Why have I proposed a series of discussions on Buddhism and its meaning for Friends?

Transcription

1 NOTES FOR INTRODUCTION TO FRIENDS FORUM SERIES ON BUDDHISM AND QUAKERISM Why have I proposed a series of discussions on Buddhism and its meaning for Friends? Because we live in a Christianized society and belong to a religious group rooted in Christianity, most of us are familiar with at least the outlines of Christian history and scriptures. Formally or informally we offer Bible study to meeting attenders and also from time to time courses in Quakerism 101. Yet I have met many Friends both in this meeting, at FGC gatherings. and at Pendle Hill who have drawn real inspiration from Buddhist meditation and from the world view and philosophy of Buddhism. So I asked: isn t it time we talked a little about its roots and its various forms today? It is my hope that this will develop into a series of conversations about the personal experiences that Friends of this meeting have had with Buddhist practice and its spiritual meaning to them. In today s talk I simply will try to set the context for that. Why Buddhism? There are real parallels with the practices of traditional Friends: Many -- not all -- Buddhists use silent meditation as a central form of practice. Many -- not all -- Buddhists oppose violence and war. Many -- not all -- Buddhists emphasize compassion. In the case of Buddhists, compassion extends not only to humans but to all sentient beings. Many -- not all -- Buddhists place a higher value on practice than on faith or on belief in creeds and dogmas. The Big Picture Today the whole human race is facing a profound spiritual crisis -- maybe the greatest crisis it has ever known. Not an economic or political crisis, but a spiritual

2 one. Our own existence and perhaps the existence of all sentient life on earth is at stake. So for that reason we need to look at it globally. Buddhism, along with Hinduism, Taoism, and Confucianism, is one of the great Eastern religious traditions. The Western three are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam -- all stemming from the Biblical patriarch, Abraham, and all believing in a single, all-powerful god. In saying this I don t intend to denigrate the hundreds of indigenous traditions but only point to those that have lasted the longest and served the most people. Western monotheists sometimes get huffy about calling either Buddhism or Confucianism religions, since neither of them addresses the questions of an ultimate cause or end. They may be more properly called philosophies, but they stand in the place of religion for millions of people. The Axial Age All of these traditions except Islam date from what has been called the Axial Age. (The term did not originate with Karen Thompson, but her writings have popularized it.) Roughly speaking, it is defined as from 800 BC to 100 AD. -- You can give or take a century or two on either end. It was a time of great change, when the foundations were laid for the civilization we know today. Plants and animals had been domesticated to meet the needs of humans. Scattered villages all across Eurasia became linked by trade routes, and small centers grew into cities where ideas as well as goods were exchanged. Tribal coalitions became small kingdoms and then empires. Most important of all was the development of writing, with its profound effect on the human mind. Along with the new fund of information produced by writing came a wave of thinkers and teachers whom we still revere -- with good reason. The first, who probably lived in the 800s BC or a little earlier, was the Persian astronomer and philosopher Zoroaster. He was followed in the next century (700s BC) by the Hebrew prophets Amos and Isaiah, whose teachings started to change Judaism from a simple tribal religion into something more profound. The century beginning in 600 BC and ending in 500 saw a perfect blossoming of human thought and vision. In the years 599 to 500 BC we have the Babylonian captivity of the Jews along with the prophet Jeremiah, the Buddha in the Ganges valley of India, Confucius in China, and the Greek philosopher/mathematician Pythagoras. All of those were more or less contemporaries, although widely separated geographically. Only a hundred years later came Socrates and Plato, then Plato s student, Aristotle, who lived from 384 to 322 BC and tutored Alexander, whose short-lived empire spread Greek ideas and culture throughout the Middle East.

