Monday, December 27, 1999
ISSUE ID: 99/12/27 Compiled by Nima Dorjee

Contents:

1. Life in Old Tibet
2. Partners in Exile
3. Why Buddhism, Why Now? And why in America?

All the articles in Today's WTN is from "Civilization" - The Magazine of the Library of Congress. The special feature is edited by Prof. Robert Thurman. "Due in no small part to the soaring popularity of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, it seems Buddhism is everywhere these days -- from Hollywood to the fields of Indiana to the business best-seller list. Our special section examines the remarkable spread of Buddhism in the West, and looks to Tibet for the roots of this compelling tradition." - Civilization - December/ January 99/2000 issue. http://www.civmag.com

---

Life in Old Tibet

A clear-eyed reminiscence

By Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche

Born in 1939, Kyabje Gelek Rinpoche is a blood relation of the 13th Dalai Lama and the son of one of the top incarnate lamas in Tibet. Due to its sacred lineage, Rinpoche's family held a revered position in Tibetan society and lived comfortably in downtown Lhasa and on nearby estates. While still a young child, Rinpoche was recognized by the regent of Tibet as the reincarnation of a famous abbot. He was educated at a monastery in Tibet through 1959, when he was forced to flee to the sanctuary of India. He relocated to the United States in 1987 and now lives in Michigan. Below, Rinpoche offers some memories of his early years in independent Tibet.

When I was five or six, my tutors discovered I could memorize texts very easily -- 30 or 40 pages in a few hours. The tutors would meet me in the evening to hear me recite what I had memorized. Some-times I would fall asleep while still reciting. They would figure out that I was sleeping and make me stand up. But I would lean against the wall and sleep standing up, still reciting. Then they made me stand near a window three stories up -- even there, I leaned my back to the side of the window, fell asleep, and kept on reciting until they carried me off to bed. Maybe that's why they called me an incarnate lama. When I went to the monastery, I received strict training and lived in rather sparse accommodations. It was quite cold and the routine was rigorous -- getting up early in the morning, praying and studying in poor light, having very little time to play.

I was 11 years old when the Chinese arrived. They called themselves liberators, but we did not know from whom they were liberating us. What they told us, since we were the elite, was: "We are here to liberate you from the Western clutch, the control of the imperialistic power." Actually, there was only one Western person in all Tibet at that time -- a Mr. Ford, who worked in Chamdo as a radio operator for the governor of Kham. So the whole Chinese army had to come to Tibet to liberate us from one single Western radio operator. They quietly told the simple Tibetans that they were liberating them from us -- Tibet's privileged classes and institutions.

There was a great Tibetan acting prime minister at the time named Lukangwa, who was famous for dealing firmly with the Chinese. He used to say, "We will not attack anybody -- this is the religious side of our government commitment. On the other hand, whoever attacks us, we will not let them go easily, no matter what it takes -- this is the rule of the secular law. We will fight you, no matter if we finish all our arms, if you cut them off at the shoulder. And if you finish all the human beings in Tibet, then the environment will fight you."

So the Chinese tried to make conversation with him. They asked, "How many cups of tea do Tibetans drink per day?" He answered, "It depends how good it is. If it's good, we'll drink a hundred of them. If it's bad, we won't even take a drop. Do you understand what I mean?"

The first way the Chinese "liberated" Tibet was with silver coins. When I was 12 years old, I was a member of the editorial board of a daily newspaper and received 300 silver coins every month as a salary. But I never spent a single day in the office and I never saw the newspaper. My teacher used to tell me, "This is poison. Leave it over there. One day they will make you pay it back." So we put the coins in the corner of the house somewhere in a box. That's how the Chinese first came to Tibet, trying to win the goodwill of the people.

Some Westerners imagine Tibet as Shangri-la, but we always believed Shangri-la lay somewhere to the north. The Tibetan climate is harsh and unforgiving: very cold, dry, and dusty, without much snow. At times, we had great difficulty finding food.

