Contributed by: Thomas Cattoi, Santa Clara University

Nestled in an isolated area of the Los Padres National Forest, two hours south of San Francisco in California, the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is the oldest Japanese Buddhist Sōtō Zen monastery in the United States, as well as the first Zen monastery established outside Asia. Tassajara was founded in 1967 as an extension of the San Francisco Zen Center. Its first abbot was the Japanese monastic master Shunryu Suzuki (1904-1971) - not to be confused with his namesake and contemporary D.T. Suzuki - who had moved to America in 1959 to run Soko-Ji, a Sōtō Zen temple attended largely by elderly Japanese immigrants. The state of California, and the San Francisco Bay Area in particular, had long been home to a large immigrant community from Japan; many of its members had suffered greatly during the years of the Second World War, when they had been subject to discrimination and often internment in security camps. For the members of this community, the temple offered a place of refuge in a world that did not fully accept them as citizens and viewed their culture as irremediably foreign. In this context, the practice of Zen was often just an afterthought - a pretext to maintain one’s identity and a link, however fragile, to the old country where they could never return.

Suzuki arrived from Japan at the age of fifty-five to minister to this community, but he soon made a startling discovery - alongside Japanese senior citizens, there were younger Americans - mostly white - who had discovered Buddhism, and who wanted to practice meditation with a Japanese master. These Americans had no cultural connection to Japan, but they were disillusioned with what they saw as the hypocrisy of mainstream American society and they could not find any answer to their spiritual existential questions in the various forms of Christianity to which they had been exposed. Eventually, Suzuki abandoned Soko-ji to spread Zen among white American converts at what would become the San Francisco Zen Center. “In Japan” – he would claim- “Zen has grown moss on its branches.” In America, however, the enthusiasm of the converts would help Buddhist practice rediscover its philosophical roots and its emphasis on zazen (meditation). When Tassajara celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 2017, most of its residents were white converts, practicing a form of Japanese Buddhism that has now taken deep roots in American soil. [i]

The entrance of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery

One hundred and fifty miles north of Tassajara, in the city of Berkeley, just a few blocks from UC Berkeley, the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery serves as an important center for Buddhist practitioners. Located in a former Nazarene church vacated by its original congregation, the center houses a small monastic community and hosts a variety of initiatives – lectures, talks, and meditation sessions - serving Berkeley’s Chinese Buddhist community, as well as numerous American converts, many of whom affiliated with one of the area’s institutions of higher learning. Lectures and talks are held primarily in English, but on Saturdays the local Chinese Buddhists stream into the temple - where the old organ loft and altar area remind visitors of the building’s past as a Christian church- and hold a meditation and worship service in Chinese. [ii] While the community’s lineage stretches back to Master Hua (1918-95), a Chinese Han master who fled the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, the current abbot is an American convert who took the name ‘Heng Sure’ – ‘constantly real’ - when he took monastic vows in 1976. Fluent in Chinese, Heng Sure serves as community leader for the American and the Chinese communities alike, thereby reversing the trajectory that Master Hua - no less than Shunryu Suzuki - had undertaken fifty years ago: while in the past it was Asian masters who had brought the dharma to the West, now it is sometimes Westerners who bring the dharma back to the East. [iii]

The ‘altar area’ inside the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery

The example of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center and the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, which serve -sometimes simultaneously, but often separately- very different groups of Buddhist practitioners shows us that ‘ethnic’ and ‘convert’ Buddhists in the West have practiced their tradition in very different contexts, or, in Erik Braun’s words, have effectively created a plurality of Buddhist ‘modernities’. In his study of contemporary American Buddhist communities, Braun observes the co-existence of traditional and ‘modern’ attitudes and beliefs, and argues that claiming that American Buddhism as a whole is following a linear modernization process is an unhelpful simplification; rather, what one witnesses is a situation that encompasses accommodations to post-secular sensitivities in some contexts, and the intentional preservation – and sometimes deliberate recovery- of traditional ethnic and cultural markers on the other.

Historically, Buddhist-Christian encounter in the Buddhist societies of Asia was driven by the evangelizing mission of the different Christin churches, and an analogous approach was often taken when engaging communities of ‘ethnic’ Buddhists settled in societies with a Christian majority. By and large, this approach presupposed the survival of an intact tradition that had merely been transplanted in a new Western context. The increasing number of ‘convert’ Buddhists, however, ensures that contemporary Western Buddhism encompasses realities that are often only tangentially related to the experience of ‘ethnic’ communities, some of which actually question the authenticity of Westerners’ commitment to Buddhism and view with suspicion their lack of lineage or their loss of connection with ritual and community. This picture is made even more complex by the fact that numerous Western Buddhists who engage in Buddhist-Christian dialogue themselves come from at least a nominal Christian background, but while they may be conversant with Buddhist philosophy and practices, they often lack an equivalent preparation in Christian theology. Sometimes -though not always!- Buddhist converts’ attitude towards Christianity is colored by negative personal experiences in the context of their original Christian communities, making dialogue with them actually more challenging than with communities of ‘ethnic’ Buddhists, who may have little if any knowledge or familiarity with Christianity. In addition, Christians who engage in dialogue with Buddhism - both in an ecclesial and an academic context - are eager to engage in Buddhist practices - such as meditation - which they believe would supplement their own spiritual life. ‘Ethnic’ Buddhists who engage in dialogue with Christianity do not usually manifest an analogous desire to participate in Christian rituals, whereas among ‘convert’ Buddhists, some will actually try to rediscover the significance of practices that earlier in their spiritual trajectory, they had rejected as sterile or meaningless. The combination all of these factors, and the proportionally high number of ‘convert’ Buddhists actually engaged in dialogue with Christianity ensure that Buddhist-Christian dialogue in the West is often an intellectual exchange between Christians and post-Christians- or in other words, it is part of Christianity’s broader engagement of secularization, in a social context where individual religious identity is no longer part and parcel of one’s ethnic and cultural heritage, but the expression of one’s individual spiritual choices.

The fact that for the foreseeable future, Buddhist-Christian dialogue in the West will engage different communities with very different priorities and sensitivities means that Christian scholars and practitioners will have to implement different strategies with different groups, and be fully aware of the fact that often, dialogue with ‘convert’ Buddhists is as much an instance of internal dialogue with former Christians as it is an occasion of mutual understanding with another tradition. There are of course no easy recipes for this endeavor, which requires patience and humility, as well as readiness, on occasion, to learn from the other. During his visit to Myanmar in November 2017, Pope Francis surprised an audience of Buddhist monks by quoting the Buddha’s own words in Dhammapada XVII, 223: “Overcome the angry by non-anger; overcome the wicked by goodness; overcome the miser by generosity; overcome the liar by truth.” [iv] This kind of openness to the truth articulated by the other tradition will always resonate with its adherents, appealing to ethnic members and converts alike.

[i] For an overview of Shunryu Suzuki’s thought, see Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (Boston, Mass.: Shambhala Publications, 2011).

[ii] See “Berkeley Buddhist Monastery” at http://www.berkeleymonastery.org/ (accessed on Jan. 21, 2020).

[iii] See Heng Sure and Heng Ch’au, News from True Cultivators: Letters to the venerable Abbot Hua (2nd. ed. Burlingame, Cal.: Dharma Realm Buddhist Association, 2002)

[iv] See Gerald O’Connell, “Pope Francis: Buddhists and Catholics must unite against “intolerance, prejudice and hatred”, America (Nov. 29, 2017), at https://www.americamagazine.org/faith/2017/11/29/pope-francis-buddhists-and-catholics-must-unite-against-intolerance-prejudice-and (accessed on Jan. 21, 2020).