3 The Axial Age ended with Jesus of Nazareth -- or if you give it another century, with the Buddhist monk Nagarjuna. Nothing is known about him except his writings. They launched a movement that in the next couple of centuries reinvented Buddhism and divided it into two great schools: Theravada and Mahayana. By then Buddhism (already 500 years old) was the dominant religion throughout India. Its original form of Theravadan Buddhism, preserved in the Pali language, hung on and is still practiced today in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. Mahayana, with its philosophical probing, its mythical overlay, its countless Buddhas and Boddhisattvas, and its scriptures recorded in Sanskrit spread to most of India and into China and Tibet. Buddhism Spreads Just as with other religions, Buddhism adapted to the local culture wherever it found itself. In China it came up against the powerful influences of Confucianism and Taoism. One of the distinctive things about Buddhism was meditation, so it acquired the name Chan, which means meditation. The same word in Japanese is Zen. By the 7th century (we re now at the 600s AD -- the heart of the Dark Ages in Europe) Chan was well established in China, and some scholars claim that it was at least as much Taoist as Buddhist. Meanwhile back in India another change was occurring with the development of Tantric Yoga and its influence on Buddhism under the name Vajrayana. This third school of Buddhism found a welcome in the still largely tribal society of Tibet, where it picked up some of the psychic and shamanistic practices of the local Bon tradition. Tibetan Buddhism dates from about the 700s and 800s AD. By then the prophet Mohammed ( AD) had brought Islam to Arabia, and the new religion was sweeping across the Middle East. At just about the same time the Normans were invading England and defeating the Saxons at the battle of Hastings (1066), Islamic conquerors from the west were wiping out Buddhism on the mainland of India. (Of course I m not talking exact years -- only centuries.) Buddhism may have been an easy target in the India of 1000 AD because it was an elite religion of monks, monasteries, and mighty statues of a serene Buddha carved in stone. There was no provision for lay membership. Ordinary Indian householders supported it by giving to the monasteries and went on with their traditional rituals and Yoga practices. They might also give a bowl of rice now and

4 then to some wandering, ragged holy man with strange ideas, just as they had done for as long as anyone could remember. So Buddhism was pretty well wiped out from its homeland, but it had many variations in other places, and those multiplied down the years. Some of the Variations of Buddhism As literacy and communication spread and as societies became more sophisticated, the need to address the laity became more urgent -- in both the West and the East. This may account for the remarkable coincidence of new religious ideas and movements that we see in the 13th century (1200s AD). This was the period of the High Middle Ages in Europe, the later Crusades in the Middle East, and the Mongol empire in Asia. Some of the sages who lived in that century were: Francis of Assisi -- ( ) Eihei Dogen ( ) Jelaluddin Rumi -- ( ) Nichiren ( ) Thomas Aquinas -- ( ) Meister Eckhart -- ( ) The form of Chan Buddhism that we today call Rinzai Zen had originated in China in the 800s AD. It spread to Japan in the late 12th or early 13th century. There it appealed to the upper classes and was adopted by the Samurai warlords. Soto Zen, introduced by the monk Dogen later in the 13th century, was seen as a reform movement, and its meditation was adapted to the needs of the laity as well as of the monks. It is said to have been called farmer Zen. Even more politically divisive was the teaching of a monk from the poorer classes called Nichiren. He abandoned Zen altogether and based his faith exclusively on the Lotus Sutra, which he held to be the final summation of the Buddha s ideas. Nichiren s method employs repetitive chanting instead of meditation, and it also uses a mandala called the Gohonzon. (Chant: Nam(u)-Myoho-Renge-Kyo) To this