But as the Dalai Lama has said, Tibet was unique in the quality of the culture, the rigor of the education -- even the simple, good human beings it produced. We were fortunate to have available to us the living tradition of the Buddha's wisdom and compassion.

---

Partners in Exile

Tibetans and Jews compare survival strategies in diaspora

By Rodger Kamenetz

In 1990, I attended a meeting of a group of rabbis and Jewish scholars with the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, his exile home. "When we became refugees," the Dalai Lama told us, "we knew our struggle was not easy, would take a long time, if not generations. Then we very often referred to the Jewish people. Through so many centuries, so many hardships, they never lost their culture and their faith. As a result, when other external conditions became ripe, they were ready to build their nation."

Here was an extraordinary moment in world history. The religious and political leader of one nation, exiled in modern times, called on the religious leaders of another ancient exiled people for the wisdom of their experience. The Dalai Lama asked the Jews for their "secret" -- "the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile."

The Jewish people have responded warmly to the Dalai Lama's question, and the relationship between Jews and Tibetans has grown in the decade since that first encounter. Tibetan educators have visited Jewish summer camps to learn how they might educate their own children living in exile in the United States, India, and Europe. The Dalai Lama was the first public visitor to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. Jewish religious and lay leaders have provided strong political support for the Tibetan cause. And the Dalai Lama, in turn, has politicized his struggle for Tibetan autonomy, so much so that I call him a "dharma Zionist." Jewish history is full of exile, destruction, and loss: the Babylonian exile at the time of the Buddha; the destruction of Jerusalem and the second temple in 70 C.E.; the Crusades; expulsions from Spain, Britain, and France; and the more recent horror of the Holocaust. There are many secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile, many powerful responses to the exile experience. In the dialogues in Dharamsala (often referred to as Little Lhasa), three pivotal points were touched on: the Jewish family, the synagogue, and the devotion to Torah.

Judaism is a "householder" religion, a religion of parents and children, and has been so from the time of the patriarch and matriarch Abraham and Sarah all the way to the present day. Blu Greenberg, a Jewish scholar and mother, explained to the Dalai Lama and his abbots the power of Jewish family life and its home celebrations: the weekly Sabbath meal, the lighting of Hanukkah candles, the Passover seder. However, as I looked around the room, I realized we were addressing a group of celibate monks! Tibetan Buddhism, in contrast with Judaism, is primarily a monastic religion.

Another Jewish secret is the synagogue, a unique institution that began to develop with the destruction of the first temple and the first historical exile of the Jewish people: the Babylonian captivity in the sixth century B.C.E. When the second temple was destroyed by the Romans in 70 C.E., the Jewish people already had an institution that met their needs in the Diaspora: With no temple to serve as a religious center, the synagogue became a combination prayer and study center and community gathering place -- and also the model for the Christian church. So far, in exile, the Tibetans have focused primarily on rebuilding in India the monastic institutions destroyed in Tibet.

Finally, the Torah and its associated commentary and literature, the Midrash and the Talmud, have sustained the Jewish people throughout the centuries. Study is a key value of Jewish life, and it was a dramatic moment when Rabbi Moshe Waldoks, of Temple Beth Zion in Brookline, Massachusetts, presented a Torah scroll to the Dalai Lama, who peered at it intently, as if he was studying the secret architecture of the Jewish soul. When I made a subsequent visit to the Dalai Lama five years later, the Torah was displayed proudly in his special meeting room. The Tibetans, too, have a strong textual tradition. When we visited the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, we saw stack after stack of texts written on the traditional flat leaves and wrapped lovingly in cloth. Clearly, Jews and Tibetans share a love of study of their essential teachings -- their Torah, their dharma -- and this love of study has sustained the Jewish people, just as it seems to be giving strength to the Tibetan leadership today.

