the congress’s 12-member executive committee today and Sunday in Los Angeles to decide how to implement other goals of the organization.

Ratanasara, 76, is an exception to the non-activist Buddhist image. The native Sri Lankan, now a U.S. citizen, formed the multi-tradition Buddhist Sangha Council of Southern California shortly after arriving in Los Angeles in 1980. He also was instrumental in forming the national congress.

“I always encourage the Buddhist communities to integrate into society,” said Ratanasara.

One philosophical dissenter to Buddhist activism during the congress’s national meeting was the lone Japanese-heritage Buddhist on the program, Mokusen Miyuki, professor of religious studies at Cal State Northridge and a Jungian psychotherapist who does private consulting work.

Asked to lead a workshop on “Dissemination of the Buddha’s Teachings,” Miyuki conceded that he was not interested in an active propagation of the principles of Buddhism, taught 500 years before Christ by Gautama Buddha in northern India.

Key Buddhist teachings of impermanence, suffering and selflessness are realities that can be discovered by reflection whether Buddhists actively teach them or not, Miyuki said. Such a realization can “any time, anywhere occur when the situation has ripened for it,” Miyuki said in prepared remarks.

For example, he said the Buddhist view that all things are interrelated was discovered during the late 1960s and early 1970s by many students fascinated by Hindu and Buddhist beliefs. “What we need is a vision of the unity of life, or a web of life, found in Asian or Native American religions,” he said.

Miyuki said people in the West have seen the unity of life as they developed concerns about fragile ecological systems. “Computer science also makes us experience the fact of the interrelatedness of life,” he added.

Miyuki said in an interview that he did not favor active propagation of Buddhism, which at worst could develop into a kind of fundamentalism. The Buddhist dharma , or teaching of reality, “can spread by itself,” he said.

Ratanasara contended that such passive views are changing. Active pan-Buddhist groups, promoting a distinctively American Buddhism, are strong in Los Angeles, Chicago and Houston, and to some extent in Washington, D.C., and New York, Ratanasara said.

Some analysts are less optimistic about achieving respectful links between different Buddhist sects and meditation centers in this country.

Writing in Tricycle, a Buddhist quarterly published in New York, Jan Nattier, who teaches Buddhist studies at Indiana University, said that American-born converts to Buddhism tend to gravitate toward various demanding forms of Zen or Tibetan traditions while ignoring other ethnic groups.

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While ethnic temples demonstrate that Buddhism can be practiced by dedicated monks and busy laity, Nattier said there is an extraordinary lack of communication. “It is quite common for members of a Japanese temple, for example, to be unaware of the existence of a Thai temple nearby, or for a Chinese group to operate without any knowledge of its Korean neighbors,” Nattier said.

“We all practice get-what-you-want Buddhism; we just want different things,” Nattier wrote.

Addressing that fragmentation in his speech to the American Buddhist Congress, Guruge said the future of Buddhism in America lies not only with cooperation by U.S.-born converts and ethnic leaders but also with numerous religious “seekers” and friends of Buddhism.

“Very serious seekers wish to ascertain whether Buddhism actually lives up to its reputation as a . . . tolerant, dogma-free, ethically pragmatic and non-rigid religious system,” said Guruge, a former Sri Lankan ambassador to the United States. These seekers are often decision-makers and opinion leaders in America, and as such, Guruge claimed, “the best and most convincing publicity agents for Buddhism.”