5 day Nichiren Buddhism remains a peoples movement, represented mainly in a lay organization called Soka Gakkai, founded in Another school of Buddhism that developed to meet the needs of ordinary householders is called Pure Land, and it may be the form that has been practiced most widely. It first spread through China in the 13th century. Today it is the main kind of traditional Buddhism in China, Japan, Viet Nam, Korea, and Taiwan. Instead of the demanding discipline of Chan or Zen meditation, it asks the devotee only to repeat the name of Amitabha, the Buddha of love and compassion. Through constant devotion and repetition his attention will be drawn, and the practitioner can hope to be reborn in the Pure Land, which sounds a lot like the Christian heaven. It is the kind of simple Buddhism your great-grandmother might have practiced, and if she is now in the Pure Land, she may advocate on your behalf. Because of this belief, Christian missionaries often accused Buddhists of ancestor worship. Meeting of East and West The time of Christian missionaries was not far off. The end of the 13th century saw the epic journey of Marco Polo to China and -- more important -- his account of it was read around Europe. Seafaring trade with the Orient was opened by Spain and Portugal, and by the 16th century Jesuits were spreading Christianity in both China and Japan. Meanwhile the new printing press and translation of the Bible into common languages were bringing literacy to thousands of people. Europe stood on the brink of a revolutionary sweep toward science and technology that brought along with it the brute power to conquer the rest of the world. Christian missionaries didn t have much influence on established forms of Buddhism. With the help of colonial governments they tried suppressing it, but it was other Western forces that brought about change. One of those forces that has been widely overlooked is the Theosophical movement. Henry Steele Olcott, its co-founder with Helena Blavatsky, was the first well-known Euro-American to convert to Buddhism. He devoted much of his life from the 1880s to his death in 1907 to initiating a renaissance of Buddhism in Asian countries from Sri Lanka to Japan. His greatest success -- which was shared with his friend and co-worker Anagarika Dharmapala -- came from unifying many Buddhist groups around the preservation of Bodh Gaya, which is the traditional site of the Buddha s enlightenment.

6 With the World Parliament of Religions at Chicago in 1893, Eastern ideas began a slow but steady move westward. Some came with immigrant groups to America and others reached the intellectual centers of Europe, Britain, and America. One of those centers was the Harvard office of the philosopher William James. His influence on his colleagues and their students, one of whom was the Quaker Rufus Jones, had far-reaching impact. Jones spent much of his scholarly life in trying to establish the roots of Quaker meditation in medieval mysticism and in distinguishing it from Eastern forms. Other names associated with Buddhism in the West during the first half of the 20th century are the distinguished Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, the Englishman Alan Watts, and -- known mainly to Quakers -- Teresina Havens, who studied in Japan in the 1930s and offered courses, workshops, and at least one Pendle Hill pamphlet pointing out the parallels of Buddhist and Quaker practice. After WW II, the pace picked up. The 1950s Beat Generation Buddhists (Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsburg) made Buddhism a household word and stimulated the 1960s pilgrimage of young people to the East. In 1959 the Diamond Sangha (Zen) was founded in Hawaii by Robert Aitken, and in 1962 the San Francisco Zen Center was incorporated under its chief teacher Shunriyu Suzuki. author of the popular book, Zen Mind, Beginner s Mind. In 1972 Dainin Katagiri came from San Francisco to open the Minnesota Zen Center in Minneapolis. Other teachers and centers for Zen practice have since appeared all over the country, although first and most frequently on the east and west coasts. Other young seekers were finding the Theravadan Buddhism of Burma and Thailand more compatible with Western culture than Chan or Zen. The key teacher in Burma was Saya Gyi U Ba Khin. Born in 1899, he became an accountant, rose in the ranks of public office, and in 1948 was named Accountant General of the newly independent Union of Burma. Meanwhile he had been studying and later teaching Vipassana or Insight meditation -- the original method said to have been used by the Buddha. U Ba Kin s skill was recognized by the country s leading Theravadan monks, and in 1950 he founded the Vipassana Association of the Accountant General s Office, where laymen could learn the method. Students came from all over Burma and elsewhere. The most notable was S. N. Goenka, from India, who received permission to teach Vipassana in a whole network of centers around the world. Another was Ruth Denison, a German woman who was married to an American and living in California. She was one of the last to whom U Ba Khin gave