Jews and Tibetans have developed religious explanations for their historical predicaments. The prophet Isaiah interpreted the Jewish exile as a calling for Jews to become "a light unto the nations" -- to spread their teachings about God throughout the world. Similarly, some Tibetans have interpreted their exile as an opportunity to spread their religious teachings, or dharma, throughout the world. Certainly, the enormous growth of interest in Buddhism in the West owes a great deal to the prominence of the Dalai Lama and other popular Tibetan teachers who have emerged since their forced exile in 1959.

The Jewish people have faced both exile and destruction of their homeland, as the Tibetans do today. But a second crisis hitting the Tibetan people is the powerful lure of contemporary life and culture. Tibetan youth in exile are not immune to video games, MTV, or American culture. This was brought home to me very clearly a few years ago at a dance for young Tibetan immigrants in Chicago. I saw young people in hip- hop outfits, doing an unusual dance. "Is that a Tibetan folk dance?" I asked a Tibetan friend. "No," he said, "that's the Macarena."

So in the face of the systematic destruction of their religion and culture at home in Tibet and the seductions and allures of assimilation in exile, Tibetans living in diaspora need a strategy for preserving the memory of the lost homeland and its values.

Sometimes to preserve a tradition, it is also necessary to renew it. As Rabbi Irving "Yitz" Greenberg, president of the Jewish Life Network and husband of Blu Greenberg, explained to the Dalai Lama, the most important secret of Jewish survival was the reinvention of Judaism by the rabbis. They changed it from a temple-based cult to a religion of memory.

After the destruction of Jerusalem and the subsequent dispersal of the Jewish people 2,000 years ago, the new religious leadership had the courage to recreate a Judaism that relied on the collective memory of the Jewish people, as encoded in sacred texts, prayers, holidays, and customs. New emphasis and democratizing changes were added to already existing Jewish holy days that had previously lost prominence, such as Tishah-b'Ab, a solemn day of mourning that commemorates the destruction of the temple. Daily prayers included mention of Jerusalem; the Sabbath now was seen not only as a day of rest, but as a return from the exile of the week to the homeland of the spirit. The prayers once recited by priests in the temple were now recited by parents at the table.

Because the rabbinic leaders insisted that every Jew take religious responsibility, the religion became far more democratic than it had been during the time of the priesthood, and memory was thereby infused into the customs of the people. Rabbi Greenberg explained, for instance, that the groom at a Jewish wedding breaks a glass to remember, even in joy, the destruction of Jerusalem. The Dalai Lama responded, "The points you have mentioned really strike at the heart. This is the secret of Jewish survival. In every important aspect of human life you remind yourselves, 'We have to return. We have to return. We have to return, to take responsibility.' "

During the 1990 visit, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, founder of Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal and professor of religion at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, first proposed sharing a more specific secret: the Passover seder. The ceremonial meal is ordained in the Torah, but the form we know today was created by the rabbis in response to the destruction of the temple. Because the seder takes place in the home and requires parents to teach their children, Rabbi Schachter-Shalomi saw it as a model for exiles who no longer had access to the great temples or monasteries of Tibet. He thought Tibetan families might adopt the form of the seder while adding symbols and content related to their own history.

His idea has been realized in a slightly different way. In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of the Philadelphia-based Shalom Center, created the first Freedom Seder to share with African-Americans. Building on his idea, in the spring of 1996 I began a project with the International Campaign for Tibet to use the Passover seder as a way of connecting the Tibetan cause to the Jewish people.

Over the past three years, Seders for Tibet has allowed Jews to share with Tibetans the hope of liberation from oppression. In private homes, synagogues, community centers, and colleges and universities, Jews have celebrated seders that have remembered the past oppression of slavery and the current suffering of the Tibetan people.