7 teaching authority before his death in (She was my first Vipassana teacher in 1984.) During the 1960s Joseph Goldstein, a young American from upper New York state, studied with Goenka and several other teachers in India. Back in the U.S., he joined with Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield to found the Insight Meditation Society (IMS) in 1975 at Barre, MA. Later Kornfield, who had studied at a forest monastery in Thailand, opened the Spirit Rock Meditation Center on the California coast north of San Francisco. In 1989 the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies was established as an affliliate of the IMS. They are the leading American centers for Vipassana. Mindfulness meditation, as developed by Jon Kabat Zinn, is a purely secular practice that is derived from Insight meditation and is increasingly used in medical settings throughout the country. Tibetan, or Vajrayana Buddhism was little known in the West until after the wellpublicized trip of Alexandra David-Neel, an adventurous French woman who reached the forbidden city of Lhasa in 1924, disguised as a Tibetan pilgrim. Even then the closed, inaccessible theocracy of Tibet remained a romantic mystery to most Westerners until after WW II. Invaded and occupied by China in 1949, Tibet s governing lamas met the aggression with negotiation and nonviolence until 1959, when a major uprising occurred. The capital of Lhasa was attacked by Chinese troops, and the young 14th Dalai Lama (then 25) fled to India. There he established a government in exile in the town of Dharamsala at the foot of the Himalayas where he has become not only the champion of autonomy for Tibet, but one of the world s pre-eminent moral and spiritual teachers. Recently he has retired from his political role as the head of government, but he continues to urge those of his people who are still in Tibet to resist Chinese oppression nonviolently. The Tibetan diaspora has grown to an estimated 150,000 people. There are Tibetan exile communities not only in bordering countries like India, but in Europe and North America. The Twin Cities hosts one of the largest in the U.S. They cling to their culture and the form of Buddhism that is at the heart of it. Some Tibetan monks, however, have taken steps to adapt their practice to the West, the best-known being Chogyam Trungpa. Already the head of a monastery at the age of 20, he fled to India in 1959, moved to England in 1963 and to the U.S. in While in the UK he left monasticism and became a lay teacher. He was widely recognized for his charismatic

8 personality, his brilliant scholarship, his command of esoteric Vajarana practices, and his freewheeling lifestyle. In the U.S. he made his headquarters in Boulder, CO, where he founded the Naropa Institute in 1974 (now Naropa University) and trained a number of teachers. He died in Changes in the East The term engaged Buddhism, -- which has a certain parallel to liberation theology in the Christian world -- was first used by the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh, but the phenomenon really began much earlier in India. There Buddhism became an instrument of liberation in the struggle for civil rights against the oppressive caste system. India Dr. Bhimrao R. Ambedkar was born an untouchable in village India in His father escaped the caste system by becoming an officer in the British army. Ambedkar was educated in England and the U.S. He achieved degrees in both law and philosophy and devoted his life thereafter to Indian independence and the ending of caste. By the 1950s he had become convinced that mass conversion to Buddhism was a feasible and effective strategy for India s untouchables, and a start was made at a national ceremony held in Ambedkar died the next year, but the movement continued, and there are now well over three million Indian Buddhists. One of the leading historians of Ambedkar s movement is former Professor Eleanor Zelliot of Carleton College, who has written extensively about it. She is a graduate of Quaker schools and an attender at the Cannon Valley Friends Meeting. Sri Lanka The revival of Buddhism in Sri Lanka sparked by Henry Steele Olcott remained strong but conservative until 1958 when Dr. A. T. Ariyaratne, a faculty member at Nalanda University in Colombo, launched Sarvodaya Shramadana. Begun as a student work camp program, it was so successful in uniting and restoring the nation s poverty-stricken villages that it became a national movement. It has consistently played a peace-making role in the bloody ethnic struggle between