In 1996, Rabbi David Saperstein, director and counsel of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, hosted a seder in Washington, D.C., attended by His Holiness and dozens of other religious leaders, Tibet activists, and political dignitaries, including Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and several congressmen. Our seder for Tibet added to traditional Passover ceremonies, prayers, and songs with the voices and songs of the Tibetan people, including a dramatic recording of an imprisoned nun; the recording had been smuggled out of Tibet.

At the end of our seder, the Dalai Lama and the rest of us joined together for the traditional cry -- "Next year in Jerusalem!" -- followed by a very untraditional cry: "Next year in Lhasa!" In a very concrete way, two exiled peoples had joined together to find courage and strength in the shared belief that oppression does not last forever, as long as the memory of freedom -- and the determination to return home -- survives.

---

Why Buddhism, Why Now? And why in America?

By Jan Nattier

In 1960 there were, at most, 200,000 Buddhists in the United States. Of these, a few were "self-converts" who had begun to think of themselves as Buddhists after reading a book, traveling to Asia, or having some other chance encounter with this unfamiliar religion. But the vast majority -- more than half of them residents of Hawaii -- were the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Asian Buddhist countries, primarily China and Japan.

Estimates of the number of Buddhists in America today vary widely -- the U.S. Census Bureau no longer records religious affiliation -- but most observers put the figure at between two and three million adherents. Even the more conservative figure represents a tenfold increase in only 40 years. Some of this growth can be attributed to waves of immigrants from Buddhist countries such as Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Taiwan. But Americans of non-Asian ancestry are also becoming Buddhists. If we include those who merely admire Buddhist ideas or use Buddhist texts for inspirational reading -- people whom Tom Tweed, author of The American Encounter with Buddhism, calls "night-stand Buddhists" -- the number of Buddhist sympathizers might well exceed ten million.

What fuels this attraction to the Buddhist faith? How are we to account for the fact that millions of Americans who were not raised as Buddhists are now drawn to a religion that holds that ultimate reality can be attained not through a relationship with a Supreme Being, but through a radical transformation of our notion of the "self"?

No systematic survey has yet been made of why Americans are drawn to Buddhism, though many mention difficulties with the idea of theism itself. But the single factor most often credited by converts with leading them to abandon their inherited traditions is an existential longing for a road map for personal change. There are great differences among the various forms of Buddhism now taking root in America, but virtually all of them offer clear-c ut instructions for daily religious practice. These range from chanting to meditating to receiving initiation from a guru, but they share one common-ality: the promise that the conscientious observance of these practices will result in a profound change in one's spiritual condition.

There are two major, and very different, strands of "new Buddhism" in America: the chanting-centered practice of the Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the meditation-centered practice of the Zen, Tibetan, and Vipassana traditions.

In the SGI, the promise that chanting the formula Nam-myoho-renge-kyo not only will bring spiritual peace but also will enhance one's social, economic, and professional circumstances has drawn large numbers of less- than-affluent adherents. Meditative Buddhism, on the other hand -- favored by the upper middle class -- critiques the concern with material well-being as fundamentally un-Buddhist, focusing instead on understanding the ultimate nature of oneself and the world.

The SGI is relatively homogeneous in its practice and teachings; all local groups in the United States are linked directly to a single head organization in Japan. Within meditative Buddhism, by contrast, there are substantial differences in both content and style, due in part to the different cultures from which they are derived. The aura of a Tibetan Buddhist shrine room, with its riot of color and dizzying variety of images of gods and goddesses, could not be more different from the black- and-white austerity of a Japanese Zen meditation hall or the neutral decor favored by practitioners of Vipassana -- a meditative tradition drawn mainly from the Theravada Buddhism of Burma and Thailand.

Significant doctrinal differences exist as well. While most Tibetan Buddhists tend to accept that enlightenment requires many lifetimes of gradual practice, Zen Buddhists, like followers of SGI, believe that enlightenment is available here and now. And while both Zen and Tibetan Buddhism consider a relationship with a spiritual teacher to be vital, Vipassana places far less importance on cultivating such a bond, thus appealing to independent "non-joiners," many of whom do not call themselves Buddhists at all. Commenting on the differences between Tibetan Buddhists and her own Zen tradition, one longtime priest declared, "They're Catholics, and we're Quakers." Following this logic, Vipassana practitioners are surely Unitarians.