9 Sinhalese and Tamils, and most recently it has worked to repair damage from the historic tsumani of Over the years Quakers like George Willoughby and George Lakey have been active with Sarvodaya, as has the Nonviolent Peaceforce, started by Quaker David Hartsough and Minnesota peace activist Mel Duncan. Thailand The temple-centered Theravadan Buddhism of Thailand was shaken up in the mid- 20th century by Ajahn Buddhadasa ( ) who taught Dhamma Socialism because he thought we needed to get out of the terrible trap of egotism and dukkha, both personal and collective. His deep reverence for nature inspired a movement to establish remote forest monasteries and a more extensive practice of meditation among both lay followers and monks. More attention to the needs of Buddhist laity and women in Thailand has been inspired by the work of Sulak Sivaraksa. Born in Bangkok in 1933 of Chinese ancestry, he received a university education and law degree in the UK and returned to Thailand to become a teacher, publisher, and social change activist. In 1994, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by the American Friends Service Committee. The AFSC letter of nomination read: Rooted deeply in his Buddhist faith and the traditions and indigenous culture of Siam, Professor Sulak has created organizations and publications which have helped to form and nurture a community of persons dedicated to non-violence in a region particularly torn by violence and war. Viet Nam Lotus in a Sea of Fire is how Thich Nhat Hanh described his country in Unlike the other nations along Asia s southern coast, Viet Nam received its Buddhism from China, and therefore its tradition is Mahayanist and its common practices have been Chan (now usually referred to as Zen) among monks and Pure Land among lay people. In south Viet Nam, however, the Theravadan tradition has been widely followed. During the years of French dominion a sizable Catholic Christian minority also became established. In the 1960s, when war threatened between the Communist-controlled north and the U.S.-backed regime in south Viet Nam, the varied Buddhist groups tried to remain neutral and play a peacemaking, mediating role. In 1963, led by the wellknown monk Thich Nhat Hanh and several others, they combined to form the Unified Buddhist Church of Viet Nam.

10 Because of his strong U.S. connections, (he attended Princeton and lectured at Columbia), and his eloquent writing, Nhat Hanh soon became the international spokesperson for his country s peace seekers. He also became a permanent exile, since returning during the war would have meant almost certain death. He has established a Buddhist community and meditation center at Plum Village in southern France, and his continued writing and speaking have made him a world spiritual leader equal to the Dalai Lama. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King, and he has been consistently supported by Quakers. I attended one of his retreats in the 1990s that was co-sponsored by the AFSC. China/Taiwan Buddhism in China has been forced underground. An example of the kind of suppression it has faced is the fate of the nonreligious meditation movement, Falun Gong. One can only guess that the roots of the Buddha s teachings are still alive and waiting for a better time to grow and blossom. In Taiwan, where the remnants of the Chiang Kai Chek government took refuge from the Communist takeover in 1949, Buddhism has thrived and its Westernization has been rapid. It has been notable for its extensive social services and its acceptance of women in leadership roles. Japan The chief representative of engaged Buddhism in Japan is the lay organization, Soka Gakkai, still based on the teachings of the 13th-century monk Nichiren. It was reorganized in 1975 as Soka Gakkai International, and was then rejected by other Japanese followers of Nichiren. Soka Gakkai International now claims 12 million members in 192 countries; operates the Institute of Oriental Philosophy in Tokyo; supports educational and cultural causes around the world; and has an office here in St. Paul. Some compare it with Christian fundamentalist and Pentecostal groups. Like those, it is uncompromisingly orthodox in its views; it claims worldly success as a result of its practice; and -- at least in Japan -- it has become active politically. Unlike most Buddhist groups in the U.S., it has appealed to people of color. Westernization?

11 This may be the wrong word to describe the modernization of Buddhism as it spreads around the world. As Sallie King, professor of religion at James Madison University and the leading U.S. Quaker-Buddhist, has pointed out, there are a variety of issues that traditional Buddhism must adjust to: the secular, scientific world view; the position of women in society and in spiritual teaching; the distinction between laity and clergy; and the responsibility of standing for an ethical society Rhoda Gilman