All of these forms of Buddhism -- including both the SGI and the various meditative traditions -- experienced their first phase of rapid growth in this country during the 1960s, when they were embraced in substantial numbers by baby boomers. But since then they have taken quite different turns. Most Vipassana groups (and Zen groups, to a slightly lesser degree) still consist overwhelmingly of aging baby boomers, while the SGI tends to have a somewhat broader demographic appeal. But young people -- men and women in their teens and early twenties -- today seem to find Tibetan Buddhism the most attractive.

Surely the high profile of the Dalai Lama has been one factor in this attraction, as has the popular perception of Tibet as a pristine Shangri- la whose very real suffering under Chinese control has drawn condemnation even from conservative Christians. Similarly, the recent spate of Tibet- centered movies (Kundun, Seven Years in Tibet) and the patronage of a number of celebrities (Richard Gere, Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys) has placed Tibetan Buddhism in the limelight. Yet famous names are associated with other forms of Buddhism. So why do younger Americans choose Tibetan Buddhism over the other brands of Buddhism available on the American market?

One item often mentioned by converts is what might be called the aesthetic factor. Feeling comfortable with a religion means not only finding the doctrines and practices appealing, but also feeling comfortable with its iconography. It may well be that the austere aesthetics of Zen and Vipassana are simply too minimalist for a generation raised on the nonstop visuals of MTV. If more is better, the rich, multicolored imagery of Tibetan Buddhism may give it a subliminal aesthetic edge.

Although the images and teachings of Tibetan Buddhism may seem wild and chaotic on the surface, it is overall the most highly structured of all the forms of "new Buddhism" in America today. And while the offspring of the baby boom generation may share their parents' skepticism, they do not share their 1960s-bred confidence in spontaneity. Indeed, this generation often expresses a need for structure, and the fact that Tibetan Buddhism offers the most elaborately structured map of the path to enlightenment - - and demands the strongest commitment to the authority of the guru -- may actually be not a weakness but a strength.

For the moment, then, we can expect the fascination with Tibetan Buddhism to continue, and the other forms of "new Buddhism" to grow at a more moderate pace. But whatever American Buddhism looks like today, we can be certain that in 50 years it will have quite a different face. For what distinguishes all forms of the "new Buddhism" from the more traditional Asian- American temples is that these new organizations consist almost entirely of first-generation converts. And a new convert to any religion is a very atypical member. Consciously or unconsciously, converts reinterpret their adoptive religion in ways that conform to their own needs and preferences, often failing to see problematic elements in a new religion that they would be quick to condemn in their own. Will the security of a detailed road map to enlightenment in Tibetan Buddhism, for example, eventually give way to dissatisfaction with its strongly hierarchical system? Or will fascination with images of tantric goddesses turn to disillusionment as followers discover that Tibetan Buddhism -- like virtually all religions on our planet -- accords a distinctly second-class status to women?

It has been argued that one of the distinctive features of American Buddhism is the extent to which non-Asian converts insist on reconfiguring Buddhism in accordance with their own values and preferences. Yet it is ironic that Tibetan Buddhism, which has arguably made the fewest concessions -- and in many circles is moving away from adaptation and farther toward the maintenance of tradition -- is scoring the greatest success with the younger generation.

As these newly transplanted forms of Buddhism enter their second and third generations in America -- including the lukewarm practitioner as well as the serious devotee -- we can expect that they will come to bear a far greater resemblance to their more traditional Asian-American counterparts. And given the fundamental Buddhist tenet that all conditioned things must change -- all things, that is, save nirvana -- one can expect that the future of Buddhism in America will be as kaleidoscopic as its past.